The ignorance of Rosie Duffield and blatant transphobia is now beyond a joke, as displayed in her latest tweets where she states:
“I have feminist and gender critical beliefs which mean that whilst I’ve always fully supported the rights of trans people to live freely as they choose, I do not accept self-ID as a passport for male-bodied biological men to enter protected spaces for biological women. That includes DV refuges, women’s prisons, single-sex wards and school toilets”.
Poor mental health is an ongoing pandemic that must be addressed by every responsible person, and if I choose to use the word “woman”, I am hurting no-one, but I am taking responsible measures to look after my good mental health. The NHS recognises this, hence spending millions of pounds each year on running many gender identity clinics around the country that help trans people with their gender identity-related mental health issues.
In the decades since HRA 1998 Article 8 was passed, there is no evidence whatsoever that trans women like me, who still retain male biology, have been a threat to women and abuse women in sex-segregated spaces like toilets. Male-bodied people enter women’s toilets all the time, they have a clever disguise that seems to fool everyone, they dress up as cleaners!
I know several trans-girls in their teenage years and facially they are physically indistinguishable from cis-gendered girls, courtesy of the kindness of youth; they all have “male biology” and to ban them from using girl’s toilets in schools, as Rosie Duffield suggests, would be an act of gross victimisation and in-direct bullying. If they used the boy’s toilets they would almost certainly be subjected to direct bullying.
In my charity work supporting transgender people I have met many trans men and to a man they pursue their masculine looks with vigour to counteract the feminine bodies into which they were born. They grow beards, shave their heads, and strive to perfect their testosterone-induced husky voices. Most, if not all of them, still possess a womb, a vagina and 30 trillion XX chromosomes, and therefore according to Rosie’s gender-critical biological essentialism, they are still women. Let them loose in a woman’s toilet, as Rosie suggests, would cause havoc and frighten the lives out of the other occupants. It would be less traumatic to send a Taliban fighter into the Ladies; at least you can see his weapon.
She says she supports the rights of trans-people to live as freely as they choose. I have lived openly in society as a gender non-conforming person for 35 years, and have been verbally and physically abused on the streets of Britain by more people than I care to remember. It does not matter how freely I choose to live, if my fellow countrymen ridicule and abuse me when I exercise this right, yes I might be physically free, but my mind is choked with anxiety and fear. That’s the same freedom that the Taliban are currently offering the people of Afghanistan; thank you Rosie, but no thanks.
The impression Rosie Duffield leaves by these tweets is a politician who has no basic understanding of the laws she is supposed to uphold, a blinkered and bigoted view of what it is like to be a trans person, and disrespect of the views of the general public, the majority of whom are accepting of trans-people. I really doubt that she has ever met a trans woman and spent any time getting to know that person.
In fact she couldn’t have, otherwise she would not have written such condescending rubbish.
