I’m a psychotherapist of about 20 years, and one of my main areas of experience and training has been in the LGBT arena (or LGB as it was known here until about 2005 or thereabouts). I work for a prominent LGBT organisation and have been there for around 13 years now, so I’d be known in the community and commended for my work over the years.
I started to notice more trans clients around 4 or 5 years ago, and more of the trans agenda around the workplace which seemed to be taking precedence over a lot of other stuff, and in particular, seemed to completely push out lesbian groups, there just weren’t as many of them.
When the JKR statement came out, I couldn’t hold back, I wasn’t tweeting very much at all at that stage but her letter had really moved me and was so coherent that I thought to myself (so naively) ‘This is wonderful, maybe now we can have a conversation, how could anyone say she is transphobic now? We can talk about *everyone’s* concerns at last!’ Ha, was I wrong or what.
Very quickly I was rounded on, and I can’t go into detail on this, but my professionalism and ability to do my job was ‘questioned’ by someone who knew who I was, and where I worked. Long story short, (too late etc,) quite apart from it upsetting the shit out of me for weeks, I can’t and don’t want to lose my job.
So though it pisses me off, I need to be ‘anon’ in my work too in a way. I can’t talk about what I really think of the explosion in teens identifying as trans, I can’t risk it. There’s becoming an almost secret circle of therapists doctors and psychologists who refer to each other, we don’t talk too much, I get a call here and there from one of them, or from a parent, or a friend of a former client who says they put them on to me, or a TD or two.. (like they’re gonna speak out, nope.)
Quite apart from women’s rights which I am absolutely PASSIONATE about and always have been, and is another 12 million pages on its own, I feel the risk to children is more pressing.
I want them to be heard, I want them to have space, and I want them to be whatever they want to be and whatever that entails *without* an affirmation that they were ‘born wrong’, because *no one is*.
Source: Please stop what you’re doing and read this – The Cry of GLINNER!
The silent majority agrees with you.
This has been so silencing for lesbians, we have lost our gatherings, our spaces and right to speak. I am refused work by a well known lgb service over this issue and the work with young lesbians in youth services despite 4 0 years experience working with women and lesbians in women’s services and working nationally and internationally on lesbian human rights. All bullied into silence.