Clarity Was Removed on Purpose

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.