Trans women are beautiful though
A minor intervention in the debate
On May 1st, I am running the Milton Keynes Marathon to raise money for the charity Melanoma Focus. Please sponsor me at this link, and thanks again to those who already have.
There are a few things I don’t really write about on this newsletter which are topics of consuming social media interest: Brexit, Israel-Palestine, internal Labour Party politics and, above all, the conflicts around transgender rights.
On this issue, I sometimes feel both sides are talking past each other, and surveying both groups online, you sometimes realize that there are rhetorical compromises laying there untaken; for example, it is perfectly possible to say both that there needs to be safeguarding in place for male sex offenders in female prisons and also to acknowledge that trans people feel, like any minority, unhappy to be defined by their tiny number of criminal members; it’s only where the debate has got to which means that holding these two positions at once is seen as inflammatory, not mediation but provocation.
At least on social media, people have invested too much of their identity in being wholly on one side of the argument of the other, even if in practice they could happily reconcile aspects of both.