There’s a few issues that separate us from transidentitarians (tucutes) that we like to focus on.

*Demedicalizing our experience puts transsexuals at a unique disadvantage.

I get that the medical community hasn’t always been our best friend and I get that traditional gatekeeping methods in the 50’s up to even what I experienced in the early 2000’s do more harm than good and are meant to uphold a patriarchal value system. But we still need some gatekeeping to prevent harm and I believe it should be up to us as the people who use that system to define it. A total demedicalization of transsexualism has a couple problems. For one it would take away insurance support that a lot of us desperately need. It would also push a lot of us away from being able to access therapists and other mental health resources. Demedicalizing and removing gatekeeping also allows individuals such as gender non-conforming, or fetishists, or people being coerced into trans culture to seek out and gain HRT as an experiment over someone whose dead set on needing HRT to function. This can cause a large backlog of resources and health outlets.

*Defining Dysphoria out of our experience allows us to be taken advantage of

I get that the trans umbrella caters to a vast number of different kinds of trans people. But I believe it ultimately does more harm than good because it causes us to fight for the spotlight with each other. I as a transsexual whose primarily focused on sex dysphoria shouldn’t have to be fighting for attention under the same label as say a non-binary person whose focus might be more on social dysphoria. I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m fighting for attention with a non-binary person whose more interested in breaking gender norms than they are medically transitioning. I shouldn’t have to feel like my identity is being coopted by AGP’s and other fetishists who transition with sexual motivations. I shouldn’t have to share anything with the Yaniv’s of this world who pursue selfish gains. The issue here being that in the trans activism of today my voice is not being heard nor included in the decision making because there can only be one “trans activism”. I want trans activist groups to be focused on what I need such as third spaces for transitioning individuals, a push for more medical research, birth certificate changes, and easier access to medical transitioning for those with lower incomes or less family support. I don’t want to be focusing on things like Self ID’s which harm me as a woman, or getting X’s on drivers licenses which in no way impacts my life, or normalizing the asking of pronouns which again, has no impact on my life. I feel left out of the current political movement.

*Our goals in life just aren’t the same

Many feel we need some sort of way to distinguish ourselves from non-transsexuals due to our needs and goals. As transsexuals we’re often focused on topics like stealth, blending in, and the pursuit of surgeries. We struggle in a different way with our body image and we relate to members of our target sex differently. We’re also more focused on sex dysphoria and less on gender dysphoria. We struggle more with our genitals and we focus more on what it means to be passing. Yes these aren’t all exclusive to transsexuals but they’re more central to our experience. And when you get us together in a group with non-binarys or genderqueers or crossdresser’s, or otherkin; we transsexuals, due to our smaller numbers, tend to get pushed out. This loss of safe space for us tends to result in a lack of in real life transition resources for surgeries. And this lack of safe space, both online and offline makes it difficult for individuals post transition to connect with other post transition transsexuals.