When Maryann Barton* was 4-years-old, her happy childhood was upended by parental conflict, leaving her and her siblings in the ruins of a confused family.
“My dad, I think, thought my mom was cheating,” she told IW Features. “He had started developing this sense of hatred towards her… She just turned in on herself, just became this little, meek thing of self-hatred.”
Barton recalled her father relying on her as a confidant, and her family life became “a survival situation.” She said her mother gained weight and struggled with her self-image, and Barton took on the behavior she saw modeled.
“I thought I was so overweight and just awful looking,” she said.
But looking back, she realized she looked like a normal, attractive 16-year-old.
During the 2008 market crash, her family lost their home and moved to an apartment. Her parents were verbally aggressive toward each other, according to Barton, and she recalled a few instances of physical altercations.
“I just had no sense of self, no sense of worth and grounding,” she said.
Seeking a way to “escape reality,” she got into anime and cosplay, and the summer when she turned 16-years-old, she attended a convention where she met a transgender-identifying individual and saw firsthand the pathway she would try to follow to escape her tumultuous youth.
When Barton’s father left the picture, she said she was “free falling.” Now in high school, Barton struggled with her identity as a woman, and she began wearing heavy makeup to hide her internal struggle.
By her senior year of high school, she said she had a mental breakdown and told her mother she was transgender. With the support of a lesbian friend, she started dressing like a boy and identifying with a male name.
But socially “transitioning” did not grant her acceptance and let her “pass” as a man.
“Because I was so feminine looking, everyone just assumed I was androgynous, even though I was desperately trying to be manly,” she said.
So when she began college, she sought medicalization, desperate to escape her womanhood. She got a doctor recommendation from the transgender-identified individual she had met years before, and at 20-years-old, she obtained a prescription for hormonal treatment after just one consultation and an initial appointment.
The testosterone injections soon changed Barton’s personality and mental state.
“I was very moody and grouchy and lost a couple of friendships from it,” she said.
She recalled becoming “hypercritical” of others’ perceptions of her and hyperaware of other women around her. At the time, she thought she was becoming attracted to women, but in retrospect, she said she was envious of their female figures and appearance.
Two years after starting testosterone, Barton sought an elective double mastectomy. She said she reached out to a popular YouTube therapist and easily received a referral letter, despite never being an official client.
At first, the double mastectomy was a relief after years of breast binding, but Barton said she couldn’t look at her post-surgery chest without feeling intense shame. She worried about the appearance of her scars, and as the wounds began healing and her stitches were removed, she began applying lotion and intensely massaging the area, despite how painful it was.
“I was going with my hands as hard as I [could] to pop the keloids that were forming,” she said. “It was an obsession. I was like, ‘No one can ever know that I got my boobs taken off.’”
Meanwhile, she had increased her testosterone doses and decreased the time between injections, after telling her doctor that the withdrawal between injections was becoming too intense.
Soon, the side effects of the sex-rejecting procedures piled up. She said she began losing hair on her head, even as the testosterone had given her more body hair, and her testosterone levels were dangerously high.
“I was a lot more angry, horny, hungry, all the things that come when you go on testosterone, but doubled, tripled, with a person who’s mentally unstable,” she said.
This was also the time when COVID-19 lockdowns were implemented across the country. Barton said she started meditating and focusing on her ceramics projects. She dug through her past and started coming to terms with unprocessed feelings.
Not too long after, Barton got a cramp in one of her ovaries, a sign of ovarian atrophy caused by testosterone injections and a symptom that often requires a hysterectomy. The possibility of losing her uterus made her realize she wanted to have children one day—and that she wanted to live as a woman.
She gradually decreased her testosterone injections and supplemented her female hormones with additional progesterone as her estrogen levels rose. But the damage had been done.
Even today, despite not taking testosterone for years, Barton still suffers from permanent effects of the sex-rejecting procedures she underwent: her voice is permanently deepened, and she will never be able to breastfeed her potential future children.
Nothing can give her back the years of early adulthood she lost to gender ideology.
“I felt like part of my brain was turned off,” she said. “I feel like I blipped. The female version of me feels like [it] had been paused for a long time”
But today, she’s reclaiming her life from transgenderism. She has been with her boyfriend for two years, and as they plan a future life and family together, Barton’s journey has come full circle.
“We’re starting pregnancy planning,” she said. “I am in a [much] better place.”
Her hope is that she can be the model for her future children that she desperately needed growing up: confident, stable, and loving.
“I believe parents really pave the way for how children view the world,” she said.
* A pseudonym is used to protect this storyteller’s identity.
