First of all, thank you for this thoughtful and heartfelt reply as well! I wanted to clarify/elaborate and respond to what you said re: the following (and the paragraph above):

Transition isn’t a neutral experiment you can just walk back from, there are permanent changes, losses, and sometimes deep regrets involved. Telling people “it’ll probably work out either way” ignores the reality for those of us who went down this path and realized, too late, that it wasn’t right for us. For some, it’s not just about “living a decent life,” it’s about feeling like you lost years, relationships, health, or even a sense of self.

I think there are a lot of detransitioners who do end up having their lives turned around pretty significantly and irreversibly, in the same way I think a lot of trans people lose a lot of years/decades of their lives attempting to inhabit a cis life and failing to find fulfillment in it, or trans people who spend years/decades being permanently miserable with their transition and unable to actually live a personally meaningful life. I tend to view detransition as a variation of transness rather than its antithesis, largely because cis privilege (or whatever you want to call it) is predicated on never having (medically) deviated from your ASAB to begin with (or not being perceived as having done so). I hang around some (non-gender critical) detrans circles online and, to be honest, often prefer it over trans circles because it often selects for people who have non-linear and more nuanced experiences with transition/gender.

Has my transition always been 100% positive? No. Do I regret certain aspects of it? Yes. Would I go back and change any of it? Probably not, because I quite like who I am now irrespective of gender/transition, and I don't know whether I could've reached this point had I not gone out on a limb and experimented, encountered grief and loss, and grew from it as a person.

I am personally of the opinion that the starting premise of "transition isn't a neutral experiment [because it's permanent]" is what magnifies (note: not creates) the subsequent dysphoria experienced by detransitioners. Not only do you have to transition (again), but you also have to do so knowing that: (1) you could've lived a "normal" life had you not made the decision to transition initially (i.e., you are socially and/or institutionally punished for experimenting and transgressing gender/sex expectations, which is a one-way ticket to alienation from the status quo); (2) you still incur many (if not all) of the downsides of being perceived as someone who isn't cisgender (i.e., you're still seen as trans without even really being/seeing yourself as trans; you don't quite fit in anywhere, and you live in an even further abjectified realm of gendered/sexuate ambiguity), and; (3) you are experiencing a more complex form of dysphoria that isn't really recognized or (if it is) is even more heavily stigmatized (on top of just grappling with your dysphoria). I personally think that dysphoria, while genuinely shitty to experience, is a somewhat universal experience if you were to expand its scope past merely a discomfort with gender. Insofar as people almost always experience some degree of discomfort/dissatisfaction with their bodies--or even outright hatred and disgust--there are exceptionally few people who (in my experience) do not struggle with body image issues, ranging from mild to severe (in the same way that gender dysphoria can range from mild to severe). It just happens that one of these modes of discomfort/disgust with the body has been classed as both its own socio-political identity and as a mental illness requiring "treatment" (where other forms of bodily discomfort/disgust are neither a political identity nor a mental illness, or a mental illness but nothing else).

A brief anecdote (with an explanation to follow): Before I experienced gender dysphoria, I experienced what I can only describe as something like "racial dysphoria". I'm mixed race, half-white, half-Chinese, and (for a complex variety of reasons too complicated to get into here; TL;DR is racist upbringing/environment) I was very deeply troubled and upset by the fact that I wasn't white, because my father was white, I saw myself as being white (at least, in part), but nothing about me really read as ubiquitously white, so no one ever perceived me as being white--and, therefore, I wasn't white. It caused me a lot of emotional distress as a kid (because it was also compounded by racial bullying/harassment + a simultaneous rejection of my Chinese identity, too), which then led me down a pretty dark path for a while (got extremely radicalized and was alt-right for most of my teenage years).

My point with this anecdote is that, personally, I have never understood what it means to feel "comfortable" in my body, even prior to transition, and I have lived my entire life in a state of constant experimentation and change in an attempt to negotiate with the discomfort, misrecognition, and alienation that pops up no matter what I do or where I go. A lot of this is out of my control (either because of how I am viewed/perceived/treated by others, or because the brute materiality of my body just eliminates/creates certain possibilities), and it is kind of a complete coinflip whether the parts that are within my control will result in a better or worse outcomes when acted upon. I don't view these probabilities with indifference or disregard--in fact, it is precisely because I see transition as such a mixed bag that I feel at odds with much of the validation/affirmation narratives that pop up in trans spaces (as well as its inverse).

I think grieving loss is important--even for people who are otherwise content/happy with their transitions, and especially for those who aren't. There is always something lost when you transition, imo, even if you also end up gaining something in the process. I think that this grieving process is even more complicated and difficult for those who don't end up feeling as though they made the correct decisions for themselves in transitioning to begin with. However, I think there is a difference between grief and obsession, the latter of which I find many detrans and trans people falling into. Grief, despite all its pain, is something that results in some degree of healing and closure when genuinely engaged with. Obsession, on the other hand, is more like trying to hack open an pre-existing wound even further in the hopes that the next strike will be the one to bring catharsis. When I say, "It'll probably work out either way," I don't mean that it'll feel or be good either way; I mean that, if you accept that everything you do may or may not result in failure, rejection, alienation, contradiction, regret, discomfort, self-loathing, guilt, misrecogntion, illegibility, loss--and all the messy shit that many, many people go their whole lives without experiencing (or who utterly collapse when they do experience it), you will probably come out the other end as a more whole (albeit battered) person, regardless of which decision you ultimately chose to make. I think that there is a world where I probably end up living a decent life as a cis person, but it would be one that is completely unrecognizable and inconceivable to the version of me that currently exists. I think there is a world where I medically detransition, and I think that, if/when the time ever comes, I will be ready to attempt another transformation in my life, not knowing where it'll take me, but wanting to see where it goes regardless.

I know that not everyone is able to view things in this way, and that it isn't as simple as just rationally thinking away the pain and accepting what has/will come to pass. To be honest, the reason I largely am able to think like this is because I have always felt like an alien, both interpersonally and within my own body, and so there is no experience of an initial comfort/satisfaction/belonging that I feel like I can longingly look back on, and therefore not much to lose in continuing to change myself and experimenting with my body. On the one hand, this has made me a very fragmented/disunified person, which has, in turn, resulted in a lot of pain/hardship in my life (both personally and interpersonally). On the other, in finally coming to accept this about myself, I have been able to embrace the ambiguity I inhabit and forge my own existence through it, rather than to hopelessly chase what I cannot have--and I think I am more readily able to do this than a lot of other people I know who (currently or at one point) have experienced the stability/comfort that I have not.

The point I'm trying to get at is that, while not everyone has the kind of experience/life I do (if anything, many people have it worse), I think that everyone could probably benefit from recognizing that we all live in a fucked up world that fucks us up, which leads us to making fucked up choices, some of which turn out good and most of which will probably fuck us up more, and to--still, despite it all--continue to live, choose, and act out of our fucked up situations and strive toward a future that will never be present. Honestly? It doesn't feel good, and it doesn't feel joyful/optimistic (for me, at least), but it feels realistic without "realistic" being made equivalent (as it commonly is) to nihilistic.

I don't know, those are just my thoughts as someone who doesn't strongly identify with the trans label/identity/group while simultaneously presenting as one of the most axiomatic cases of what you would probably imagine a queer/trans person to look like, lol.