Dear Susie Green,
Like your child Jackie, I also have attempted suicide multiple times, the first time at age 15, and have many scars from self-harm. Most of the times, when I hurt my body, it was in response to misogynist behaviour perpetrated by boys and men. Suicidal and parasuicidal behaviour are common amongst teen girls, with 22% of fourteen-year-old girls self-harming in the UK and LGB children, like I was, being twice as likely as straight children to attempt suicide. Trans teens are not the only children who face such harmful urges and overstating the risks to trans teens is a dishonest tactic to persuade people to prioritise trans teens over all others.
I owe my GCSEs and my life to being able to attend a single-sex secondary school. I was sexually assaulted by two bepenised children in a mixed primary school changing room in Year 4, who cornered me and groped my vulva because they wanted to know what pubic hair felt like. I use the term "bepenised" because their gender identity was and still is irrelevant to me, as was mine to them. I insisted upon a girl-only secondary school to escape from that hell. Being in a girl-only school meant that I was no longer in fear of beatings and sexual assaults from bepenised children, who, by virtue of their biology, were bigger than me, stronger than me, and had a weapon built-in to their bodies to rape me with. Had I been told that I had to share the toilets and changing rooms with a bepenised child, I know that my first suicide attempt would have come a lot earlier than 15. I would have been in constant fear that the bepenised child would weaponise their body against me. These fears are not hypothetical: the cases of Karen White and TracyXXs's daughter demonstrate that such abuse can and does happen.
I attended the Brownies and the Guides. Our camps were jointly-held with a local Scout troop and I feared the Scouts even though they were at the other end of a large field from me. The single-sex nature of Guides at that time meant that, even though some of my fellow Guides were bullies, I could cope because they were physically matched to me and they didn't have penises to rape me with and leave me pregnant. There was no inherent, sexed power imbalance between me and the other Guides, because we were all bevulvaed females. When I aged out of Guides, I was expected to go on to Rangers. I refused, because our Rangers used a RaVen model of joint activities with Venture Scouts and I was afraid of the bepenised Ventures. I'll repeat that: I was so scared of the bepenised Ventures that I left Guiding sooner than do Ranger activities with them.
I consider it no coincidence that my first suicide attempt was within weeks of leaving Guides. Having to face a choice of close proximity to bepenised people or stopping the adventurous activities I enjoyed, brought the trauma of my sexual assault up to the surface from where it had lain buried as it wasn't relevant in a single-sex school nor in single-sex Guides.
Had my Brownies allowed bepenised members, I would have left. Had my Guides allowed bepenised members, I would have left. I would have been denied the preparedness and practical skills that I learned at Guides.
Why does a girl, traumatised by a sexual assault that she doesn't even dare to disclose to her parents until her twenties, matter less than a bepenised trans child?