The new anti-gay activism
Those who advocate for gender identity ideology are fundamentally opposed to gay rights. We need to start describing them accurately.
It was hardly a plague of locusts, but it was disruptive nonetheless. During the annual LGB Alliance conference at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in Westminster on Friday afternoon, teenage activists unleashed thousands of crickets into the auditorium. The inconvenience was only temporary. The crowd simply relocated to another room and the event went on as before.
As those responsible were apprehended, many people were struck by just how young and posh they were. By this point, it should surprise precisely no-one that anti-gay activism in its current form is a predominately bourgeois pursuit. The symbolism of the crickets was, of course, deliberate. It was an attempt to dehumanise those in attendance, to suggest that they were akin to parasites, vermin, spreaders of disease, a common trope of those who seek to demonise minorities.
The perpetrators were children, and so it would be unwise to speculate too much on their motives. It is likely they were being manipulated by the group that has claimed responsibility, calling itself “Trans Kids Deserve Better”. As Bev Jackson, co-founder of LGB Alliance said on my show last night:
“Trans kids do deserve better. They deserve better than to be told lies that that they might have been born in the wrong body. They deserve better than to be told that these hormones and surgeries that they are clambering for will somehow solve all their problems. Many are on the autism spectrum. Many are struggling with their sexual orientation. We know that. They deserve better than to be told that we hate them. And they deserve better than to be labelled trans when they’re going through all the turbulence of adolescence, when your feelings about yourself are in constant flux.”
Irrespective of the intentions of the teenagers involved, this was anti-gay activism. To attack a group of lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have assembled to discuss the ongoing threats to their civil rights could hardly be defined in any other way. Likewise, to refer to groups such as LGB Alliance as “anti-trans”, “transphobic” or “hateful” - as activist media outlets such as the Metro and the Guardian have been known to do - is also an anti-gay strategy. In order to address a problem, one needs to label it accurately.
Gender identity ideologues are, by definition, anti-gay. They are campaigning to force their pseudo-religious belief-system onto the rest of society, one that claims that same-sex attraction is a myth, and that a mysterious spiritual sense of “gender” is the defining feature of homosexuality. Even if they have convinced themselves that they are “pro-trans” and “compassionate” and “progressive”, the implementation of their demands would result directly in the demolition of gay rights. And so “anti-gay activism” is not only an accurate description, it also cuts to the heart of what is at stake.
The trans activist movement in its current form is dominated by this belief in a material and stable “gender identity”, what one trans campaigner explained to me as an “essence of male or female”. This is a departure from the theories of Judith Butler, who posits that “gender identity” is an illusion created performatively and repetitively in accordance with societal expectations. For all their deification of Butler, the trans rights movement is insistent that she is wrong on this key point, and that an individual is “born trans” when there is a misalignment of body and “sexed soul” (to borrow Helen Joyce’s phrase).
This belief is wholly incompatible with the struggle for gay rights, which has always been predicated on the notion that there exist a minority of people who are innately attracted to their own sex. Activist groups such as Stonewall now argue that “homosexuality” is based on gender rather than sex, meaning that it is possible for a man to be a lesbian. He may have been born male (or “assigned male at birth” to borrow the voguish parlance), but his “gender identity” is female and this should be the salient factor when it comes to sexual orientation.
It is no easy feat to explain the contortions of logic on display here. Lesbian dating apps are now replete with men who claim to be women, many fully bearded and bepenised. Likewise, sex clubs for gay men now routinely admit women who have had their breasts removed and believe themselves to be male. The gay male hookup app Grindr even prohibits its users from filtering out women. As the company’s website puts it:
“When designing gender settings on Grindr, it was important to us to not further perpetuate discrimination and harm for the trans and nonbinary community. For this reason, we allow filtering based on gender - you can specify that you want to see men or women - but this will include all men or all women, because trans men are men and trans women are women.”
In other words, a company that has made a fortune from gay men’s sexuality is now shaming its customers for being gay.
The situation is so confusing that we now have mainstream celebrities such as Billy Bragg effectively campaigning against gay rights without realising it. He is not homophobic (as far as I’m aware) and yet he is assiduously promoting a movement whose end goal is the eradication of homosexuality. Bragg’s 1991 song Sexuality included the lyric: “Just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away”. Perhaps a more appropriate version would be: “Just because you’re gay, I’ll have you surgically corrected in order to better conform to heterosexual paradigms”, although it wouldn’t scan or rhyme.
This is why to grow up gay in 2024 is considerably more risky than during the time of Section 28 in the 1980s. We have gay conversion therapy being promoted by the NHS in the form of “gender-affirming care”, and children who are gender non-conforming (and therefore statistically far more likely to be homosexual in later life) are being medicalised and shamed for their orientation. Moreover, the very organisations that were originally established to fight for gay rights are now actively working against the interests of gay people.
To release bags of insects into a gathering of homosexuals is the kind of tactic we might once have seen from neo-Nazis and extreme religious fundamentalists. Just because those responsible now claim to be “on the right side of history” does not justify their behaviour or make them any less regressive. These are the new reactionaries, espousing a particularly toxic form of anti-gay ideology because it has the approval of the corporate, media, political and managerial class. Homophobia never went away, it just took on a fresh disguise.
My full interview with Bev Jackson from LGB Alliance is available to watch here.
When will we stop naming these activists Trans-activists and start naming them anti-LGB activists? Seems like there’s no better moment to start than now.
Gender ideology is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-science. They are the flatearthers of biology.
Has Stonewall UK condemned this attack on the LGB Alliance and the LGB communitiy? I couldn't find a statement on X, but maybe they shared their horror of this assault on gay people on another platform (or platforms).
Thank you for having Bev Jackson on your program last night, she's brilliant and I was glad to see she (and the others) are okay and fighting on.