THE keynote of the ever-disenchanted Steph Paton’s column of April 21 seems to be “disappointment”, in this particular instance with Kezia Dugdale’s appointment at the helm of Stonewall, the organisation that has hitherto given voice to the most militant and disaffected LGBTQ+ activists and certainly not the entire “community” whose sentiments Paton has appointed themselves to represent in The National every week (Not a great start from Dugdale as the new chair of Stonewall).
I can assure Paton that they do not speak for many of my trans friends.
With relentless reiteration at every opportunity, Steph uses their penchant for hyperbolic language and privileged access to a newspaper dedicated to an independent Scotland to fight and fight again for the extra trans rights they regard as “being relentlessly targeted by wealthy elites”.
I have asked before and I will now ask again where Paton sees this tyranny best represented in the average LGBTQ+ life in Scotland, in order that Scottish citizens can get fully behind them to extirpate this injustice that seems to take precedence above obscene economic and health inequality, deaths of despair, and a tsunami of existential angst and colonial exploitation. What are the main concerns?
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Paton refers to a 200-year waiting list for “trans healthcare” in Scotland rather than generic waiting lists for care of the sick in general. They are surely more aware than others of the steady appearance of poor people who know the full meaning of “disappointment” as they enter their thirties and forties in chronic distress, debility and physical surgical disfigurement perpetrated on them by non-evidence-based surgeons and puberty blockers in the medical industrial complex in the name of “trans healthcare”.
I and many other compassionate physicians are constantly learning of new ways to avoid such harms and pursue optimal health and happiness for our trans patients, friends and families, and welcome contributions from responsible and informed journalists. Perhaps Steph could offer some innovative suggestions?
Dr Andrew Docherty
Selkirk
RESPONDING to my letter on Out for Independence’s dismissal of sex-based safeguarding (‘War’ didn’t start with defence of sex-based boundaries, Letters, Apr 13), Ron Lumiere refers to my “reliance” on the 2011 Swedish cohort study by Dhejne et al. (Letters, Apr 19).
I referred only to what the study says: that trans-identified male subjects had higher rates of criminal convictions than female controls, but not than male controls; that this suggested a retained male pattern of criminality; and that the same applied to violent crime.
For the purposes of the point I made – that there is no good evidence for believing that trans-identified males are less violent than other males – that was sufficient.
Mr Lumiere does not in fact rebut my point. Instead, perhaps in an attempt to explain away the study’s findings, he speculates about how social marginalisation might contribute. But that is beside the point. Even if one assumed that stigma, discrimination or exclusion contributed to the outcomes observed, that would still not convert those outcomes into evidence that trans-identified males are less violent than males as a class. Such speculation says nothing of substance against sex-based safeguarding.
Brian Forsyth
Edinburgh
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