Nicola Sturgeon, forrmer First Minister of Scotland, in a recent interview:
Ms Sturgeon also doubled down on her view that transgender women are women, and said in the on-stage interview with trans novelist and activist Juno Dawson that “people should be able to live how they want to be”.
She warned that “it seems like everyone in society is raining down on trans people” and despite forming 0.5 per cent of the population, they were used as “a battering ram” and that gay people and other marginalised groups were becoming “collateral damage”.
In my view trans people “living how they want” is not really the issue.
- The issue is ignoring the instincts and wishes of most of the 99.5% of the people by criminalizing and ostracizing the view that binary sex is immutable and gender is merely a social construct.
- The issue is threatening people with fines, jail, or “cancelling” for seeing an important distinction between biological women and trans women, and daring to say so.
- The issue is denying physical women the safety of biologically female-only spaces.
- The issue is expecting biologically female athletes to compete against trans athletes with the physique of a man.
- The issue is whether we should allow children and adolescents who are still under their parents’ care and who need parental permission or agreement for most important decisions, to make this one life-altering decision without parental consent. Even with parental consent, irreversible treatments at such a young age are problematic.
- The issue (not only in the trans debate but in many of these hot topics) is the notion that people have the right to everyone else’s approval and affirmation and the right not to have their feelings hurt, and that people who withhold that approval and affirmation or hurt someone’s feelings should be criminally prosecuted. This makes a mockery of freedom of speech and freedom of opinion.
And “gay people” (specifically lesbians) and also other biological women, are becoming collateral damage when forced, against their preference, to share toilets, showers, changing rooms, etc ., with biological males who have self-declared as female, and are being slandered as TERFs when they object.