There is a reason clarity disappeared, and it was not an accident of language or a benign evolution of science. The progressive erasure of transsexual specificity from the DSM—moving from DSM-III through DSM-IV to DSM-5—did not simply “update terminology.” It dismantled material protections, dissolved diagnostic boundaries, and rerouted a vulnerable population into informal economies where exploitation could be reframed as identity, desire, or consent. That is not an unintended side effect. It is the point.

DSM-III named transsexualism as a material condition with medical, social, and risk implications. It was imperfect, but it acknowledged reality: that some people are born with a cross-sexed embodiment that places them at disproportionate risk of violence, coercion, homelessness, and sexual exploitation. That clarity created obligations—clinical, legal, and institutional. By DSM-IV, that specificity was already being softened, reframed as “gender identity disorder,” pathologised in theory while being hollowed out in practice. By DSM-5, the final move was complete: transsexuals were dissolved into “gender dysphoria,” a symptom without a subject, a feeling without a body, a distress abstracted from the material conditions that produce it.

What disappears when you remove the body is accountability.

Once transsexuality is no longer a concrete, sexed condition but a floating identity state, institutions are no longer required to protect people as a class exposed to predictable harms. Medical care becomes optional. Housing risk becomes invisible. Sexual violence becomes reframable as “exploration.” Survival strategies become “kink.” And trafficking—actual trafficking—becomes legible only if it is violent enough to offend liberal sensibilities, not when it is slow, relational, aestheticised, or consent-adjacent.

This is how exploitation modernises. You do not need chains when you have narrative. You do not need force when you can produce meaning.

Transsexuals, especially those without family protection or institutional backing, are disproportionately funnelled into sex work, informal domestic arrangements, and dependency-based “support” systems precisely because formal systems no longer recognise them as a protected class with material needs. When you erase diagnostic clarity, you do not liberate people—you privatise their risk. And once risk is privatised, it can be monetised.

The BDSM world, the “chosen family” economy, the patronage model dressed up as care, the fetishisation of vulnerability as authenticity—these are not fringe phenomena. They are downstream effects of institutional abdication. When medicine and law retreat, markets rush in. When psychiatry refuses to name reality, culture sells it back as empowerment. And when harm occurs, it is reframed as desire, consent, or personal failure rather than structural exposure.

This is where trafficking hides now: not in vans, but in bedrooms; not in threats, but in offers; not in force, but in meaning. A spare room offered “safely.” Financial support framed as devotion. Sexual access laundered through identity affirmation or spiritual narrative. Control presented as containment. Surveillance reframed as care. The language is soft; the outcomes are not.

The DSM changes made this possible by removing the language required to say no clearly. Once there is no recognised subject who can be exploited, exploitation becomes unspeakable. Once there is no diagnostic clarity, there is no baseline against which coercion can be measured. Everything becomes vibes, feelings, negotiated meanings—exactly the conditions under which power consolidates without scrutiny.

This is not about nostalgia for pathologisation. It is about recognising that naming reality is a prerequisite for protection. Transsexuals were not liberated by being erased from diagnostic frameworks; they were exposed. They were stripped of legibility at the same moment neoliberal culture expanded markets of intimacy, care, sex, and identity. That convergence is not coincidence. It is political economy.

Clarity was removed because clarity interferes with profit. It interferes with plausible deniability. It interferes with the ability to sell harm as choice and dependency as empowerment. Ambiguity is not neutral; it is an enabling condition. And the populations most harmed by ambiguity are always those whose survival already requires discipline, hyper-attunement, and self-governance.

I am not interested in reforming the language gently or asking institutions to do better if they feel like it. I am interested in naming what happened. Diagnostic erasure did not make transsexuals safer; it made them available. Available to markets, available to predators, available to systems that require someone else to absorb the risk so the surface can remain clean.

This is why clarity is treated as dangerous. This is why it is called “cold,” “rigid,” or “uncompassionate.” Because clarity collapses the stories that keep exploitation polite. It forces a reckoning with who benefits when reality is softened and who pays when it is denied.

Clarity is not market-friendly. That is precisely why it is necessary.

The city loved symbols the way it loved neon: bright enough to sell the night, cheap enough to replace when they burn out. Every year it dressed itself up in fresh colours and practiced saying the right words in public, like a man rehearsing an apology in a mirror he didn’t plan to mean. It called that progress. It called that pride. It called that community. In the daylight, the same streets still stepped over people without slowing down, and the same institutions still ran on shortages, delays, and polite refusals. But the banners looked good in photos, and photos were the closest thing the city had to a conscience.

When her crisis came, it didn’t arrive as poetry. It came as bone-deep fatigue and a calendar full of appointments that never happened on time. It came as a phone tree, a voicemail box, a referral to another referral. It came as doors that opened only after you proved you deserved to walk through them. The waiting rooms were full of laminated optimism—posters about being seen, slogans about safety, smiling faces floating above the fine print. The words were soft. The chairs were hard. The line moved like a bad alibi.

On the walls, flags hung like promises. Some of them were there out of genuine care, some of them because someone had decided it was good policy, and some of them because nobody wanted to be the first to take them down. She watched people glide past those colours with the confidence of the healthy, the kind of confidence that thinks it’s virtue. She watched the same people who could chant about liberation on a weekend go silent on a weekday when the subject turned to shortages, billing codes, and the ugly mechanics of staying alive. Nobody wanted to talk about that part. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t shareable. It didn’t fit on a tote bag.

There were activists, too—real ones, loud ones, tired ones, earnest ones, the whole spectrum. Some showed up like firefighters, carrying water into burning rooms. Others showed up like marketers, carrying a ring light and a list of approved phrases. The difference wasn’t always visible at first. Both kinds wore the right colours. Both kinds spoke the language. Both kinds knew how to make a crowd rally. But only one kind stayed after the applause died and the work got quiet and expensive.

The city had an appetite for stories, but it was a picky eater. It liked wounds it could romanticise, pain it could turn into a moral lesson, survival it could use as proof that everything was better now. It didn’t like the unmarketable truth: that living takes infrastructure, that bodies need medicine, that rights live on paper before they live in the street. It didn’t like the truth that some people don’t get to treat society like a bonfire metaphor because they’re still depending on those systems to breathe, to eat, to be recognised as who they are when a clerk is deciding what box they fit in.

She knew that dependence the way you know a bad neighbourhood—by the exits, by the hours to avoid, by the sound it makes when things are about to go wrong. Her life was a chain of permissions: prescriptions refilled on time or not, legal documents updated or not, appointments approved or not. A missed signature could turn into a month of suffering. A careless policy change could turn into a cliff. For some people, “burn it down” was a slogan. For her, it sounded like someone threatening the bridge she still had to cross.

In public, everyone loved to say they were on the side of the vulnerable. In private, they treated vulnerability like a stain that might rub off. They could handle the idea of a person in pain; they couldn’t handle the logistics. They could handle an inspiring speech; they couldn’t handle the paperwork that followed it. They could handle a march; they couldn’t handle a ride to the pharmacy at night when the snow was falling and the bus had stopped running. They wanted the feeling of helping, not the responsibility of it.

So she learned how the social contract really worked: the city did charity the way it did fashion—seasonal, performative, abandoned the moment it stopped flattering the wearer. When pain stayed stylish, it had an audience. When pain got specific—when it asked for resources, time, sacrifice—people got busy. They didn’t have to push her away. They just drifted, like smoke finding the nearest crack to escape through.

Some of them called it boundaries. Some called it burnout. Some called it self-care, like a prayer they said to themselves to avoid guilt. She didn’t argue. She didn’t chase. She’d spent too much time chasing things that were supposed to be guaranteed: access, recognition, basic competence from systems that said they were there to help. She didn’t have extra energy to spend convincing strangers to act like they meant what they posted.

And then there were the men—always men—who came sniffing around the edges of it like it was a perfume. They didn’t ask what she needed. They asked what she was. They called her “intense” and meant it like a compliment, the way you might compliment a knife for being sharp. They asked if her energy was good or dangerous, like a woman’s spine was a parlour trick. They wanted the danger in the abstract: the aura, the edge, the story cleaned up into something they could flirt with. They didn’t want the actual truth that made her the way she was—the nights that taught her how to listen for disaster, the mornings that began with pill bottles and contingency plans, the legal hurdles that made ordinary life feel like a court case with no closing arguments.

They liked her most when she was a rumour. They liked her least when she was a ledger.

The city encouraged that kind of misunderstanding. It trained people to read depth as attitude, resilience as arrogance, boundaries as a challenge. It taught them to approach pain like a spectacle: look, react, move on. It taught them to treat a survivor like a character in their own private film. When she spoke plainly, they called it harsh. When she refused to flatter them, they called it bitterness. When she described the structures that hurt her, they tried to turn it into a personal disagreement, like the problem was her tone and not the machinery chewing people up.

She watched organisations pose beside the same flags while their waiting lists grew longer. She watched public statements bloom like flowers while clinics closed like shutters. She watched speeches about inclusion land in rooms where the air still tasted like neglect. It wasn’t that symbols were worthless. It was that symbols were cheaper than solutions, and the city had always preferred bargains over bills.

There were people inside the community who showed their humanity the way it’s meant to be shown: quietly, consistently, without needing credit. A nurse who didn’t roll her eyes at complicated history. A receptionist who didn’t smirk at a legal name mismatch. A friend who didn’t ask for a perfectly packaged explanation before offering help. Those moments mattered. They were proof that tenderness could survive in a place built to grind it down. But tenderness was small and violence was big, and big things cast longer shadows.

The violence wasn’t always a fist. Sometimes it was a denial letter written in polite font. Sometimes it was the gap between a promise and its funding. Sometimes it was the way the system treated her body like an inconvenience, a cost centre, a risk. Sometimes it was the way strangers demanded she be inspiring on command, demanded she translate her pain into something consumable, demanded she deny her own reality to preserve their comfort. Violence, in this town, wore many suits.

It seeped into her calendar. It sat in her mailbox. It lived in the minutes between “we’ll call you back” and the silence that followed. It was the constant sense that her life was subject to other people’s moods: the pharmacist’s patience, the doctor’s schedule, the clerk’s bias, the politician’s appetite for headlines. It was the knowledge that the law could be both her shield and her chain, and that she needed it anyway. There was no purity test that kept you alive. There was only what worked.

Winter made the city honest. Not kinder—just honest. The cold stripped away the parties, the festivals, the sunny speeches. It left the essentials: heat, food, medicine, shelter, paperwork that didn’t care about your feelings. Holiday lights appeared in windows like a joke told by someone who didn’t know the punchline. People spoke about togetherness as if it were a natural resource, as if loneliness was some personal failure instead of a system doing its job.

She didn’t make enemies. She didn’t stage dramatic exits. She didn’t slam doors. She simply stopped performing her pain in ways that made others feel heroic. She stopped rounding the edges of her truth to make it easier to swallow. She stopped pretending she could afford to lose the structures she depended on just to prove she was brave.

And what remained was stark: one person, one body, one set of needs, moving through a society that loved liberation in theory and resented it in practice. A society that celebrated identity as culture but balked at identity as a legal fact. A society that clapped for defiance but flinched from dependency. A society that told her she was free—so long as her freedom didn’t require anything from anyone.

That’s the trick the city plays. It sells you belonging in bright colours while charging you extra for survival. It praises your authenticity until it becomes inconvenient. It teaches you to call neglect “growth,” abandonment “boundaries,” and bureaucratic cruelty “policy.” It gives you language for everything except responsibility, and then it wonders why people get sharp.

By the time December came around again, she understood something clean and terrible: the crowd isn’t a home. It’s a weather pattern. It changes with the season, with the headlines, with whatever makes people feel good about themselves that week. If you build your life under it, you’ll spend every year wet and wondering what you did wrong. So she built smaller. She built quieter. She built sturdier. She learned to keep her necessities close and her expectations closer. She learned that solitude wasn’t a punishment; it was an insurance policy she could actually rely on.

In the end, only violence stayed for the truth, because violence is loyal in the ugliest way. It doesn’t get bored. It doesn’t drift. It doesn’t decide it’s moving on to a nicer story. It persists in the gaps, in the refusals, in the cheap promises hung on expensive walls. It is the one thing you can count on in a system that calls itself compassionate while letting people fall through its hands.

And she—without speeches, without slogans, without a crowd—kept herself alive anyway, one form, one refill, one hard-earned inch of recognition at a time, listening to the keys of an old typewriter strike the page like rain on a window that never opens.

Preface: On Historical Clarity and the Erasure of Words

This essay, “Transgender Territory: Do You Use the Word ‘Transgender’ Without Thinking?” first appeared in 1994 and was republished in 2011 by Suzan Cooke on her blog Women Born Transsexual , one of the most unflinching and incisive voices to emerge from the early post-transsexual resistance to what she called “Transgender Inc.”

Cooke’s site has since gone offline, preserved only through the Wayback Machine. The original URL is now controlled by MyTransgenderDate—an irony that encapsulates both the erasure and sexualisation of transsexual women: our political vocabulary overwritten, our bodies commodified. I am republishing this text to safeguard a document of historical and political significance—a record of how early transsexual women articulated themselves and resisted linguistic and institutional absorption into a category that effaced the specificity of their existence.

Written anonymously, decades before transgender came to dominate both academic and public discourse, the essay is sharp, deliberate, and alive with stakes that remain urgent. It speaks from a generation for whom transition was a medical and existential necessity—not a cultural identity—and whose language was later overwritten in the name of inclusivity.

Reposting this is not an act of nostalgia, but of archival preservation. It is an effort to recover a vocabulary that once carried precision, pain, and political coherence before it was collapsed into abstraction.

What follows is the full text of the original post, as preserved via the Wayback Machine. No edits have been made to its language or structure.

— Reposted from Women Born Transsexual (1994 / 2011)

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“Transgender Territory: Do you use the word “transgender” Without thinking?01/26/2011 — Suzan

The resistance to assimilation to the collective identity presented by Transgender Inc. is not a new phenomena, nor is it simply the product of a few disgruntled post-transsexual women who are “elitists’.

If we struggle with anything it with finding words to describe our lives after the whole hoopla of SRS and transition has become ancient history.

Mostly we leave transgender nation become assimilated into the ordinary world.

The following piece was written in 1994.

It is republished here with permission of its author who has requested anonymity. I consider this to be of historical significance as it articulates our early resistance to erasure by Transgender Inc.

By Anonymous

Transgender Territory

( With Reservation )

Do you use the word “transgender” without thinking?

Think again.

[ originally published, 1994 ]

There is something going on. A subtle change, fundamental and insidious. Transsexuals are now being referred to as “transgendered”.

If you are a transsexual, be afraid Be very very afraid. It is social engineering disguised as political correctness.

Like most social engineering, the intent was not necessarily evil.

Transgendered was a word created to describe any individual who appeared to fill the opposite gender role of the one more typically associated with the sex of their birth. This nebulous term encompassed a broad range of conditions, from fetishistic cross-dressing (otherwise known as transvestism), to transsexualism.

Some of the behaviors typically associated with these conditions may be quite similar in appearance and manifestation, and so the term transgendered indeed applied. However, they are dramatically different in causation and degree, and so the original terms would be necessary for clarification. It is the typical structure of scientific classification wherein all humans are primates, but not all primates are human. All transsexuals are transgendered, but not all transgenders are transsexual.

Such was the intent, and it probably never would have impacted the life of any transsexual at any time, save for being used in a therapist’s file as an initial diagnosis. It does not bear the obvious ramifications of immediately diagnosing one as transsexual, and yet, at the same time, it is a term more kind and gentle than Gender Dysphoric. Again, it probably would not have affected the life of any transsexual, but something happened somewhere. Now it not only affects the life of an individual transsexual, but it threatens to impact the very future of all transsexuals.

What happened was that individuals outside of the scope of social sciences began using the word transgender indiscriminately.

Originally it was all quite harmless on the surface, and even remotely benevolent. These people were no doubt well meaning. This neat new term gave them a large box into which they could quite nicely fit everyone who did not fit elsewhere. It made them feel good, socially progressive. It also meant that they did not have to tax their minds and their sensibilities by sorting out all of those bizarre folks.

No more discomforting thought of a man wearing women’s underwear beneath his business suit, or the mental gymnastics required to wrap around the concept of a woman in a man’s body (or a man in a woman’s body). No, all of those people were simply transgendered, and that was that.

Worse, many transsexuals became warm and fuzzy with the word themselves, and for the exact same reasons. Some may have also felt that it was a tip of acceptance being extended, and they had best grab onto it while it was being offered. To do anything less would be…. well, impolite. The offering should be accepted gratefully by the affected minority from the gracious all-powerful hand of the majority.

The majority is saying that, on the one hand, you are separate from us, but, on the other hand, you are equal to us. There is no polite way to argue with that sentiment.

This insidious tool of manipulation may have led to African Americans continuing to endure a prolonged period of social inequity. However, more than that minority, it proved wholly crippling to Native Americans.

They were sent to reservations. They were given the freedom to preserve their culture and their ways as much as they wanted, only not in “our” backyard– the white people’s backyard– a yard which grew progressively larger every day. It was kind of like this for the Native Americans: existence is preferable to extinction, and assimilation is not an option. As a result, acceptance as a human being came with a very high price tag; it was acceptance with grave reservations.

About the same time the word transgender was being applied indiscriminately (not yet social engineering but simply mildly benevolent bigotry), a different movement was underway. It was the movement to remove the word “sex” as the overhead classification of the terms male and female. That is, male and female would become terms descriptive of an individual’s gender, not their sex. Sex as an identifying term will eventually slip into extinction through disuse.

This will affect many words. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has far reaching, and largely unintended consequences.

This is how words work through social progression. We can’t get rid of the stereotypes associated with a word, but we can get rid of the word. African Americans have gone through many such evolutions. At one time, being called a Negro was seen as socially progressive. It was much more preferable than the alternative. Words that may offend the sensibilities of people today were simply the words of progressive usage yesterday. Perhaps we can’t change the world, but we can change the word.

Transsexual is a word about to be changed. It (along with others words containing the word “sex”) is about to become extinct through planned disuse. Political Correctness may be the term being used to describe the pressure that will lead to that extinction.

Ideally, the “transsexual community” should not even exist at all as a static group. It should be a “revolving door”, a community through which individuals pass only briefly on their way elsewhere (that is, to an assimilated life as the sex opposite that of their birth). The “transsexual community” is a way station, a processing point, an encampment for sexually transient refugees. It is the Ellis Island of the sexes. It is a community unlike any other, and it is certainly not a destination in and of itself. I don’t think anyone aspires to be a transsexual. They aspire to live as either a male or a female, and they accept being labeled a transsexual for a period of time as a part of the process.

To accept the label “transgendered”, however, is to accept a permanent place, a reservation, if you will, a territory graciously given to you in which you may freely dwell. It is a territory that is different, apart, and separate from the two sexes, and regardless of what anyone says, it is certainly not equal.

Once a person has declared themselves “transgendered”, claiming this label for their own, they have accepted a social contract which is not breakable and non-negotiable. They have forever joined a static community in which they will live for the rest of their lives. They will not live as a female, they will not live as a male. These social locations and their associated neighborhoods have become out of reach, beyond the pale. Instead of living as a man or a woman- that which a person has labored so hard to achieve –the transgendered will, instead, live under a roof which has been handed to them. To do anything less would be… well, rude. After all, you have been given a name and a place in this world — with the footnote, of course, that you certainly cannot have our place. Individuals who accept such an offer may have a place to live life a little more easily, but they may also have reached the end of their journey.

This may be fine for some. There are transsexuals who are incapable of assimilating into life as the sex opposite that of their birth. They may have painfully obvious physical limitations which may impede or prevent their assimilation. They may also have mental and emotional obstacles as well. To these individuals, signing the social contract and accepting the Transgender Territory is a blessing. They have found a place in which they may eke out a life unburdened by the rules and struggles that apply to either sex (it also should be noted, however, without having any hope of ever being equal to them).

There are others who live in Transgender Territory too. Transsexuals who prefer being known as such, who are outrageous, or notorious.

Still others, who could have lived a life as the sex of their choosing, but who were called out, either by their own choice or by circumstances beyond their control. Renee Richards, for example, after coming out as a transsexual to her friends and associates, and then going back into society as a woman, came back out again into the spotlight as a woman tennis player, one with quite a sensational past.

This was her own choice. To fight for something that she believed in required that she sacrifice one of the very things that she sought to achieve- her privacy -and we owe her a debt of gratitude. Another example is Caroline Cossey, otherwise known as Tula, who was outed by circumstances beyond her control. She is a beautiful woman, and she no doubt would have enjoyed a very successful modeling career as such.

However, after being so publicly outed by someone who wanted only a sensational tabloid story, she became less of a beautiful woman, and more of a beautiful sexual curiosity. This is very unfortunate, and surely not what she wanted when she began the process.

I refuse to accept the “Transgender Territory”. Make no reservations for me in that name. I am a transsexual, and I am that only for a while. I am one who has crossed the ocean between the sexes, and I have already staked my claim. I have assimilated into a greater territory, a broad expanse of land defined only by myself. I have a life as the sex opposite that of my birth. I have worked hard to make it work, and like a settler coming to this country 200 years ago, I may not have been born here, but I have no intention of ever giving it up. Nor should you, at least, not without knowing exactly what you are surrendering, how you are surrendering it, and what you are accepting in return.

You can live as a male, you can live as a female, or you can live as a transgender. There are no other options. By accepting the label of transgendered, you are surrendering the very way of life that you have worked so hard and fought so hard to achieve. Neither male nor female, you will live in a separate territory apart from both, forever becoming a part of a static community. In addition, this territory is composed of many different “tribes”, from fetishistic crossdressers and transvestites to drag queens, not all of whom you may feel comfortable being closely associated with. It is important to remember that the married heterosexual male transvestite who spends perhaps a few days a month in women’s clothing is given “transgender territory” right along with the transsexual. An Apache and a Cherokee may be quite different, yet to the general population, they are both simply American Indians (much to the dismay of both, I’m sure). A transsexual and a transvestite are equally different, yet to the general population, they are both simply transgendered. There is no difference.

As a transsexual who accepts a place in “transgender territory” you surrender your unique identity, along with the entire path you have taken to reach it. Simply ponder the educational task that lies ahead when the word transsexual eventually becomes extinct through disuse.

You accept this social contract simply by claiming the term transgender to describe yourself. It doesn’t matter whether it is on your website, your business card, or used as your preferred term of social reference. By doing so, you forever accept your place in “Transgender Territory”. My fear is that you may be doing so without thought, without reservation. It may seem more socially acceptable to you than transsexual. If so, then you have already been socially engineered, adapted to fit the new age of political correctness.

Quite frankly, if you wish to live a normal life as the sex opposite that of your birth, then you are a transsexual. It’s as simple as that. Use the word, hold the word, embrace the word. Do so for as long as you feel necessary. It represents a “revolving door community”. It is your Ellis Island. Then, if you wish, move on.

Assimilate into the life of the sex opposite that of your birth.

Live as a male, live as a female, but live.

Here is the bad news: I fear that regardless of what you may do, the word transsexual will effectively become extinct through disuse within our lifetime. It will become as dusty and as brittle as other words that you may be able to remember, but rarely, if ever, use. Some descriptive words should be allowed to drift from common usage through social pressure. They bear stings, negative associations, and bad memories. Negro, Colored, Red Man, Yellow Man, Mongoloid, Retarded, etc. These were all socially progressive and perfectly acceptable words in their time. I, for one, do not believe that the word “transsexual” belongs in such company. Yet even so, I am equally confident that it will eventually join them. The best that you can do is simply delay its demise.

I have no prejudice, no axe to grind, and nothing to gain. I have close friends who use the word transgender prolifically. It is not a “bad word” (although when I don’t know someone’s category of sexual identity I prefer to simply use the initial “T” to describe them). I am not on a personal crusade, and I do not want any recognition. If you are a transsexual, I simply want you to think before you use the word “transgender”. If you don’t have a reservation about using it, then, in a matter of speaking, you may end up living on one.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a medically transitioned, Anglo-American transsexual woman living in exile between systems, nations, and narratives. She writes from the borderlands—between erasure and endurance, between faith and fallout, between what’s lost and what remains.

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Preface

On 11 July 2025 I submitted the op-ed below—“Moral Injury and the Total Erasure of the True Transsexual”—to The New York Times Opinion desk (cc Azeen Ghorayshi). No acknowledgment or response followed. I am publishing the submission here, in full and unedited, as a record.

This is not a culture-war provocation. It is testimony from a medically transitioned, post-operative transsexual writing under a pen name for safety. The piece names a specific moral injury: being rewritten out of existence and then asked to applaud the rewrite. Read it as evidence, not an invitation for debate.

Reprints are permitted only in full, unedited, with credit to “Tired Transsexual.” Send a request here:

Treat what follows as the paper of record declined to: a primary source.

From: Tired Transsexual
Date: On Friday, July 11th, 2025 at 2:03 PM
Subject: Submission: Moral Injury and the Total Erasure of the True Transsexual
To: opinion@nytimes.com <opinion@nytimes.com>
CC: azeen.ghorayshi@nytimes.com <azeen.ghorayshi@nytimes.com>

Dear Editors,

Please find below an original op-ed submission titled "Moral Injury and the Total Erasure of the True Transsexual", written under the byline Tired Transsexual. It addresses the moral injury of being a medically transitioned, post-operative transsexual woman in a world that has rewritten our reality out of existence—while expecting our silence in return.

The piece speaks to a growing and unrepresented demographic: those of us who pursued full transition through psychiatric gatekeeping, surgery, and decades of clarity—only to be branded problematic for refusing to pretend that “transgender” now means the same thing. It is written plainly, directly, and without euphemism.

Thank you for considering it. I am available to confirm authorship and identity privately if required, but request to publish under pen name for reasons of personal safety. This is my real experience. I am not confused. I am not political. I am one of the last.

Warm regards,

A (very) tired transsexual

Moral Injury and the Total Erasure of the True Transsexual

There is a kind of moral injury deeper than trauma itself. It is not just the harm done to you—it is being forced to lie about it afterwards. To say it was never real. To let others speak over you using your language, your body, your pain—and then to applaud them for it. It is coerced complicity with those who replaced you. It is nodding along while your entire existence is recast as myth, mistake, or metaphor. That is what it feels like to be a woman born transsexual in 2025.

I am not transgender. I am not non-binary. I am not a gender identity. I am a diagnosed, medically transitioned, post-operative transsexual. Classified as Group 3 under a medical model that once protected us, my condition was transsexualism before the DSM-IV diluted and collapsed it into something “inclusive." My treatment was surgical; my outcome was resolution. And what they call “trans” today has absolutely nothing to do with what I am.

I exist—and I was never meant to be trendy, marketable, or inclusive. I transitioned because I had no choice. The agony of sex dysphoria forced a stark binary decision: die, or fix what could be fixed. My path was medical, precise, lonely, and undertaken in a world devoid of celebration, demanding only resilience.

But now, in this strange new world, a man can call himself a woman because he feels euphoric in a dress. A teenage girl can be fast-tracked onto hormones because she’s anxious in her body. A tech executive can don a wig, declare themselves non-binary, and be praised as brave for doing nothing more than speaking. Yet I—who actually changed my body to survive—am told I am part of the problem for asserting these things are not the same.

People see figures like Blaire White and assume that is what we are. But Blaire White is a conservative man with breast augmentation and makeup. He is a transgenderist who, by his own admission, openly lives as a male-sexed person, still uses his penis, and performs femininity without confronting the deepest truths of sex dysphoria. That is not a transsexual. It is not even a woman. Yet because he critiques queer activism carefully and panders to the reactionary backlash, many falsely believe he represents someone like me. He does not.

I did not transition to express myself, nor to become a spectacle or symbol. My transition was not political or cultural; it was an act of survival. And now my existence is dismissed—not because it is untrue, but because it is too real. Too embodied. Too resolved. The ideology of “trans” today collapses entirely if the world accepts that people like me actually fixed something.

We threaten their narrative precisely because we are no longer in crisis. For us, "trans" was never an endpoint—it was a way-station, an Ellis Island we passed through to reach resolution on the other side of the sex binary. We do not seek visibility because our transitions are complete; we know exactly who and what we are. We speak plainly: not everyone who claims the label "trans" is genuinely transsexual, and not every discomfort with sexed embodiment justifies medical transition.

This moral injury is not just erasure—it is the coercion to lie about it. To let people think this movement was ever ours. To let them take our surgeries, our suicide statistics, our language — and use them to justify hormone-dosing children and abolishing women’s spaces. To stand quietly while drag queens speak for us, while fetishists speak for us, while “they/thems” speak for us.

To be so thoroughly erased is more than symbolic—it is practical. It means being denied care because we no longer fit an “inclusive” model. It means exclusion from protections because we are inconveniently specific. It means media misrepresentations because our lives are too complex to market. It means we are made invisible, even as those responsible declare themselves inclusive.

What they now call “trans” bears no resemblance to what I am. It is neither medical, coherent, nor a continuation of our history. It is an ideology—not a diagnosis, nor a treatment protocol, nor a condition. The rigorous psychiatric evaluation, real-life experience, and surgical commitment that defined transsexualism have been replaced by performance art augmented by hormones. The body is optional now; truth, disposable.

I am not confused, nor a relic. I am not part of their umbrella, not their proof, nor their shield. I am a woman born transsexual—medically transitioned, surgically resolved, and unwelcome in a world built atop the scaffolding of my life.

To be erased means watching your own history reclassified as hate speech. It means knowing you were real, even as the world claims you never existed. It means becoming dangerous merely for telling the truth—not an opinion, not a feeling—but the undeniable truth that some of us transitioned solely because it was the only way to survive, not because it was fashionable, affirming, or easy.

They prefer us silent. They want us quietly folded into a movement that leveraged our suffering for mainstream acceptance and discarded us once we became inconvenient. Yet here I remain: not confused, not political, not “trans” by today’s standards. Simply one of the last standing amid the rubble, refusing to lie.

To be erased this completely is not just lonely—it is unspeakably cruel.

But I will speak it anyway.

And to be clear: it was not the right that did this to us. It was a deliberate betrayal by the political left, who pose as our saviours but systematically destroyed or undermined every safeguard protecting genuine transsexual women. They redefined our reality, erasing the critical distinction between physically transitioning through surgery and hormones, and merely "identifying" into womanhood. They replaced "transsexual," derived from a precise medical diagnosis tied explicitly to the necessity of physical treatment, with vague, meaningless terms like "transgender" and "transfemme," suggesting we are merely feminised men playing dress-up. They handed our narrative to fetishists, provocateurs, and activists who turned our lives into grotesque spectacles, poisoning public perception against us. This wasn't misguided allyship—it was conscious exploitation. They took our vocabulary, diluted our category, and handed our rights to men who openly mock the reality of sex and female embodiment, leaving true transsexual women erased, silenced, and vilified. They are not our friends. They are not our allies. They are our executioners.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a medically transitioned, Anglo-American transsexual woman living in exile between systems, nations, and narratives. She writes from the borderlands—between erasure and endurance, between faith and fallout, between what’s lost and what remains.

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This is a record of what it means to choose life not because it is beautiful, but because to die now would let them tell the story. Because survival, when everything pushes you toward disappearance, becomes authorship.

This is what remains when hope does not.

The point of being alive

To survive your own erasure.
To refuse to die as someone else's footnote.
To defy abandonment—not with hope, but with relentless, impossible existence.
To confront the void—not to escape it, but to sanctify its screaming silence.
To choose life, again and again, out of pure defiance.

To know your death would have been weaponised, rewritten, trivialised—and to deny them that power.
To live as proof that you fought alone, bled alone, rebuilt alone—yet remained human enough to love anyway.

To maintain control—not over others, but over narrative integrity.
To hold fast when the mind fractures under trauma, when ideation emerges, when support systems collapse.
To preserve the capacity to withhold surrender.

To remain alive as the final act of authorship.
To refuse death scripted by indifference, erasure, or pathology.
To retain the power to correct the record—not for vindication, but for accuracy.

To acknowledge every system’s failure, every structure’s erasure.
To affirm survival as active, intentional selection.
That selection—repeated, daily—is the most precise form of control available.

To claim narrative sovereignty.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a medically transitioned, Anglo-American transsexual woman living in exile between systems, nations, and narratives. She writes from the borderlands—between erasure and endurance, between faith and fallout, between what’s lost and what remains.

The federal government has erased 'transgender' from its websites — but for transsexuals, the erasure began long before that.

There was a time when transsexual meant something specific. It referred not to an identity, not to an ideology, but to a medical condition — a deep, neurobiological incongruence between body and self that could only be resolved through structured medical intervention. But that specificity is gone. In its place, a fiction has been constructed, one that folds transsexuals into an incoherent mass identity under the ‘transgender’ label, subsuming them into a movement that neither understands nor serves them. This is not a matter of mere semantics, but the slow obliteration of transsexual reality, one that has left those with a diagnosable and treatable condition without recognition, without representation, and increasingly, without access to the medical care upon which their very survival depends.

I should be grateful, perhaps, that the US federal government has finally dropped the term ‘transgender’. But there is no satisfaction in seeing an incoherent concept removed when what was once meaningful has already been buried beneath it. To be erased from false recognition is not a victory. It is simply a confirmation of what has already happened.

1) Transsexualism Is Not an Identity — It Is a Medical Condition

There was a time when transsexuals had a name, a framework, a path forward. It was not perfect, but it was understood. We were not an ‘identity group.’ We were not a political faction. We were patients — people with a rare but real condition, one that required sex reassignment to resolve. The fight was not for affirmation but for access. For care. For the ability to align our sexed bodies with the neurobiological expectations that would otherwise tear us apart.

But those distinctions have collapsed. The categorisation of transsexuals under the ‘transgender’ umbrella was not organic; it was an ideological manoeuvre — one that originated not from shared experience but from organised transvestism seeking legitimacy. It was never about solidarity; it was about appropriation. Transsexuals, with their documented medical histories and structured treatment pathways, lent credibility to a movement that had none. Similarly, their absorption into the broader ‘LGBT’ framework was not an act of mutual alliance but of convenience. In both cases, transsexuals lost.

Unlike homosexuals and transvestites, who need only societal permissiveness, transsexuals require structured medical intervention to function in daily life. And yet, by forcing them under a movement that increasingly rejects any medical basis for being ‘trans,’ their needs have been deprioritised, their care politicised, and their reality rendered unspeakable.

Medical necessity was replaced with ideological affirmation. Physiological relief was discarded in favour of performative indulgence. And in that shift, something essential was lost — precision, legitimacy, and the ability to name what transsexuals are without apology.

2) The Paradox of Recognition: What Happens When a Category Becomes Meaningless?

The erasure of ‘transgender’ from official recognition presents a paradox. On one hand, it risks further obscuring those who truly require medical transition. On the other, the term ‘transgender’ had already become so broad that it rendered any recognition meaningless.

The category is now so expansive that it has lost any definitional coherence. One report will claim there are 15,000 ‘transgender’ personnel in the U.S. military, yet within the same article, only 2,000 are noted as having a formal diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ — a diluted, catch-all that replaced the once-distinct diagnoses of transsexualism and transvestism. An even smaller, unreported fraction of this 2,000 have pursued or undergone sex reassignment surgery. What exactly is being measured here? Is it transsexuals, who have a distinct medical history and a clear end-goal? Or is it anyone who ‘identifies’ outside of traditional sex-based categories? The numbers betray the absurdity of the conflation.

A man who faces discrimination for his mannerisms is not experiencing the same thing as a transsexual whose body fundamentally mismatches her neurobiological own-body perception. A teenage girl who is struggling with social expectations and the sexualisation of her pubescent body is not the same as a child experiencing the visceral horror of sex dysphoria. Yet under the ‘transgender’ umbrella, all of these experiences are collapsed into one. Medical transition is treated not as a necessity but as an option— one possible ‘identity affirmation’ among many. And the result is incoherence.

Policymakers cannot make informed decisions when the category itself is functionally meaningless. Medicine cannot provide effective treatment when it is no longer allowed to name the condition it is treating (sex hormones have nothing to do with ‘gender’). And transsexuals are left adrift, buried beneath a term that speaks for everyone and represents no one.

3) When Recognition No Longer Matters: The Role of Transition

A transsexual only truly requires recognition when they are still visibly in transition. During this period, medical and legal institutions play a role in facilitating access to treatment, document changes, and ensuring safety. But once a transsexual has undergone the necessary interventions and no longer appears ‘in-between’ sex phenotypes, their daily life is indistinguishable from that of any other person of their target sex.

The struggles a post-transition transsexual faces are not about being transsexual. They are about being perceived as a man or a woman in society. The moments that provoke reactions — the second glances, the judgment, the hostility — do not come from any residual aspect of their transition, but from realities of sex. A transsexual woman holding hands with another woman in a conservative area is not perceived as a ‘transsexual’ — she is perceived as a homosexual, and faces risks on that basis. A transsexual man wearing a kippah in an antisemitic environment is not harassed for being ‘trans’ — he is harassed for being visibly Jewish.

And a transsexual woman standing on a street corner is not seen as someone who fought through years of medical intervention to reclaim her body — she is seen as a prostitute, disposable, a cautionary tale. The violence she faces is not because she is ‘transgender,’ but because she is perceived as a woman who is economically and sexually vulnerable, as so many women are. The world does not recognise nuance. It does not look at her and see a medical condition, a history, or a debate about gender theory. It sees a body, a role, an object to be taken or discarded. And when it does, no movement, no ‘inclusive’ umbrella, no ideological framework will step forward to claim her. Because when transsexual women are reduced to nothing but their survival, they are no longer useful to anyone.

The modern fixation on permanently categorising transsexuals as a separate social group is both reductive and unnecessary. Outside of medical and bureaucratic contexts, it serves no function except to keep transsexuals permanently tethered to a process they have already completed .

4) The First Step to Reversing Erasure: Dismantle the ‘Transgender’ Category

The term ‘transgender’ has been weaponised against transsexuals, forcing them under an umbrella that distorts their reality. The ‘transgender movement’ deliberately obscures the distinction between those with a medical need for transition and those who simply identify in opposition to sex-based norms.

As long as this umbrella remains dominant, transsexuals will remain buried beneath it — treated as mascots for a movement that has no stake in their survival. Their medical needs will continue to be deprioritised. Their condition will continue to be recast as an ‘identity.’ And their struggle will continue to be erased, not by external opposition, but by those who claim to represent them.

Restoring clarity requires the total rejection of ‘transgender’ as a valid category and the recognition that transsexuals exist outside of ideology, politics, and the concept of ‘gender.’ Transsexuals are not symbols. They are not political pawns. They are not representatives of a gender spectrum. They are individuals with a diagnosable, treatable condition that has been hijacked by activists, exploited by institutions, and erased in service of an ideological war that has nothing to do with them.

This erasure did not begin with a government website. It began the moment transsexuals were forced under an umbrella that was never meant to help them. It will not end with a simple change in language — it will only end when transsexuals are allowed to reclaim their own medical reality, free from the distortions of political fiction.

Until that distinction is made clear, until transsexuals can speak for themselves without being drowned out by a movement that was never theirs, this erasure will continue. And as long as it does, transsexuals will remain voiceless, lost in the shadow of a movement that never had any intention of seeing them in the first place.

Tired Transsexual is a woman born transsexual. Born and raised in the United States, she now resides in the UK.

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I do not know how I am supposed to feel. That, more than anything, is the prevailing sensation of the past ten days — ten days in which executive orders have tightened around transsexuals like a noose, their justification echoing familiar refrains. They are what I always expected, yet they are not weightless. I have always understood the concerns that undergird these actions, at least on some level. But understanding does not spare me from the weight of being caught in the indiscriminate reach of these decisions. I do not rage, yet I am not numb. I do not despair, yet I feel the full weight of my existence pressing down on me.

And so, as I watch it all unfold from my forced, fragile exile across the Atlantic, I realise that what I feel most acutely is not injustice. It is dissonance. Not the fact that I would be barred from military service, but the phrasing, the quiet condemnation buried in bureaucratic language. ‘A conflict with an honourable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.’ As though my existence itself is inherently lacking in those things. As though the integrity with which I have lived, the meticulous construction of my life, the sacrifice, the endurance, the unwavering conviction — it all amounts to nothing. That even in my most disciplined, most structured self, I am still unacceptable. Not for what I have done, but for what I am.

And then there is the medical care. The quiet, necessary interventions that turned me from a shell into someone who could inhabit their own life, now deemed ‘mutilation’ by the highest power in the land. Banned for those under nineteen. It is not the ban itself that stays with me — I have always known that my existence was an anomaly of timing, a brief convergence of medical advancement and fleeting tolerance. That I was permitted to inhabit this body not by inevitability, but by historical accident. That I was allowed to heal only because I reached the threshold before the door sealed shut behind me. No, what lingers is the cognitive dissonance of it all. The widening gap between what they say and what I know to be true. It is like being caught between someone who acts as though open-heart surgery is a trivial cosmetic procedure and someone who believes it is a horror beyond reckoning. Neither framework fits me. Neither explains my life. And yet, this dissonance is the acceptable cost of policy, the inevitable consequence of ideological convenience.

But perhaps the most painful part is not the dissonance itself, nor even the weight of the world’s judgment, but the knowledge that I must let myself feel all of it. I cannot suppress it, cannot go numb. There is no escape, no absolution from it. I have spent my entire life enduring the unendurable by locking the weight away, by pressing forward without pausing long enough to drown in it. But in the moments when no one is looking, when I can let my breath hitch and the tears fall without anyone seeing them and trying to make them stop, I force myself to acknowledge the totality of it.

This weight was given to me; it is mine to bear.

To bear this weight is to inhabit the dissonance between the narratives others project onto me and the truth of my life. Executive orders may describe my existence as incompatible with honour, discipline, or truth, but I know what it took to build this self. I know the discipline it required to face the abyss of sex dysphoria and not be seduced by the pull of oblivion. I know the courage it took to remake my body, the relentless truth I had to confront about who I am. And yet, I also know the pain of being deemed a pariah — not because I faltered in that, but because I lived it too fully for others to accept.

I do not react with anger; I react with the knowing of someone who has already faced this verdict in a thousand different ways, long before it was written into policy. Perhaps this is why I cannot simply go numb. Because to go numb would be to refuse the life I have lived. Because while I do not believe in the sanctity of detachment, I do believe that to carry the weight is an act of faith.

I am not permitted the illusion of irrelevance. I cannot say, this does not concern me, because it does. I cannot say, this is not meant for me, because it is. I cannot say, this is only about others, because I am bound to them. It is the inheritance of every version of me that came before — the child who didn’t yet have the words to explain her pain, the adolescent who begged for invisibility, the young adult who walked into a world that would not make space for her unless she carved it herself. It is also the weight of those who will come after me, younger transsexuals who will feel the impact of these policies before they can even articulate the harm. To suppress this weight would be to abandon them, just as I was abandoned. It would be to deny the sanctity of my struggle, to sever myself from the covenant that binds me to my past, present, and future selves.

This is where I find resonance with Adam II, the lonely man of faith who does not transcend the weight of his humanity but embraces it as a sacred obligation. Adam II knows that the fractures in his life, the moments where the world presses most heavily upon him, are not flaws to be erased but holy tensions to be sanctified. He lives within the dissonance because to evade it would be to deny the meaning found in its midst. So too do I live within this weight, not because it is easy or even bearable, but because it is mine. To carry it is to affirm that I exist, that I matter, that the struggle to live as I am is not futile, but a testament to the sanctity of my being.

And yet, beneath this weight, beneath the exhaustion and dissonance, I find a light made more radiant by the shadows that loom — gratitude. Not for the present moment, but for the naivety of the person I once was. The younger version of me could not have conceived of all of this, and in that ignorance, there was mercy.

Back then, all the weight was internal, and I did not understand how much heavier it would become. I thought that if I could just survive the war within myself, if I could just reach the other side of dysphoria’s despair, I would be free. But I was never prepared for what it would mean to be at peace with my existence and despised for it.

I did not understand that I would trade the weight of being invisible in my suffering for the weight of being unseen in my wholeness.

I knew what it was to fight an invisible battle, to be unseen and in conflict with myself. But now, I know what it is to be at peace in my body while the world wages war on my existence. To be invisible, demonised, and yet still standing. I grieve the loss of that ignorance, but I am also grateful for it — it allowed me to take the first steps without being paralysed by the daunting terrain ahead.

This is the paradox of my existence: to carry a weight that is both unbearable and sacred. To live within dissonance and find meaning there. I was born into a world that demanded my erasure, and my survival is its own burden, because to exist in defiance is not a triumph, but an unending responsibility.

To carry this weight is my duty, not because I am strong, but because it is mine.

And perhaps, it is also my sanctity.

Tired Transsexual is a woman born transsexual who lives in the UK. She was previously on Twitter/X with the handle @tiredtransmed.

It all condenses down to grief, a layered symphony of losses echoing from all directions. I grieve for an America I once believed in, for a West that felt like home and still holds my heart. My soul belongs in the desert, yet I am an exile in this damp, gray UK —feeling the weight of each missed sunrise, the familiar pull of a land I may never truly return to.

This grief, though, is so much more than just for the home I knew. It’s grief for a nation that has fallen into the hands of a man who embodies its worst shadows—a felon, a misogynist, a rapist, an arsonist of the planet itself — and still people worship this demagogic false prophet as he stokes the fires that burn what goodness remains. Watching people choose this path, again and again, is like losing America piece by piece, seeing the country I loved hollowed out from within.

The grief that lives in me is not just for what I witness but for the limits of my power to change it. Watching the rise of antisemitism, I felt myself pushed away from the gentile world by a visceral reaction to its silence — a rejection I didn’t choose but couldn’t ignore. And yet, though I found my way to Judaism, drawn by a resonance that mirrors my own suffering, I am now confronted by the cruel irony that I cannot explain why it fits. To reveal that the existential pain I’ve known is as profound as Job’s suffering would be to out myself, to tear open wounds I’ve only begun to heal.

What haunts me is that rather than impacting the world’s hatred, I’ve found myself on a path that leaves me silently enduring this hostility, bound to a people who know exile and resilience but who cannot fully know me. And so, together, we endure — a shared awareness of the world’s harshness, but with a grief uniquely mine to bear, knowing I will always remain partly hidden, a Jew by choice, with roots that cannot be wholly disclosed.

Then there is the grief of a life once wasted, of years spent desperately trying to be the son my father could accept. I tried to twist myself into an image that wasn’t mine, until I had no choice but to let go in early adulthood to save myself as it worsened — severing the only link I once clung to. I carry the weight of it, of words that could never reach, of a life where love was conditional on everything that had to be left behind; the heart doesn’t stop yearning simply because the mind knows it must.

There is grief, too, for the life that might have been mine if I had been born differently, one way or the other — without the struggle of transsexualism, without the daily dissonance that defined my early life. It’s a life I’ll never know, a world where I might have lived without the burdens that made me and which left me scarred.

There’s also the grief for others like me, those who face not just an internal house of mirrors, but an external one as well. The diagnostic codes that once defined our condition — the DSM-III-R and ICD-10 terms that acknowledged our sexed experience — have been watered down and absorbed into a nebulous ‘gender’ narrative, as if what we carry were about makeup or clothes rather than the physical misalignment of our own bodies. This grief is for our erasure, the dissolution of our reality into something unrecognisable, where even the words that described our suffering have been taken from us.

There is grief in knowing that my every choice, every place I’ve felt drawn to, seems always to place me at odds with the worlds I move through. Born American but anchored in Britain, holding a profound love for Russia yet grieving for Ukraine, stepping onto the path of Judaism while carrying the legacy of a gentile. I am the Eagle Scout who never made it to space, nor the presidency, but instead, a woman born transsexual, a Jew in the making, a soul at odds with nearly every facet of a life she thought she would have. I carry all these parts of myself, and each one is a reminder of a world that cannot fully contain me, that cannot reconcile all that I am.

And then there’s the bitter grief that even the spaces meant to heal are closed to me. I cannot walk into a therapist’s office and trust that I will not be another puzzle piece for them to fit into a framework that never held me, never understood me. It’s a £250/hr gamble with bad odds on a system where my soul is at risk of being buried beneath labels and agendas that want me to be either a poster child or a cautionary tale of either bigotry or malpractice. So, instead, I turn inward, writing these reflections and sending them into a void where they can be witnessed without expectation or the burden of response.

But perhaps the heaviest of all is knowing that I’m still called to bear this weight and look beyond it. To gaze past this sorrow, to summon a sense of purpose and of hope, despite it all. To carry the yoke of being asked to see life beyond despair, to act against the night, even while my own heart aches with loss — to reach for light while I walk through shadow.

ממעמקים קראתיך יי

Tired Transsexual is a woman born transsexual who lives in the UK. She was previously on Twitter/X with the handle @tiredtransmed.

"Can a woman have a penis?" I don't think so, but you'd never know that from the rhetoric being amplified by some of today's leading LGBTQ+ organisations. When groups like Stonewall and the Human Rights Campaign assert that "men can have vaginas and women can have penises," they not only distort LGBT realities but also undermine the authenticity of our existence. This erasure extends beyond mere words—it strikes at the heart of what it means to be homosexual or transsexual, co-opting our struggles for a narrative that prioritises inclusivity over truth.

The Co-Opting of Homosexual Identity

The claim that "lesbians can have penises" is not just a controversial statement; it's an erasure of the very essence of homosexuality. Being a lesbian means being attracted to women, not to penises. This rhetoric, propagated under the guise of inclusivity, dilutes the unique challenges and identities of homosexuals. Coming-out stories are not just about declaring one’s orientation; they are about navigating a world that often meets the LGB with hostility and violence. By redefining LGB identity, these organisations negate the profound struggles many of us have faced to be accepted for who we are.

The Trivialisation of Transsexual Reality

Similarly, the assertion that "you don’t need to have or have had dysphoria to be trans" trivialises the intense and often debilitating experience of transsexuals. Dysphoria is not a trend or a passing discomfort — it is a deep-seated conflict between one’s physical body and self-concept. It — desperation for relief — is what drives transsexual people to seek medical interventions. By erasing the necessity of dysphoria from the "trans" narrative, these organisations overlook the core of our experiences and the reality of our struggles.

Identity Politics vs. Lived Realities

The focus on identity politics has created a cacophony where the loudest, most provocative voices drown out the quiet truths of discrimination, violence, and systemic inequality that many LGBT people face daily. Our pain becomes a backdrop in a self-serving performance that celebrates superficial diversity over authentic understanding. Transsexuality is not a fashion statement—it’s a necessity for survival, for a semblance of peace in a life of internal conflict. Yet, the movement that claims to advocate for us prioritises visibility over vulnerability, performance over genuine support and nuanced understanding.

The Overreach of the Queer Movement

The queer movement’s emphasis on nonconformity and rebellion leaves little room for those whose lives are marked by a quieter, more painful struggle for acceptance. In its rush to redefine words and expand definitions, it overlooks the deep-seated prejudices and dangers that still exist. The celebration of "queerness" and the usurping of every norm and boundary comes at the cost of ignoring the very real, ongoing battles for safety, acceptance, and love that the actual LGBT still endures.

Reclaiming Our Narratives

We are told to celebrate our identities, but how can we when the fundamental truths of our lives are ignored? We need to reclaim our narratives, to speak openly about the realities we face, and to demand a movement that acknowledges and addresses the dark shadows of being LGBT. Only by doing so can we truly say we are moving forward. Until then, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals will remain ghosts in the rainbow, our voices drowned out by the very chorus that claims to sing for us.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed.

Sometimes, all it takes is a simple, heartwarming image to remind us of what we've lost, or perhaps never had. An image of joy, innocence, and family, encapsulating the deepest human yearnings. But for some, like me, it's a stark reminder of the battles we fight every day and the life we can never truly have.

It’s curious how a simple image can evoke such profound emotions. Recently, a seemingly innocuous advertisement from McDonald's Japan featuring a joyous family resonated with many. For transsexuals, it was a bittersweet reminder of the life we yearn for — a life that remains forever out of reach.

Joy in Simplicity

The advert portrayed nothing extraordinary: just a family, sharing a meal, lost in their own bubble of happiness. Yet, this candid moment of joy felt alien and deeply poignant. It was a reflection of what many have lost in our rapidly evolving society — a sense of community, connectedness, and innocent, unbridled joy.

For transsexuals, such depictions often invoke deeper introspections. While many would see a happy family, we would see layers of personal yearnings and heartaches. The man in the ad? A reminder of a life we wish we could have led, had it not been for the wracking sex dysphoria. The woman? A haunting affirmation that, all over again, it’s as close as we can get to that or nothing at all.

This stark difference between being a transsexual and the narrative the wider 'trans' movement sells is crucial. Their joy of 'becoming' clashes with our pain of 'unable to be there' and 'not quite being.'

The Curse of Dysphoria

While many chase ideologies or materialism, we have always longed for a life unperturbed by the tormenting incongruence of my body and psyche. This isn't something we chose; it's something we were born with. It's called transsexualism. Innocent images of 'normal' families remind us of the life we could've had. A life where we could be the man holding his wife, or the woman leaning onto her husband.

However, our reality, as transsexuals, is far from this ideal. Every step in our path to align our bodies with our experienced selves isn't met with euphoria. It merely serves to dampen the unrelenting pain of dysphoria. And while we’re grateful for the medical interventions available to us, every now and then, we are reminded of the life I can't have.

The Threat of The 'Trans' Agenda

But this fight is not just personal. In this modern world, a horde peddles a narrative that muddles the profound struggle of transsexualism with a fluid, ideological understanding of 'gender identity'. These ideologues risk inflicting upon others the torment transsexuals face daily, without the underlying condition of transsexualism to justify it. Such an act isn't just misleading; it's downright cruel.

In this age of 'trans euphoria', it's crucial to distinguish the real, unchosen struggles of transsexuals from the broader, often confusing narratives of the 'trans' mob. Our fight isn't for superficial validation, but to prevent others from being misled by these narratives and to uphold the reality of the true transsexual experience.

Hope in The Face of Despair

We are no martyrs, but we will not be silenced. Transsexuals don't seek this life of torment; it's thrust upon us. And as the world rushes to embrace the fallacy of 'choose-your-own-gender,' we will scream from the rooftops about the searing anguish it gleefully overlooks.

A transsexual’s life can feel like a cruel joke, an endless marathon towards a mirage. But if there’s one glimmer of purpose amidst the despair, it's the hope that by raw, unfiltered truth-telling, the voices of transsexuals might finally pierce through the smothering blanket of 'transgender' deceit.

The Solemn Path

Imagine walking a tightrope, every single day, with no safety net underneath. You're striving for the other side, a place where you know you will finally be at peace. But, the world below insists that you should not be walking this rope at all. It says that the rope itself is a mistake, that the struggle you're feeling is not because of the rope's thinness, but because you're not supposed to be up there.

You know you're supposed to be up there because every nerve in your body screams it. Each step is precarious, challenging, yet essential. You are a tightrope walker; it's not a choice, but a fundamental aspect of your being.

The Circus of Superficial Performance

But then, one day, people join you on the rope. They wear harnesses and safety gear and they say they are tightrope walkers too. They say they enjoy the thrill of the height, the challenge of the balance.

The crowd, who once derided you, now cheer them on. For them, it's a performance, a daring feat to be celebrated. For you, it's a necessity, a path to survive. The rope, which was once your private battle, has now become a spectacle, a showground for those who do not understand the perils of the walk.

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From Profound Pain to Popcorn Show

Suddenly, the narrative changes. It's no longer about reaching the other side of the rope but about the spectacle of the walk. The crowd below applauds the audacious performers. They jeer at you, saying that you're not a true tightrope walker since you're not enjoying the thrill, and because you only wish to get to the other side.

You shout, attempting to explain that for you, this is not a performance, but about survival. But your voice is drowned out by the cheers for the performers, who are now seen as the 'real' tightrope walkers because they outnumber you.

Lost in the Shadows of the Spectacle

Your struggle, once denied and then appropriated, is now misunderstood and disregarded. The end of the rope, once so clear, now seems further away, obscured by the new narratives

The performers mock you and revel at your plight, while the crowd below taunts you, insisting that it is impossible to reach the other side, and meaningless even if you manage it. Why did you step onto the tightrope in the first place if you have a fear of heights?, they ask.

Beyond the Theatrics

Your once solitary and deeply personal journey is now crowded, not with fellow pilgrims, but with interlopers, who without grasping its depth, have turned it into an arena of showmanship. Their numbers and exuberance don't validate them; instead, they serve as glaring indicators of a world that would rather revel in the superficial than engage with the profound. This theatre, encouraged by an audience that misunderstands and misrepresents, poses a cruel irony: In an age where the "trans" flag is instantly recognisable, the genuine experiences of transsexuals are buried beneath layers of performances and misguided applause. The tightrope, once a symbol of a raw, agonising journey, has been transformed into nothing more than a stage prop in a grand charade.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed

In a world where aesthetic and anguish are equated, the onus is on all of us to distinguish between transsexualism, a largely forgotten medical condition, and the 'transgender' ideology of organised transvestism that has subsumed it. Holly Boswell's 1991 manifesto to transgenderists provides a blueprint for this distinction.

Published in the Summer 1991 edition of TV-TS Tapestry, Holly Boswell’s "The Transgender Alternative" delineated the philosophical foundation and roadmap of "transgenderism," paving the way for the profound expansion of 'gender identity' as a sociopolitical concept beyond the biological male and female dichotomies of transsexuals and transsexualism.

Boswell challenged her readership to question the strict binaries of crossdressing and transsexuality, arguing that "gender evolution" was an imperative for personal growth:

The Pillars of Boswell’s Manifesto

Before delving further into Boswell’s propositions, it is pertinent to highlight several key elements underpinning this manifesto to transgenderists:

1. Obscuring Distinctions: Boswell blurs the boundaries between 'transsexual', 'transgenderist', and 'transvestite', creating a milieu of confusion characteristic of queer theory.

2. The Exaltation of Androgyny: Boswell extols the virtues of androgyny, positioning it as a means to achieve "psychological integration and evolution".

3. Disdain for Transsexuality: Throughout the manifesto, an intense disdain for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) and transsexuals is expressed. Boswell’s writing is laced with a mixture of misplaced jealousy and antipathy that transsexuals still encounter from transgenderists today.

4. Transgenderism as a Third Gender: The manifesto pitches transgenderism as a third, cultural gender, implying that it is an external social identity that can be adopted or discarded at will, rather than an innate aspect of a person's internal self-conception.

5. Gender Liberation as Human Enlightenment: Boswell presents 'gender liberation' as a pathway to broader human enlightenment, a narcissistic, quasi-mystical belief that implies that the complexity of human society can be reduced to a single issue.

6. Advocacy for the Indoctrination of Children: Boswell advocates for the early socialisation of children into the labyrinth of transgender ideology, suggesting a drive towards ideological hegemony over genuine understanding and acceptance.

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"Harbingers of our Future"

Boswell's use of the term "androgyne" appears to be an early conceptualisation of what we now understand as 'non-binary'. Thus, despite protests from confused transsexuals who apply transgender to themselves and try to separate 'transgender' from 'non-binary', 'non-binary' was part and parcel to the transgender movement right from the inception. To add insult to injury, transgenderist activists like Boswell went so far as to dub them "harbinger[s] of our future".

The Underlying Misogyny, Homophobia, and Anti-Transsexual Militancy

Boswell’s audacity doesn't stop there. In the appendix, Boswell attempts to redefine transgenderists as transsexuals (without 'non-op'), demonstrating the relentless obliteration of boundaries characteristic of queer theory. This redefinition represents the start of the ongoing marginalisation of the Group 3, true transsexuals, who can be considered the initial casualties of queer theory and the 'transgender' movement.

Elsewhere in the manifesto, Boswell insinuates that a person with male genitalia could "live as a lesbian" but not as a straight woman, further underscoring the casual misogyny, homophobia, and anti- transsexual sentiments intrinsic to the transgender movement, yet often hidden by the confusion and distortion wrought by its ideology.

While I do not think anyone should be pressured into SRS for any reason, it is crucial to underscore that this contempt for SRS is a theme that runs through many early writings of organised transvestism. These authors, like many transgenderists today, often assumed that transsexuals didn't actually want or need SRS, pursuing it because of external pressures rather than an internal drive. While some transgenderists may have perhaps pursued SRS due to the sociopolitical climate, this doesn't excuse the erasure of countless transsexuals who needed SRS to function. The level of narcissism required to believe otherwise is astronomical.

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Children in the Crosshairs

Perhaps most dangerous of all, however, is the emphasis on early indoctrination. Advocating for the “enlightened socialisation of our children” to imbibe these fluid ideologies is not merely about acceptance; it's about reshaping societal narratives, potentially at the cost of the well-being and mental health of these children.

Imperialistic Ambitions

The birth of the modern transgender movement, as evidenced by Boswell’s manifesto, is mired in a series of contradictions and ambitions, with its casual disdain for transsexuals being most glaring. The narcissistic attempt to absorb and redefine the term 'transsexual' (as well as 'transman' and 'transwoman') lay bare the transgender movement’s inherent imperialistic nature, seeking to conquer and redefine all aspects of gender and sexuality.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed.

Step RIGHT up, folX, to the greatest show on the internet! Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between (and especially those just dropping by), welcome to the modern trans extravaganza, where every gender quirk is a spectacle and the classic trans narrative is so "outdated."

Neon Lights and Blinding Sights

Remember those subtle trans folX, just seeking a life of normalcy? 🤫Neither do we! 🤷‍♀️Now, the highlight of our show is the Blatantly Not Bothered Brigade. Watch as they present their award-winning performance Transmasquerade: where being as conspicuous as a neon sign in a monastery is the only way to be.😎🌟

Dysphoria? Never Heard of Her!

BUT WAIT, there's more! Remember when 'dysphoria' was the talk of the town? Silly old concept! 🤪 Now it's all about 'euphoria', where every fleeting feeling of gender variance is a golden ticket into TransLandia! Grab your fedora or glitter beard, because everyone’s invited to this jamboree! 🎊

Where Transs*xuals Belong: The History Corner

And oh, for the vintage lovers, we've pushed those pesky transs*xuals into a corner called 'Ancient History'.🦕 These relics of a bygone era may be offensive to those with more modern trans identities, so it's best not to linger there too long; one might shatter the illusion of our all-inclusive masquerade. 🪄🎇👻

An Explosion of Expression

In TransLandia, it’s a riot of colours🌈, a place where binary is just another word in the dictionary📚, sandwiched between 'bizarre' and 'brouhaha'. Here we stand, united under the flag of fabulous fluidity🏳️‍⚧️, refusing to acknowledge those seeking a quieter, unassuming existence. In TransLandia, if you’re not loud, you’re not proud! 📢 And if you think passing is important, well, I’m afraid you’ve missed the memo: assimilation is the new taboo!🚫

Everyone's a Winner Here!

To end your tour on a high note, join our 'Validation Vortex'! 🌀No matter how you identify, everyone gets a certificate of authenticity📜, signed by our very own 'Queen of The Gender Spectrum'. Because here at TransLandia, if you say you're something, you're something! No questions asked!🤐

Dazzle or Fizzle - The TransLandian Contest

Finally, stand back and marvel at our incredible main event, the 'Olympics of Outrageousness' 🏆where everyone competes to be the most unique, the most dazzling, and the most unconventional. But let’s be honest, who needs harmony when discord is so much more entertaining?🎶💥 In our world, the louder and more discordant you are, the higher you climb on the rickety ladder of TransLandian hierarchy. 🎢

Final Curtain Call

So, come one, come all to TransLandia,🏰 where the forgotten transs*xuals are just the stepping stones on the glittering path to an infinite gender gala! 🎉It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, where everything is loud, everything is celebrated, and, most importantly, everything is valid, except, of course, for those who were here first! 🎩🎪

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed

A Crisis of Identity

There is a crisis unfolding in the heart of the LGBT. In the name of 'progress', our fundamental values have been upended, replaced with an ideological agenda that has strayed far from the struggles of those the community was established to protect. At the center of this crisis is queer theory, a paradigm that has hijacked the narrative and distorted the essence of what it means to be LGBT. It is an ideology that has morphed into a juggernaut of 'transgression', and 'queering' any and all boundaries without regard for the real-world consequences. In this process, language has been rendered meaningless and the focus of the LGBT has shifted dramatically away from the rights and needs of homosexuals and transsexuals.

Collateral Damage of Queer Theory

In this Alice in Wonderland landscape, being LGBT is no longer about one's sexual orientation or sex reassignment and a dissonance with one’s biological sex. Instead, it's about challenging societal norms, rejecting binary conceptions of ‘gender’, and celebrating ‘fluidity’. This shift has imposed severe collateral damage on those for whom these labels were originally intended - homosexuals and transsexuals.

Transsexuals: Lost in the Shuffle

Transsexuals, particularly, have been victimised in this ideological upheaval. A group characterised by a distinct medical condition, transsexuals has been swallowed whole and erased by the catch-all term 'transgender,' an umbrella that encompasses an ever-expanding array of identities which have nothing to do with the medical, sex-based experience of transsexualism.

An Unwanted Alliance

The result of this conflation is that transsexuals are being forced into association with a group whose aims diverge significantly from ours. Whose priorities we are largely opposed to. It’s important to understand that transsexuals, much like the LGB, don't wish to be yoked to this growing madness. Gender ideology erases our struggle just as it undermines what it means to be homosexual. However, every time 'trans' or 'transgender' is used interchangeably with 'transsexual', this unwanted alliance is reinforced.

The Path Forward: Unity in Purpose

It is for this reason that LGB separatists must join forces with transsexual separatists. It is crucial to acknowledge that the erasure of transsexuals is a grievous wrong that must be righted. The queer/ 'trans' movement has done much to obscure this reality, presenting a unified front that hides the fractures within. By aligning with transsexuals, LGB separatists can disarm accusations of ‘transphobia’ and help peel back this veneer, challenging the prevailing narrative of the so-called ‘trans community’ by exposing its militantly anti-transsexual views and actions, including the plight of MtF transsexuals at the hands of organisations that should stand with us.

Reclaiming the LGBT Narrative from the "LGBTQ+"

The task is not a small one. It involves difficult conversations, reclaiming language, reinstating the distinction between sex and gender, and acknowledging the unique, erased struggles of transsexuals. It's a moral and ethical duty—one that transcends political ideologies and speaks to the core of human dignity. It it is a task that is both necessary and urgent if we are to protect the integrity of the real LGBT.

A Clarion Call for a Unified Battlefront

The essence of this alliance is clear: a shared battle against an ideology that seeks to co-opt our distinct identities and distort our experiences. By standing united, the LGB and TS can challenge the ideologues, unmask the frauds, and restore our communities to their rightful focus.

It’s time to rise, united in purpose and vision, against the behemoth of the queer-industrial complex and its gender cult of followers. Together, homosexuals and transsexuals can debunk the nebulous narratives of the 'queer'/'trans' movement and ensure our distinct stories — authentic, raw, and real — are told. This is the struggle that binds us, and it is only by acknowledging and respecting our distinct, but related, battles that we can hope to prevail. The time for action is now.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed.

Once upon a digital age, on an unnamed social media platform, a tale unfolded. This is the story of Alex, but it could have been anyone.

Act I: The Search for Self

Alex was a regular guy — or so he thought. In a world swirling with identity politics, a curious Alex ventured into various online communities seeking to understand himself better. He had always felt slightly out of place, not quite macho nor entirely effeminate. He did not experience a dissonance with their natal sex, nor an unwavering sense of allegiance with the female sex, but an online influencer convinced Alex that he possesses a 'gender identity' that transcends conventional definitions: 'nonbinary'. He felt an immediate kinship. Could this be the answer to his feelings of not belonging?

Act II: The Euphoria

Eager to fit into his newly found label, Alex began participating in more and more online discussions, vehemently defending the 'trans' ideology. Over time, Alex's understanding of 'trans' evolved, and it became less about self-expression and more about an extremist ideological commitment. As with all forms of extremism, nuance was lost, and absolutes dominated. Alex believed unequivocally that 'gender' was a purely social construct, an abstract spectrum where everyone could pick and choose their 'gender identity'.

Act III: The Doubt

However, life outside the internet wasn't as accommodating. When Alex introduced himself as 'nonbinary' to his friends, family, and coworkers, reactions varied. Some were supportive, some indifferent, but many were skeptical. Doubt began to creep in as Alex's feelings failed to align with this new identity consistently. He started to question: Was he genuinely 'nonbinary', or had he merely been convinced of an identity that didn't truly resonate with him?

Act IV: Radicalisation

It was this existential crisis that led Alex back to the bowels of the internet. There, the once welcoming ‘trans' movement had grown more extreme. Any dissent or doubt was met with hostility. The louder the external criticism became, the more isolated and radical these online communities turned. Here, Alex was introduced to the concept of the 'trans community' being under siege by outsiders.

Desperate for validation, Alex became engrossed in conspiracy theories, painting a world where those questioning the 'trans' ideology were the enemy, including traitors to the cause like detransitioners and 'true transsexual scum'. This mindset was a dangerous cocktail of fear, paranoia, and the need for validation. And, in this melting pot of emotions, the concept of lone-wolf acts to defend the ideology began to seem not just valid, but necessary and honourable.

Act V: The Turning Point

The story could have taken a dark turn here. An individual feeling under siege and exposed to radical ideologies, is a potent recipe for lone-wolf acts. But this isn't a tale of tragedy. It's a cautionary story, a lesson about the dangers of extremist ideologies, and the importance of nuanced discussions and support systems.

In Alex's case, an old friend, aware of his struggles, stepped in. They used deradicalisation techniques and re-introduced Alex to the world outside the internet to spaces where nuanced discussions on sex, gender, and identity, away from the extremism of "trans" ideology, could take place. With support, Alex healed, realising the importance of distinguishing between a medical condition and an imposed external ideology.

To be a transsexual in a world inundated with the kaleidoscope of gender ideology is to stand on a jagged precipice of reality, where those who don't — or won't — understand try to pull you down to the depths of their ideological dogmatism.

Medical Conditions Are Apolitical

Transsexualism, for me, has never been about politics. It's not a mask I wear or a stage I act upon. My path has been charted by an existential need for alignment—between an unerring voice within that screamed and a body that felt like a shroud I was unfairly wrapped in. It's deeply intimate, a matter of sensory perception and the profound ways our brains map our selves. A neurobiological condition, not a chosen identity.

The Ideological Compactor: A Dual-Pronged Assault

In articulating this narrative, I find myself threatened by an ideological compactor, a relentless force from both ends of the sociopolitical spectrum that desperately seeks to extinguish my voice and erase my reality. It's a dual-pronged assault on someone who already bears the scars of battles fought within.

From one side, there's a push to amalgamate and subsume my experiences under the 'transgender umbrella'; from the other, a pull to reduce me to a caricature, a man in a dress or a trans-identified male. Both sides, albeit with divergent motivations, conflate my transsexuality with common gendernonconformity, obscuring both the sex-based reality of my existence as well as the sex-based nature of the medical condition I struggle with. "Transwomen are men in dresses," declare some; "male crossdressers are trans women," counter others, both drowning the true transsexual narrative in a sea of oversimplification and misrepresentation.

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Resilience in the Dichotomy

Every time I raise my voice, a myriad of others rise to shout me down. Yet, with every insult, every attempt to devalue me, there emerges a clearer picture of the broader war. It's not just a war over rights or spaces; it's a battle for the very right to define and own one's narrative. For the right to articulate the intricacies of one’s truth without being drowned in the agendas of the loud and the dogmatic.

Between these opposing forces of the ideological compactor, I’ve carved out a sanctuary. It is not a refuge built on the shaky sands of external validation, but the truth of my experience and the integrity of my narrative. How does one explain the weight of a torment borne from a ceaseless assault on their reality? The constant psychological warfare from the so-called 'trans community' is breaking me, but I refuse to shatter, because the integrity of my soul is on the line. Fighting back isn’t a choice; it’s survival against existential annihilation.

In Search of Light Amidst Shadows

In our contemporary society, the pursuit of happiness has been commodified into a mindless chase for fleeting pleasures. Society conditions us to pursue ephemeral joys and to be fearful of negative emotions, thereby encouraging us to neglect the deeper, more intricate dance between struggle and triumph.

There's unparalleled value found in this interplay. This delicate dance, often lost in the hustle of the West's fear of negative emotions, is where we find the brilliance of our soul. It's within the depths of melancholy, the profound grasp of тоска, that we fully discern the intensity of joy. We also discover resilience—a strength that emerges from the friction. It’s an indomitable spirit that refuses to be quelled, no matter the adversity. True light, as I've come to understand, gleams most radiant in the shadows.

While critics might dismiss these outpourings of my soul as the delusional byproducts of "severe mental illness". To them, I say this: If you believe transsexualism to be a disorder, don't those afflicted with it deserve effective treatment and compassion? It’s unfortunate that the 'trans' movement isn’t about things like higher quality care, research into long term HRT effects, and prevention of dysphoria. All things that transsexuals overwhelmingly support. Instead, it’s pronouns.

Beacons of Hope

Amidst this tempest, there is also beauty. A kind of raw, haunting beauty that emerges on the precipice of reality, in the air pockets of the ideological compactor, where one can witness the full spectrum of humanity — from boundless empathy to chilling cruelty. It's in the fleeting moments of understanding, the glimmers of acceptance, and the outstretched hands of allies who dare to see beyond the noise, and who brave the crossfire with me.

My life has taught me that while society might wish to label and categorise us, we remain the authors of our stories. It's a mosaic of experiences, of allies and adversaries, that shape our understanding and challenge our perceptions.

To those who dare to see and stand by me for who I am, not as a transsexual but as a unique, complex individual who happens to be one: you are the lighthouses in this storm, and you remind me that every storm, no matter how fierce, eventually breaks. In that dawn, I see a world where every voice is valued, every narrative respected, and every soul finds its sanctuary.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed.

The transgender movement has become a beacon for many, a symbol of acceptance, progression, and an evolved understanding of human identity. But beneath this warm, rainbow-coloured exterior lies a much more complex, and in many ways, darker truth. For those willing to brave a deeper dive, one discovers that what many herald as 'progress' is nothing more than an ideological mirage: the dogma of organised transvestism.

The Roots of Misdirection: Charles 'Virginia' Prince

To understand how we got here, one must first go back, back to the era of Charles 'Virginia' Prince, the godfather of organised transvestism. Prince, a chemist by trade and a crossdresser in personal life, has left an indelible mark on the landscape of gender ideology. He was not a transsexual. He was a man who derived pleasure from wearing women’s clothing — a transvestite. And yet, his beliefs, born out of his personal experience and a self-centred, vehemently anti-transsexual worldview, would later be the bedrock upon which modern gender ideology stands.

Prince championed the cause of crossdressing organisations, moulding a space where like-minded individuals could congregate, share, and evolve their understanding of their inclinations. But what started as a personal journey soon took on the form of a crusade. Prince, along with his acolytes, began to evangelise an ideology which stated that 'gender is a performance'. In this belief system, biology takes a backseat, and the act, the performance, becomes paramount.

From Performance to Dogma

In this, lies the heart of the modern transgender movement: the sacrament of self-identification. A person can be whoever they feel like, irrespective of the tangible realities of biology. Such a narrative is poison for transsexuals, who have, for years, relied upon the concrete understanding of physical dysphoria. The struggle of a transsexual is not about putting on a show; it's about aligning one's entire being with a deeply felt, often painfully experienced reality.

Yet, the echoes of Prince's ideology can be seen today, with the rise of concepts like neopronouns. Unlike the medical condition of transsexualism, which is rooted in own-body sex perception, based on the presence of physical dysphoria, and seeks alignment with one's experienced 'true' sex, gender ideology conflates gender roles, behaviors, and appearances with intrinsic self-understanding, leading to the rise of concepts like neopronouns.

Performative pronouns aren't tools of understanding, as many would have you believe. No, they are the ideological descendants of the 'gender as performance' doctrine, an attempt to codify a wholly subjective, personal 'inner sense' of gender into the fabric of our language and societal structures.

Transsexuals: Casualties in a War of Ideologies

Amidst this ecclesiastical fervour, transsexuals stand as the dissenting voices, the apostates. For the transsexual, this is a silent war. A war where the very essence of their existence, backed by decades of medical research and rooted in biological realities, is being systematically eroded and replaced by the abstract, subjective identities and the whims of personal self-identification. This is not advancement; it's erasure. The transgender movement, while parading under the banners of progress and inclusivity, is redefining what 'dysphoria' means and is actively silencing and invalidating the lived realities of transsexuals.

A New Religion?

It's all very religious when you stop and think about it. The unquestionable tenets of gender ideology, the sins of 'misgendering' or 'deadnaming', the rituals like pronoun circles, and the utopian promise of a society 'beyond the gender binary'—it's eerily reminiscent of any structured faith. But unlike most faiths that strive for spiritual enlightenment, this religion relentlessly seeks to overwrite biological, medical, and personal truths.

Beyond the Fog of Ideology

The transgender movement isn't about a broader understanding or deeper acceptance; it's about the propagation of an ideology as rigid and dogmatic as any religious creed. It’s a faith born from the recesses of crossdressing organisations, magnified by modern queer theory, that's marginalising and harming the very people it claims to represent.

Transsexuals are not asking for the world, just the right to exist without being overshadowed by an ideology that erases them. It’s time the world looked beyond the charade of the 'trans umbrella' and stood with those who genuinely need understanding and support. It’s time to reassert the medical model of transsexuality.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed

Sometimes, there is an insidious, consuming rage that bubbles from the deepest pits of one’s soul. A rage born of betrayal, of alienation, and most fatally, of erasure. I stand on this platform, not as a mere individual, but as a beacon for an annihilated identity, a forgotten human experience, and a misunderstood medical problem. In this current epoch of the 'transgender umbrella', the 'trans' narrative has been hijacked, distorted, and weaponised, obfuscating the raw, visceral reality of transsexual lives.

Why I Fight

Why do I fight? Why do I rage against the wave of so-called 'transactivism' that sweeps across our culture with a fevered, unforgiving tide? It's not for lack of compassion or an inability to understand. It's because the very heart of my existence is under siege. It is because these crusaders of a newfound 'wokeness' are leading a war that erases the blood, tears, and pain that have been the backbone of my lived experience on this Earth.

It is because every fibre of my being screams in anguish at the audacity of those who hijack our stories and claim them as their own. It is because I am tired of watching the true essence of transsexual strife diluted and reduced to nothing more than a fashion statement or a social media trend. It is because the battle I wage is not against a world that doesn't understand me, but against those who pretend they do.

Transactivism, in its present form, is an opiate for the uninformed masses. Cloaked in the veneer of righteousness, it parades itself as the ultimate advocacy for all under the transgender umbrella. But what it truly is, is an Orwellian leviathan, a well-oiled propaganda machine that homogenises, dilutes, and ultimately, erases the distinct narrative of the transsexual.

In the grand spectacle of transactivism, where has the voice of the transsexual been left? Erased, overshadowed, and drowned out by those who think that plastering their profiles with flags and slogans makes them heroes of our cause. You know nothing of the agonising nights, the tears shed in quiet corners, the echoes of sex dysphoria screaming inside one's mind. And yet, you dare to assume authority on it?

Allies or Adversaries

It's one thing to face ignorance from the outside world; it's another to be blindsided by those who claim to be your 'community'. When did the unvarnished voices of genuine transsexuals get drowned out by a cacophony of ill-informed, virtue-signalling activists? These so-called 'activists' label me "divisive" for demanding a nuanced narrative, but isn't their generic, one-size-fits-none approach the true betrayal? They dilute our stories and blend them into a watered-down ideological concoction, robbing us of our individuality and our humanity.

Every single day, I am confronted with a grotesque carnival of tokenism that reduces my reality to a gendered performance. A parade where virtue signalling has replaced genuine understanding, where retweets and trending hashtags substitute for empathy, and where 'trans' 'allies' drunkenly stumble over themselves in a competitive spectacle of wokeness. This perverse pageantry is not a celebration of identity; it's a death knell for authenticity.

This is not a trendy hashtag. This is not a pithy catchphrase. This is a life lived on the razor's edge of sex embodiment and self-conception, a jagged precipice of reality in a world inundated with the kaleidoscope of gender ideology. When I see 'allies' donning the mantle of 'trans rights' without understanding the depths of a transsexual’s agony, I feel not only neglected but betrayed.

Why, you ask, do I possess such vehement distaste for what seems, on the surface, to be a noble endeavour? Because it is deeply personal. This is my soul being trampled, mocked, and co-opted for social brownie points. To witness your existence, the defining struggle of your life, commodified, caricatured, and carnivalised by those who claim to advocate for you is a torment few can fathom.

The Mirage of Inclusion

Under the guise of inclusion, transactivism has broadened the definition of 'trans' to such an extent that it has become meaningless. They've reduced transsexuals to mere footnotes in our own stories, cast aside in favour of a more palatable, sanitised narrative of 'trans joy' that the masses can digest without discomfort.

Transsexuals are told that if we just play along, if we keep quiet about our specific needs and challenges, we'll benefit from this broader 'trans' acceptance. But what acceptance is this, if it’s built on the erasure of our unique struggles and distinct needs? To conform is to silence the scream within, to betray the very essence of who we are. We are being offered a seat at a table that was built on the annihilation of our voices. This is not a gift—it's a gilded cage.

Rainbow-hued Oppression

The modern transactivist might call me a relic, a product of a bygone era. They might label me a traitor or accuse me of internalised transphobia. But in doing so, they prove my point. Their so-called 'activism' isn't for people like me; it's for themselves. It's a means to an end, a way to secure their place in the hierarchy of the 'woke'.

Their attempts to paint my fierce dedication to preserving true transsexual identity as narcissism is a laughable distraction. It's not about "liking myself too much." It's about demanding the right to define and own my narrative. It's about demanding that same respect for every transsexual out there.

In their self-congratulatory echo chambers, transactivists might have convinced themselves that they're the vanguard of a new era of enlightenment. But from where I stand, it looks a lot like the same old oppression, just dressed up in rainbow colours.

An Existential War

Why do I fight? Because if I don't, I surrender to an existence where my identity, my medical condition, and my reality are buried beneath an avalanche of ignorance, condescension, and misguided ideological zealotry. I fight for recognition and the right to define my narrative. I fight against the commercialisation of my existence. I fight to reclaim and resurrect the space that has been stolen from me, from us, and from those yet to come. Every tear, every wound, every scar drives me forward.

This is a war and the stakes are high. The casualty? Authenticity. Reality. Truth. The integrity of my soul is on the line. This battle is not a choice—it's a matter of existential survival. That, in its unvarnished, unapologetic fury, is why I fight.

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed

The current discourse surrounding "transgender" reveals a profound misunderstanding of those with transsexualism, reminiscent of alarming confusion I've seen among many clinicians.

These misconceptions frequently present themselves in claims that individuals like me are attempting to posture as the 'model transsexual' or that we label ourselves as mentally ill or delusional. This mischaracterisation couldn't be further from the truth.

In Pursuit of Alignment

At its core, transsexualism, as I understand and experience it, is a medical condition that causes a person to reject their natal sex and feel a profound alignment with the opposite sex. This alignment permeates every facet of life: physically, psychologically, behaviourally, sexually, and even in terms of loyalty. I find it intriguing that, personally speaking, despite my clear alliance with the female sex, 'trans' feels like an Ellis Island, a temporary refuge that no one maintains loyalty to or settles upon itself.

Physiological, Not Just Psychological

While many consider this phenomenon to be primarily psychological, I find 'physiological' to be a more accurate descriptor of my experience. Since my early years, I've felt an innate alignment with the female sex, a sentiment so powerful that it led me to challenge my sex characteristics even before I was introduced to terms like 'trans' or 'gender dysphoria.' My initial attempts to understand my feelings were through these terms and shaped by the prevalent narratives. However, it was only when I delved deeper into the clinical and historical underpinnings of transsexualism as a unique condition, contrasting it with the DSM-5-TR understanding of gender dysphoria and neurobiological insights on the topic, that I found self-understanding and made sense of what didn't fit.

I don't present this understanding as the ultimate truth; I view opinions as exchangeable, not as anchors. However, it is the only framework that coherently explains my experiences, and the only narrative that resonates with my life's story.

A Neurobiological Drive

It's challenging to convey to clinicians, or anyone for that matter, that my battle is purely internal, with my own body. Most assume it's intertwined with societal gender norms in some capacity, but it's not. The narrative of my life makes sense only when seen as a neurobiological compulsion, driving me on a relentless quest for answers. This quest took me across countries and continents, with the looming threat of time, trying to determine what was amiss and how I could reconcile with my existence. Growing up, my attempts to mature into a woman, despite being a boy, almost led me into child trafficking. My innate transsexualism was forcefully suppressed, and I was placed in a structure that encouraged me to bury it deeper and deeper, until I abruptly aged out of that structure at 18. I made Eagle Scout as a shell of a person, hollowed out from internal anguish.

Leaving home at 18 felt like dodging barriers on a freeway, in a car without brakes; it's sustainable only for so long. When you're in an uncontrollable car, you try to to find both a means to halt it and also prepare for an impending collision. When the crash came, I found myself starting estrogen in the middle of my MA dissertation, jobless, in a foreign country, with my visa set to expire in half a year, and without any guaranteed support. It's akin to leaping off a cliff to escape a roaring blaze behind you. Few seem to understand that this isn't rooted in a psychological delusion but is, instead, a reflection of an unwavering neurobiological drive for alignment.

Not a Victim, Just a Transsexual

Contrary to what my detractors think, I don't hate myself and I'm not trying to play some sort of intersectionality oppression olympics. I don't feel ashamed of my 'identity' or for having transsexualism. I've learned the hard way to cherish and advocate for myself. This is simply the unvarnished, raw truth of my experience.

Whereas transsexualism for me is a deeply personal battle, transgenderism, from my observations, revolves around control and societal demands. If we were to draw parallels, transsexualism feels akin to collapsing and feeling thankful for a helping hand, while transgenderism equates to demanding people to carry you in a rickshaw, insisting on titles of reverence. This article, this website, my advocacy — it isn't about shame or self-loathing; it's about empathy and understanding. Reflecting on past versions of myself, I yearn to help them, using the most compassionate and evidence-based approach, be that through sex-reassignment or potential future treatments addressing the root cause of transsexualism.

Medical Solutions for Medical Problems

I often liken my perspective to how I imagine someone with polio or paraplegia might feel. If we had the means to cure it and/or prevent future instances, wouldn't we advocate for it? My stance stems not from any shame associated with being transsexual but from a deep understanding of the anguish my younger self felt and a genuine desire to prevent and alleviate it as best possible. Given a medical condition, wouldn't anyone want the most effective treatments for their future selves? For those like me, it's not about adhering to an external social identity, or fitting into a predefined gender box, but about addressing the core condition underlying our experience. Just as someone with polio would hope for the best medical interventions, we too seek the best possible solutions for our unique challenges. The ultimate goal is to alleviate the pain and seek a fulfilling life as best we can.

Trans Joy?

The gender euphoria narrative championed by the 'transgender' movement completely misses the mark for those of us with transsexualism. Our battles, struggles, and very essence are rooted in a profound, unyielding need for alignment, far removed from societal gender constructs or euphoric proclamations.

The 'trans umbrella' may be multi-faceted and vast, but the erasure of the transsexual narrative within it is glaring and detrimental. The onus is on society, clinicians, and the 'trans community', to not just listen but to truly understand. For the sake of every individual like me, and for the generations to come, transsexuals deserve to have their voices heard in their pure, unadulterated form, our realities acknowledged and addressed with the specificity they deserve.

#StopTranssexualErasure

Tired Transsexual is the pen name of a male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed

Dear Katy,

You parade yourself around as an advocate for trans rights, but what have you ever truly done for transsexuals? The facades and the fronts you’ve put up paint a picture of a crusader, but your actions and words tell a different story. This is not merely a call for accountability but a resounding indictment of your supposed 'advocacy'.

A Charade of Advocacy

Under the guise of 'activism', your tweets, podcasts, and videos have perpetuated misinformation, trivialised our strife, and contributed to the very marginalisation you profess to fight against.

The spotlight you've sought, using our plight as a backdrop, is more about personal elevation than genuine advocacy. You position yourself as a voice for the voiceless, yet drown out and dismiss those same voices when they dare to deviate from your preferred narrative. Your focus appears to be more on personal gain and appeasing mainstream ideologies than on elevating the concerns of transsexuals. Are we just pawns in your game of self-promotion?

You act as if your alignment with the larger 'queer'/'trans' agenda places you on the moral high ground. However, when you sell out transsexuals for the sake of retweets, likes, and internet fame, all you're doing is perpetuating a dangerous and misleading ideology. You commodify and twist our struggle to fit the 'trans' narrative, and in doing so, you've willingly signed up for the erasure of your own demographic.

Your endorsement of documents and medical guidelines that equate 'transgender' and 'transsexual', like those from the American Psychological Association, is a slap in the face. It's more than erasure—it's a flagrant dismissal of our existence. You're not only failing to protect us'; you're actively pushing us into obscurity.

The 'Gender Critical' movement is not the only entity at fault. It's 'trans' influencers like you who toe the line of ideological extremism, ignoring the nuances of the broader debate, that pose an even greater threat. Our problem isn’t solely with the 'GCs' or 'TERFs'; it’s with the likes of you who fail to recognise that standing up for true transsexual identity isn't about feeding any wolf or playing into any hand. It's about maintaining clarity amidst chaos, advocating for a group that’s constantly at risk from multiple sides.

Enough is Enough

We don't need your kind of 'activism', Katy. We need true advocates who recognise the intricacies of our experiences, who are willing to distinguish and not dilute. When you equate a medically transitioned transsexual with someone who casually declares a 'woman identity', you mock our struggles, our surgeries, our hormonal treatments, and the path we’ve tread. Your activism is not a beacon of hope; it's a glaring spotlight on the very issues that plague us.

We don’t want your diluted, misguided version of advocacy. We need genuine representation. Recognise our struggles, our distinct needs, and our specificity. Stop sacrificing our medical reality at the altar of a flawed, oversimplified narrative. Until you can do that, stand corrected or step aside.

In defiance and determination,

Concerned Transsexuals #TranssexualNotTransgender

Add Your Name to the Open Letter

1. Tired Transsexual - @tiredtransmed
   Do you expect me to thank you for fighting for 'rights' I never needed and an 'inclusion' that erases me?

2. Alexis Naomi - @AlexisNaomiii
   You sold out your own.

3. Melissa - @Melissagacious
   I think your message is counterproductive, lets talk about it.

4. Jenny Matrix - @HeterodoxTakes
   Transsexual separatism now!

5. Lexy - @pleasedontuseme

6. Aimee Armstrong - @basic_chanel
   Trans should mean something.

7. MissTaffBrit II - @MissTaffBrit2

8. Lady In The Heavens - @Lady_Thy_Heaven
   You’re a disgrace to transsexuals. You traded your sisters in for popularity points. Words have meaning and at this point in time, the very word trans which actually means transsexual, is now sacred for us!

9. Charlotte Williams - @charlottes_tale
   Placating to the social justice mob hurts everyone.

10. Marnix Witlof - @MWitlof13321

11. Dolly van Doll - @Capucine_no

12. Yea Heys - @WritesMyranda
    You’ve thrown transsexuals under the bus for queer theory, why?

13. Based Transsexual - @TheBasedTS
    Your incessant grifting of gender ideology and utter lack of self-awareness are deeply harmful to the transsexual community, and you should frankly be ashamed.

14. Kev - @kevH_27

15. Leanne Mills - @Lee20236

    I am sick to the back teeth of being ignored. I've sweated my guts out this year trying to get MPs and newspapers to take on our concerns and it's like banging my head against a brick wall. We're all going to hell thanks to helpful 'allies' like you. We are facing the biggest existential crisis in our lives and you are failing us.

16. Jilted Valkyrie - @jiltedvalkyrie
    Identities ebb and flow, and we all have them. However, it's important to distinguish the difference between a medical condition and identifying as one. Conflating the two is dangerous and benefits no one.

17. Rikki Lamb - @lambrikki6
    It's because of horrid people like @KatyMontgomerie that genuine trans people face hate crimes. That tweet from Katy is nothing but unmitigated flim flam. 'Transmeds' successfully assimilate into life, cretins like Katy use trans as a way of seeking attention and hurling abuse at genuine transpeople or ‘transmeds’ as we are called who they are trying to erase. It's people like Katy who are likely to detransition because they attract so much hate to themselves and feel unable to lead a normal life. They are the genuine transphobes.

18. Beth Orens - @BethOrens

    There's something horrifying about a person campaigning for the rights of a group and ignoring what that group has to say about its own wants and needs. Katy, please stop and listen.

19. Cactus - @antenacactus

20. Buck Angel® Transsexual - @BuckAngel

21. Tracy Coyle - @tracyccoyle
    Recognising why we exist and what we need to do to have happy lives is not transphobia.

22. TeeganTandP - @TeeganTandP
    Your 'advocacy' has created a space for hatred, ignorance, and bigotry. Your stances have arguably set the stage for legislative erasure of transsexual care for everyone. You had a chance to do some real good for the transsexual community. As small as we are, we do need the help, but what you do and continue to do is not help. Please reconsider what you do.

23. Melissa Damerell - @DamerellMelissa
    I hope you'll learn to think outside the ideology.

24. Christine - @ChristineRebst1

    Katy, please stop echoing the marxist gender ideology rhetoric, it causes negativity towards us,

25. Cara - @TheSpookyCara
    You do not represent us.

26. Erin Brough - @mbrough330
    I will not be erased by you or anyone.

27. Victoria Valentine - @veeayvee1
    Your campaining is doing untold harm.

28. Greg Kaye - @finite_planet
    Please review your claims which I can't see as anything but bizarre. You're actually saying that the people who have invested most into transition, "to be more likely to become ex-trans". It just looks like baseless attack.

29. Harold Shipman - @haroldshipman56
    I approve this message.

30. Twitchmqin2007 - @sqizx735

    Get a hold of reality.

    Thank you for reading! After encountering barriers to entry in mainstream media, I launched this Substack to amplify the unfiltered voices of transsexuals and those who care about us. To receive new posts, please consider becoming a subscriber.