I’ve read this and just tripped over my jaw:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stonewall-tried-to-silence-warnings-of-weak-evidence-for-trans-healthcare-n299v00c3
The sheer shamelessness of it. I read The End of the World is flat last year, and to be honest thought he’d overegged it - but not a bit of it.
“Hunt said her only regret was trusting the “experts”, such as Dr Polly Carmichael, the former director of the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids). “I think there was a responsibility on the NHS, schools and social services.“
Er where were schools and the NHS getting their information from, Ruth?
And
”She denied that she had ever supported “no debate”, adding: “I’m absolutely someone who has always been working in the middle ground, trying to build consensus.”
Hunt’s critics may contrast that position with her response in October 2018 to a petition asking Stonewall to acknowledge there was a conflict around transgender rights and sex-based women’s rights. She wrote: “We do not and will not acknowledge this. Doing so would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others. We will always debate issues that enable us to further equality but what we will not do is debate trans people’s right to exist.”
and
In an opinion piece for the Independent in November 2017, she branded people raising concerns about the rise in young lesbians believing that they were born in the wrong body, “as anti-trans campaigners” deploying a “cynical tactic” amid a “public bout of transphobia”. She wrote: “It feels to me that the old homophobic attitudes have simply morphed into new transphobic ones. The same hatred is behind all of it.”
She added: “They claim that the identities of young, butch lesbians are being erased and that instead of being allowed to feel confident in their sexual orientation and as themselves, they are being pushed into believing they are trans men.
“But the hard facts simply aren’t there to back any of this up. Talking to a specialist is not the same as transitioning. Very few young people who access support go on to transition. This is what we would expect: that’s what much successful gender treatment looks like.”
Today Hunt says that, as a lesbian herself, “I’ve always been deeply concerned about the internalised homophobia that is going on for young women that means they think they can’t be a dyke, and they’ve got to be a boy.”
She said: “I had this kind of fantasy that little baby lesbians could go [to a clinic] and say, ‘I want to wear a suit so I want to be a boy’ [and be told], ‘no, you’re a lesbian who wears a suit’.”