Sometime ago, you began your posts with saying that you were seriously considering suicide. I hope that is no longer true. Your contributions to this debate are essential. If there is any chance of resolving it, you are one of our strongest hopes. Please continue thinking and writing about this. There are many of us who would feel a great loss if you were no longer with us and not providing your essential insights.
Thank you for the care in this message. I want to clarify something important about that period.
When MAiD entered my writing, it was not because I wanted to die, but because I was trying to name the architecture of choice that appears when every other institutional frame has failed. It functioned as a boundary condition, a way of refusing coercive survival and dishonest belonging, not as an expression of imminent intent. Writing about it was a way of regaining authorship over my life, not relinquishing it.
I am still here, still thinking, still working, and still planting. The writing continues precisely because clarity returned. I appreciate your concern, and I receive it in the spirit it was offered.
I read your article and found it very insightful. What stood out to me is how clearly you trace the downstream effects of removing diagnostic clarity — not just in language, but in protection. When gender dysphoria is no longer recognized as a material condition with predictable risks, it becomes much harder to argue for protected status, medical necessity, or discrimination claims that rely on institutional recognition.
That loss doesn’t just affect people who understand their transness through dysphoria; it affects all of us when access to care, housing protection, and legal recognition become framed as optional, aesthetic, or purely personal. Without a recognized condition, harm becomes individualized and easier for institutions to ignore.
I don’t see this as an argument against people who experience gender primarily as identity — both realities are valid — but as a warning about what happens when the medical and legal systems no longer have a language that obligates them to act. Ignoring that tradeoff has consequences, and your piece does a good job of naming them directly.
Thank you for reading it that precisely; yes, the argument is not about policing identity but about what happens when systems are no longer structurally obligated to recognise risk, at which point harm is privatised, protections become discretionary, and exploitation gains plausible deniability.
My transition goal, if I ever had one, was the opposite of performance. I did not transition to be ornamented, eroticised, or validated through display. I transitioned so that my sex would be legible without costume.
Makeup, heels, exposed skin, or their absence are culturally contingent signals. Sex is not. If those signals disappear tomorrow, nothing about my sex changes, because it was never grounded in imitation or fetish in the first place.
What you’re describing isn’t a problem for transsexuals. It’s a projection of how narrowly you understand female embodiment, and how dependent sexualisation is, in your frame, on women doing work for the gaze.
You are collapsing distinct phenomena into a moral absolute, substituting refusal for analysis, because declaring “the answer is no” avoids the harder work of differentiating fetish from condition, deception from embodiment, and risk mitigation from blanket prohibition, which may feel decisive but does nothing to constrain harm in the real systems where it actually occurs.
Kat, “there is no distinction” plus “they all belong in mental hospitals” is not women’s safety, it is a proposal for collective punishment and involuntary confinement based on category membership. A policy that refuses to distinguish intent, history, and behaviour cannot target offenders or reduce harm; it only widens the net, erases due process, and replaces enforceable safeguards with a moral label.
I applaud what you're attempting to do with the clarity and obfuscation discussion but no one should be relying on the head shrinkers for clarity! Psychiatry is irredeemably corrupt - used as a warehouse for inconvenient victims of severe trauma. The DSM is very political, as are all institutions and I agree with you about how manipulation on that level helps to define social constructs and sets up non-normies for psychiatric (and other) abuse. It's a discussion very well worth having. I don't agree with your premise that "some people are born with a cross-sexed embodiment". It's a very manipulative concept that bars entry to discussion about (mostly) male perversion. (Women do the trans thing for different reasons than men.) If one has to accept that some men are born in the wrong body, there's no room for what transsexualism really is. I'm not pretending I know anything I don't know but I reject completely that anyone is ever given the wrong brain for the body.
Zoë, you’re right that psychiatry is political and frequently functions as a containment system for inconvenient trauma, but rejecting diagnostic clarity altogether does not dismantle that power, it simply hands it over to markets, informal authority, and moral entrepreneurs; the claim that some people are born with a cross-sexed embodiment is not a metaphysical romance about “wrong brains,” nor a shield for male perversion, but a materially observable pattern of early-onset, sexed distress with predictable medical, social, and trafficking risk profiles that require naming if they are to be constrained. Collapsing all transsexuality into perversion or post hoc motivation erases female transsexuals, survivors, and minors entirely, and it conveniently relocates analysis away from institutions and incentives and back onto individual morality, where abuse is easiest to excuse and hardest to prosecute. You do not have to believe in mystical essences to recognise that bodies, risk, and exposure are real, and that when those realities are denied, people are not freed from psychiatry, they are simply made available to other, less accountable systems of exploitation.
Thank you for your considered response. It seems like you are trying to assert "true trans" and to get some fencing around what has become an out-of-control freak show for every tom dick and harry, which is what LGB persons have been saying for quite some time. In that way, you are actually highlighting how harmful the trans "discussion" has been and what it has opened the door to and I am noticing that the problem stems from the idea that there is a such thing as true trans. Am I wrong? I particularly and very strongly agree with your first sentence up to the first semi-colon and the last part of your last sentence "...people are not freed from psychiatry, they are simply made available to other, less accountable systems of exploitation." I think you are very, very sensitive and kind and understanding and I totally agree with your assessment of the industry. (I had a sister who was driven to suicide by psychiatric abuse.) I think the next step is to define real trans which I think we know by now is an impossibility. If you have to rely on "a materially observable pattern of early-onset, sexed distress", (which, to me, is just a way to make "born in the wrong body" seem more easily digestible,) that is the entire problem. The consequences of accepting trans ideology (which I realize you are trying to rein in) has spawned some pretty severe abuse of a lot of people, particularly women and children, but also those who are under "the spell." I realize you do not agree with the shit show it has become and that is your raison d'être here. I would also like to apologize for "Collapsing all transsexuality into perversion," etc. That is not ok. I do have a habit of reducing things like that and is not fair or helpful.
Your comment is not analysis; it is a refusal to distinguish, and refusals do not manage risk, they externalise it. Declaring that nothing exists except “male nature” collapses female transsexuals, intersex conditions, childhood-onset dysphoria, and decades of clinical observation into a single moral accusation, which may feel decisive but does nothing to prevent exploitation, violence, or trafficking. Saying “just tell them no” ignores the reality that people still exist, still seek care, and still get routed into informal markets when institutions abdicate responsibility. You are not defending women by denying material distinctions; you are erasing the very categories that make protection, accountability, and prosecution possible.
Your position relies on denial rather than containment: declaring a population nonexistent does not make risk disappear, it removes the language needed to distinguish, regulate, and constrain it, which is why violence and exploitation increase under moral absolutes rather than decrease. Calling someone “the problem” may feel satisfying, but it substitutes blame for structure and guarantees that harm will continue to operate unmanaged.
This is not truth but moral panic expressed as collective punishment, where you replace analysis with accusation, conflate risk management with extermination, and label an entire category “predator” to justify denying material distinctions, due process, and accountability.
Dana, this response mistakes visibility for power and reduction for realism. The DSM does not need to be known by “normies” to shape outcomes; it governs insurance coverage, standards of care, research funding, liability, institutional risk thresholds, and what forms of harm are legible to courts, clinicians, and regulators. Calling transsexualism “vibes and feelings” ignores that diagnostic framing determines whether distress is treated as a material condition with predictable exposure to violence, homelessness, and sexual exploitation, or dissolved into a subjective mood state where protection becomes optional. Hormones, surgery, and passability are downstream interventions; the question is whether the system recognises who is exposed to what risks and therefore owes what duties. When specificity is removed, accountability collapses and harm is reclassified as choice, identity, or lifestyle. That is not punching fog; it is naming infrastructure. Dismissing this as “blaming the DSM” is a category error. The claim is not that a manual caused personal unhappiness, but that institutional erasure creates conditions where exploitation can operate without being nameable. If you cannot distinguish between individual feelings and structural incentives, you are not being pragmatic; you are refusing to think at the level where power actually functions.
It means you are conflating social recognition with structural leverage and mistaking the flattening of complex systems into personal anecdotes for realism, which is why you keep circling vibes, identity, and lived experience while missing the point that power operates upstream through institutions, incentives, and legibility, not through how out, clockable, sincere, or long-in-the-life someone feels.
Sometime ago, you began your posts with saying that you were seriously considering suicide. I hope that is no longer true. Your contributions to this debate are essential. If there is any chance of resolving it, you are one of our strongest hopes. Please continue thinking and writing about this. There are many of us who would feel a great loss if you were no longer with us and not providing your essential insights.
Thank you for the care in this message. I want to clarify something important about that period.
When MAiD entered my writing, it was not because I wanted to die, but because I was trying to name the architecture of choice that appears when every other institutional frame has failed. It functioned as a boundary condition, a way of refusing coercive survival and dishonest belonging, not as an expression of imminent intent. Writing about it was a way of regaining authorship over my life, not relinquishing it.
I am still here, still thinking, still working, and still planting. The writing continues precisely because clarity returned. I appreciate your concern, and I receive it in the spirit it was offered.
I read your article and found it very insightful. What stood out to me is how clearly you trace the downstream effects of removing diagnostic clarity — not just in language, but in protection. When gender dysphoria is no longer recognized as a material condition with predictable risks, it becomes much harder to argue for protected status, medical necessity, or discrimination claims that rely on institutional recognition.
That loss doesn’t just affect people who understand their transness through dysphoria; it affects all of us when access to care, housing protection, and legal recognition become framed as optional, aesthetic, or purely personal. Without a recognized condition, harm becomes individualized and easier for institutions to ignore.
I don’t see this as an argument against people who experience gender primarily as identity — both realities are valid — but as a warning about what happens when the medical and legal systems no longer have a language that obligates them to act. Ignoring that tradeoff has consequences, and your piece does a good job of naming them directly.
Thank you for reading it that precisely; yes, the argument is not about policing identity but about what happens when systems are no longer structurally obligated to recognise risk, at which point harm is privatised, protections become discretionary, and exploitation gains plausible deniability.
My transition goal, if I ever had one, was the opposite of performance. I did not transition to be ornamented, eroticised, or validated through display. I transitioned so that my sex would be legible without costume.
Makeup, heels, exposed skin, or their absence are culturally contingent signals. Sex is not. If those signals disappear tomorrow, nothing about my sex changes, because it was never grounded in imitation or fetish in the first place.
What you’re describing isn’t a problem for transsexuals. It’s a projection of how narrowly you understand female embodiment, and how dependent sexualisation is, in your frame, on women doing work for the gaze.
You are collapsing distinct phenomena into a moral absolute, substituting refusal for analysis, because declaring “the answer is no” avoids the harder work of differentiating fetish from condition, deception from embodiment, and risk mitigation from blanket prohibition, which may feel decisive but does nothing to constrain harm in the real systems where it actually occurs.
Kat, “there is no distinction” plus “they all belong in mental hospitals” is not women’s safety, it is a proposal for collective punishment and involuntary confinement based on category membership. A policy that refuses to distinguish intent, history, and behaviour cannot target offenders or reduce harm; it only widens the net, erases due process, and replaces enforceable safeguards with a moral label.
I applaud what you're attempting to do with the clarity and obfuscation discussion but no one should be relying on the head shrinkers for clarity! Psychiatry is irredeemably corrupt - used as a warehouse for inconvenient victims of severe trauma. The DSM is very political, as are all institutions and I agree with you about how manipulation on that level helps to define social constructs and sets up non-normies for psychiatric (and other) abuse. It's a discussion very well worth having. I don't agree with your premise that "some people are born with a cross-sexed embodiment". It's a very manipulative concept that bars entry to discussion about (mostly) male perversion. (Women do the trans thing for different reasons than men.) If one has to accept that some men are born in the wrong body, there's no room for what transsexualism really is. I'm not pretending I know anything I don't know but I reject completely that anyone is ever given the wrong brain for the body.
Zoë, you’re right that psychiatry is political and frequently functions as a containment system for inconvenient trauma, but rejecting diagnostic clarity altogether does not dismantle that power, it simply hands it over to markets, informal authority, and moral entrepreneurs; the claim that some people are born with a cross-sexed embodiment is not a metaphysical romance about “wrong brains,” nor a shield for male perversion, but a materially observable pattern of early-onset, sexed distress with predictable medical, social, and trafficking risk profiles that require naming if they are to be constrained. Collapsing all transsexuality into perversion or post hoc motivation erases female transsexuals, survivors, and minors entirely, and it conveniently relocates analysis away from institutions and incentives and back onto individual morality, where abuse is easiest to excuse and hardest to prosecute. You do not have to believe in mystical essences to recognise that bodies, risk, and exposure are real, and that when those realities are denied, people are not freed from psychiatry, they are simply made available to other, less accountable systems of exploitation.
Thank you for your considered response. It seems like you are trying to assert "true trans" and to get some fencing around what has become an out-of-control freak show for every tom dick and harry, which is what LGB persons have been saying for quite some time. In that way, you are actually highlighting how harmful the trans "discussion" has been and what it has opened the door to and I am noticing that the problem stems from the idea that there is a such thing as true trans. Am I wrong? I particularly and very strongly agree with your first sentence up to the first semi-colon and the last part of your last sentence "...people are not freed from psychiatry, they are simply made available to other, less accountable systems of exploitation." I think you are very, very sensitive and kind and understanding and I totally agree with your assessment of the industry. (I had a sister who was driven to suicide by psychiatric abuse.) I think the next step is to define real trans which I think we know by now is an impossibility. If you have to rely on "a materially observable pattern of early-onset, sexed distress", (which, to me, is just a way to make "born in the wrong body" seem more easily digestible,) that is the entire problem. The consequences of accepting trans ideology (which I realize you are trying to rein in) has spawned some pretty severe abuse of a lot of people, particularly women and children, but also those who are under "the spell." I realize you do not agree with the shit show it has become and that is your raison d'être here. I would also like to apologize for "Collapsing all transsexuality into perversion," etc. That is not ok. I do have a habit of reducing things like that and is not fair or helpful.
Your comment is not analysis; it is a refusal to distinguish, and refusals do not manage risk, they externalise it. Declaring that nothing exists except “male nature” collapses female transsexuals, intersex conditions, childhood-onset dysphoria, and decades of clinical observation into a single moral accusation, which may feel decisive but does nothing to prevent exploitation, violence, or trafficking. Saying “just tell them no” ignores the reality that people still exist, still seek care, and still get routed into informal markets when institutions abdicate responsibility. You are not defending women by denying material distinctions; you are erasing the very categories that make protection, accountability, and prosecution possible.
Your position relies on denial rather than containment: declaring a population nonexistent does not make risk disappear, it removes the language needed to distinguish, regulate, and constrain it, which is why violence and exploitation increase under moral absolutes rather than decrease. Calling someone “the problem” may feel satisfying, but it substitutes blame for structure and guarantees that harm will continue to operate unmanaged.
This is not truth but moral panic expressed as collective punishment, where you replace analysis with accusation, conflate risk management with extermination, and label an entire category “predator” to justify denying material distinctions, due process, and accountability.
Dana, this response mistakes visibility for power and reduction for realism. The DSM does not need to be known by “normies” to shape outcomes; it governs insurance coverage, standards of care, research funding, liability, institutional risk thresholds, and what forms of harm are legible to courts, clinicians, and regulators. Calling transsexualism “vibes and feelings” ignores that diagnostic framing determines whether distress is treated as a material condition with predictable exposure to violence, homelessness, and sexual exploitation, or dissolved into a subjective mood state where protection becomes optional. Hormones, surgery, and passability are downstream interventions; the question is whether the system recognises who is exposed to what risks and therefore owes what duties. When specificity is removed, accountability collapses and harm is reclassified as choice, identity, or lifestyle. That is not punching fog; it is naming infrastructure. Dismissing this as “blaming the DSM” is a category error. The claim is not that a manual caused personal unhappiness, but that institutional erasure creates conditions where exploitation can operate without being nameable. If you cannot distinguish between individual feelings and structural incentives, you are not being pragmatic; you are refusing to think at the level where power actually functions.
It means you are conflating social recognition with structural leverage and mistaking the flattening of complex systems into personal anecdotes for realism, which is why you keep circling vibes, identity, and lived experience while missing the point that power operates upstream through institutions, incentives, and legibility, not through how out, clockable, sincere, or long-in-the-life someone feels.