I just can't even begin to understand that woman. She must know what is going on. She must know that what she is saying is a lie.
We’ve been here before. Just a few years ago, we were fighting to remove the infamous Section 28 – which banned “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities – from our statute books.
Yes, I grew up as a young lesbian through all that. Not only was my school not a welcoming place to be a young lesbian, it wasn't allowed to be. It was forbidden to present homosexuality as 'normal'. With "trans*" it has within a very short space of time being promoted across schools and teachers are afraid to question anything, even where they think it is promoting sexist stereotypes and pushing children towards thinking they are in the wrong body.
Having lived through a lot of the fights for LGB rights, I know how different this is - how within such a short space of time (since the 'T' got expanded from 'transsexual' to 'any predator who says he is') this has suddenly become an all-powerful lobby, with dissenting voices stamped out. Because it is no longer about transsexuals but is now a movement for powerful heterosexual men to assert their rights over women.
One particularly strange tactic that anti-trans campaigners use is presenting any move forward for trans rights as being inevitably at the cost of lesbian rights.
Because it is. And she is hearing this repeatedly from lesbians but is choosing to stick her fingers in her ears and ignore it.
They claim that the identities of young, butch lesbians are being erased, and that instead of being allowed to feel confident in their sexual orientation and as themselves, they are being pushed into believing they are trans men. But the hard facts simply aren’t there to back any of this up.
So why wasn't she able to answer any of the questions that Janice Turner put to her? If there is a defendable position on this, I'm willing to listen. I'm someone who started out in the 'pro-trans' camp (as I think did many lesbians) but was won over by reasoned argument and concerns about what I was seeing happening in real life (which was changing massively from my long experience of transsexual individuals within our community). The transactivists just can't debate the issues and I can only conclude it is because they know their arguments don't stack up.
Lesbian identities have often been hidden in our movement. That void is nothing new, and is something I am personally very serious about tackling.
Hmmm. Well, I'm seeing lots of stuff on trans rights from Stonewall, maybe she could run through all the things they are achieving for lesbians (preferably the female ones).
Maybe the transphobic sections of the press are simply, cynically, using the oldest tactic in the playbook here – to try to divide and rule. But I don’t think it’s going to work this time.
It's completely worked - The LGBT 'community' has been ripped apart - but it's not 'transphobes' who have achieved this.
Sure, there has also been a fair amount of bile and vitriol, and abuse across social media directed at trans people and their allies.
Seriously, how can she write this crap? I understand that some 'pro trans' people don't know what is going on. As someone who wasn't really engaged in online trans stuff or transactivism specifically (just as part of 'LGBT rights') I wasn't aware of all this abuse - but she is in the thick of this, she is on twitter - She knows who is abusing, threatening and assaulting who.
I could go on but what's the point? I presume Stonewall have seen that some papers are printing articles questioning the ideology so are trying to push back. I can't believe this is a organisation that used to be for LGB people and which I used to support....
OK.