YANBU, OP. I’ll lay my cards out: have never had the remotest issue with trans rights from the early 80s, when I became aware of them through reading about Tula in my sister’s Cosmo magazines through to when I went to Leelah Alcorn’s vigil in London & saw the very real distress on the faces of the trans folk there. The high levels of depression, suicide attempts etc are very real. But things have shifted very dramatically recently and the furore over self-id and the screaming down of anyone who tries to say ‘hold on, we need to DISCUSS this’ is scary.
Was reading an interesting interview recently with Tamsin Sutherland (themselves trans and who I haven’t heard of before), who said this:
“The battle lines, politically-speaking, appear to be the sanity of those that understand we fall outside of the norm, and merely seek societal empathy for the accident of our birth, versus those that seem keen to use the power of their ability to CHOOSE to ‘identify’ as transgender as a societal cosh with which they can beat society into a different shape.”
and:
“In my opinion, the highly laudable attempts of the old school LGB community to gain parity in society have been thoroughly co-opted now by those for whom the postmodernist screed is all important. The ‘T’ of Transsexual quickly gave way to standing for ‘transgender’ and that’s when the trouble started. They hijacked the transsexual narrative, overtly co-opted our pain to book society on a guilt trip, and then thoroughly infiltrated the entire community with ‘queer theory’, again; straight out of the postmodernists’ handbook......The next generation down are being transed at ever increasing rates and it IS actually deeply homophobic. Right down to the age of four now, any sign of gender nonconformity is the green light to a lifetime of medical intervention.
At who’s (sic) cost?”
Corbyn et al are rushing into this to appear ‘ahead of the law’ without stopping to consider the ever present problem of the ‘law of unintended consequences,’ just as they did when they pushed through their Gambling Act and told those who raised concerns that they were being ‘elitist.’ That was an incredibly regressive act on their part, with the consequence of gambling addiction increasing (at what cost to children of addicts ffs?). The consequence of throwing aside the sensible GRC approach for self-id alongside the rush to chemically cosh and physically alter children with no option of reversal could be utterly catastrophic. It is NOT ‘transphobic’ to be concerned about this! Are we rushing to erase lesbian and gay people as well? That seems to be on the agenda here. And yes, many, many trans people like your friend will be shoved under the bus.
The drive to drug children at ever increasing rates benefits Big Pharma more than anyone else. I thought Corbyn et al were anti-corporatist? Or does the opportunity to virtue-signal override everything else? Rupert Everett said he was desperate to be female as a child but is grateful the world then wasn’t as now because he’d have been shoved on drugs, but after the age of 15 he never wanted to be female any more. He was slated for it.