Moral Injury and the Total Erasure of the True Transsexual

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.

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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.