Reflections on Grief…
It all condenses down to grief, a layered symphony of losses echoing from all directions. I grieve for an America I once believed in, for a West that felt like home and still holds my heart. My soul belongs in the desert, yet I am an exile in this damp, gray UK —feeling the weight of each missed sunrise, the familiar pull of a land I may never truly return to.
This grief, though, is so much more than just for the home I knew. It’s grief for a nation that has fallen into the hands of a man who embodies its worst shadows—a felon, a misogynist, a rapist, an arsonist of the planet itself — and still people worship this demagogic false prophet as he stokes the fires that burn what goodness remains. Watching people choose this path, again and again, is like losing America piece by piece, seeing the country I loved hollowed out from within.
The grief that lives in me is not just for what I witness but for the limits of my power to change it. Watching the rise of antisemitism, I felt myself pushed away from the gentile world by a visceral reaction to its silence — a rejection I didn’t choose but couldn’t ignore. And yet, though I found my way to Judaism, drawn by a resonance that mirrors my own suffering, I am now confronted by the cruel irony that I cannot explain why it fits. To reveal that the existential pain I’ve known is as profound as Job’s suffering would be to out myself, to tear open wounds I’ve only begun to heal.
What haunts me is that rather than impacting the world’s hatred, I’ve found myself on a path that leaves me silently enduring this hostility, bound to a people who know exile and resilience but who cannot fully know me. And so, together, we endure — a shared awareness of the world’s harshness, but with a grief uniquely mine to bear, knowing I will always remain partly hidden, a Jew by choice, with roots that cannot be wholly disclosed.
Then there is the grief of a life once wasted, of years spent desperately trying to be the son my father could accept. I tried to twist myself into an image that wasn’t mine, until I had no choice but to let go in early adulthood to save myself as it worsened — severing the only link I once clung to. I carry the weight of it, of words that could never reach, of a life where love was conditional on everything that had to be left behind; the heart doesn’t stop yearning simply because the mind knows it must.
There is grief, too, for the life that might have been mine if I had been born differently, one way or the other — without the struggle of transsexualism, without the daily dissonance that defined my early life. It’s a life I’ll never know, a world where I might have lived without the burdens that made me and which left me scarred.
There’s also the grief for others like me, those who face not just an internal house of mirrors, but an external one as well. The diagnostic codes that once defined our condition — the DSM-III-R and ICD-10 terms that acknowledged our sexed experience — have been watered down and absorbed into a nebulous ‘gender’ narrative, as if what we carry were about makeup or clothes rather than the physical misalignment of our own bodies. This grief is for our erasure, the dissolution of our reality into something unrecognisable, where even the words that described our suffering have been taken from us.
There is grief in knowing that my every choice, every place I’ve felt drawn to, seems always to place me at odds with the worlds I move through. Born American but anchored in Britain, holding a profound love for Russia yet grieving for Ukraine, stepping onto the path of Judaism while carrying the legacy of a gentile. I am the Eagle Scout who never made it to space, nor the presidency, but instead, a woman born transsexual, a Jew in the making, a soul at odds with nearly every facet of a life she thought she would have. I carry all these parts of myself, and each one is a reminder of a world that cannot fully contain me, that cannot reconcile all that I am.
And then there’s the bitter grief that even the spaces meant to heal are closed to me. I cannot walk into a therapist’s office and trust that I will not be another puzzle piece for them to fit into a framework that never held me, never understood me. It’s a £250/hr gamble with bad odds on a system where my soul is at risk of being buried beneath labels and agendas that want me to be either a poster child or a cautionary tale of either bigotry or malpractice. So, instead, I turn inward, writing these reflections and sending them into a void where they can be witnessed without expectation or the burden of response.
But perhaps the heaviest of all is knowing that I’m still called to bear this weight and look beyond it. To gaze past this sorrow, to summon a sense of purpose and of hope, despite it all. To carry the yoke of being asked to see life beyond despair, to act against the night, even while my own heart aches with loss — to reach for light while I walk through shadow.
ממעמקים קראתיך יי
Tired Transsexual is a woman born transsexual who lives in the UK. She was previously on Twitter/X with the handle @tiredtransmed.