I have read and read until my head is swimming with information for months now. I have watched with shock and horror the sudden pervasive influence and seeming power of the trans movement and I keep coming back to the same question.
How?
How can such a small percentage of the population (0.3-1% depending on the statistics you read) have such a powerful and far reaching influence on political parties, universities and colleges, schools, woman's shelters, prisons, girlguides, brownies and rainbows, the NSPCC, newspapers, sports, etc.
How can such a small % of the population suddenly make free speech and seemingly the way we THINK "hate speach" if we refuse to lie down and accept everything they are demanding of us? How can questioning the demand that we have to accept people of one natal sex (without having undergone surgery or hormonal treatment) into spaces reserved for the opposite sex be a hate crime? How can questioning the rights of safety of one sex over another be hateful?
I have always believed that you should treat everyone with kindness and respect and judge them on who they are as an individual and how they treat me and other people, not on whether they are female, male, by skin colour, whatever their religious beliefs (or none), whatever their sexual orientation or gender identity and expected the same courtesy back. That everyone deserves to live their life without fear, violence, discrimination or hate. I have never tried to impinge on anyone's rights or private spaces and have expected the same consideration back.
But now I am being told that I have been wrong all along. That my opinions and concerns are wrong and infact I am evil for ever voicing them or questioning the sudden and sweeping changes happing. That a tiny % of the population's wants and needs are much more important than mine and other people's because they say so.
And I keep coming back to the same question.
How?