Many of the posts on this blog have been written out of anger. This one is written more out of despair, which is why it’s been the hardest one I’ve ever had to write.
It’s about transgenderism. That will probably be enough to stop many of those who’ve read and enjoyed this blog in the past from reading any further. It appears to be a topic that skeptics don’t want to think deeply about and I can understand that – I didn’t myself for a long time. Sometimes things need to impinge on one’s personal life to make one sit up and take notice. This was the case for my husband – a respected and very active skeptic – whose interest in this topic only dates back to the events of 13 September 2017 at Speakers’ Corner.
But sometimes it’s simply a matter of having one’s eyes and mind open, seeing that harm is being done and wanting to do something about it. At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, that was what happened with me and why I became very concerned about a year ago when I was horrified by reactions to what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable opinions expressed by Dame Jenni Murray in the Sunday Times, by seeing a local newspaper report on a fugitive convicted rapist referred to as “she” throughout and by becoming aware of a website called terf is a slur, which documented tweets made by trans activists about women who disagree with them. The hatred, the vile sexual taunts, the exhortations to assault and kill those women labelled ‘TERFs‘ for having the temerity to disagree, shocked me to the core.
Since then, I have immersed myself deeply in the subject and read everything I can get my hands on from every point of view. I’ve collected several hundred links that I’ve put on a website I’ve made called Peak Trans. One purpose of this post is to introduce that website to those who don’t already know it.
Warning: one “skeptic” who saw it today called it “TERF central”, which leads me to the main purpose of this post and that is to ask:
