Trans people are often dragged out in arguments or polemic essays to demonstrate the ‘wrongness’ of other people’s thinking.

In my mind’s eye I have a picture of this phenomenon. I see an innocent person dressed in their regular clothes standing in the middle of a muddy field with opposing teams on either side, dressed in their team’s colours, faces red and contorted with the passion of their righteous battle, hurling cruel words and threatening violence.

The trans person is caught in the middle of this false dichotomy, dropped down like bait in the centre of the orchestrated battle. We sacrifice trans people by using them as a symbol in the battle of ‘right’ against ‘left’.

Trans people don’t represent science (there are some trans people who live without medical interventions). Trans people don’t represent the liberal left ( there are trans people who don’t support Trudeau!)

A trans person is first and foremost a private person. They want to live their life outside of the spotlight. Their most treasured asset is to ‘pass’, in other words, to be unidentifiable as a trans person. Their feelings about who they are and who they may love, are as private as yours and mine.

It is clearly a private issue, so private. What made us the way we are, how we behave, how we dress; absolutely private and personal.

It is not our business to tell someone what to do with their body. The family is sacrosanct as well. We don’t get to tell people how to bring up their children.

Trans people have a tough road to walk. In order to be true to themselves they must be brave. Brave to face the public censure and brave to face difficult injections and operations. We should not make it more difficult for them by throwing them in the middle of the battle.

There are many books written about being trans but my favorite is Conundrum, written in 1974 when the author, Jan Morris, was 48 years old. Before transitioning, Jan had lived as James, married and had children (they stayed together after the transition), and made a living as a writer.

Jan wrote Conundrum to see if she could still make a living as a writer, as a woman. The opening lines of Conundrum are: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

Jan Morris was a well known writer, her Pax Britannica trilogy (covering the history of the British Empire) is especially well known but she wrote many books before transitioning. In her life as a man she worked as a journalist accompanying the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, and she reported on the Suez Crisis as well as the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Jan is a great writer, honest and brave, and it is fascinating to read about her experiencing life as a woman, after a full life as a man. Like my son, she can see the good and bad attributes of both sexes with a clarity that us of the limited one gender background cannot.

I had to work to accept the idea of transitioning. It was new to me and I had to read and think and open my mind. My mind had to find new paths; new circuits were created, new pathways.

Once I had really begun to accept the concept of transitioning gender, the old world feminism that I was brought up on seemed out of date and doomed for failure. When I dropped the focus on gender, I saw us as one united people.

Why do we care about gender? There are so many other more important distinguishing facts about a person. Are they brave, are they honest? Are they kind, are they thoughtful?

Due to what I call the COVID wrinkle, in which we all experienced the underlying tyranny and elitism of the liberal philosophy, I have found myself between a rock and a hard place.

Is the rock the ‘right’ and the hard place the ‘left’?

I don’t know, but I don’t support either, fully. I make up my mind issue by issue and do not follow any ideology.

Between the rock and the hard place is a small, soft place with moss and lichen that catches the afternoon sun.

It is full of more life than you might expect, with fungi that grows deep and spreads out, breaking down rocks and creating oxygen.