Sarah Phillimore and Robin Moira White interviewed by Andrew Doyle

It was the most grown up discussion on TV so far. Both sides given equal time and respect. Sarah got the essential points across magnificently. How she remained so calm impressed me greatly. The presenter appeared impartial too. More of this please to win heart and minds 🤪

I watched this yesterday.

RMW's responses to SVP's points about women and girls' awareness of the dangers that men can pose to them, show no understanding, concept or experience of what it is like to be a woman, and no ability to imagine it either.

When Robin is next on discussing Robin's 2 rape crisis centres, could Robin say whether it is acceptable that there are now no rape support groups in the entire county of Sussex that are for female only participants?

It's a valid position to expect the self invested / those with particular experiences to share their views and have them listened to. Where this has gone so terribly wrong is that these opinions have been catapulted to the top and been allowed to dominate. While professional knowledge & equally valid experiences of others has been downgraded and labelled as bigotry & hate speech.
This has been a catastrophe for vulnerable children and is one of the most unforgivable aspects of all this.

Wasn't there a trans poster on a thread about Girl Guiding, who when asked the very simple question "should 14 year old females be sharing tents with 14 year old males?" responded with a 2000 word rambling essay. Their ideology means they can't say No, but they know this goes against the instinct and common sense of every parent out there. Hence the obfuscation and inability to answer straightforward safeguarding questions.

I have no idea if there are "genuine" trans kids out there

I don't believe there are. I don't think any child is 'genuinely trans'.

How would we define what a 'trans child' is? No child is literally 'born in the wrong body'.

A genuinely transsexual child would have to be a child who suffers from gender dysphoria so severe that even after years of intensive psychotherapy the only possible treatment is preventing puberty, giving them opposite sex hormones and reconfiguring their genitals as soon as they are deemed to be old enough for such an operation.

I don't think any such children exist. How much psychotherapy have children referred to GIDS received to try to help them to accept their bodies as they are?

This 'wrong/right puberty' nonsense winds me up almost as much as calling surgically created holes vaginas.

What is puberty? At its core, surely puberty is the process by which a child's infertile and non-sexual body turns into an adult body, usually becoming fertile (barring any medical issues that may or may not be immediately apparent) and gradually developing a sexuality and sexual function.

Children who've had puberty blockers and then advance to cross-sex hormones are not going through anything like puberty as it is experienced by the opposite sex. What this path actually does is prevent a child ever becoming fertile or developing normal sexual function. How could that ever be 'right'? It's abuse.

And for all Robin’s complaints about how woeful life was half a century ago, Robin is proof that you can get through all that, go to university, study law, have a sex life, have a family, become a successful barrister, and appear on TV.

Robin, you could be empowering children to realise that even though life sucks, it can get better. Why not do that?

Nope. Everyone has a rotten time, it's not reserved for the special peeps.

I can see that there will be bad apples who will use any loopholes available to them to gain access to that which they wouldn't normally be able to. Self ID creates loopholes. Glaringly obvious loopholes. In Scotland's case, they chose not to close those loopholes.

These bad apples will, if Self ID comes in, be trans people.

Robin - these bad apples WILL BE TRANS PEOPLE. Mostly tw.

When the general public starts to "deal" with them, and believe me, they WILL deal with them, they'll deal with all trans people, not just the bad apples. All trans people. There won't be any distinction because people like you are saying, in public, that there isn't any distinction. You're all trans. Whooopee.

If you think it'll just be the bad apples that attract attention, dream on.

It strikes me that you're somehow not connecting the dots and seeing that. How can I see that, yet you can't? Tolerance is wearing pretty thin, especially with the risks to children from the bad apples becoming clearer and clearer as more and more is known by the general public.

I'm quite appalled at the blindness of seemingly intelligent and thoughtful people.

Just for the removal of any doubt, I'm not keen, or happy or even ambivalent about the general public "dealing" with self ID'd bad apples and involving innocents at the same time.

I'm fearful for the innocents. All the innocents.

Whittle.

There is nothing that could convince me that putting children on puberty blockers for reasons relating to so called 'gender identity' is an appropriate treatment.

My view is that people who think there is such thing as a 'wrong puberty', which can and should be treated with puberty blockers are deluded and a danger to children.

Re puberty blockers:

There is limited evidence that medical transition leads to positive outcomes.

There is little evidence that medical transition decreases suicidality.

Puberty blockers are more than a ‘pause button’: roughly 98% of children who take them go on to take cross-sex hormones.

Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones negatively impact bone health in a significant number of cases.

Source: statsforgender.org/puberty-blockers/

I also find it extremely distasteful when the response to women saying that they need certain rights and protections is basically this weird gloating, saying well too bad, you don't have those rights and we can do whatever we like. In which case the whole idea of legal sex as distinct from actual sex is a bad one and we need to throw out the whole GRA, don't we?

Which is actually what I probably would have thought back in 2004 if I had been a) aware of it at all and b) older than my early teens at the time. Anyone who was a politically aware adult in 2004, do you remember the GRA being passed? Was there any public debate? I know concerns were raised by some politicians when it was being introduced but had the impression that they were hand waved away because the number of people getting a GRC would be so tiny. But was this a topic of conversation in the media or in feminist groups or online?

Why is RMW, along with all other TRAs, so determined that children who think that they are trans should be denied the advantages that RMW has had? Why are they determined to deny these children the opportunity to explore their sexuality, to eventually have a sex life, to have children of their own, to have whole and healthy bodies. Why are they so determined that male children should not get the social advantages that male socialisation gave them? Why are they so determined to ensure that children who believe they are trans should be unable to get cross-sex surgery as adults? Why are they so determined to ensure that these children's brains do not have the opportunity to fully mature? Why are they so determined that these children be subjected to poorly-researched medical procedures? Would they accept that for themselves? Do the children they claim to be fighting for deserve worse medical care than everybody else?

It just appeared out of nowhere. A friend immediately left his wife and two young sons and started dating men wearing women's clothing. Maybe he already was doing this in secret. His father was a bullying vicar. His poor wife was just a cover for his homosexuality.

I was a first time mum in 2004. GRA from memory was to make life easier for a very very small number of troubled people. The time where pride was being celebrated, live and let live etc etc. I do remember my late fil who was a Labour die hard ranting and raving a lot and shouting at 'Mrs Blair and Mrs Brown' during the Labour years. We would consider him an old dinosaur who needed to get with the times. But he knew what he was talking about. We were too busy bring kind and accommodating.

They say it's out of concern for children, but in reality it's because transsexual children are essential to TRAs in the interests of pushing the narrative that transsexualism isn't a sexual fetish.

This is how one American transactivist, Autumn Sandeen, put it some years ago, in a video which was subsequently deleted once it became obvious they were saying the quiet bits out loud.

“I’ve always said there are two groups that are going to make change in transgender legislation and the “gender identity and expression” related language in legislation. It’s going to be trans youth because … they demystify it and take the sex right out of the trans experience.”

mirandayardley.com/en/this-is-an-all-out-political-war-the-gender-recognition-act-and-beyond/

Countering that we have Nick Timothy writing in today's Telegraph:

Autogynephilia, the feeling of sexual arousal some men feel as they pretend to be women, is according to some researchers behind many or even most cases of gender dysphoria among those born as men.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/22/britain-becoming-sick-trans-debate-facts-can-cure/

If you want your sexual fetish to be seen as not a sexual fetish, it's good to convince the public that it's identical to a condition which is seen in young children and teenage girls. Transactivism recruits children as a human shield to make ordinary people sympathetic to males with a fetish. As more people are affected via their own children or other young relatives the more likely they are to support the TRA cause.

That said, I too was pleasantly surprised by the overall polite tone and by the relatively reasonable concessions. Maybe that just shows the level of batshit to which we've become habituated.

I must say I didn’t notice any concessions, only a bit of misdirection on things like risk assessments in prisons (which clearly are not fit for the job as the bar is so low, being a rapist or murderer does not immediately risk assess that male as not being suitable to be placed with vulnerable women) and a refusal to retract the snidey remarks to Sarah on a previous occasion about women with our views ‘being mad’.

I noted several references to the wonderful "system" that the MoJ has for allocating dangerous men who think they're women into the women's estate. This is yet another shadowy system where very self interested men get to pronounce on which of rapists / paedophiles /murderers etc get to serve their prison sentence harassing vulnerable women. It's evidently a lucrative gravy train for unknown individuals with likely dubious qualifications and a lack of care for women's safety.
I always contrast the elevation of these men over the needs of pregnant women, women with disabilities and older women in the prison system. I bet they don't get special meetings to discuss their individual needs.

Leafstamp · Today 11:59
There is nothing that could convince me that putting children on puberty blockers for reasons relating to so called 'gender identity' is an appropriate treatment.

My view is that people who think there is such thing as a 'wrong puberty', which can and should be treated with puberty blockers are deluded and a danger to children.

I agree, and think not only is too little known about the physical effects, but also the effects on mental maturity.

Possibly, for example, RMW might not have been so capable of becoming a barrister had they had their puberty blocked. Disregarding the advantages in his career that may have been conferred on them by by their being a man at the outset ( if this was before they were a transwoman), maybe a mature mind is an important aspect.

Dogs that are castrated before they have fully matured at about a year old are thought generally disadvantaged physically and mentally by experts who have researched the field. (n b this is not necessarily known by vets.)

Oh, hello Robin!

those that are tell me that some young people know themselves well enough to make that choice. I believe I would have been one of those.

Trouble is, sometimes those medically qualified people have got it disastrously wrong. And they've discounted or failed to conduct the follow ups that would have warned them how often they were getting it wrong. At present even the medically qualified don't reliably know which young people can make that choice.

Yes there may be a minority of kids who really know who they are, who will grow up to want transition whatever any one else says or does. And I get you're probably one of them. But most of us can be influenced to some extent about our body image and how it fits our gender identity. We might change our minds later about gender identity but then it's too late. And right now we're seeing the effects of a big change in social influences, many kids are deciding they are trans or gender fluid or in the wrong body because of self image and social influence, and not some permanent unshakable conviction like yours. And we only know for sure it's permanent if it doesn't change.

You have hindsight to tell you that you should have transitioned younger, other transitioners have hindsight to say they shouldn't have transitioned so young or at all. And now they are in a much worse situation than you are. So what should foresight do?

If we had a way to know for sure which kids would not change their minds, that would help. If we had a way to reverse a wrong decision, that would help. But we don't have those, and we don't have a time machine. The safest decision for young people is still - don't.

😂

That's how I knew Robin didn't pipe up with the spiteful aside at Allison's tribunal.

‘No trans person would say that an offender should not be properly dealt with, no trans person would say that’

(approx 32.00)

erm, Robin, have you met Action for Trans Health?