Hi @Keir_Starmer. 25 years ago, under a Labour government, I was one of the first hundred or so trans adolescents in the UK treated with GnRH Agonist 'Puberty Blockers' for gender incongruence by the NHS.
This treatment - the one your health secretary @wesstreeting banned last year - gave me an incredible opportunity not just to survive, but to thrive.
Every day, I am thankful for the GIDS clinicians who listened with compassion and foresight and carefully provided me with a roadmap to a future filled with hope.
That road is now closed, permanently, to those following in my footsteps.
When I was referred, I was the same age as Brianna Ghey - the murdered trans girl you exploited in front of a grieving nation as a rhetorical battering ram last year. Remember her? You stood in parliament and chastised Rishi Sunak for making a transphobic joke that dehumanises people like us. I remember your outrage on that poor family's behalf.
Was it all just an empty, cynical ploy? Are you truly so shameless that you'd exploit a murdered child's grieving mother, knowing full well that you intended to not only ban critical life-saving healthcare for people like Brianna and myself, but to engage in a political race to the bottom by effectively exiling us from public life entirely?
A little over a year ago, I begged you not to ban me from NHS single-sex services and accommodations. I begged you not to dehumanise and humiliate me by walking back on longstanding policies of compassion, tolerance and humanity - everything that Labour has represented for as long as I have lived.
I pleaded with you not to ruin my life; to spare me from the abusive mob seeking to destroy everything that your party once had the grace and foresight to give me.
Labour allowed me to be created; they gave me an incredible chance at a future of relative safety and immense joy that I could not have dreamed of at the time. You have destroyed that legacy. You have betrayed me in almost every way you possibly could have done.
Why are you now trying to destroy my life? Why are you now trying to take away everything we have desperately fought for decades to achieve?
I beg you to stop this nightmare before it gets any worse. Your support for this anti-trans crusade is already destroying lives. You are driving an entire marginalised community to the edge of despair - and to what end? What even is the purpose of it all?
Your party is now routinely presenting anti-trans statements that are extreme even by the standards of the far right. These people will never vote for you, no matter how deeply you plumb the depths of hatred.
You have the power to end this nightmare. You have the power to save us. Your failures to do so are tearing your own party apart. Your membership stats are so catastrophic that you even stopped reporting them out of embarrassment.
Your downward spiral has inspired the birth of an astonishingly successful new party created by MP's who have been rightly recoiling in horror against your policies.
You are destroying your own party; your own legacy - and this country's hope for the future - and for what end? So you can make the lives of already marginalised people even harder? So you can crush our spirit just a little bit further? Who are you trying to placate? Why are you letting them wield you like this?
I begged you not to abandon us before. I'm still begging you now.
Please.
Your endorsement of the EHRC's guidance would have forced poor, terrified Brianna to use male facilities; this would have not only forcibly outed, humiliated and dehumanised her every single day for the rest of her life, but it would have forced her into close proximity with violent, murderous transphobes like Eddie Ratcliffe on a regular basis.
These people already abuse and murder us with terrifying regularity. Forcing us to use male facilities will only make it worse - a lifetime of brutal censure for the crime of simply being ourselves.
It is the moral duty of government to protect vulnerable minorities like us from those who seek to harm us. You - a respected and accomplished human rights lawyer - understand this more than most people.
How many more of us have to die?
@BadWolfArchives I think when it became most noticeable for me was the start of Chibnall's era. My brain couldn't cope with how good The Woman Who Fell To Earth looked
@BadWolfArchives I think my favourite, underrated moment is the way he talks about the fairy circle at the end of 73 yards. Just the idea that this ancient being can be charmed by something that probably seems so small, and Ncuti played the wonder of it perfectly