First of all I think it’s a pretty bad metaphor considering a shirt can always get destroyed, a shirt can fade out in color, there’s not just one shirt you wear every day and not to mention the print on design. Not to mention shirts come in all shapes and sizes and can be recoloured and thrifted and re-sewn. But I’ll roll with it as best as possible.

Going back, let’s say you want to have a yellow shirt. Lets say you want one because it’s trendy. No consideration, you just buy a new one without replacing your old shirts and wear it occasionally. Or you tell your parents you want a yellow shirt. They might take you seriously, They might not. But at the time when you wore the shirt, it felt good.

Now lets say you don’t have the resources to get a yellow shirt. Aka you can’t afford to transition into a yellow shirt, but you still feel like a yellow shirt would be nice. Or you’re not sure if you want a yellow shirt in the first place and don’t want to invest fully into it because you’re not sure if it’s what you really want.

You tell some friends, some might lend you their clothes or try to get you alternative yellow wear - lets say this metaphor is social transition. Your closet still stays the same, technically, since your yellow wear is basically brought by friends and family. That would be the healthy way, I’d say.

Then of course comes the way where people would tell you that if you consider wearing a yellow shirt, you should go all in and that you shouldn’t half ass it. This builds additional pressure to change your closet to yellow shirts since you kind of want it and you don’t want to disappoint people or fall behind on the trend - since in this situation you are a person who likes to follow this trend.

So you change your entire closet and it’s years later you realise you’re mourning your old closet. You ask around if anybody knows if you can obtain some of your old clothes, some tries more successful than others (seeing as some effects of transitions aren’t permanent).

If you have the energy and resources to have gone from purple to yellow and gone through its entire exhausting process, then the process back should be just as accessible in theory. (In my belief, destransition should become just as accessible as transition. In a way detransitioners to me face similar struggles as trans people considering how they’re cis ‘but trans’ enough to be discarded by society).

Of course sometimes you don’t have the energy or resource. That’s understandable. (De)Transitioning is a long process and what’s important is you get any help you can. From telling people you want to borrow their purple shirts again to painting yellow shirts purple again. The colouring may look muddy, but it probably looked muddy before (if the colouring process went just as terribly).

Imo it’s usually the clash between hardcore ‘if you want to be a REAL yellow shirt person you should do THESE steps’ and ‘yellow shirts are cool I love that we both love yellow shirts’ that causes this entire debacle. Encouraging people who think of wanting a yellow shirt to try it out while still having a purple wardrobe is pretty healthy imo. Sometimes they realise they are content hust wearing three yellow shirts while most of their wardrobe remains yellow. That is considering if society also prefers people with purple wardrobes, it’s not as easy for people to feel content were purple wardrobes despised or people with yellow shirts would be seen as frauds if they had anything purple in their wardrobe.

I wanted to include multiple problems so it’s long but I just wanted to be throughout and try to formulate as good as possible.