Worrying if there is a man in the next toilet or feeling uncomfortable with a trans woman has literally never been on my radar. If I'm making a decision about voting for the politician who can bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, it's Starmer every time. I wish JKR would just pipe down.
Did you read her article? "Pipe Down" is the most utterly patronising phrase and only ever directed at women. You are shameful and disgraceful for using that phrase about a woman just expressing her opinion. Who are you to tell her - tell anyone - expressing an opinion to shut up? I disagree with what you have written but I wouldn't tell you to 'pipe down'.
The article was partly about a book she has contributed to is called The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, which she says " the book of essays to which I contributed, and which came out last month. “Wheesht” is a Scots injunction to be quiet: “haud your wheesht” means “hush!”"
This is a quote from her article:
"Two hours before I watched Starmer fail, yet again, to get off the fence he’s so reluctant to stop straddling, I met the woman who wrote what I think all contributors would agree is the most important chapter in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht. It’s called A Hashtag is Born. The writer coined the phrase “women won’t wheesht”, which has now been taken up as a feminist battle cry in Scotland and beyond.
She wrote anonymously about being smeared as a bigot and a transphobe for wanting female-only intimate care for her beautiful learning-disabled daughter (I know her daughter’s beautiful, because I met her, too). In part, this mother wrote: “The material reality of a man is not changed by how he perceives himself, and telling vulnerable women and girls to ignore their own discomfort to accommodate a man’s perception of himself, is gaslighting.”
I cannot vote for any politician who takes issue with that mother’s words.
If you choose to prevaricate and patronise rather than address her concerns, if you continue to insist that the most vulnerable must embrace your luxury beliefs, no matter the cost to themselves, I don’t trust your judgment and I have a poor opinion of your character."
The point here is not about whether you have an issue with transgender men in loos, it is about the fact that young women and girls are having rights erroded.
Would you be happy for a little girl going camping on a first Brownie excursion to HAVE to share a tent with a boy with a penis who has decided he is identifying as a girl?
If you were in prison, would you want to share a cell with a male rapist with a penis who is in your female prison because he has decided he is identifying as a girl?
Would you want your daughter, starting menstruation, to have to be dealing with that and the bullying and invasion of privacy that goes with having mixed sex bathrooms, changing rooms and showers at school?
If you are dying of cancer, vulnerable, dependent on others to clean you, wash you, take care of your urine and bowel movements - would you want that on a mixed sex ward? Would you want a choice about whether your genitals are cleaned by a woman?
THIS is why it matters.