Comment on GRA & Liz Truss Opinions

I’m often surprised at human beings. We are capable of so many compassionate acts of kindness and love towards other human beings and nature, but we also have the capacity to inflict unspeakable acts against our own kind. With the coronavirus outbreak, we have shown we have the capacity to support each other in ways not dreamed of before.

However, there is a small, but vocal minority who lose their humanity when they attack another, even smaller minority of human beings: the transgender community. I am in that community; a trans woman in my sixth decade.

I still struggle with my own body, and this is made exponentially worse by those who choose to think I am less than them. Life has been a struggle for me trying to fit into a box marked ‘normal’. However, ‘normal’ for me is not defined by me, but defined for me by a society who have deemed LGBT people marked out for derision and hostility. It’s difficult enough trying to live on the fringe of society, but when society actively sends derision in your direction, life can become intolerable.

Some in our population are bent on having only their opinions being defined as valid, that override all others, to be the only beliefs that are ‘right’.

Opinion doesn’t enter into it. Opinions are only opinions; not fact, not reality. Opinions come only from our beliefs, and our beliefs from our experiences. Our experiences are thus created through our interaction with the people we meet in our life, and the choices we make.

Whose opinion is right? Whose belief is right? Whose truth is right? Not yours, not theirs, not mine. It’s all relative. There is no objective truth; it’s all a matter of perception. So, how you see your world, is not the same as how others see their world.

I see the Gender Recognition Act as a way forward to balancing the scales, to make life easier for those who are on the edge. And sometimes literally on the edge, as suicide is far higher in the trans community than the general population. Not because it’s a mental illness, but simply because of the treatment they receive from people. The pain of rejection is indescribable.

You have rights ONLY to your opinion. You have NO rights to enact that opinion or belief into law. Section 28 is a testament to an appalling attack on human beings who just happened to love someone differently. As a country, we cannot afford to go back to those dark days of discrimination and hostility towards an already marginalised group of people, of whatever age, who just want to be themselves, to be the best they can be.

Why must I, a human being, ask another human being for permission to be myself?

Trans children need to feel accepted and if, as a government, you cannot do this, what signals are you sending to the next generation of souls who are here to show the older generation what is possible. If you vilify the younger people, they cannot express the gifts they were born with, and so, society loses out, everyone loses out.

Who knows what these children can achieve if they are given the opportunity to reach their full potential. What would the computing world look like today had they not vilified Alan Turing to an early grave. That loss is immeasurable.

You have NO right to place yourself in between the patient and their doctor. You have NO right to create laws which limit possible routes to satisfactory outcomes for that patient. It is a role in which you are NOT ideally qualified. You are here to create the environment where people can become the best they can be; nothing more, nothing less. Do NOT try to add to the GRA other issues which the GRA is designed to achieve.

You cannot possibly know what a person has been born for, or what they are here to achieve. That is between them and their maker. Thinking that a human being is incapable of making choices for themselves, of whatever age, denigrates that person. We learn by experience. Taking away their choices limits their growth. And their potential. You have NO right to do that. The damage you could inflict upon such a young group of children is immeasurable.

We all make choices in life, and sometimes, with the benefit of hindsight, we would make different choices. That’s called life experience. Who knows what I could have achieved in life had I not been forced to where a mask, forced to place major parts of my nature in a box under the bed every day because those parts of me were deemed unacceptable.

The pain of rejection is indescribable. Don’t force trans children to endure the same. Help them by creating a better, more compassionate environment for them to grow; NOT its opposite.