Hey Kelcat9494. Thanks for posting so reasonably and politely.
Firstly, while some do have animosity for trans people, absolutely, most here don't. The animosity is for the erosion of women's rights, and the Trans Rights Activists who are threatening rape and murder to women who disagree with them.
In my view, there are three areas of concern. One is what is being done to children and young people. The second is around women's safety, and women's sport. And the third is around the harm to women's rights, if we can't be identified as a sex class at all. I'm going to focus on the first.
I think to start: lots of people don't believe that a settled gender identity is a real thing at all. They believe that there is biological sex, and then personality. Biological sex is why women are oppressed all over the world. We are physically less strong, and smaller, and we perform absolutely all of the reproductive labour. To put it in simplest terms: we are the means of production of human beings, and in the same way that whoever controls the means of production of things has power, controlling women's reproductive potential gives power, and men have done so across almost all cultures and all of history, accordingly, using their greater strength and their lack of vulnerability in pregnancy and when child-rearing to do this. Misogyny is therefore baked in, to the point it's largely invisible. Now, the concept that everyone has a gender identity, unrelated to sex, is therefore controversial. Some claim it's proven by brain scans. This is utter nonsense. There's some indicative signs from scans, absolutely, but they can be interpreted in many ways and as proving many points. If brain scans were really determinative, as some assert so strongly, they'd be using them in Gender Identity Clinics to decide who needed to transition. It would be swift, reliable and a lot cheaper than the existing care model They don't do it because they can't. It's not a thing.
Most of us were where you are, when we first heard of this. Myself, I went to research the claims made on here to prove them wrong. I went to look up the data on suicides to prove that they were indeed horrific. Murders, same. I also went to prove transwomen are no threat to women at all, and in no way share male criminality patterns. The problem is, my beliefs were wrong, and the arguments here right.
The suicide stat was taken from a questionnaire, asking for young people with struggles with their mental health to complete it online, anonymously other than their email details, in exchange for being entered into a prize draw. There were no checks at all on who the respondents were, nor even if any had replied more than once. For a survey to be regarded as evidentially useful, it's important to know who the group surveyed are and how representative. That wasn't so. Now, from the thousands of responses, 27, I think it was, said that they were trans, and 12 that they had considered suicide in the previous year. No information is available on whether they had other mental health difficulties, such as autism and anorexia, which are common in trans youth and which also have dangerously high levels of suicidal ideation. Simply a very small sample, self-selected. That's where that stat comes from. It's also worth nothing that the Tavistock's Gender Identity Clinic, who now see in excess of 2700 of the most vulnerable young people in the country in regards to gender identity, say in a recent Freedom of Information request that no young person under their care has committed suicide in the past two years (the time frame being questioned) and that one per year has attempted it. This is not high at all for a group of young people under the care of CAHMS. GIDS have further stated that they deplore the framing of trans youth as especially prone to suicide, because all the evidence is that telling a group they are especially vulnerable to suicidal ideation makes them so. It is a risk factor in itself - it harms their resilience. Finally, half the cohort being treated are autistic, and 75% of autistic young people have co-morbid mental health problems, largely as a result, I suspect, of the way they are treated by the world.
This might be a good moment to explain that a lot of parents here have teenagers with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria - no history of it in earlier childhood, and often some traumatic events. It might also be a good moment to explain that 3/4 of young transitioners now are girls, and that there are a growing number of detransitioners who have not found transition helps their dysphoria at all. It's not hate to question a narrative that sets a young person on a pathway to harm. Without intervention, and with watchful waiting, over 80% of young people questioning their gender identity reconcile to it, and decide that they are simply gay. With medication - a medication that mimics menopause - to delay puberty, 100% go on to take cross sex hormones. Simply put, in most cases puberty is a cure for gender dysphoria. And in addition, children put on puberty blockers, by GIDS' own accounting, are MORE likely to suffer from suicidal ideation than those who are not. It also has unknown long term consequences, and known problems in the short term including hot flushes, mood swings, and the failure to develop sexually, not just in physical terms, but also in emotional terms - in crush terms. It has an impact on the architecture of the teenage mind, and therefore unknown long term implications for the adult personality. There are no long term studies at all. It is experimenting on children.
There's also a huge concern around the fact that half of these children and young people are autistic. Autism means, quite often, a real difficulty coping with changes, a real difficulty managing the actual process of transitioning between changes, a difficulty parsing and understanding unspoken social rules and expectations, and an increased sensitivity to pain, as well as an increased distaste for dirt and mess. An unease with the physical body, for sensory reasons, is also common, as is a sense of social dislocation - of not being like everyone else. Now, that being the case, consider adolescence: a time when your body starts changing enormously, and as a prolonged process. For girls, breasts grow and periods begin, both of which are painful, and periods are messy and require organised management of that mess. It's also an intense stage in terms of socialisation and social expectations: remember how girls form really strong bonds, and also in groups and out groups? Where your tribe, and fitting in, and knowing the right thing to say or do in a hive mind way is so valued - where even non-conformity is conformist? Imagine that stage for an autistic girl. Imagine trying to fit in but not understanding the mindset, and feeling wholly different. Autistic girls are also more likely to be gay, and more likely to be gender non-conforming, than those who aren't autistic. And autism also means you like solid, concrete answers... and imagine you were told that some people never feel right in their bodies, and are socially at sea because they have to perform a femininity they don't feel. That it's not being odd, or weird, just male. That fancying girls doesn't make you gay, just trapped in the wrong body. And it's also a way of escaping the absolute barrage of unwanted male sexual attention at this age, that none of us are really equipped to deal with but autistic girls, especially, struggle to manage because it's inevitably harder to sidestep and deflect, with less adept social skills.
I know a lot of adult autistic women, because I'm a big believer in Nothing For Us, Without Us, so when I had a child diagnosed, I sought them out. Most say that they would have thought they were trans as teenagers, and are very relieved they aren't teenagers now. Because here's the other thing you aren't told: transition is not about sunny uplands. It's not about everything falling into place and being happy forever, in many, many cases. Efforts to explore this and do long term studies have been very effectively shut down but if you talk to detransitioners - which I have done - you hear some heartbreaking stories. Stories of lesbians whose school counsellers were gung ho on the way transition could solve all their problems. In actuality, they made them worse. Testosterone has huge health implications, when taken in large doses by women. The East German athletes have suffered appalling health difficulties. A detransitioner told me that after 5 years on testosterone, almost all trans men need a hysterectomy because the damage is so great. She's a campaigner against transition now because she is clear that it's not a cure for dysphoria - because dysphoria is about someone's mind, and not their body. She's a fiercely intelligent, kind woman who actually gently corrected me when I thought that transition was akin to my own reconstruction after breast cancer - cosmetic surgery to make me feel better in my own body - because she pointed out that helping someone feel okay in their own body by restoring it to what it was before being mutilated beyond their control is very different to mutilating a perfectly healthy body to attempt to cure a dysphoria in the mind. She said that the narrative for so many trans youth is that surgery will fix that profound sense of being wrong, so being desperate for that 'cure' they are also aggressively opposed to hearing anyone try to tell them that it isn't one. So they are being sold a dream that isn't likely to work. She is a campaigner against this because she says in her view, what evidence there is shows there's no improvement at all in mental health, or dysphoria... and that after five years or so, health outcomes are in fact worse.
It's not hate to recognise that people who are deeply unhappy need support, and understanding, and skilled, evidence based and well researched healthcare to ensure their greater happiness. Yet that is now being framed as hateful bigotry.
One final thing. With trans, safeguarding is abandoned. I've seen teachers on social media earnestly saying that they have a trans boy who needs adult trans confidantes and can some get in touch. They are literally advertising a vulnerable young person online, asking for strangers to contact so they can enter into a private relationship, based on enormous trust from the youth side, with no oversight from anyone else. The safeguarding implications of that are completely horrific - the assumption that being trans (or even just claiming to be trans - it's the internet!) is a 100% guarantee that the person can't possibly be predatory is disturbing. Yet it's also very common. And when anyone raises that as an issue, they are deemed transphobic. Safeguarding 101 is transphobic. That's really alarming. No group should be seen as beyond question in this way, when any kids, but especially extremely vulnerable kids, are concerned.
I am more than happy to provide evidence for any of the above, if you'd like it. I have videos of detransitioners if you're interested in viewing them. I strongly believe in listening to lived experience, as well as facts and studies. Sadly, the more research I've done, the more I think this is a huge scandal in real time. Newsnight did an appalling brief piece on GIDS, discussing some very alarming allegations against their practice - have you seen it?