Include me out
The 'transgender umbrella' gives no shelter to transsexuals
Tired Transsexual*
When I first encountered the “trans community”, I carried the belief that it was built on acceptance, understanding and compassion. That it was a safe haven for individuals like me—transsexuals, propelled by dysphoria, navigating the deeply complex, intensely personal journey of sex reassignment. Sadly, over time, I’ve witnessed this community increasingly transform into a platform for what can only be described as sociopathic narcissism, exploiting the struggles of transsexuals for its agenda, and displaying an alarming antipathy towards those who refuse to comply with its convoluted narratives.
I want to first clarify what I mean by sociopathic narcissism. Sociopathy and narcissism are both personality disorders characterised by a lack of empathy, a sense of superiority and a disregard for the feelings and rights of others. When I apply these terms to the trans movement, it’s because I see a system that prioritises individual self-expression and validation over collective welfare and truth.
It’s a system that promotes self-identification over biological and psychological realities, invalidating the experiences of transsexuals who suffer from sex dysphoria. It’s a system that conflates the struggles of a minority with the desire for limitless self-definition of the majority, undermining the fight for legal protections and medical assistance that transsexuals desperately need. It’s a system that forces transsexuals into the same category as crossdressers, drag performers and fetishists, further stigmatising and marginalising us. A system that cares more about the societal validation of “non-binary identities” than the welfare of the transsexuals it claims to represent.
We, who should be at the forefront of the trans movement, are instead pushed aside, silenced, or even vilified if we dare to challenge the ideology. We are othered as “true transsexual scum”, “transmedicalists” and other derogatory terms simply for stating that our experiences are rooted in an unchosen, deeply distressing medical condition, not a fluid sense of gender or a rebellious stance against societal norms.
“My username reflects the exhaustion of navigating a world that often misunderstands or misrepresents transsexuals, not a personal failing. The tireless effort to seek clarity amidst ignorance isn’t a me-problem, it’s an us-problem. So, if I’m tiring myself out, it’s only because I’m doing the heavy lifting in conversations that most would rather sidestep. And if that’s exhausting for you to witness, imagine living it.”—tweet, Tired Transsexual, 30 August 2023
We are berated and vilified for seeking and advocating for medical treatment, which for many of us is a matter of survival. We are dismissed when we point out the very real differences between us and non-dysphoric individuals who claim the trans label. We are accused of being exclusionary, of being gatekeepers, when we simply ask for our unique struggles to be acknowledged and respected. We are denied the right to speak to our distinct experiences and needs by those who claim to care about us the most, and this leaves us with a profound sense of despair and hopelessness.
An equally grave consequence of this “trans umbrella” and gender ideology manifests in paediatrics. Misconceptions and ill-informed policies can lead to irreversible decisions made for young, gender non-conforming children who may not have any true discomfort in their sex, yet have been encouraged to consider sex-reassignment therapy under the guise of “affirming their gender”. The severity of this issue and its implications for everyone included in the ever-expanding trans umbrella cannot be overstated.
For readers unfamiliar with this level of nuance, consider the potential repercussions. When mainstream society finally grasps the potential harm being done, the backlash may reverberate beyond paediatric gender clinics and queer theory activist groups, negatively affecting public support for the LGBs & Ts—the lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals—who never asked for any of this.
“Many transsexuals worry that minors may be unable to give informed consent in an era where gender non-conformity and transsexuality have been intentionally conflated with transgender.”
The concern among transsexuals about paediatric transition is multilayered. Those of us who have gone through hormonal and surgical sex reassignment interventions ourselves understand how difficult and irreversible the process is. Many worry that minors may be unable to give informed consent in an era where gender non-conformity and transsexuality have been intentionally conflated with “transgender”, and where medical transition has been glamorised as a mechanism to achieve “gender euphoria” or “trans joy”, rather than a means of reducing distress and trying to reach a baseline of normalcy.
Additionally, many transsexuals argue that natal males and females should be treated differently in diagnostic safeguarding due to observable differences in aetiologies—teenage females dominate the red-flag category of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”— and the greater difficulties of “undoing” the effects of male pubertal maturation when embarking upon medical transition.
While there are those who advocate for an outright ban on paediatric care, this viewpoint is far from universal among transsexuals. Many of us fear that such a ban would give momentum to those who want to ban sex-reassignment interventions altogether, creating a harmful domino effect and an existential threat to our lives.
In essence, the prevailing view among transsexuals is not against paediatric care itself, but against a medical paradigm where the clinical understanding of “gender dysphoria” has become completely detached from the sex-based strife that we experience. In our view, the watering down and genderfication of diagnostic codes (the DSM and the ICD) is a grievous mistake. Those classifications used to recognise transsexualism as a condition involving discomfort over sex characteristics. Now transsexualism is a diagnosis no more, and the reality of discomfort has been obscured by identity politics.
We argue as transsexuals that the psychosocial diagnostic model should be aligned with the emerging neurobiological understanding of dysphoria, with a primary focus on own-body sex perception, not perceived conformity to gender roles.
My own experience resonates much more closely with not just the older diagnostic category of transsexualism, but also with Stephen Gliske’s controversial 2019 theory, which proposed that dysphoria is a sensory perception condition caused not by cerebral sex dimorphism, but by the profound ways our brains map our sense of self, characterised by sex-atypical primal behaviour, own-body sex perception and distress, fear and anxiety. Unfortunately, Dr. Gliske’s paper was retracted by eNeuro in 2020, after a sustained activist campaign was launched against the journal.
Today, transsexuals are such a marginalised sexual minority that our very existence doesn’t warrant a mention in the American Psychological Association’s latest guidelines on sexual minorities, despite transgender being defined as an apparently limitless umbrella term. In defining transgender this way, they acknowledge it is not synonymous with the word transsexual, yet they simultaneously choose to dismiss this meaningful distinction by omitting a term that once gave clarity, recognition and respect to our distinct medical condition and biological reality.
How can the medical community provide us the care we need when we’re vanishing from the very documents guiding that care? How can transsexuals have honest, meaningful discussions about our healthcare, our rights, our lives when our very identity is stripped from us without any consultation?
“The inclusive transgender umbrella has, paradoxically, left transsexuals out in the rain.”
The trans movement, in its quest for inclusivity, has become a breeding ground for self-centred entitlement. It has completely lost sight of its initial purpose—to advocate for the rights and well-being of transsexuals—and has instead morphed into a free-for-all where any and all boundaries are viewed as oppressive, and where the feelings and experiences of actual transsexuals are disregarded by gender ideology (i.e., the notion that “gender identity” is a universal trait, rather than exclusive to people with transsexualism). The inclusive transgender umbrella has, paradoxically, left transsexuals out in the rain.
There is an urgent need to reclaim our narrative, to bring the focus back to the realities of being transsexual. As a society, we must resist the sociopathic narcissism that has overtaken the trans movement and re-establish a distinct space for true understanding, empathy and advocacy for transsexual rights and recognition. This struggle is not for an abstract, ever-broadening notion of identity. It is a fight for our right to exist, to receive the medical care we need, and to live our lives without being swallowed up in an all-encompassing trans umbrella that erases our identity and deprives us of the very language we need to articulate our experience. It is a fight for acceptance, not as an identity, but as human beings with unique experiences, challenges and needs rooted in material reality. We are transsexuals and we deserve to be seen, heard and respected as such.
Every application of the term transgender to us is an attempt to mask what we have done and as such co-opts our lives, denies our experiences and violates our very souls. We have had enough.
* Tired Transsexual is the pen name of an Anglo-American male-to-female transsexual who lives in the U.K. Her Twitter account is @tiredtransmed
Superb, and I’m grateful to the Gliske article. I have a set of notes on transsexualism (gender being a folkloric fiction) I’ve maintained for years, I wanted to share a tidbit, From a 50-point “transifesto”
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MATERIAL REALITY OF TRANSSEXUALISM
3. Human neural systems perform predictive coding (consciousness) to create and maintain models of reality. Perceptual systems are primed with the models. Prediction errors (entropy, surprise, free-energy) between actual sensations and the model trigger model adjustment or behaviors to change the environment to maintain homeostasis (Friston free energy). Models maintained include the body itself, which are prepared through evolution (arms, feet), embryogenesis (female genitals and wiring, male genitals) or through training (perceiving height, weight, hair patterns, age-related changes).
4. Changes in the physical body can trigger major problems in the predictive coding such as “phantom limb syndrome”, where staggering pain unrelieved by opiates is generated by the brain itself in response to the model / perception error (I’m missing an arm, but my brain thinks it’s still there). Coding / perception errors may cause clinical depression as well as great pain; at points of great change in the body (puberty, senescence) a key compensatory mechanism may simply be suicide.
5. At puberty, during hormonally accelerated nervous system maturation (synaptic pruning) mediated by C4a and other genes, and in-utero organized neuronal systems activated by testosterone, the process sometimes does not go smoothly. Under-pruning can produce a variety of issues including Autism, Social Isolation Behaviors, Facial Agnosia, an over-pruning can produce schizophrenia and psychoses. Sometimes certain evolutionary or gestation-developed cognitive models emerge which are not in sync with the physical body, and due to intrinsic factors (essential neural pathways) the model cannot be re-aligned to reality.
6. The perceptual differences between the physical body and predictive coding which cannot be reconciled can create distressing sensations, anxiety, and feelings of imminent death (inability to maintain homeostasis, body integrity). This is the underlying mechanism for many dysmorphia disorders, from cranio-facial (compulsive plastic surgery), full body size and weight perception (muscles too small, overweight, anorexia), feelings that a hand, leg, or even half a body is wrong (body integrity), feelings that a limb belongs to someone and possibly of a different sex, anxiety about senses (sight, hearing) - along with feelings that removal of body parts “makes me feel whole”. Importantly, this is also about sex - higher cortical models of the body’s primary and secondary sexual characteristics which mismatch the perceived sex in certain individuals.
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As I’ve read on dysmorphic dysphorias, almost 20 years ago I watched a group of transsexuals harshly cutoff a woman in their community who dared to state the observation that people with body integrity dysphoria “... speak about their problem in exactly the same language...” as transsexuals did, without any common experiences, without prompting. I’ve been waiting for confirmation by others of my hypothesis.
I spoke to Lynn Conway around 19 years ago, and that was the first time I heard the idea of pre-pubertal sex characteristic manipulation through puberty blockers. Unfortunately, in retrospect, Conway clearly never understood the physiology of puberty, so while being enthusiastic about it she didn’t seem to grasp that it has the effect of not only sterilizing a child but also removing sexual response. She maintains silence on the subject while waxing rhapsodic on children made eunuchs under the form of Hijra.
I wish that more gays spoke out with transsexuals too, because I predict exactly the same backlash as you state.
Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals are real and based in material reality. All “gendered” individuals are based in fantasy/fetish worlds which, as you eloquently stated, are a sociopathic narcissism, to which i would add “malignant”.