Seeing Clearly: Transsexual Reality in a Transgender World

John Nada (Roddy Piper), a transient without meaning in his life, discovers a pair of sunglasses capable of showing the world the way it truly is. They Live (1988).

There’s a harsh truth for transsexuals to acknowledge: our experience has been co-opted, repackaged, and sold back to us by a movement that seeks to annihilate us. Let's clear the fog and lay it bare.

Dispelling Illusions

When you denounce the transgender movement as a transsexual, you've discarded not one pair of lenses through which you see the world, but two. Let me explain this metaphor. We were first given glasses at birth, with lenses tinted by our physical biology. For most people, these glasses fit comfortably. However, for transsexuals, they only refract and distort our reality, causing dissonance and distress. Transsexuals don't 'choose' to be transsexual or 'identify' as such, any more than someone 'chooses' to be diabetic or 'identifies' as asthmatic. Our experience is rooted in a profound disconnect with our physical bodies—a medical condition known as transsexualism. It's about own-body sex perception and sex characteristics, not social issues of gender.

The Second Pair of Glasses: A Seductive Narrative

To mitigate the aforementioned dissonance, transsexuals today are offered a different pair of glasses—the narrative of the transgender movement. On the surface, it's a seductive tale of liberation in a world of 'cisgenderism.' But make no mistake, this perspective is no less an ideological constraint; it is another distortion, a set of beliefs and assumptions that warp our perception of reality.

So, what do these new glasses show us? They frame our transition not as a private medical issue to alleviate discordance with our biological sex, but about 'affirming' a gender identity, sociopolitical revolution, public spectacle, and a vehicle for reshaping the structure of society. Transsexuals — MtFs, in particular — instantly become figureheads for the broader movement. We're told we're 'brave', 'revolutionary', 'trendsetting'. But does this really apply when our transition was compelled by a primal need to alleviate distress? The reality is, transsexuals are not seeking to 'disrupt the gender binary', but are simply trying to navigate our way through a private, deeply personal medical phenomenon.

The Cognitive Clarity: A Painful Reality

Grasping this uncomfortable truth demands an awareness of the omnipresent power of ideology. Taking off both sets of these glasses is a painful process. It means acknowledging that our medical condition has been distorted and watered down in subsequent iterations of the DSM and ICD, and politicised with an ideological narrative. It means confronting the fact that our struggles have been co-opted and exploited to advance a dark cause that does not serve us, and to push for policies like self-ID which no transsexual has ever needed. This is not an easy admission. It’s a sharp, disquieting jolt, and a tough pill to swallow.

To be transsexual is not to don a costume or perform a role, but to wrestle with a medical condition that screams for resolution. To see the world—and ourselves—as we truly are, we must take off both sets of glasses, peeling away the layers of cozy ideologies to reconnect with objective truth. This cognitive clarity is painful, but it is essential to understanding our grim reality as transsexuals in this dystopian era of transgender.

The Journey Ahead

Such is the reality of transsexualism: an unrelenting drive to our truth, navigated through a sea of clashing ideologies that seek to destroy us. To challenge the co-opting of our experience by the transgender movement is to break free from the constraints of an ideology that does not serve us. It is to reclaim our narrative and our reality from an umbrella term that erases us. Are you ready to take off the glasses?

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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