Transgender people exist and their lives are real
Dr Helen Webberley on Times Radio: the gender debate, with Jo Coburn, Times Radio
Transgender people are a theory, a trend, or a political position. The debate about them is abstract, something to be settled by experts arguing in studios, and the people at the centre of it are almost beside the point.
I have sat with these children and their families. I have listened to adults describe what it was like to grow up knowing something about themselves that the world around them refused to recognise. Whatever anyone says in a broadcast, those people do not stop existing when the microphone goes off. They were assigned a sex at birth that turned out not to be their gender identity, and that is not a debating position: it is simply what is true about them. The most powerful thing I could think to say in that moment was: come and meet them. Because once you have, the argument looks very different.
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