I think one of the things this conversation has made apparent is that a lot of gay men seem to look at the trans issue and they just identify with it and don't think much further.

What they identify with is the sense of being different, socially judged, and shamed for being > https://twitter.com/Lachlan_Edi/status/1251061013249744897

a certain way.... like John seems to have done here, they look at a story of the struggle of a young male trans person, and they see their own story in it... and then they conclude that it's exactly the same thing... and everyone objecting is just the same as homophobes...

This kind of empathic identification is understandable... emotionally, there may be some similarities between gay men's and trans males' struggle for acceptance...

But that's where the similarity ends.

As we have been saying. Male people wanting it to be okay to have sex with

other males is not at all like male people wanting it to be okay for them to be treated as female *in all circumstances.*

Because there is another group of people who *are* female, and who have been oppressed for thousands of years on the basis of being female.

Asking to be accepted for a behavioural practice is not the same as asking to be accepted as another class of persons, especially when there is already half of humanity in that class, who have their own experience, and tbf should be the authority, on being a member of that class.

The equivalent of the gay rights situation would be trans people *asking to be accepted as trans people* not *trans women asking to be accepted as females.*

Gay rights never involved redefining other groups of people, and it never involved redefining reality around the idea that

sexual dimorphism does not exist. Which, as many gay people who have thought about his further than an initial act of sympathy have realised, actually involves erasing the possibility of the existence of homosexuality itself.

As I've said, it's understandable that many gay men

have the sympathetic identification. What's not really acceptable, when dealing with an issue which has such massive social, political, and legal consequences for women, gay people, children, intersex people and transsexuals, is to think this identification is an adequate basis

for making policy and law. And what is not acceptable, it to refuse to engage with the massive amount of work we've done to explain why this throws up all kinds of problems, and to simply keep exhorting us to 'be kind' - as if this was all there was to the matter.

I understand you feel sympathy, and you want to be kind. But please consider what it is you are asking women to give up here - clue: their entire political existence and the rights that go along with that. And please consider why you find it much easier to sympathise with the

young males and their struggle, rather than with the experience and interests of the women who, actually, have every good reason to object to being redefined against our will, by ideas of gender we consider to be profoundly conservative and harmful.