Just Another Woman Breaking her Silence

I have tried to write this piece for over a year now. I have watched, read, and listened to endless diatribes about trans rights and women’s rights. I have tentatively responded as best I can in online spaces, I have tried a hold reasoned conversations with friends or family, strangers and acquaintances alike, but I am truly losing patience with and am tired by the new victimhood rhetoric of the national LGBT organisations that purportedly exist to make my, and other lesbians’ lives, better. What follows is therefore my personal assessment of what is happening in this debate in Scotland, and my rudimentary attempts to find a way through rather than against the tragedy that is unfolding in our children’s and young people’s lives, in our schools, our public institutions, through our public broadcaster, in our parliament, distracting us from much more concerning political issues affecting women’s and children’s lives.

    Before I do so, I should say that I am not an expert in any one of these issues, but I am experienced in third sector culture and practice, I am a lesbian, I am a mother, and I have possibly done a little more than the average person to consider what these issues really mean. I, therefore, write from my own perspective and seek simply to add to the plethora of braver women’s voices who are already, or have been doing this work for years now, some for decades (I admire your resilience and tenacity).

    I have had the somewhat unique experience of working in and with the so-called “women’s sector” and the “LGBTQ” (or whatever alphabet spaghetti is the latest “inclusive” acronym) sector. I have also held senior positions in charities, undertaken professional research on hate crimes, won awards for my trans-inclusive work in the police service and finally, consider myself to be a feminist. On the latter point, I have no academic prowess in this arena. I know only that as my experience as a woman grows with time, so too does my fury and sense of helplessness, as well as my hope that the next generation will get a better deal, but more on that some other time.

     I’ve also spent a great deal of time healing from the effects of family dysfunction, domestic abuse, and the challenges brought on by many attempts at failed fertility treatment. These experiences are too innumerable to mention but processing them has led me back to being able to trust my gut instincts, after years of ignoring the warning signals given off by people or situations I’d now rather avoid. This leads me to talk about the differences between who I was in my twenties and early thirties and what influenced my thinking back then.

     I learned early on that to get on in life I was going to need to get myself an education, earn my own money and rely on no-one for the benefits I thought these material possessions would bring to me. I was a Good Girl. I dutifully followed the script of study hard, work hard, and it worked fairly well, until I started to try to fall pregnant and become a mother. While it remains true for me that my education and earning my own money have undoubtedly help me to avoid some of the most horrendous traps that can befall a woman, it is also fair to say that these alone have not protected me from the myriad ways the patriarchal system we live in has hurt me, nor has it isolated me from the power plays of other people’s agendas.

     And so it is that I arrive at my analysis, tinged with fury, heartbreak, confusion, and ultimately sadness, that this is the quality of the political debate in Scotland. We deserve better from our elected leaders. Our children, young boys, and girls, need us to be adults in this situation, to use the best of our human and collective experience, skills and knowledge to resolve this toxic debate and find a better set of answers to our most pressing human difficulties and social problems.

     If there are a growing number of children and young people with gender dysphoria, then we must ask ourselves why, and design interventions that are free from political interference and harmful ideological assumptions. Above all, we must put our children and young people’s wellbeing at the heart of every word we say, and every action we take, informed by evidence not popular opinion.

     We must also wake up to the fact that the next generation are inheriting a shitshow of mental health crises, isolation, increasing individualism, fewer real economic opportunities, greater global instability and don’t even get me started on the status of women and young girls. Degrading sexual violence, rape prosecution rates that haven’t changed in decades, the ubiquitous nature of online pornography and child exploitation, poverty, sex trafficking, poorer health outcomes. It’s a state so depressing there are times I can’t even bear to express it fully in words. Indeed, where to begin when the adults are so busy arguing about what a woman is, that we can let months and years pass ignoring the real plight of actual women and children.

     Of course, I don’t have all the answers to these problems, but I do know that when I woke up this morning and checked my Twitter feed, I was angry enough to finally snap out of my own complacency and fear of speaking out to write this post. My earlier versions were full of the all the terrible practice I witnessed in the “LGBT” and “women’s sectors” and there was a lot, believe me. But exposing all this dirty linen would simply keep the “gotcha” point scoring alive and perhaps, there has been enough of that.

     What we really need are for our politicians, our public institutions to wake up to the facts of what are going on, and then to stop leaving the need to find better answers to the new-found women’s and same-sex rights groups or the individual women (because it nearly always women doing this work) with tragic personal stories, to shout about the tragedy of what is going on. I am not as brave as those women on at that frontline, but, I will no longer maintain a silence when our hard-won rights are being jeopardised by the very leaders supposed to protect us. Women are adult human females, and we deserve a right to single sex spaces, our own language, and our sex based rights, whenever we decree it so.

     Trans people deserve their freedoms and rights protected too, of course, but when they start to impinge on women’s rights and seek to redefine our language, our sense of self, and what our needs are, then something has gone wrong, because no social justice movement should ever, by design, be about forcing radical new theories of thought and behaviour on a group of people, who know to their very core who and what they are. Men cannot be women no matter how much they might wish it so.

     I’ll close by signposting to some of the most thorough work done by others on this very topic, and simply let you make your own mind up. If you think the tone of this piece is transphobic, then I’ll have failed in my efforts to persuade you that we need to do better to hear each other’s difficulties and find better answers to the challenge of protecting women, girls, and boys, and anyone who is struggling with their sex and the gender stereotypes, and I’ll try again tomorrow.

• Steven Nolan investigates the role of Stonewall https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09yk1fy
• The Cass Review https://cass.independent-review.uk/publications/interim-report/
• UK Charity Commission launches inquiry into Mermaids, a controversial charity that claims to support young trans people https://www.gov.uk/government/news/regulator-announces-statutory-inquiry-into-mermaids
• Also, of interest, EHRC position regarding protecting people from sex and gender reassignment discrimination  https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/our-work/news/protecting-people-sex-and-gender-reassignment-discrimination