God help me, but I’ve made a Twitter because I can’t deal with “TERFs” and their ilk for another minute. My daughter has happily lived her life as trans for years. At first I felt so relieved seeing her finally at peace. In the last year, I do not recognise the same person.

I did not notice, but I learned she was avoiding public bathrooms. Running straight to the toilet after a car journey, shopping trip, university. When I notice and ask why, she’s scared of being “clocked” and confronted by “TERFs”. She is going HOURS at university without peeing.

My daughter is in her second to last year of studying medicine. She has a smaller frame than her (cisgendered) sister and refuses to join any sports clubs out of fear of being confronted and harassed. She fears meeting someone in a club and having to out herself or being accused

Of deception. I watch her neglect her studies and scroll through social media, where I find GROWN WOMEN my age telling her she is a fetishist, a pervert, a creep. It devastates her. Nobody knows of her trans status, and nobody ever will. She is now utterly ashamed of herself.

I now have to watch my daughter, after years of misery and a brief period of freedom, endure the same things other minorities like gay people endured in the 1980s. “Turn off your phone” I’ve told her, as any mother would. She says it’s bigger than that and it is.