October 6, 2022 - 10:15am
What a difference a year makes. In Manchester in 2021, the LGB Alliance was nearly excluded from the Conservative Party’s annual Conference after a protest by the Party’s own official LGBT group, the LGBT+ Conservatives. Some members of that influential group, whose event last year was addressed by Carrie Johnson, claimed the presence of the LGB Alliance made them “feel unsafe”. One even said it made her “feel sick”.
In the end, a spokesperson insisted the Party had to defend free speech. More pity, then, that Labour, the Lib Dems and SNP have seen fit to ban us from their conferences for two years in a row. I suppose the prospect of speaking to someone with whom you disagree was just too terrifying.
If the reaction at Tory Conference this year was anything to go by, there has been a genuine shift in mood. There have been queues to speak to our reps, and not just from Party members. Staff at the venue and those working on commercial stalls in the hall have jostled with MPs, peers and a gamut of sometimes unlikely seeming allies — from dog-collared vicars to observant Muslims — all keen to find common ground with a gay charity that proclaims a belief in free speech and child safeguarding. “At last”, said one woman serving tea who asked me what my badge represented, “it’s about time gay people stopped promoting all this weird stuff.”
Child safeguarding kept coming up as a theme and was the focus of our own event. Everyone wants to ensure that trans people’s rights, which are protected under the Equality Act, are maintained and cherished. But the way in which gender ideology is pushed in schools and in certain parts of social media is undermining the mental health of a generation. We have to find ways to protect a tiny minority without patronising the majority of young people through the denial of basic biology.
One common refrain from parents was that they were grateful we existed because, while they were determined to resist the absurdity of enforced pronouns or the attempted erasure of women’s sports, they were worried they might unwittingly find common cause with homophobes: “It’s really important to know gay people also oppose this.”
It’s particularly important for those within the Conservative Party who remain traumatised by Section 28. The last thing mainstream Conservatives want is an opportunity for critics to label them the ‘Nasty Party’ again. It’s a measure of the success of the gay rights movement that one of the worst accusatory labels in British politics is that of ‘homophobe’. Unfortunately, the LGBTQ+ lobby has developed the habit of carelessly dropping this H-bomb on anyone who dares to push back against any of their demands, no matter how extreme.
This bullying approach has only been made possible by the trans takeover of the gay rights movement, dating in the UK from 2015 when Stonewall moved from being an LGB organisation to an LGBT one. This made any criticism of Stonewall’s policies — or those of any of a further 400+ LGBT+ organisations — on the promotion of gender identity within schools or the undermining of single sex spaces not just transphobic, but somehow homophobic, too.
The irony is that nothing could be more homophobic than the central demand that the definition of homosexuality should change from same-sex to same-gender. Our rights as gay people are protected under law as individuals who are same-sex attracted. Same-gender orientation would mean that gay men are attracted to biological females as well as males; as for lesbians, they not only could be attracted to biological males — they could even be biological males themselves.
We gender-critical gays are ahead of the curve. We see the dangerous implications of gender identity ideology up close and know it’s our responsibility to warn the rest of our fellow citizens. It is to their credit that the Conservative Party has heeded this warning. It is deeply saddening that this country’s liberal Left is yet to do so.
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SubscribeJustin Trudeau has just delivered the latest Frankenstein acronym to which gay people MUST be conigned: ‘2SLGBTQQIA+‘. I remember a few years ago, while visiting Canada, one of my straight brothers there saying to me, ‘hey big gay bro, what the f**k does this mean?’ at a previous Canadian iteration of this absurd and embarrassing alphabet soup. My response? ‘F**ked if I know, wee man’. This the stuff of which backlashes are made and will be one among many reasons why Pierre Polievre and the Canadian Tories look increasingly likely to kick Justin Trudeau’s trust fund ass in the next general election.
I’ve been saying for some time that acronym is the world’s greediest regular expression.
And as a hetero cis white male I’m sure I’m not included, so where is my is special exclusion?
2SLGBTQQIA+[^CISWM]
Apologies to everyone who made the sensible life choice of not having a career in a computer science related discipline.
Brilliant! Thanks for that. 🙂
Well pointed out.
Fear not, so conceptually incoherent has LGBTQ+blahblah become that ‘hetero cis males’ are, according to Trudeau’s own definition, now included under the rainbow umbrella within ‘additional sexuality and gender diverse communities’. AKA ‘people’. Congrats, you now have access to the currency of victimhood! I’d like to see that groovy-socked cretin argue otherwise.
I’d ask him urgently: ‘where’s my parade?’. 😉
(LGB)(TQ*[A-Z]*[0-9]*.*)
Might the above sum up the situation?
So
S/LGBTQ* [A-Z]*[0-9]*/LGB/GP
Sorry, just couldn’t resist using ed, the original unix editor, to clean things up by deleting the tq whatever. Yes, I’m that old.
Kudos for the regex jokes! I never expected to see such a thing on UnHerd, ever.
The world is divided into:
– 96%+ who won’t have the first clue what you are talking about
– 3% who will know but detest regexps with a passion
– 1%< (like me) who embrace the stuff and live it, because it flows out from our fingers, like spagetti in some animated gerald scarfe horror grotesquerie.
P.S. never apologies for being a comp sci dude. Instead wear it as a badge of pride.
Ha. It’s always good to diversify the content on here.
I’m not quite sure which of the latter categories I fit into. I have a love hate relationship with them – probably because I don’t use them quite often enough to remember how to use them properly when I need to.
And I do love the old quip about trying to solve a problem with regular expressions – you end up with two problems 🙂
2SLGBTQ{2}IA\++
Surely?
Anyway, I’ll stop now ;0)
Great to see JK Rowling today openly challenging celebs who support Mermaids to sue her for her stance on the danger of Mermaids to children exposed by the appointment of a paedophile-friendly ‘officer’, as highlighted by Julie Bindel on Unherd.
She’s just marvellous!
So, not all doom and gloom at the Tory conference? It does bring to the fore the point that should the Tories lose the next election, these organisations are unlikely be subject to any form of scrutiny as they have captured every other major party that holds seats on the mainland. We can also breathe a sigh of relief that the ghastly Mrs Johnson’s influence appears to be waning.
It took a few years to progress from protecting a minority, but the trans rights bandwagon has been so successful after getting away with sexualising and medically abusing children that its now openly entered the territory of promoting sex with children. And we only react now? Que sera.
There’s a great article on The Critic explaining the dependency brainwashing tactics of Mermaids:
https://thecritic.co.uk/gender-sirens/
Those lgbTTTTT (emphasis intended) charities and organisations, and all the celebrities and companies supporting them, better watch out as they are now at risk of being associated with promoting paedophilia (and unfortunately tainting the LGB world too, which homophobes will applaud). That’ll be a difficult tar to clean off their woke reputations.
Great link to the Critic piece, thanks. Nancy Kelly and Susie Green ought to be very afraid.
“And we only react now?”
People have been raising this issue for some time but they were called intolerant and shut out.
I mean people who wield influence, not ordinary folk like me and you (I presume). I’ve been active on this for about 5 years, writing to MPs, organisations, etc. But it probably made zero difference.
No one is trans.
It was great to see you and others from the LGB Alliance at the Conservative Party conference. Your film about the dangers to children of the trans ideology was illuminating, and frankly upsetting.
The panelists were so well informed, backing their knowledge up with research. Any decent individual should be concerned to protect our children from unecessary mutilation and a life time of drugs. The lack of rigour in ‘diagnosing’ children as trans is clear.
We must all keep doing whatever we can to raise this with decision makers and influencers. Funding and charitable status must be reviewed. It should not (and in my opinion) is not, a party political issue. I do hope we meet again soon.
For a long time hetero men and women have argued against the growing demands of the trans movement, especially their moves into the world of children. For this they were attacked and ridiculed for their intolerance. Now the LGB community are suddenly heroes for doing the same.
The issue here is that the ‘trans’ zealots have used gay organisations as Trojan horses. Gay people, particularly men (lesbians have been doing it for years) speaking out against this is a huge step forward and to be welcomed, although I would prefer it without the obligatory concession to ‘trans’ rights. As mammals cannot change sex, there is no such thing.
This story might give the Tories a lifeline. Promote Kemi Badenoch, and emphasise culture war issues, such as the danger of trans ideologists to children (both medically, and – see Julie Bindel’s article – exposure to perverts), and the opposition’s support for these ideologists. https://unherd.com/2022/10/mermaids-is-endangering-children/
“We have to find ways to protect a tiny minority without patronising the majority of young people through the denial of basic biology”
100%
Thank you. Good to read.
You seem not to understand that most people do not care a jot about whining, moaning LBGT self obsessed zealots, and that your obsessive interest in your profoundly irrelevant ” cause” is a massive negative for the vast majority of voters.
I don’t see any reason for their presence at the Conservative conference, What else could they possibly need to agitate for these days? There claim of defending children or lesbians against trans activists looks more like a contrived claim for attention and relevance. What’s so special about them that they feel the need to be represented at the conference? They got what they wanted, now get on and live it. This looks like legitimising by stealth.