How can people be so cruel?
This is a departure from the usual. Not so much article, as open letter to those who sit on the anti-trans side of UK politics. It is both an ask and an expression of incredulity. Because I cannot believe how you can do what you do: inflict cruelty after cruelty on people you have never met and are never likely to. Yet still feel righteous in your hate.
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
It is a letter to friends I once had “that side of the wall”. Women, mostly, with whom I broke bread, and shared my house. Women with whom I campaigned, long and hard, against male violence. Against rape. Against social exclusion.
You knew me once. You knew who I am, how I am: in truth you still do. You know, should know, I am not the monster depicted by the gender police. How are you not ashamed to be where you are now?
It is letter, too, to those who never have been friends: who presume to know me from sound-bites picked out of context and random slurs repeated and repeated on social media until no-one can remember where they came from.
I do not get you: I do not get any of you. Over here, this side of the wall, the effects…
