Letters - 03 October 2025
From process of acceptance to letters and language
Process of acceptance
I have a granddaughter who has become a grandson, and know a number of parents and grandparents of Gen Z people who have redefined themselves. None of them belong to the activist movement. Their transitions satisfy a personal need and they wish to retain their privacy. They avoid public confrontation and appear to suffer little in terms of discrimination or unpleasant behaviour from strangers.
To me they seem wiser in their generation than I was in mine. At their age I was marching against the bomb, against the government, against almost any form of power in society; from apartheid to patriarchy, from bureaucracy to university hierarchies; and a great deal of animal rights campaigning. Over a lifetime I learnt to absorb the violent anger of those I was marching against and never reflect it back; I learnt the joy of being vegan was far greater than my desire to tell others to stop eating animals; I discovered people, who were annoyed at climate change activists, were often engaged in much more useful work to preserve the environment, than ‘my lot’, who interrupted traffic flow; that lecturing others on their moral failings is usually less effective than getting to know them and work with them.
Of course, as a Quaker for nearly sixty years, I should have known all these things from the start. There is that of God in everyone, even Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and our job is to ‘answer that of God as we walk cheerfully over the earth’.
We seek the common ground, especially with those who seem to disagree with us most, for we cannot learn, we cannot ‘transition’ to a deeper understanding by remaining with those who agree with us, in a comforting media bubble.
It is in this painful process of acceptance, especially of those who do not seem to accept us, that I believe young people who are transitioning from one pronoun to another, have something deep to teach us, as they get to know gender-critical people and befriend them. For we can never bring peace to the world unless we first love oppressor and oppressed equally, befriend both sides and help them to see that of God in each other.
‘Love thine enemies and bless those who persecute you’ is hard teaching, but it works.
John Myhill
Testimonial rendition
Are our current testimonies (peace, equality, simplicity and truth – PEST) an accurate and precise reflection of current Quaker faith and practice? Gerard Bane (Letters, 19 September) is on the same wavelength as me, as this is exactly what I review and discuss in my latest YouTube Quakerology video ‘Are Quakers choosing “Woke” over God?’. Happily, I can answer ‘No’ to that question, but it also leads me to a more precise rendition of our testimonies in 2025.
Emma Roberts
