“[W]hen the novelty of that wore off, I thought, ‘Why do I still hate myself? Why do I still have all these issues?’” Watson recalled. “And at that point, it was like, ‘Am I going to keep going? Am I going to get the hysterectomy, am I going to get the phalloplasty, and I’m still going to feel this way, or am I going to have to address the other problems that I have?’”
A woman in Scotland recently told the BBC that obtaining hormones and surgery to physically appear as a man did not eliminate her problems, and when she began advising mental health professionals of her regret, they offered little help.
Sinead Watson says that she read about gender dyphoria online when she was 21 and concluded that she had the condition as a number of the symptoms lined up. She decided to move forward with presenting herself as a man.
“I was very aware that I wasn’t going to literally change my sex, but I thought if I could transform to such an extent that I passed [as a male] and lived socially and legally as male, that it would solve all the problems I had,” she said. “So, if I transition, then all of the depression and self-hatred and discontent with my body would go away.”
Watson stated that she felt better for a while, but her problems never really went away. At first, she thought that maybe she just needed to give herself more time.
Research