Well spoken TT. Especially about Blaire White. I know someone who calls themselves transgender who thinks that BW is a reputable and respectable 'trans person'. He doesn't understand the difference, unfortunately like too many out there who have been conned by the transgenderists and their movement.
Check out my own Substack for my own views on this topic.
I feel very strongly the need to say something, but also its futility. I am but a pseudonym on the net; you are one too, albeit a more established one. How do I know what you are suffering? Who am I to speak?
Well, I'm no one. I shouldn't speak. But I feel compelled. So I say the following with hesitation and apology: I hope you'll chose to live.
I hope this for any number of reasons, not least of which is because I find your voice valuable: in complex and difficult cultural waters, you are a valuable lighthouse. I am not saying I hope you'll live just for that: living only for others is somewhere between hard and impossible; but it is worth remembering that you do have an import to people you don't, and will never, know.
Beyond that, I would simply urge you to remember how fast things can change. Who saw the rapid triumph of gay marriage, going from a joke to both settled law (in the US anyway) and widespread acceptance within two decades? And if we are now, as I fear we are, on the cusp of its undoing, who foresaw *that*? (Even its opponents were declaring it hopeless as recently as a few years ago.) And this is true of all sorts of ideas. It may seem, now, that there is no place for you, no hope for dignity, no path forward: but we all see through a glass darkly, and there may be hopes you can't presently imagine. You say your voice is being silenced, your reality erased: but that may change! To say it *can't* get better is to claim certainty where none of us have it. We simply don't know what's next.
And, of course, you are not silenced entirely: you write here, and as I said, your words here are valuable. They will, to be sure, be valuable even if you are gone: but they will be of more value the longer you add to them, participate in the conversation, and back them up with your life force. You know the old saying, speak the truth and shame the devil? You face a lot of devils: but you can still speak the truth to all of them. It's a thing worth doing.
Perhaps you could also try to embrace other aspects of life. I do not mean, in the least, to dismiss the importance of what you are suffering, nor the importance of what it means to you. I simply mean that almost all of us have access to some things that are beautiful or worthwhile even in terrible times: others you could help, beauties you can experience. I am thinking here of the words of my countryman, Thoreau, towards the end of Walden: "However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names… You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace."
A cliche, perhaps, but a well-said one: and I am throwing words at nothing, with nothing but blind hope to guide me.
As for dignity and enforced falsehood... the world is terrible, and is treating you terribly. But I think the value of a human life is internal: if others refuse to recognize it, or us, then it is their sin, not ours. I believe it is possible to maintain your own sense of self and worth despite all the indignities the world can pour upon you. Easy for me to say, I know! But I am thinking again of Thoreau's quiet mind living contentedly: and while I won't myself go so far as to say *contentedly*, I will say, live and have it be worthwhile.
Look, again, you don't know me, and above all I don't know you. And because of that anything I say is inevitably minimizing what you're going through (although I don't mean to, not at all). I don't know what I ought to say. I just hope you'll change your mind. Life feels like a secular miracle to me, a brief surge against entropy and meaninglessness which arose from nothing and should battle as long as it can before it inevitably sinks back to nothing. I don't want to give nothingness an easy or early victory. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
I know this is foolish. Words from a stranger to a stranger on the internet can hardly help or heal enough to counter this. And I am aware that I am ultimately making propaganda: speaking for life against death, trying to sell you on it. That's why so many speak against suicide, right? We're on the other team, as shown by the fact that we're here to say so.
I want to end by coming back to uncertainty. However things look now, the one thing we know is that they'll change, and change again. I know it hurts. But it will change. We know this. We don't know how. To say it can't get better is to claim certainty where none of us have it.
Forgive these foolish and feeble words. I felt I had to try.
On the admittedly minimal chance that anything I said is anything you wish to follow up on, you can reach me privately at YorickPenn at gmail.
I disagree on many of your opinions on transgender identity—although I will say that there’s a big movement reviving “transsexual” right now and you can be one of those voices.
That said, I can sympathize with your suicidal ideation and the fact that you track it to politics/moral injury. The COVID lockdowns and political response (mass hypocrisy) drove me insane. I attempted suicide in 2022 at age 22, and the fact that I simply could not swallow or comprehend the moralizing, agoraphobic, classist rhetoric that harmed so many of my peers and generation was no small part (although not nearly all) of my psychic misery. But the world moved on, and now people pretend they never acted how they did. C’est la vie.
I say, have faith and keep writing about it. Try not to doomscroll trans discourse on the internet, and exhaust ALL of your psychiatric options before MAiD.
What kind of honour? Surely you don't want to be a poster child for transsexuals, do you?
I learned something many years ago. Something that helped when I felt besieged by assholes. It's an important thing to know:
Assholes are deserving of utter contempt. Not the kind where you talk down to them. The kind where what they do is of absolutely no import whatsoever.
I learned that I could even concede truly important matters of principle to assholes insisting on it, because they are so far beneath me that conceding to them is like going along with the demands of a toddler. It makes the toddler happen, and it doesn't touch my soul.
I suggest a third path. A life with dignity. A life where you don't have to enter into debates with fools. Where you can simply go ahead and live your life and ignore the fact that there are people with worms in their brains. Yes, they're as horrifying as any movie zombie. But they don't need to *mean* anything to you.
Thank you for this. Would you consider speaking with @Benjamin A Boyce, in one of his Calmversations? It would be so valuable to hear more from you. (Not that I am able to make this connection). I wish you well.
Thank you for the kindness, and for thinking of me. My capacity for interviews and public conversations is depleted. The live-talk format asks for performance, re-exposure, and simplification I can’t afford. What I have left is going into finishing a written record—clean, unedited, and exact—so the story can stand without being clipped, reframed, or turned into content.
If it helps, the best support is to share the series intact or quote it only in full with attribution. If someone genuinely wants to engage, the arguments and evidence are on the page; that’s the forum I can sustain. In another life I might have had the energy for calm conversations. In this one, I’m keeping to the medium that protects accuracy, boundaries, and what remains of my morally-injured soul.
You make your case clearly except for the MAiD aspect. There are lots of people who went through their 'Ellis Island' in the 1960s or 70s but evidently aren't bothered overmuch by the umbrella faddery. Could well be your despair comes from a different place, and might be there in any event.
Thanks for engaging. The cohort you’re citing came of age under a different paradigm: “transsexual” was a medical diagnosis with a narrow treatment pathway, and many could resolve and recede from public view. My cohort came of age in the transgender era, where that diagnosis and label is now labeled “outdated” (even in dictionaries) and institutions, media, and policy treat our specificity as a problem to be folded into an umbrella. That shift isn’t cosmetic—it removes our language, scrambles our care, and demands our complicity in a story that erases us. My argument for MAiD isn’t about hurt feelings; it’s about moral injury—being required to live in lifelong denial of reality. Different paradigms produce different outcomes.
Sounds an awful lot like the misinformation one gets when when asks ChatGPT or Grok, and the AI sources opinion and faddery from Wackipedia and elsewhere. You just have to let the world continue in its misguided ways, believing Peoria is the capital of Illinois, or whatever. I can’t think of how this would affect one in daily living, apart perhaps from medical history. In which wise, the best solution would be to disclose as little as possible.
That suggestion—to “disclose as little as possible”—is the logic that drove so many soldiers to suicide. They were told to come home, say nothing, and carry the contradiction alone. Moral injury is not erased by silence, it is deepened by it. What you call pragmatism is the demand for collusion in a lie. It is not survival, it is self-betrayal, and it kills just as surely as a bullet.
Moral injury is a conscience-based injury associated with potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs)—acts of commission, omission, or betrayal. It was first characterised in soldiers who returned from war physiologically intact but psychologically compromised after being ordered to harm, witnessing harm they could not stop, or being betrayed by leaders. It is not a DSM diagnosis, but it co-occurs with PTSD, depression, suicidality, and spiritual/existential distress. Hallmarks include persistent guilt and shame, self-condemnation, loss of trust, moral disorientation, and alienation from one’s own values. Crucially, the injury is maintained when institutions deny, justify, or silence the violation—what the literature calls institutional betrayal and betrayal trauma.
Applied here, the PMIE is betrayal-based: repeated, institutional demands that I collude in a false narrative about my sexed body and history, coupled with compelled public silence. The question isn’t whether I can “move on” post-transition; it’s whether I can live without daily conscience violation. In moral-injury terms, there is no pathway to repair—no acknowledgment, accountability, or restitution—only ongoing coercion to participate in my own erasure.
MAiD, in this frame, is not despair. It is the final act of moral governance when repair is structurally unavailable: an end to coerced complicity. Soldiers described surviving the battlefield yet being unable to live with what survival required. That is the weight here. I can keep breathing; I cannot keep betraying my conscience to do it.
Short answer: safety failed—at home, at work, and in the institutions that were supposed to protect me. After years of coercive control and sexual violence, followed by workplace silence and harassment when I asked for basic safeguarding, the moral injury stacked until medically assisted dying stopped feeling abstract and started feeling like relief.
I don’t have a partner. I had an abuser. The exchange (surrender=safety) collapsed after the UK Supreme Court ruling; the whole country stopped being safe, and my controlling partner told me point-blank that autonomy was not mine to have. As for ‘family’: they exist, but love that won’t cross an ocean, sit in a police station, or stand next to me in court is sentiment, not safety. When it counted—housing, legal process, medical crisis—the chair beside me was always empty.
how did the supreme court ruling make you unsafe? isn't gender reassignment a protected characteristic in the UK? you are from the UK right, i think i'm remembering correctly
Thank you for hearing me, and for seeing me—both when I wrote as more than testament, and now. It reminds me that the words did not fall entirely into silence.
Still, short of institutional reversals that are exceedingly unlikely, there is little that could convince me otherwise. When institutions look away, it does not end the harm—it invites exploitation. None of them needed to kill me outright. They only needed to force the choice between a death with dignity and a life stripped of honour.
I hear you and see you as best as I am able to without actually meeting you.
You are more than very tired, you are exhausted and depleted to a point where there seems to be only one pathway forward for you. I have no platitudes to give you. I only hope that we can share and converse tomorrow.
Well spoken TT. Especially about Blaire White. I know someone who calls themselves transgender who thinks that BW is a reputable and respectable 'trans person'. He doesn't understand the difference, unfortunately like too many out there who have been conned by the transgenderists and their movement.
Check out my own Substack for my own views on this topic.
"It means being denied care because we no longer fit an 'inclusive' model."
Can you elaborate on what care you've been denied and how it relates to the new "inclusivity"?
I feel very strongly the need to say something, but also its futility. I am but a pseudonym on the net; you are one too, albeit a more established one. How do I know what you are suffering? Who am I to speak?
Well, I'm no one. I shouldn't speak. But I feel compelled. So I say the following with hesitation and apology: I hope you'll chose to live.
I hope this for any number of reasons, not least of which is because I find your voice valuable: in complex and difficult cultural waters, you are a valuable lighthouse. I am not saying I hope you'll live just for that: living only for others is somewhere between hard and impossible; but it is worth remembering that you do have an import to people you don't, and will never, know.
Beyond that, I would simply urge you to remember how fast things can change. Who saw the rapid triumph of gay marriage, going from a joke to both settled law (in the US anyway) and widespread acceptance within two decades? And if we are now, as I fear we are, on the cusp of its undoing, who foresaw *that*? (Even its opponents were declaring it hopeless as recently as a few years ago.) And this is true of all sorts of ideas. It may seem, now, that there is no place for you, no hope for dignity, no path forward: but we all see through a glass darkly, and there may be hopes you can't presently imagine. You say your voice is being silenced, your reality erased: but that may change! To say it *can't* get better is to claim certainty where none of us have it. We simply don't know what's next.
And, of course, you are not silenced entirely: you write here, and as I said, your words here are valuable. They will, to be sure, be valuable even if you are gone: but they will be of more value the longer you add to them, participate in the conversation, and back them up with your life force. You know the old saying, speak the truth and shame the devil? You face a lot of devils: but you can still speak the truth to all of them. It's a thing worth doing.
Perhaps you could also try to embrace other aspects of life. I do not mean, in the least, to dismiss the importance of what you are suffering, nor the importance of what it means to you. I simply mean that almost all of us have access to some things that are beautiful or worthwhile even in terrible times: others you could help, beauties you can experience. I am thinking here of the words of my countryman, Thoreau, towards the end of Walden: "However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names… You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace."
A cliche, perhaps, but a well-said one: and I am throwing words at nothing, with nothing but blind hope to guide me.
As for dignity and enforced falsehood... the world is terrible, and is treating you terribly. But I think the value of a human life is internal: if others refuse to recognize it, or us, then it is their sin, not ours. I believe it is possible to maintain your own sense of self and worth despite all the indignities the world can pour upon you. Easy for me to say, I know! But I am thinking again of Thoreau's quiet mind living contentedly: and while I won't myself go so far as to say *contentedly*, I will say, live and have it be worthwhile.
Look, again, you don't know me, and above all I don't know you. And because of that anything I say is inevitably minimizing what you're going through (although I don't mean to, not at all). I don't know what I ought to say. I just hope you'll change your mind. Life feels like a secular miracle to me, a brief surge against entropy and meaninglessness which arose from nothing and should battle as long as it can before it inevitably sinks back to nothing. I don't want to give nothingness an easy or early victory. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
I know this is foolish. Words from a stranger to a stranger on the internet can hardly help or heal enough to counter this. And I am aware that I am ultimately making propaganda: speaking for life against death, trying to sell you on it. That's why so many speak against suicide, right? We're on the other team, as shown by the fact that we're here to say so.
I want to end by coming back to uncertainty. However things look now, the one thing we know is that they'll change, and change again. I know it hurts. But it will change. We know this. We don't know how. To say it can't get better is to claim certainty where none of us have it.
Forgive these foolish and feeble words. I felt I had to try.
On the admittedly minimal chance that anything I said is anything you wish to follow up on, you can reach me privately at YorickPenn at gmail.
I disagree on many of your opinions on transgender identity—although I will say that there’s a big movement reviving “transsexual” right now and you can be one of those voices.
That said, I can sympathize with your suicidal ideation and the fact that you track it to politics/moral injury. The COVID lockdowns and political response (mass hypocrisy) drove me insane. I attempted suicide in 2022 at age 22, and the fact that I simply could not swallow or comprehend the moralizing, agoraphobic, classist rhetoric that harmed so many of my peers and generation was no small part (although not nearly all) of my psychic misery. But the world moved on, and now people pretend they never acted how they did. C’est la vie.
I say, have faith and keep writing about it. Try not to doomscroll trans discourse on the internet, and exhaust ALL of your psychiatric options before MAiD.
What kind of honour? Surely you don't want to be a poster child for transsexuals, do you?
I learned something many years ago. Something that helped when I felt besieged by assholes. It's an important thing to know:
Assholes are deserving of utter contempt. Not the kind where you talk down to them. The kind where what they do is of absolutely no import whatsoever.
I learned that I could even concede truly important matters of principle to assholes insisting on it, because they are so far beneath me that conceding to them is like going along with the demands of a toddler. It makes the toddler happen, and it doesn't touch my soul.
I suggest a third path. A life with dignity. A life where you don't have to enter into debates with fools. Where you can simply go ahead and live your life and ignore the fact that there are people with worms in their brains. Yes, they're as horrifying as any movie zombie. But they don't need to *mean* anything to you.
Thank you for this. Would you consider speaking with @Benjamin A Boyce, in one of his Calmversations? It would be so valuable to hear more from you. (Not that I am able to make this connection). I wish you well.
Thank you for the kindness, and for thinking of me. My capacity for interviews and public conversations is depleted. The live-talk format asks for performance, re-exposure, and simplification I can’t afford. What I have left is going into finishing a written record—clean, unedited, and exact—so the story can stand without being clipped, reframed, or turned into content.
If it helps, the best support is to share the series intact or quote it only in full with attribution. If someone genuinely wants to engage, the arguments and evidence are on the page; that’s the forum I can sustain. In another life I might have had the energy for calm conversations. In this one, I’m keeping to the medium that protects accuracy, boundaries, and what remains of my morally-injured soul.
You make your case clearly except for the MAiD aspect. There are lots of people who went through their 'Ellis Island' in the 1960s or 70s but evidently aren't bothered overmuch by the umbrella faddery. Could well be your despair comes from a different place, and might be there in any event.
Thanks for engaging. The cohort you’re citing came of age under a different paradigm: “transsexual” was a medical diagnosis with a narrow treatment pathway, and many could resolve and recede from public view. My cohort came of age in the transgender era, where that diagnosis and label is now labeled “outdated” (even in dictionaries) and institutions, media, and policy treat our specificity as a problem to be folded into an umbrella. That shift isn’t cosmetic—it removes our language, scrambles our care, and demands our complicity in a story that erases us. My argument for MAiD isn’t about hurt feelings; it’s about moral injury—being required to live in lifelong denial of reality. Different paradigms produce different outcomes.
Sounds an awful lot like the misinformation one gets when when asks ChatGPT or Grok, and the AI sources opinion and faddery from Wackipedia and elsewhere. You just have to let the world continue in its misguided ways, believing Peoria is the capital of Illinois, or whatever. I can’t think of how this would affect one in daily living, apart perhaps from medical history. In which wise, the best solution would be to disclose as little as possible.
That suggestion—to “disclose as little as possible”—is the logic that drove so many soldiers to suicide. They were told to come home, say nothing, and carry the contradiction alone. Moral injury is not erased by silence, it is deepened by it. What you call pragmatism is the demand for collusion in a lie. It is not survival, it is self-betrayal, and it kills just as surely as a bullet.
why are you taking your own life? is it over this? why? you could, being fully transitioned, just move on and live a happy life...
Moral injury is a conscience-based injury associated with potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs)—acts of commission, omission, or betrayal. It was first characterised in soldiers who returned from war physiologically intact but psychologically compromised after being ordered to harm, witnessing harm they could not stop, or being betrayed by leaders. It is not a DSM diagnosis, but it co-occurs with PTSD, depression, suicidality, and spiritual/existential distress. Hallmarks include persistent guilt and shame, self-condemnation, loss of trust, moral disorientation, and alienation from one’s own values. Crucially, the injury is maintained when institutions deny, justify, or silence the violation—what the literature calls institutional betrayal and betrayal trauma.
Applied here, the PMIE is betrayal-based: repeated, institutional demands that I collude in a false narrative about my sexed body and history, coupled with compelled public silence. The question isn’t whether I can “move on” post-transition; it’s whether I can live without daily conscience violation. In moral-injury terms, there is no pathway to repair—no acknowledgment, accountability, or restitution—only ongoing coercion to participate in my own erasure.
MAiD, in this frame, is not despair. It is the final act of moral governance when repair is structurally unavailable: an end to coerced complicity. Soldiers described surviving the battlefield yet being unable to live with what survival required. That is the weight here. I can keep breathing; I cannot keep betraying my conscience to do it.
what happened that drove you to this? don't you have a partner and a family?
Short answer: safety failed—at home, at work, and in the institutions that were supposed to protect me. After years of coercive control and sexual violence, followed by workplace silence and harassment when I asked for basic safeguarding, the moral injury stacked until medically assisted dying stopped feeling abstract and started feeling like relief.
I don’t have a partner. I had an abuser. The exchange (surrender=safety) collapsed after the UK Supreme Court ruling; the whole country stopped being safe, and my controlling partner told me point-blank that autonomy was not mine to have. As for ‘family’: they exist, but love that won’t cross an ocean, sit in a police station, or stand next to me in court is sentiment, not safety. When it counted—housing, legal process, medical crisis—the chair beside me was always empty.
how did the supreme court ruling make you unsafe? isn't gender reassignment a protected characteristic in the UK? you are from the UK right, i think i'm remembering correctly
what did your partner do? what have you gone through?
Hear! Hear!
Thank you for hearing me, and for seeing me—both when I wrote as more than testament, and now. It reminds me that the words did not fall entirely into silence.
Still, short of institutional reversals that are exceedingly unlikely, there is little that could convince me otherwise. When institutions look away, it does not end the harm—it invites exploitation. None of them needed to kill me outright. They only needed to force the choice between a death with dignity and a life stripped of honour.
I hear you and see you as best as I am able to without actually meeting you.
You are more than very tired, you are exhausted and depleted to a point where there seems to be only one pathway forward for you. I have no platitudes to give you. I only hope that we can share and converse tomorrow.