Such is the unstated implication of the Conversion Practices draft bill, published last week. Two supposedly core, immutable elements of the human person are identified, for which corrective drugs, bribes, or shaming are all presumed diabolical — though these are completely fine to use for more flexible attitudes elsewhere. To try to alter the pattern of someone’s sexual desires, by exerting psychological or emotional pressure or worse, risks becoming a “conversion practice”. The same goes for trying to dissuade someone from a heartfelt profession of gender identity. Past a certain threshold, the police and courts must get involved.

This bill is already receiving much hostile comment, both for its performative aspect — violent and abusive acts are already punishable — and its absurd overreach into understandably heated family discussions about life-changing hormones and surgery. Accompanying notes to the draft try to make a virtue of the chillingly authoritarian focus upon “verbal or non-violent physical acts”. Offenses include practices causing “serious alarm and distress” and “serious harm to mental health”, both of which are too vaguely specified to protect loving parents from police investigation for speaking their mind. The wording is also unlikely to induce religious clergy to express honest and well-meant thoughts about the wisdom of homosexuality or medical transition. Thankfully, at least, there is a carveout for healthcare professionals, but it remains unclear why conversations perfectly acceptable in the doctor’s surgery or therapy space must be harmful at home or in church.

More from this author

Why Britain needs political chameleons

By Kathleen Stock

But not much has been said about one unexpected implication of the bill: that conversion practices involving straight people are just as harmful as those involving gay or trans ones. The intention to cause a heterosexual or “cis” person to become homosexual or trans is to be treated in just as draconian a manner as the inverse case. In theory at least, progressive parents who preach the gospel of gender affirmation a little too enthusiastically risk criminal investigation later, when their children have second thoughts — a possibility which, you have to admit, is darkly funny. The idea that there might also be criminal liability for the hundreds of lanyard-wearing youth workers out there, still working very hard to cement the idea of medical and social transition into deeply unworldly heads, is even more delicious.

But these enticing visions also point to an ambiguity at the heart of the draft legislation; namely, how are third parties supposed to know for sure that a professed sexual orientation or gender identity is permanent, as opposed to a temporary form of experimentation? It would be ironic if the first parent prosecuted for trying to “convert” her child from X to Y turned out later to have been right about the merely transitory presence of the X-ness all along. Unless authorities can answer this question, the law will be unworkable; and I suggest that they can’t.

Since we cannot look into minds directly to find some bedrock, a proxy method must be found. The original epistemic formula, implicit in early gay-rights activism though rarely spelled out, was that you knew a person must be same-sex-attracted if he said he was, because there was no good reason for him to be confused about this, or to pretend. Back in the day, the social context was so hostile and punishing for gay people, it would be irrational for someone to say they were gay when they were not. This meant you could usually take the act of coming out as accurately revealing the state of profound and permanent inner feelings.

Academics chimed in with essays on “heteronormativity” and “compulsive heterosexuality” in society, implying that if a same-sex attraction ever did emerge against such oppressive odds, it could only be a sign of true inner authenticity: a rare delicate flower, improbably growing on stony ground. But conversely, the surrounding atmosphere of homophobia and the heavy expectation of normality made professions of a straight sexual orientation unreliable. In this case, unlike the other, there was good reason to lie to others about who you really were, or even lie to yourself. Despite your protestations, onlookers couldn’t be sure; and nor, for that matter, could you.

When transactivists came along in the Nineties, effectively they adopted the same strategy: you can tell someone is “really” trans if she says she is, because it would be crazily self-defeating to lie. For decades, LGBT activists have kept up this narrative of intense cultural persecution, even as the UK became one of most accepting countries for sexual minorities in the world. Indeed, the Conversion Practices bill itself is the fruit of furious myth-making, with lobby groups suggesting to politicians that Britain is riddled with dastardly ECT-wielding doctors and stern-faced religious exorcists, blithely ignoring the rainbow flags draped all over the Royal Colleges and the Church of England.

As gay and trans identities have become extremely popular in young people, the preferred strategy has not adjusted. According to rainbow dogma, such people can only be expressing authentic realness when they announce their identities, whereas those who say they are straight or “cis” may just be blindly going along with the normie flow. Professed heterosexuality is always suspicious and can legitimately be challenged, in case there is a less conventional, more socially oppressed orientation trembling shyly underneath, waiting to be coaxed into the sunlight.

But by including legal protection for straight people, the Conversion Practices bill produces a reductio ad absurdum of this whole approach. The logic of infallible authenticity, as applied to heterosexual identities, patently collapses; for almost every gay person started off by sincerely self-interpreting as straight. Things are even worse with asexual identities which — ludicrously — are also protected by the bill, according to the accompanying notes. As a concerned mother worried about your lonely son, it seems you will not be permitted to try to robustly argue him into trying to find a girlfriend, if he is telling you at the time that he is asexual. Otherwise, though, it is fine. But since, with the right sort of encouragement, today’s depressed asexual might easily become tomorrow’s happy lothario, why on earth should the law protect awkward teenagers from what they don’t want to hear?

Ultimately, the point extends to gay and trans identities too. These days, we don’t so much have compulsory heterosexuality in  youth culture as compulsory queerness, and it no longer makes sense to say that the only plausible reason a young person would tell herself she was gay or trans, is if she “really” was. There are several alternative explanations available, including that a non-binary teaching assistant suggested she might be; or that she thinks it sounds cooler and more likely to win her friends than the boring straight alternative. This associated glamour can make self-interpretation confusing, and lead to false positives; not something that could have been said of the typical gay experience in the Sixties.

Suggested Reading

Labour’s war on gay rights

By Andrew Doyle

The insuperable problem here is that nobody can tell now whether a current identity will stick; not even its owner, and especially not when she is young and naive. And of course — a bit like television channels — though there used only to be two or three, there are now so many more to choose from. Ironically, gender studies academics used to stress this impermanence before it became inopportune to do so, always banging on about the endless flexibility of constructions of the self. What seems lifelong today may turn out to be temporary, and vice versa; in which case it cannot be remotely helpful to criminalize the verbal attempts of others to persuade you to take a different path. Critical discussion might feel rude, upsetting, or intrusive, but none of that means it is the business of the law to rule it out. And in fact, with the presumption of your own infallibility about yourself removed, attempts to “convert” you may turn out to be perceptive recognition of what there is, or what still could fruitfully be.

The fantasy of an immutable orientation or identity, offering a key to your true nature, sits awkwardly with human powers of self-interpretation and self-creation. For as long as you are alive, your current understanding of yourself might change, because of social influence or personal reinterpretation or something else entirely. No amount of felt certainty that this won’t happen can rule the possibility out. Life is full of surprises. And sometimes conversion from one set of outworn ideas or feelings to another can be a form of personal salvation.

Now take a look at the recent Senate hearings on sex changes for children. Again, the Dems were unanimous, and their position utterly unchanged: the “safety” and “effectiveness” of transing children is beyond any dispute; no one but Republican bigots oppose it; and any problems can be dealt with retroactively by malpractice suits. (The only slight concession to reality was an end to the lie that transing children was the only way to stop them killing themselves. But no apology for the lie, of course. Or for the human wreckage the lie caused.) The Cass Review never happened. Affirmation-only guidelines never existed.

Gays and lesbians and feminists and liberals who oppose transing children and defend the fact of the sex binary? Senators Sanders, Markey, and Baldwin don’t seem to know we even exist. Unsurprising. MS NOW, to take one example, has never had a single guest who’s been critical of child sex changes. The Cass Review, when it has even been mentioned, has been instantly dismissed. The gay and lesbian press, such as it is, reports on all this as a trans genocide in full swing.

That’s where we are in gay and lesbian world this Pride month. Queer as fuck. About a year ago, I wrote an op-ed for the NYT warning that the queer takeover of what’s left of the gay and lesbian rights movement was hurting support for gay causes. I expected a huge backlash, but received a huge private thank you from gays and lesbians on the street in Provincetown and throughout the reader comments. I asked for a debate among gays and Democrats. But a year later, no debate has happened outside social media tweet-storms, no gay or lesbian institution or public official has said a word, and the policies — profoundly unpopular, rooted in critical gender and queer theory — are hegemonic.

Which is why it is only appropriate that Zohran Mamdani put out a Pride statement referring solely to “queer and trans people”, excising LGBs from the movement we built. Mamdani described all gays and lesbians with a word, “queer”, chosen by only 6% of us in a recent survey. (Check Google Trends to see how rarely the word was even a search item until the 2020s.) They even took Stonewall from us. Rachel Maddow called it “a riot by trans people”. Try to find a single trans person in the photos of that night in 1969. Now ask any gay under 40 who Frank Kameny was. No clue.

The rigid refusal to compromise on this radicalization — they also changed the Pride flag to insert mandatory references to TQ+, the discredited BLM themes, and “brown people” — is merely a part of re-writing the narrative back to the Seventies, before AIDS and gay integration. There is little attempt to engage the straight majority with reason anymore — or even gays and lesbians queasy at these new mandates — just an impulse to provoke, condemn, or cancel them.

I suspect the queers are so insulated they don’t even realize that this is what they have been effectively saying to Joe Public for a decade now. Remember when they told you that gay and lesbian people were just like everyone else, and just wanted to be left alone? Scrap that. We’re actually queers who believe marriage is a “fundamentally violent institution” and that the sex binary is a white supremacist fiction. Now we’ve gotten marriage, we will indoctrinate your kids in queer and gender theory, fire you if you don’t repeat our pronouns, force girls to shower next to boys in locker rooms, give irreversible sex changes to minors, and insist that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

And, after a few years of this kind of messaging, and no pushback from regular gays and lesbians … guess what? Support for marriage equality from the center and center-right is nosediving. Gallup shows a decline from 71% to 65% support for gay marriage among all Americans in just three years. Among Independents, support has dropped by six points in four years, from 73% to 67%; and among Republicans by 18 points, from 55% in 2022 to just 37% today — setting us back 20 years. On the morality of same-sex relations, the drops are more acute: down 10 points among Indies and 21 points among Republicans. As someone who played a part in bringing those Republicans and moderates around to gay marriage, it’s distressing to see what the queer overreach has done — especially in red states.

We’re told that this is all about “hate”. Really? The same polls that show growing opposition to men in women’s sports, and against the transing/sterilization/mutilation of children with gender dysphoria, also show huge support for civil rights protections for trans adults. But the distinction between adults and children, like the one between men and women, doesn’t exist for the Democrats. The only mention of “transgender” in the 2024 Dem autopsy was to note how Trump’s ad on the issue was “very effective” … no shit. But the response is to keep giving Trump ever more ammunition!

Perceived morality of gay or lesbian relations, by party ID

Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, please tell me whether you   personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong. Gay or   lesbian relations Figures are the percentage “morally acceptable”

Within the gay and lesbian world, the policing of even mild dissent is oppressive. Express skepticism and you’ll be instantly accused of “pulling up the ladder” after you; or “throwing trans people under the bus”; or of being a “pick-me” gay who wants his rights but denies them to trans people. But when you ask them what civil right we are saying should be given gay people but denied trans people, they come up empty. Because there isn’t one.

I want every trans person to have every civil right a gay person has — and they do! What I disagree with is a new, hard-Left, genderqueer political agenda — which has nothing to do with gays and lesbians at all, except that it actually endangers LG children with gender dysphoria, and threatens women’s rights as well. I don’t have the slightest problem with people calling themselves queer and innovating whatever lifestyles they want. God bless them. I simply have a problem saying that 6% should define and brand the other 94% of relative normies.

Yes, some truly ugly forces have seized on this own-goal by the queers to ramp up real hatred of gays and trans people. That’s vile. But the Right didn’t invent men-in-women’s-sports or sex changes for children. They just responded to these things being imposed on them by fiat. They were growing more tolerant before the queer onslaught. The last GOP convention dropped opposition to marriage equality; Trump himself has said he’s “fine” with gay marriage; he appointed an openly gay married man with children as treasury secretary; his first Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, wrote the majority opinion for Bostock that secured employment rights for both gays and trans people. What more do you want? YMCA at every rally? Homoerotic AI images of Trump? An army of gays working for Trump? You got ‘em! And the Gallup nosedive began under Biden and Levine, not Trump. What the queers are doing, in other words, is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Which, one suspects, is what they really yearn for. Marriage equality was a huge blow to the queer Left. They hated the idea that gay men and women could just be normies, primarily interested in getting on with their lives, marriages, jobs, and children once their civil rights were settled. Where’s the edgy radicalism in that? What are activists gonna do if that happens? Get a life? A truly terrifying prospect for those clinging to adolescent revolt in their 40s.

And so, for the first time since 2015, I genuinely fear for the future of marriage equality. Our rights are vulnerable without broad public support. And that support was based on a moderate approach and universal language, with conservative as well as liberal variations. Replace that moderation, persuasion, and live-and-let-live ethos with a hectoring, radical, genderqueer revolution? We could lose everything. And we are beginning to.

Dismiss my arguments if you want. The queers and Dems certainly do. But I did the actual work of persuading and engaging people for a couple of lonely, exhausting decades. I learned something from it. And what I learned suggests we are making a terrible mistake; and if we don’t correct soon, and drastically, the Fifties will beckon once more. They’ll be calling us queers again. Because we just gave them permission.

***

This article was first published on Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish. 

Claims that homophobia is “surging” particularly among young men are proving promising fodder for clickbait publications as well as for fundraising drives by LGBT advocacy groups. The non-profit GLAAD has warned of a steady uptick in anti-LGBTQ incidents. This, in turn, seems to be causing unnecessary worry: Stonewall has claimed that less than half of LGBTQ+ people feel safe holding their partner’s hand in public.

The good news is nearly all of such claims of a growing homophobia “epidemic” in Western countries are completely unfounded. The bad news? Correcting this sort of narrative requires careful attention to survey design, trend interpretation, and definitional changes, precisely the kind of work that most readers and much popular media will not do.

Here’s an example. Last month, PinkNews reported that “men born in the 2000s are far more likely to hold conservative views on LGBTQ+ rights compared to previous generations”. This narrative was picked up by other media outlets and spread across social media. Soon a flurry of speculation on potential causes erupted on social media. Is this because of incel forums and far-Right propaganda? Have trans issues caused a backlash against the LGBs? Are we entering a new era of Christian traditionalism?

For those asking if there was any truth behind the original premise, the short answer is no. It’s true that PinkNews based their article on credible research undertaken by Dr Ryan Burge at the American Institute for Boys and Men. Yet Dr Burge’s research was not about generational attitudes towards homosexuality; instead it looked at how changing religious views correspond to gender. When I contacted Dr Burge about the PinkNews reporting he called it a misrepresentation. “The Pew Religious Landscape Survey data does not indicate increasing homophobia among young men,” he clarified. Any apparent difference amongst young men today and previous generations “is almost certainly a methodological artifact, not a real trend”, he explained to me.

But the “take economy” allows no time to carefully sift through the numbers. Content-oriented media outlets like PinkNews are structurally incentivized to privilege speed, moral urgency, and emotional resonance over careful methodological scrutiny.

More from this author

Meet the new gay dissidents

By Jarryd Bartle

No surprise, then, that PinkNews has distorted data before. In response to UK Home Office figures last year which indicated that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes were down for the second year in the row, the news site claimed they were false statistics. PinkNews’s argument wasn’t just that hate crimes are chronically underreported (which they certainly are), but that the Met Police’s data, which covers most of London, was excluded, and thus “likely under-represents national totals for LGBTQ+ hate crime”. The implication was that actual hate crime numbers could be skyrocketing.

This conveniently leaves out why the Met Police’s data was excluded last year. A flaw in the previous system meant that hate crime “markers” which applied to one offense could be automatically applied to all offenses within the same incident. As a result, Met statistics from 2021 to 2024 had overstated the number of hate crime offenses. Even with that inflation, LGBTQ+ hate crime numbers had continued to decline. Perhaps things really aren’t as terrible as PinkNews would like them to be?

We can’t only blame the journalists, though. Sometimes researchers on homophobia oversell their conclusions. In a recent New York Times guest essay, psychologists Dr Tessa Charlesworth and Dr Eli Finkel argued that apparent cultural progress in gay acceptance — reflected (for some reason) in the widespread popularity of gay hockey show Heated Rivalry — masked a far more troubling reversal in public attitudes.

According to Charlesworth’s research, “the decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then”. This conclusion was based on large-scale survey data which captured implicit and explicit social attitudes in the US. Between 2021 and 2024, anti-gay bias had risen by around 10%, with the trends being “distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25”.

Again, the data is misleading. Far from supporting the implication that young Americans are driving a new wave of homophobia, the reported “increase” in anti-gay bias amounts to a modest proportional rise from historically low baselines. It’s not a return to earlier levels of hostility. Even after the post-2021 uptick, Gen Z and Alpha remain the least anti-gay cohorts in absolute terms: they show the lowest average anti-gay/pro-straight bias scores compared with their elders.

More from this author

Is this the end of genderism?

By Jarryd Bartle

So what is the real story about social attitudes towards gay people in Western countries? Long-running attitude surveys, which continue to offer the strongest evidence of social change, reveal that a persistent majority accepts, not merely tolerates, gay relationships.

In the United States, Gallup’s long-running Values and Beliefs polling shows that Americans’ acceptance of gay or lesbian relations has increased markedly over the past two decades. In 2001, only about 40% of US adults said same-sex relations were morally acceptable. That proportion rose steadily to a high of 71% in 2022. Since then, the trend has evened out to roughly 64% across the past few years.

Approval of same-sex marriage in the US has followed a similar trajectory. When Gallup first asked the question in 1996, only about 27% of Americans said same-sex marriage should be legal. By 2004, support had grown to around 42%, and in 2011 it reached a majority for the first time, remaining above 50% into the early 2010s. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, support continued to climb, reaching around 70–71% in Gallup polling in 2022–2023. This year, in subsequent surveys, support plateaued at around 68%.

The plateauing of social attitudes in these surveys is sometimes framed as a “backlash”. However, the flattening of trend lines after a period of rapid social change is actually the norm. Attitudes rarely move in a straight upward line indefinitely. Once a broad social consensus has formed, gains tend to slow down and fluctuate within a narrow band year-to-year. We see identical trends with acceptance of divorce or moral permissibility of sex outside of marriage, both of which showed long plateaus once majority approval was reached.

One survey in the UK has been asking about the acceptability of same-sex relationships since 1983. According to the British Social Attitudes’ latest report, attitudes toward same-sex relationships have transformed over the past four decades. In 1983, 17% of adults said a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex is “never wrong”; by 2022 that number had risen to 67%. As expected, those who said such relationships are “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9% over the same period. Other surveys, like YouGov Polling, have found similar results.

By all accounts, despite the headlines, gays and lesbians in Western countries have never been more accepted. It’s important to pause and reflect on just how rapid this moral victory has been. In 1988, the year I was born, the UK Parliament passed Section 28 of the Local Government Act, prohibiting local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” — a measure with widespread support. A year earlier, The Sun published an article entitled “Fly away gays – and we will pay!” offering free one-way plane tickets to Norway to gay activists so they could leave the country for good. Such a world now seems unimaginable to us.

Creating a narrative of rising homophobia without solid evidence also causes real, tangible damage. Research about “minority stress” shows that anticipated violence and perceived stigma significantly contribute to anxiety and are associated with rising rates of depression. These effects do not require an increase in experiences of homophobia; they require only the belief that homophobic experiences are likely. When the underlying data is ambiguous, “rising homophobia” narratives risk intensifying perceived danger and worsening distress unnecessarily.

We gays and lesbians should be celebrating our victories, not indulging in panic over dubious numbers. Ignore the doom merchants, the future is brighter — and gayer — than you’ve been led to believe.

So it’s not surprising then that we are seeing a splintering of gay men away from big tent “queer” identity. One faction is the “LGB without the T” crowd who wish to segregate sexual deviance from gender bending. Another is formed of the homo-nationalist movements, who seek to align gay liberation with a white Western ideal.

Despite appearances of a united front, rabid infighting has generally been the norm within the so-called LGBT community — or the LGBTQQIAAP2S+ community (yes, really), as some now insist on calling it. Lesbians, and particularly lesbian-feminists, have wavered back and forth in their tolerance for gay male sexual excesses. In her book, Anticlimax (1990), the radical feminist Sheila Jefferys famously documented what she saw as an “eroticizing of power difference” inherent to gay male subcultures — particularly our penchant for sadomasochism and the rise of macho “clone culture”.

Among gay men too, the Nineties and early 2000s saw significant divides. “Anti-assimilationist” queers such as Michael Warner questioned the gay movement’s focus on inclusion within traditional institutions like marriage and the military in his book The Trouble with Normal (1999). The homosexual conservative Andrew Sullivan meanwhile argued in his own book, Virtually Normal (1995), that gays should become model citizens in order to be embraced by mainstream society.

More recently, a new group of gay male academics, writers and artists have entered the fray providing “post-liberal” or “dissident” perspectives on gay life. Their essays are collected in a new book Inversion: Gay Life After The Homosexual (Verdurin) edited by Pierre d’Alancaisez and Amir Naaman.

More from this author

How Grindr tamed gay desire

By Jarryd Bartle

The editors frame the collection around what they call a “crisis” in homosexuality — the crisis being that gay men have become “normies”, “albeit a peculiar kind of normies that get a whole month of Pride dedicated to them.” Their fear is that as the LGBTQ+ umbrella expands and various formerly fringe gay identities become ever more mainstream, “it becomes difficult to articulate what position gay men, former social pioneers and cultural taboo breakers, play in society. Even the historical characterization of the homosexual as exceptional is thrown into doubt with the advent of this crisis.”

One clear theme unites the gay dissidents who contribute essays to Inversion — a wish to reinvigorate a sense of profanity and vice within homosexuality. Unlike previous anti-assimilationist queer movements, the contributors do not wish to abolish “institutions of normalcy” nor to frame mainstream heterosexual culture as the enemy. Indeed, in their view, homosexuality ought to be pushed to the margins in order for it to thrive.

Anthropologist Roger Lancaster, in his contribution, bemoans the “professional managerial class” for sanitizing homosexuality into a consumerist lifestyle, and seeks — through Marxist analysis — to posit a more authentic “working class” faggotry bubbling under the surface. In a similar vein, the writer Travis Jeppenson laments the loss of the early queer punk scene, where homosexuality and nihilistic rebellion were intimately intertwined in the music of Pansy Division and Tribe 8 or the films of Bruce LaBruce and Gregg Araki. He calls on modern gay men to “nurture our inner faggotry” and to externalize “the sordidness that resides within”.

For these post-liberals, there is an inherent “scandal” to homosexuality — one that cannot and should not be normalized or sanitized by corporate Pride parades or cutesy Netflix shows about gay teen romance. In their reading, the authentic gay man is not happily partnered in the suburbs but on his knees in a public toilet.

He is also perpetually alone. According to co-editor d’Alancaisez, there is an irresolvable individualism to gay male identity precluding all strong community bonds. He argues that gay men are best understood as lone wolves “freely dissociating from a community that he is no longer able to imagine, deserving neither pity nor rescue”. Only when these men are threatened does a “gay community” form — whether during the AIDS crisis or the shared grief that followed the Admiral Duncan nail bombings of 1999. Without a clear enemy, any hope of gay communion is impossible.

Underlying many of the contributions in Inversion is sexual grievance. Most of the writers are older millennials — and they complain surprisingly frequently about being overlooked on Grindr due to their perceived politics or ideology. Co-editor Naaman constructs an elaborate theory of sexual psychopathology in order to air out his dating troubles. As an Israeli gay man living in Europe, he is sick of being “expected to voice his stance on the war in Gaza before he can be allowed to participate in chills, druggy, after-parties, or random hookups”. Pro-Palestinian homosexuals, he argues, are driven by an erotic attraction to primitive rebellion. He notes — in overloaded syntax — that these men are “…locked in a masturbatory, fetishizing gaze at the theaters of violence on their phones: in the onanistic eroticizing of morality, yearning to become one with the actors in the tragedy playing out on the screen.”

A deep fear of “biopolitics” also plagues many of the gay dissidents in the collection. The term, popularized by Michel Foucault, describes how modern institutions regulate through the setting of norms of health and productivity. Here, it is deployed to critique HIV-prevention efforts like PrEP and an undue focus on LGBT mental health. Writer and “independent researcher” David Moulton appears to be in a state of post-Covid paranoia. He fears that society has ruined the uniquely “gay art of suffering” reflected in the literary works of unrepentant sodomites like Jean Genet, who occupied a world of pimps, prostitutes and erotic longing.

In the most extreme case, Marcas Lancaster speaks in a derivative Burroughsian register about his early life of sexual abuse and neglect while romanticizing the tragic excesses of AIDS-era perversion. Lancaster describes himself as a “failed gay” for not becoming one of the “Sadian heroes, who wore their lesions like badges of honor” and for “making the ultimate sacrifice for what they believed was a higher cause”. For the post-liberals, the AIDS crisis haunts all attempts to normalize homosexuality, revealing as it does the underlying degeneracy of gay sex. The lesson that they draw from this is that we must all make peace with our place at the fringes of society.

Of all the attempts to chart a course for gay men away from mainstream queer culture, theirs is the most depressing. It is, thankfully, also not very convincing.

More from this author

Being gay is not biological

By Jarryd Bartle

It’s telling that there is no mention of romantic love anywhere in Inversion’s near 500 pages. Indeed any hint at emotional warmth is quickly shunned for an empty “transgression” — lacking any transcendent ideal. I suspect many of the gay male critics in the collection could very well resolve their inner turmoil through a simple combination of the — troublingly “biopolitical” — interventions of sunlight, cardio and tender affection.

There is, however, a slim glimmer of hope buried in one contribution. Philosopher Ran Heilbrunn outlines the failures of queer theory to account for gay male desire. One such desire is the preference amongst gay men for distinctly masculine physical beauty — contrary to the anti-hierarchical gender bending of the queer theorists. The obsession with male beauty is the thread that runs through a variety of homoerotic traditions, from Theognis of Megara to Robert Mapplethorpe. It strikes me that such high aestheticism — vitalist and passionate — could very well form the basis of a post-queer culture, but such a model is fundamentally anathema to the vacant despair preferred by our post-liberal essayists.

This more aspirational vision of gay male community is not without precedent. As historian Blake Smith notes in this collection, prior to the modern “gay homosexual” there existed a variety of homoerotic subcultures: from the formalized pederasty of Ancient Greece to the effeminate “invert” men (“fairies” or “mollies”) of the early 20th century who sought out rent boys and heterosexual “trade”. As I’ve written before, the mostly forgotten artists, scientists and thinkers who clustered around Adolf Brand’s magazine Der Eigene in late-19th-century Germany, saw their desires as an extension of refined taste and romantic male friendship. The past was complex and it demonstrates that homosexuality can come in many forms, both the lowly and degrading and cultivated and meaningful.

So desperate are the post-liberal dissidents to reject the “normie” homosexual that they have become trapped in an ironic appreciation for the worst features of past homosexual subcultures. I can only hope that their cynicism does not catch on and that gay men who find themselves out of place within contemporary queer culture aspire to something far more beautiful, communal and sustaining.

But you might struggle to make the same case for Graham Linehan, the comedy writer most famous for Father Ted. Yet there he was, apprehended by five armed police officers after landing at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, as though he were a gangster of the most feral kind. His crime? Posting a handful of tweets that caused some offense.

As for those tweets: on 19 April, he posted an image of a transactivist protest in London along with the caption “a photo you can smell”. When challenged by a user for the “unnecessary comment”, he replied: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.” The third was posted on 20 April, and in it Graham wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Those of us accustomed to the churn and clatter of social media have become adept at explaining the obvious to the congenitally literal-minded. And so, with infinite patience, Graham outlined the thinking behind this comment on his Substack, saying that it “was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence”. In any case, as the lawyer Sarah Phillimore pointed out, there is nothing illegal about tweeting advice that any father would have said to their daughters about how to handle a men encroaching on their personal space. “If you want to arrest my dad for this,” she writes, “he’s in a jar on the dresser.”

For Graham, this is only the latest act in an ongoing circus of persecution: one with multiple ringmasters. He was first contacted by the police back in October 2018, when he was given a verbal warning for “deadnaming” and “misgendering” trans activist Stephanie Hayden. A later police visit was prompted by a complaint about Graham’s tweets by Adrian Harrop, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was temporarily suspended for “insulting” online conduct. “This was the visit that really shocked my wife and frightened her”, Graham told me. “It’s one of the main reasons we broke up”.

There has, over the years, been a concerted effort by trans activists to weaponize the police against their victims, aided by the their capture of law enforcement. Consider the different standards at play here. It is now commonplace for trans activists to threaten violence and rape against their adversaries, and yet police rarely investigate. After two SNP politicians were photographed at a trans rally in Glasgow in front of “decapitate TERFS” placard, complete with guillotine, no arrests were made. Compare this with the routine hounding of feminists by police simply for expressing their gender-critical views. Perhaps the police might wish to refresh their memory about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on sex in the Equality Act, and its implications for the rights of women and gay people.

More from this author

The fools who captured the Fringe

By Andrew Doyle

The misuse of police powers has been bad enough, but it has been accompanied by Graham’s broader cancellation by the very industry that once feted him. Unable to make a living in television since 2018 — due to his vocal opposition to gender ideology and the threat it poses to women’s rights — he had no choice but to relocate to Arizona where he has been working on a sitcom for Friendly Fire Studios, with me and a new company we have established with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and writer and producer Martin Gourlay. A full draft of the series has already been written and, if we can successfully put it into production, it will be the sharpest riposte to those activists who have tried to ensure that Graham never writes again.

The farce of Graham’s arrest at Heathrow has already garnered worldwide attention. J.K. Rowling has described it as “totalitarianism”. Joyce Carol Oates has cited it as proof that “the UK is, or has become, an authoritarian government”. Perhaps sensing that the UK is fast becoming an international laughing stock, even Keir Starmer has weighed in, his spokesperson making clear that the police should be focusing on issues that “matter most to their communities”. Given his party’s appalling track record on free speech, this is almost as funny as a line from Father Ted.

But as absurd as it sounds, the arrest of a comedy writer at an airport is by no means the most egregious example of state overreach in recent years. We have seen journalists visited by police for wrongthink; citizens imprisoned for posting memes; prosecutions for controversial Halloween costumes; teenagers convicted and jailed for offensive jokes. Freedom of Information requests by The Times revealed that over 12,000 people are arrested each year for offensive comments posted online, and an estimated quarter of a million of us have been logged by police as perpetrators of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), mostly without being informed.

In spite of all this, there has been no serious effort among the political class to actually change things. There have been occasional overtures: the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has called for the abolition of NCHIs, while previous Home Secretaries have explicitly instructed the College of Policing to end the practice. But all have been ignored. The Court of Appeal has ruled that NCHIs are “plainly an interference with freedom of expression”. Yet nothing has changed, because the activists deeply embedded in the system believe they know best.

There is, though, plenty that our elective representatives could do to address Britain’s totalitarian spiral, if only they could grow a spine. For starters, Parliament should abolish the College of Policing; its activist influence, long apparent, has led to inconsistent and arguably unlawful behavior by officers trained to believe that it is their job to audit the speech and emotions of the public they serve.

More from this author

Why I'm leaving the UK

By Andrew Doyle

Parliament should further abolish all “hate speech” legislation. Given that no two governments can agree on a definition of “hate”, these nebulous laws are routinely exploited to chill free speech. Section 18 of the Public Order Act 1986 explicitly outlaws ‘“threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior” if it is intended “to stir up racial hatred”. Quite apart from the liberal principle that the state should not be attempting to intuit our private motivations, the charge of “racism” is so often misapplied that the law is effectively rendered useless.

Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 proscribe the sending of material that is deemed “grossly offensive”: a hopelessly subjective notion. The Communications Act further prohibits words that cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. If every person who posted such messages on social media were convicted tomorrow, the prison population would exceed the number of law-abiding citizens. Either way, these laws are clearly both draconian and incoherent.

Moreover, the very concept of “protected characteristics” makes a nonsense of the principle of equality before the law. Few would object to protections against discrimination on the basis of immutable qualities in the workplace. but there is no sound reason to create differential tiers of law enforcement. In all “hate crime” guidance, “perception of the victim” is the determining factor, as a 2019 report from the Home Office made clear. No actual evidence is required for someone to be recorded as a hate criminal.

Finally, we should introduce sensible laws on “incitement to violence”. The Lucy Connolly case has drawn international attention to the folly of our present laws, in which a nasty but hastily deleted tweet by someone with no influence whatsoever resulted in a 31-month prison sentence. The US standard, known as the “Brandenburg Test”, offers a model of best practice. It makes clear that the speech in question must be deliberately aimed at inciting violence, likely to do so, and that any impact should be imminent. If the UK had an equivalent on the statute books, police would no longer be wasting so much time and money on offensive tweets and memes.

There can no longer be any doubt that free speech is under life-support in Britain, and to keep ignoring the sheer weight of evidence is a labor of perversely Herculean proportions. Many commentators are claiming that the arrest of Graham Linehan could be a tipping point, but this will only be true if the public’s rising frustration can be directed into action. It has been grotesque to witness the state’s ongoing harassment of an acclaimed comedy writer, but perhaps one consolation is that it might finally jolt Westminster out of its complacency.

But then, in June, the mask slipped. He was sentenced for six counts of making indecent images of children, three counts of causing a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, and the rape of a 12-year-old boy referred to in court as Child A.

In early 2024, Ireland had targeted Child A on Grindr, an adult hook-up site for gay men, and painstakingly arranged to bring him to the flat he shared with his partner, David Sutton, a volunteer at PiS. Once there, Ireland prepared chemsex drugs in a bong, lined up pornography, then raped the child.

The court heard that Child A had contemplated jumping in front of a train after his rape. Instead, the day after the rape, he told his teacher what had happened. Had it not been for the bravery of Child A, Ireland and Sutton might never have been investigated.

It was only then that Ireland’s carefully cultivated public image began to disintegrate. He and Sutton were arrested just days later in April 2024. Alongside Ireland’s rape of Child A, the pair were initially investigated for the distribution and possession of indecent images of children — but by August 2024, police had uncovered a combined total of 45 offenses.

Despite the huge number of offenses under investigation, Ireland went to great lengths to conceal even more. A phone owned by PiS and exclusively used by Ireland was disposed of and never found. Investigators discovered a message sent via another device from Ireland to Sutton telling him to “delete everything”.

All the while, Ireland had been pivotal to the PiS movement. His position allowed him open access to children and young people. He accompanied police on visits to schools to give talks on LGBT awareness and was also a patron of Educate and Celebrate, an organization that promoted transgender ideology in nurseries, schools, and higher education facilities. How had someone like Ireland, with such dangerously twisted sexual proclivities, become so trusted in the community, particularly around children?

Since the sentencing, I have spoken with several whistleblowers, as well as those who claim there was “no evidence” that Ireland was operating in plain sight, and who have denied that evidence was ignored. But the whistleblowers all had evidence, which I was given access to, that the information they provided to police, other Pride members, and Surrey County Council should have prompted a robust investigation into Ireland.

More from this author

The grooming gang scandal isn’t over

By Julie Bindel

When Ireland first turned up in Surrey in 2018, he was an exuberant 34-year-old brimming with flamboyant confidence. When he announced that he was setting up a massive Pride event, gay residents were delighted. PiS was an immediate hit.

As Ireland’s influence grew, he cultivated strong ties with the police. A passionate trans activist, he positioned himself as a partner in their efforts to reduce “hate crime” in the community. The police, in turn, welcomed the positive publicity and affirmation that came from associating with this self-styled figurehead of the local LGBT scene. His influence over the force was so pronounced that in 2021, when Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner Lisa Townsend called for single-sex domestic abuse and rape crisis services, Ireland posted a photo of one of his officer chums sitting in the rainbow police vehicle holding up a sign that read: “TERFy Townsend not fit for office.” After Townsend raised the incident in the media, Chief Constable Gavin Stephens urged her to apologize to Ireland, informing her that he was “a friend of Surrey police”.

There were other warning signs. “It was very clear this wasn’t a Pride that was inclusive for lesbians,” recalls Maria Esposito, who attended initial planning meetings. “There was an obsessive focus on queer and trans stuff. Stephen portrayed himself as a fierce LGBTQ+ all-inclusive advocate and a self-anointed figurehead. We never went back.”

Ireland also swiftly appointed himself as Safeguarding Lead. Yet at the same time, PiS volunteers started to notice that he surrounded himself with young people who called him “daddy”. And it was becoming clear that a significant portion of his community outreach was directed at children. “If you look at PiS’s social media activity in 2019 and 2020, so much is focused on enticing children to take part,” one local lesbian says. “Stephen Ireland clearly set up PiS to get access to children.”

When volunteers voiced their disapproval, Ireland rebuffed all concerns, claiming he was in a “polyamorous relationship” — something that is legitimized and glamorized under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. And here is a problem with the expansion of the LGBTQ+ activism platform: some of the movement’s current agenda acts as a useful cover-up for nastier elements with depraved intentions. On International Fetish Day, Ireland was photographed leading a leather-clad person on all fours in a collar and dog mask. The “pup”, as discovered by one of the whistleblowers I spoke to, was a 17-year-old girl.

Glaring red flags like this are now far harder to confront. Pride has evolved away from its original purpose — seeking tolerance, acceptance and equality — and a new, hyper-permissive culture has taken root, which is normalizing predatory behavior. Unfortunately, the new openness for fetish, sexualized public displays, and Pride’s celebration of “transing” children has provided a convenient smokescreen for abusive men like Ireland.

Suggested reading

Social media is engineering amnesia

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Not that some people didn’t notice. Over the years, numerous whistleblowers from PiS spoke up, expressing concerns about Ireland’s behavior. They worried that Ireland was procuring very young men and boys for sexual gain — but their testimony fell on deaf ears.

Marion Harding, one of seven volunteers who resigned for those very reasons, told me that she had tried to get Surrey County Council to investigate Ireland back in 2021, but no action was ever taken. At the time, Ireland had introduced Sam Powell, then barely 18, into his relationship with then-partner Charlie Watts. “That was a red flag for me, because Sam looked so young,” Harding tells me. “He told everyone that Sam was his cousin, and then that changed to being Charlie’s cousin, then somebody’s brother, and he had appointed himself as the PiS Safeguarding Lead. How can the most senior person in an organization do that? It is totally against protocol.”

Eventually, Harding made her misgivings known at a special meeting called to discuss the issues at which other volunteers were present. “I told him, ‘Every bloody thing is about kinks and pups and fuck knows what. What you’re in is a threesome’,” she says. “He didn’t like that and shouted that I needed to educate myself, that I was being discriminatory.”

“I asked him, ‘If polyamory falls under LGBTQ+, what’s next? Paedophiles and rapists?’ That’s when he lost it. He was jumping up and down, jabbing his finger at me — spitting in my face.” Harding resigned on the spot.

Shortly afterwards, Harding received a “cease and desist” letter. That letter was, incidentally, co-signed by Kel Finan-Cooke, who, along with her wife Lisa Finan-Cooke, was a volunteer and subsequently a director of PiS until both resigned, on the same day, in June 2023. Both women are Liberal Democrat councillors for Surrey Heath. The Finan-Cookes, both of whom I have spoken to, insist that Harding’s concerns were taken seriously, “but it seemed to just be about Stephen having a younger boyfriend, and because he was 18 it was perfectly legal”.

Another woman, who attended PiS until 2023, tells me she sent “dozens” of emails to Surrey County Council, but was “fobbed off”. “All I wanted was for them to look into Ireland,” she says.

Only now has it become so painfully clear how right the whistleblowers’ instincts were. For his numerous crimes, Ireland was sentenced to 24 years, and with an additional six on extended license, he will remain on the Sex Offenders Register for life. Sutton was sent to prison for four and a half years after being found guilty of three counts of making indecent photographs of children and one count of possession of an extreme pornographic image.

Today, Watts, Ireland’s former partner, is the current CEO, and joint Safeguarding Lead with Powell. Now 23 years old, Powell is also Director of Pride Hub as well as Director and Company Secretary of PiS.

And PiS is alive and well, with its big annual event due to take place in Guildford on 6 September. The crowdfunder for the Pride Hub, which is still live online, has raised £1,809 to date, and it retains Ireland’s smiling face as the “project owner” profile. A fundraiser for Surrey Pride Hub, described as a “warm, sober, safe space”, is also still online. The blurb, asking for money for “operational costs”, reads: “The Pride Hub… is ideal for social meet ups, chillout groups, gaming and movie nights.”

Following the sentencing of Ireland and Sutton, I visited the PiS Hub on Egham High Street, which was staffed by Powell. In the Hub, leaflets on trans and non-binary rights predominate. I could not see anything specifically focusing on gay men or lesbians — but collars, leads, ears, tails, and paw-themed items were available to buy.

Every whistleblower I spoke to, most of whom requested anonymity, expressed the belief that PiS should be disbanded entirely. “He built this organization,” one Surrey resident says, “and it’s in his image. Stephen Ireland put his stamp on everything and demanded loyalty, not accountability, encouraging a culture of silence.”

Regardless of all these concerns, and the sentencing of Ireland, several statutory bodies working with vulnerable children have maintained ties with PiS. Surrey Fostering, for example, which facilitates the recruitment and support of foster carers, has had a stall at PiS’s events ever since the organization started up, and continues to be involved with PiS this year. A post on the organization’s Facebook page from last year asks for volunteers to visit and befriend children in care in Surrey: “Could you offer a child or young person fun activities and one-to-one time?” (I contacted Surrey County Council several times to request a right of reply regarding this issue but was met with silence.)

Meanwhile, Surrey Police has maintained silence with respect to Ireland. Days after the sentencing, Surrey County Council finally distanced itself from PiS, declaring it no longer “truly representative” of the LGBTQ+ community. Council services, including Surrey Fire and Rescue, have been barred from attending Pride events in uniform or on duty.

And what about Pride on a national level? Not many years ago, it was indomitable. Institutions used to cheer it every step of the way. But cracks are appearing here too. A recent High Court ruling found that the Northumbria Police breached impartiality by allowing officers to march in uniform at Newcastle Pride 2024. And Police Scotland barred their officers from attending Pride events while in uniform. The era of tacit state approval of all things Pride is waning.

Sponsors, too, have started distancing themselves from the movement. This year, three quarters of event organizers have reported a decrease in corporate partnerships. A quarter have seen as much as a 50% drop, according to the UK Pride Organisers Network. But the money aside, many lesbians and gay men are also increasingly speaking out about how Pride no longer represents them.

Certainly, the Ireland case should make the whole organization ask itself some searching questions about who it stands for. What happened to safeguarding the vulnerable and scrutinizing the powerful? Why were whistleblowers ignored? Where is the public apology, the expression of concern, and the clear commitment to learning from these failures? But most important of all: how is it that an organization once rooted in justice and dignity was so easily co-opted as a cover for predatory behavior?

Six years later, I’m not so sure.

The hysterectomies went well. They were uncomplicated, and no one told me they regretted their surgery. But even though we were earnest, well-meaning clinicians, were we doing the right thing?

In 2019, I took a job as an Obs and Gyn doctor at a nonprofit in Iowa, after my private practice went out of business. I had a wife, twins in preschool, and a toddler. And, after working for a Catholic organization previously, I loved the progressive policies of my new employer. They provided medical transition services for transgender patients and even sponsored an out-of-hours LGBT clinic for patients who might not have felt comfortable in a mainstream doctor’s office. I was at the clinic, enthusiastically, once a month to provide my expertise.

I was quite surprised, though, that the clinic seemed almost exclusively T, without much LGB. Call me naive, but for the past decade, I had my head down: training, getting married, having kids and starting my practice. And by the time I looked up, the LGBT world was very different from the last time I had really been around other gay people.

I also had some uncomfortable questions: hadn’t we learned in medical school that most pediatric gender dysphoria resolves by adulthood? If so, did it make sense for young adolescents to transition to the opposite sex? Was it really plausible that transgender female athletes didn’t have a biological advantage over natal females? The accepted answers seemed counterintuitive to me. Nonetheless, I was on board, assuming that the experts who crafted medical society guidelines around gender medicine had followed the usual process, carefully weighing the evidence, and had reached a scientifically based consensus before making their recommendations regarding gender medicine.

And so, for a few years, I became the go-to gynecologist for gender-affirming hysterectomy referrals and other gynecology care for transgender patients. Although this was a very small part of my practice as a full-scope Ob/Gyn in a rural underserved area, I loved it. I enjoyed taking care of my patients. Some would drive hundreds of miles from their homes elsewhere in rural Iowa to receive their care with us. I was, I felt, providing a much-needed service. The patients came in knowing exactly what they wanted: a hysterectomy. Unlike hysterectomies for abnormal bleeding or pelvic pain which require full diagnostic tests, there was no need to document prior attempts at treatment, failures, and impact on the patient’s life. “Gender dysphoria” always got approved (with the requisite two letters, one from a mental health professional and one from a PCP). Unless they had a major contraindication, such as uncontrolled diabetes, we could just book them in.

Suggested reading

The gender vibe shift and its discontents

By Valerie Stivers

Of course, I counseled my patients. Would they like their ovaries conserved or removed? I was adept at discussing the risks and benefits of both approaches. I offered referrals for egg freezing if they desired oophorectomy. I discussed surgical risks and expected recovery. But these surgeries were still, I would joke to my assistant, “my easiest consult of the day”.

But as the years went by, I couldn’t help but notice some troubling trends. The trans patients who came to me had more and more mental health complications. I also started seeing a fair percentage of them who were really quite feminine — not very different in their gender presentation from my biologically female patients.

Then came the see patients who truly stymied me. One who particularly struck me was just 21 years old, born a female but who now identified as nonbinary. They requested a hysterectomy to conform to what they saw as their gender identity, but otherwise did not desire transmasculine medicalization such as testosterone or mastectomy, and had classically feminine mannerisms and dress.

I began to feel more uneasy that hysterectomy — surgery that carries numerous surgical risks, and results in irrevocable lifelong infertility — was necessarily the right thing for this new group of trans patients. But if they didn’t have any contraindications per se, I couldn’t really say no. After all, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a hysterectomy is “medically necessary for patients with gender dysphoria who desire this procedure”.

I thought the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines might help my dilemma. But as I puzzled over the “nonbinary” section, I found no clarity. The guidelines said that “motivations for accessing (or not accessing) gender-affirming medical interventions, including hormone treatment, surgeries, or both are heterogeneous and potentially complex and should be explored collaboratively before making decisions about physical interventions”. Though that seemed like solid advice, I did not feel particularly well equipped to do so as a surgeon, rather than a mental health professional.

Still wondering how best to take care of my patients, I went on a private online forum for O&G doctors to ask about how others addressed nonbinary individuals who requested gender affirming hysterectomy. I was told my question was “transphobic”. I was told that the surgery was “life saving” (presumably due to the suicidality brought on by the presence of one’s natal uterus).

This didn’t sit well with me. I wondered about one of my patients, who had detransitioned just a few years after her hysterectomy. Conventional wisdom said detransition almost never happened; that the rate was just 1%. Well, I certainly hadn’t done a hundred hysterectomies for gender affirmation. So what was going on here?

Curious as to whether detransitioning was more common than we thought, I found my way to Hannah Barnes’s excellent book, Time to Think, which detailed the scandal at Britain’s national youth gender medicine clinic, the Tavistock Center. Barnes found that distressed adolescent girls with no longstanding history of gender dysphoria were requesting to become boys at skyrocketing rates and being prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone with very little medical or psychiatric evaluation, while any adults raising concerns were labelled “transphobic”.

Similarly, through reading Jesse Singal’s work on the scientific basis of youth gender medicine, I learned about the relatively flimsy evidence it is built on. Certainly, there have been studies that seem to show favorable short-term mental health outcomes for youth who access gender medicine. But there have also been scandals about burying the outcomes of major studies at Johns Hopkins and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. It seems nobody has published a long-term study on how these young people are doing. In fact, the Tavistock in London, which was forced to close, failed to retain or share data on thousands of children. It seems that nobody knows the true rates of detransition for young people, but according to the most credible expert in the field, Dr Kinnon MacKinnon, who is himself an openly transgender man, “it is very unlikely to be only 1%”.

I was surprised that in America there were no specific requirements for the psychological evaluation of young adolescents before it was agreed that they were ready to start transitioning. WPATH guidelines say that the young person should have demonstrated “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least six months’ duration”, but in practice, even this minimum requirement has not consistently been followed. Even the minimum standard of a basic mental health evaluation of the patient, as advised, is controversial. Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy, president-elect of the US division of WPATH, has been an outspoken advocate of the “informed consent” model, deeming the requirement of any psychological evaluation prior to starting a medical transition to be excessive gatekeeping.

And while things are changing in Britain, where puberty blockers are no longer allowed for under-18s, there are many youth gender clinics in America which routinely provide prescriptions for puberty blockers or hormones at patients’ first appointments, even when a patient does not have a longstanding history of gender dysphoria since early childhood.

I also discovered an emerging population of detransitioners, individuals who took steps to medically transition and who have now reverted to their natal gender identity. Although some do not regret the changes they made to their bodies, others are profoundly distressed by them and have serious and credible critiques of the gender medicine system as it stands.

I had just assumed the experts crafting guidelines were ensuring that there was a body of evidence supporting the incontrovertible long-term benefits for these extraordinary treatments that were being performed on young people: puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and double mastectomy.

However, since there was no unbiased scientific organization of experts on transgender issues, American medical organizations relied on WPATH to guide them. Why wouldn’t they? As upstanding evidence-based scientific organizations, they generously assumed their counterparts were the same. But the holes in the evidence behind WPATH’s official standards of care become more obvious, suggesting that these organizations can rely only on themselves to evaluate the evidence. Interestingly enough, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons conducted its own review of the evidence, and, contrary to the interests of its own members, concluded that gender affirming mastectomy for minors is not ready to be rolled out.

Suggested reading

Can the Cass Report really be enforced?

By Dr Anna Hutchinson

Let me be clear. I understand that the profound psychological pain of gender dysphoria is real. And many adults have found happiness after medical transition. But what isn’t clear is whether medical transition for adolescents still developing their identities is the solution that many hope it is. A 2024 study from Finland — a progressive nation, with a strong social safety net and a tradition of women’s rights — found that medical transition in gender dysphoric adolescents did not decrease the risk of suicide.

After all, is it really credible that gender dysphoric adolescents, who we know have existed across societies for millennia, have recently become distraught to the point of widespread suicide because they could not access puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or mastectomies — none of which was available anywhere in the world until the first youth gender medicine clinic opened in the Netherlands in the Nineties? This is a serious claim. If it were true, of course, medical and surgical transition should be available to any gender dysphoric adolescent who desired it. But the evidence that medical transition itself — rather than the compassion and acceptance the patients find in a youth gender clinic — prevents suicide, is truly scanty.

In medicine, sometimes we get ahead of ourselves. New treatments which seem so promising at first don’t always work. The widespread prescription of oxycodone as a panacea for chronic pain in the 2000s is a good example. The doctors who prescribed it wanted to help their patients, but just didn’t realize the real harms caused by oxycodone until they became common enough to see.

I’d like to believe that we are people of science who realize when it is time to course correct. On gender medicine, the time is now.

It is time for experts in our professional organizations need to make evidence-based recommendations for standards of care. We need to seriously ask ourselves what the safest, least harmful interventions are in youth gender medicine, and hold these interventions to rigorous, data-driven standards. It may be reasonable at this juncture to halt new medical and surgical treatments for minors (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mastectomies and other surgeries) outside of well-designed, lengthy clinical trials. It is time to provide resources within the institutions of mainstream medicine for people who seek detransition care.

And to question whether “gender dysphoria” as an indication in and of itself for hysterectomy, without abnormal bleeding, pain, or any other diagnosis, should continue to bypass all of the checks and balances in our healthcare system for major surgery. My fellow gynecologists, if we are people of science who know right from wrong and care about our patients, we can surely find the courage to do this.

This is an edited version of a piece first published on The Ob/Gyn Power Project.

Billed as “a new book of fantasies for a new generation”, Anderson makes a conscious nod to Friday’s seminal oeuvre in her introduction, enquiring, Carrie Bradshaw-like, “how have women’s deepest internal desires changed?” For the purposes of girlboss science, ethnicity, religious belief, wage bracket, “sexual identity” and relationship status are recorded for each participant, though weirdly not age. And as with Friday’s written contributions, there is a lot of quasi-feminist posturing at the beginning of each section. “Sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believed we are expected to want,” we’re solemnly told. “Fantasies can help crystallise our wants and needs.”

One thing that definitely seems to have changed since the Seventies is that aesthetic standards in sex writing have improved, presumably honed by contact with a thousand self-published erotic novels on Amazon Kindle. In Friday’s day, the means of expression was often rough and ready but in Want it tends to be silky smooth. Devouring looks and quickening pulses are swiftly followed by competently handled flushes, swellings, openings, and so forth.

In this professionalised context, the odd bit of purple prose stands out all the more starkly. One image unlikely to leave me anytime soon describes “a saintly stake of flesh that points to the heavens, aloof and destined to do good” whose presence is soon to be felt against the protagonist’s “sopping dividing wall”. Other bits are simply baffling: “She pulls out a large onion and rubs it across my erection,” writes one contributor.

But perhaps a more interesting way in which desires seem to have changed over the decades is that they have got a lot more boring. Things like racial dynamics, incest, slavery, and bestiality — all casually included by Friday, to the point where it was hard to find much else in there — are absent from this collection, said to be the result of whittling down eight volumes worth of responses to the publisher’s call. In fact, this book is generally so vanilla that, perhaps anticipating disengagement from readers in advance, Anderson is forced to entice us with the promise that her own fantasy is included among the anonymous offerings. Certainly, this keeps the reader more alert than she otherwise might have been. Is it the one about the door handle, one wonders? Or maybe the one about the Weasley twins?

Suggested reading

Can Challengers make sex hot again?

By Kat Rosenfield

But since many of the main fantasy themes of Friday’s era still appear on message boards all over the internet, it seems likely that their invisibility in Want is not because women have become more repressed in the meantime, but rather because publishers have. Even in its relatively etiolated form, I presume extra fainting couches were required for this book’s sensitivity readers. The closest we get to genuine transgression of old taboos is a bit of water sports and a few tentative rape scenes, rushed through with evident embarrassment and a lot of editorial emphasis that — in this case only, for some reason — the fantasies absolutely do not crystallise the author’s “wants and needs”. Not all of the participants are so convincing. “I’d probably be super-upset if my actual dentist tried to fuck me,” writes one, with an interesting use of the word “probably”.

All this coyness makes something of a mockery of the collection’s main conceit: that it’s offered in the cause of freeing women from shame about what turns them on. Predictably, contributions are not even exclusively from women: “women” is described by Anderson as “an imperfect term” and there are male voices here too. Rather than boldly illuminating the wellsprings of the contemporary female libido, Want is probably more profitably read as a guide to respectable sexual mores in the 21st century. As with female-associated activities generally, there are a lot of unspoken rules. And frankly, the news for men who don’t identify as women isn’t great.

Reading between the lines, it seems that women should expect physical encounters with men to require imaginative supplementation in order to be successful. One writer, not even particularly into robots, puts the point baldly: “Robots are necessary for this fantasy because a group of real men could never focus on a woman sufficiently to participate.” In the main, contributors seem to fall into two groups: those who are not having sex at all, and those who are, but are thinking about having sex with someone else when they do.

Of course, this is scarcely a representative sample. It seems likely that well-satisfied women have much better things to do than write down their innermost desires and send them to Gillian Anderson. And there is also a big information gap here, since we are not told whether men also have to imagine hotter versions of their partners in order to get themselves off. I assume we never will know, since it is very hard to see how such a thing could get off the ground. Friday managed it once, but even then, she had to give the book the sappy name Men in Love — a title quite hard to reconcile with the image of two nurses chopping a man’s cock off after his final orgasm, as I recall.

In any case: according to Want’s subtext, ideally as a woman you should be bisexual, or more grandiosely “pansexual”: what seems like the vast majority of participants describe themselves this way. And whether you describe yourself as lesbian, bi, or heterosexual, based on the numbers exhibited here, fantasising about women is preferable to fantasising about men — even if in practice you say you only ever sleep with the latter.

Partly due to the obvious omissions of certain topics — priests but not imams, Bigfoot but not the family dog, etc. — it seems you should also be alert for the immoral aspects of your fantasies, which is somehow not the same thing as feeling shame about them (bad). One anxiety-ridden participant writes: “Every time I find a woman attractive, I fear that it will come across as predatory, and any time I find a man attractive I question my own feelings, wondering if they are true or if it’s the patriarchal conditioning of society.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same woman says she has never been kissed.

As this quote perhaps suggests, despite the clear ideological bent of the book, tantalising glimpses of reality sometimes break through. Hinting at a fascinating back story, the woman whose kink is to flush her knickers down the toilet says it started in her college dorm bathroom, but “I now do it in a safe manner in a way that cannot affect anyone other than myself”. Her other fetish is wetting the bed every night, which she does in practice: “It took over a year to fully commit to it, and I’ve never looked back.” (She too is single.)

Other fantasists also don’t sound particularly liberated or functional. One woman describes crying each time she imagines that her partner, unfaithful in life, has sex with another woman. Another laments that “it feels like my life is made up of sex dreams punctuated by an occasional real-life event”. Equally, there are those who seem unable to shake off worldly responsibilities entirely, even for a stolen moment alone. Writes one woman, imagining the aftermath of an energetic threesome: “Impressed and shaking with pleasure, I cover myself in a luxurious robe and offer crackers and dips to balance out the wine.”

Suggested reading

How I lost my sexuality

By Hanif Kureishi

The main subtext I drew from the book, however, is that there seems to be a new range of social “taboos” shaping some women’s sex lives. These are not taboo enough to be omitted entirely by the book’s censors, but still forbidden enough to become thrillingly desired. One woman masturbates at the idea of her boyfriend proposing. An exhausted mother and wife has an orgasm when she thinks of an anonymous couple having emotionally engaged sex. To the delight of the manosphere, no doubt, there are several feminists who want to be tied up. A woman who is fed up with planning everything for her exes wants someone who takes charge: “How about you do it for a change?”

Strikingly, three separate fantasies involve the simple act of a man ejaculating inside a woman, presented as something incredibly transgressive. And one woman dreams of vanilla heterosexual sex with a man who loves her, in a “clean suburban home”, yet is appalled by this: “This fantasy is the one that makes me feel fucking sick. What does that say about sexuality? About me?”

Perhaps we should not read too much into all this. Perhaps it is mostly just a case of grass being greener. For the record, there is also a “very shy” Buddhist who imagines being a male crime boss slapping a submissive blonde in the face before she gives him a blow job. There are asexuals dreaming of couplings, lesbians craving men, three women who long to have sex with themselves, and a “Church of England (lapsed)” heterosexual who imagines being a man watching his wife being gangbanged at a sex club.

Leaving the book behind me with some relief, though, I couldn’t help concluding that Anderson might be right: there are still some honest conversations about sex that we up-to-the-minute modern women are afraid and ashamed to have. I’m just not sure they are the ones Anderson has in mind.

When I saw the book — Grandad’s Pride by Harry Woodgate — on the senior librarian’s acquisitions spreadsheet, to be ordered for June’s month-long Pride display, I quickly alerted them to the scandal. Although, in truth, “scandal” was wishful embellishment on my part. Other than a report on MailOnline, the book’s content didn’t attract great interest in the mainstream media. On the contrary, Woodgate was later a panellist at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, participating in an event about diversity in children’s publishing. Very recently, the book was longlisted for the Little Rebels prize, an award that is “designed to recognise the rich tradition of radical publishing for children in the UK”.

Grandad’s Pride isn’t the only eyebrow-raising nomination I recognised from my time working as a children’s librarian in Scotland. On the Little Rebels longlist was also L.D. Lapinski’s Jamie, a novel I read in one incredulous sitting. It tells the story of Jamie, a child of purposefully undisclosed sex who identifies as non-binary and is faced with the “unjust” decision of whether “they” attend all-boys or all-girls high school. As well as author Lapinski (who identifies as non-binary) portraying Jamie in such a way that makes it seem “they” have no birth sex, the book also contains a deliberate rewriting of the Equality Act that obfuscates the reality of sex to young readers; Jamie asserts “gender” is a protected characteristic under the law rather than “sex” and “gender assignment”.

Grandad’s Pride was the only book I was bold enough to flag, using the minor media coverage of the controversy to present an objective case against adding it to the school library collection. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t express my aversions to Jamie or any of the other — at least 30 — fiction and non-fiction children’s books steeped in unfalsifiable ideology I came across.

Why didn’t I speak out about them all? I’ll confess some of it was timidity. In Scotland at the time, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was not yet defeated. Plus, I had little authority as the assistant librarian. Within my small department, I was the only one who felt unease about these resources. Perhaps the boiled-frog effect shocked me into stunned silence too. In my first post-university job, in a public library in 2018, I’d witnessed children as young as six being signed up to a summer reading challenge where the form invited them to list their gender “girl”, “boy” or “other”. Back then, it had seemed ridiculous, a brief blip in sanity — an administrative error, even. That blip was now a hydra with heads sprouting everywhere I looked.

This was the real problem. My fight was not with my school library, it was with the whole library sector, and beyond this, the entire world of children’s publishing and bookselling. Activists disguised as children’s authors are not falling through the cracks of publishing — they are being actively promoted and lionised by the industry. It’s extremely hard to make the case that a book is deeply unsuitable for children when major bookshop chains such as Waterstones are singing its praises on their website and media reviews are glowing. Revered children’s authors such as Malorie Blackman and Philip Pullman have lent their support to trans ideology; the few children’s authors who have had the integrity to express concern, including Gillian Philips and Rachel Rooney, have been hounded and cast out.

Not long before I left my library post last year, I attended a webinar on the subject of censorship hosted by the School Library Association (SLA). I had hoped for a robust discussion on censorship from all angles, but there was a notable cognitive dissonance from the hosts. Much of their focus was on the book-banning conflicts going on in US school libraries, where the parents and authorities challenging books were implicitly framed as Christian Right-wingers. Secular parents, reluctant to expose their children to gender or critical race theory, were conveniently grouped in with evangelicals trying to purge Judy Blume and Harry Potter from library shelves. The same webinar also discreetly advised librarians how to ensure they could justify why they might have chosen to “weed” (remove) certain books: for instance, we were told that writing up an (unofficial) library policy is a good way to safeguard against objectors.

Suggested reading

The plight of Britain's school-refusers

By Steve Boggan

Something that dawned on me during that meeting was the demographic of modern school librarians, something I also observed at the 2023 annual conference for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). Most were young, progressive women, and perhaps this makes sense: consider the unique mixture of power and nurture librarianship holds; especially in a school library, where you are revered as the moulder of innocent minds, an ambassador for kindness and tolerance as much as literacy. Librarians may not write the books but it is them (us) who decide what books to display and promote, which authors get invited to give talks, and — almost as important — who and what does not get platformed.

Another, perhaps unsurprising, factor in the rise of activist librarianship is social media. Most schools and public libraries have X or TikTok accounts (“Librarians of TikTok” has posted almost 40 million times). A key part of a school librarian’s job is now online PR to show that reading is not only a crucial life skill but also “cool”. I’m not opposed to this: one of my favourite parts of the job was designing funky, enticing book displays and murals to showcase the range of the library collection. However, one of the best ways to get trending is to latch onto viral hashtags and, given that every other day is #SomethingAwarenessDay or someone’s day of “visibility”, the parts of the collection on show end up being heavily steeped in DEI and LGBTQIA+. The old-fashioned image of the librarian as an elderly, stern, technophobic, cardigan-wearer has changed dramatically — the cardigans still exist, except they now come adorned with pronoun badges and progressive slogans. And as with the worrying trends in children’s publishing, none of this is considered radical, it’s simply the new norm.

The flip side of questionable material being marketed to children is the material being hidden from them. Barely 20 years ago, a model librarian strained for utmost political neutrality. Their role was to ensure the efficient and thorough provision of the information members of the public wanted to access, not judgement of it. The 2005 intellectual freedom guidance issued by CILIP stated this clearly: “[Works] should not be excluded on moral, political, religious, racial or gender grounds, to satisfy the demands of sectional interest.”

In contrast, a CILIP guide published in September 2023 about making a public libraries “safe and inclusive” is notably less resolute in tone. There are references to protecting people from (undefined) “hate speech” and “misinformation” as well as librarians “working in a context of a highly polarised society”. With the best will in the world, such nebulous guidance has given the green light to librarians with agendas to act on biases with flimsy justification.

Evidently many are. Only last year, public libraries in a West Yorkshire council area were revealed to have blacklisted a number of “gender-critical” books, including Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, and were hiding them in stockrooms (they were later reinstated to the shelves but forbidden from being “promoted” on displays). In parts of America, the war on intellectual freedom has progressed from the front desk to the catalogue, where content warnings and deeply biased subject tags are added to databases, making it harder for citizens to access resources that don’t pass the progressive smell test. As with so many cultural trends, it’s a censorious aberration that could easily spread to the UK.

How can we defend against this? The road back to common sense in children’s publishing will be a long and fraught one. But describing the water in which we are drowning is a start. Libraries may be renowned as spaces of quiet, but this is a silence that desperately needs breaking.

Of course, this didn’t actually happen, because people don’t talk like that in real life. Many do, however, engage in this way on social media, typically towards total strangers. This week I’ve been trending on X (or Twitter, as I stubbornly still call it) following a mass pile-on instigated by several gender-critical activists. This particular bombardment resulted in my decision to temporarily deactivate my Twitter account, to the glee of my critics and transactivists alike.

Having since been contacted by friends within the gender-critical movement, I have learned that many of them are exasperated by the “intolerant elements” within their community who seek to destroy anyone who does not conform to every single aspect of their worldview, even if it means that the cause is fatally undermined. They describe a “civil war” being waged by a small but intimidating minority who maintain that any slight point of disagreement is a form of heresy, that language has the capacity to shape reality, and that those found guilty of wrongspeak ought to be publicly shamed and alienated. Remind you of anyone?

This civil war within the gender-critical movement is, of course, a boon to the high priests of gender identity, those authoritarians who have been conducting a frighteningly effective campaign to reorganise society around the metaphysical belief that “gender” should take priority over sex when it comes to spaces, sports and human rights. Given that the stakes are so high, not least for women, children, and gay people, it might be worth considering what this in-fighting is all about and how it might be avoided in the future. In order to do this, I should first explain the background to this week’s furore.

I host a weekly show on GB News called Free Speech Nation, which explores all aspects of the culture wars and has a particular emphasis on the ongoing attacks on women’s rights in the name of “progress”. Even before last Sunday’s show had aired, I was contacted by regular viewers who had taken issue with me for inviting the trans writer and teacher Debbie Hayton to appear for an interview. As an admitted autogynephile — a heterosexual man who presents as a woman out of an erotic attraction to himself — Hayton is something of a hate figure for many in the movement. By conducting this interview, I was deemed guilty of “enabling” and “promoting perversion”, in spite of Hayton’s gender-critical beliefs.

Suggested reading

The world after Trump

By Julie Bindel

Further context is required here. The day before my show, a profile appeared in The Times in which the interviewer, Janice Turner, referred to Hayton with female pronouns. Turner clarified her reasoning in a tweet: “The issue of pronouns is becoming absolutist on BOTH sides. Stonewall demands even bearded rapists be called “she”, GC ultras refuse to call any trans woman “she”. I reject both positions. I never call male sex offenders she/her. But I will be courteous to those who respect women.”

For many, the issue of pronouns has become a red line in the gender wars, and Turner’s efforts at compromise are seen not only as wrongheaded, but traitorous. It is widely held that trans-identifying individuals must never be described as anything other than their true biological sex, and cries of “hold the line” are often heard. Not only are the likes of Turner demonised for attempting to find a middle ground, but they are also told that they have been “groomed” by the men who are insisting that other people’s language must be modified in deference to their sense of self.

This tactic, of suggesting that an opposing view is the result of a delusion, is common to all ideological movements. Marxist theorists have often dismissed unbelievers as suffering from “false consciousness”. Similarly, many transactivists insist that those of us who believe that sex is immutable have been “radicalised online”. Yet this is also the identical approach of those gender-critical campaigners who deny the individual agency of their comrades and claim they are the victims of “grooming”. I suppose it is easier to explain away disagreement as the product of some collective fantasy rather than accept that not everyone thinks the same way as you.

The inevitable firestorm following Turner’s piece provided the backdrop to my own interview with Hayton on Sunday night. Initial feedback was cordial and productive: many feminists were pleased that I had listened to their concerns and asked questions about the use of toilets, single-sex spaces, and a schools guidance policy that Hayton had co-authored for the teachers’ union NASUWT in 2017. There were also many critical comments, which I welcomed and took seriously.

The first signs of trouble occurred when one of my critics began repeatedly railing against “the gays” in her posts. She complained that I had used the pronoun “her” in relation to Debbie in one of the introductory pieces to camera (as it happens, this was simply because the producer had written it that way in the autocue). I explained that I use pronouns to denote biological sex, and certainly when it comes to reporting on the news, because I do not believe in gender identity. But I also said that when it comes to personal friends who identify as the opposite sex, I have occasionally adopted their preferred pronouns and names. I have done this to avoid needless distress, not to signal that I share their belief-system. It would be like bowing my head for a prayer at a friend’s family meal, even if I didn’t believe in their particular god.

I respect and understand criticisms of this approach. Women are facing the erosion of their spaces and rights, and this is being actuated by gender-identity ideology and the compelled use of pronouns. I have written previously about the need to resist this pressure to conform to pronoun declaration, and I am particularly vexed by the tendency of journalists to describe rapists, paedophiles and other male criminals as “she” or to use nonsensical phrases such as “her penis”.

Suggested reading

Inside Britain's new trans clinics

By Kathleen Stock

Therefore, I answered many of my critics by agreeing that my view may be flawed, and that I was open to persuasion regarding their “slippery slope” argument. It was only when multiple anonymous accounts starting branding me a liar, a grifter and a hater of women, and outright telling me to “fuck off” that I realised this was beginning to turn nasty.

One of my traducers claimed that I lacked credibility and integrity because I adhere to “a deranged homophobic, sexist ideology”, even though I have consistently and outspokenly opposed it over many years. This struck me as an absurd overreaction, the kind of “you’re either with us or against us” purity demand that one has come to expect in these tribalistic times.

From there, matters escalated at a dizzying rate. I was repeatedly accused of being a misogynist, something which I find odd, given that over the past few years I have covered the rising threats to women’s rights on my show with a tenacity that has been notably absent in other media outlets. Every week I have invited women to appear, including Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, Julie Bindel, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Milli Hill, Kellie-Jay Keen, Dr Jane Clare Jones, Jo Bartosch, Mara Yamauchi, Holly Lawford-Smith, Sarah Phillimore, Kate Coleman, Rosie Kay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Sharron Davies. If my critics are correct, and I am indeed a rabid misogynist, surely I at least deserve some credit for going to such elaborate lengths to disguise it?

Many of my detractors took the view that my homosexuality was the issue. One self-declared feminist confessed to being “a raging homophobe” and wrote: “I don’t like gay men anymore. I think most of them are miso[gynist] pieces of shhh [sic] that mock women and platform AGPs”. Another was more direct: “The gays are definitely to blame as well. First off, sticking a penis inside a man’s asshole is unhealthy. If you can’t admit this then you are part of the problem.” Another went with “I hate men in general”, and then clarified her misandry in an oddly specific way: “Gay MEN. Straight MEN. White MEN. Black MEN. All MEN. I don’t discriminate. I view you all with equal amounts of derision”. Then there was an especially malicious attack from law scholar Dr Alessandra Asteriti, who called me a liar and resorted to the defamatory claim that my objective was to “harm women and children”.

Despite the onslaught, I should emphasise that this kind of sociopathic behaviour is far from typical in the gender-critical movement. Yes, there exists a small contingent who despise gay men and seek to bully and harass anyone who takes a different view. But this is most definitely not the norm, and the overwhelming majority of women I have encountered in this fight have been generous, compassionate and incredibly courageous in the face of threats and wholly unfounded accusations of “hate” and “transphobia”. It is only thanks to their hard work that we have seen a recent sea-change in public understanding of the dangers of this ideology.

More from this author

The forgotten genius of Compton Mackenzie

By Andrew Doyle

Naturally, at the time, I found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticisms and outright abuse. And once I started becoming defensive, it of course made matters worse. It’s always worth bearing in mind that, in the eye of a Twitter storm, one does not see individuals, but rather an army determined to see you crushed. At that point, nuance becomes impossible.

And while I am fully aware that most of those participating in the pile-on would have been appalled by the excesses of the few, that isn’t much consolation. This had all begun with one woman griping about “the gays” and ended hours later with complete strangers on my timeline discussing why gay men are so vile, invariably misogynistic, and have a tendency towards paedophilia (the most repugnant and common prejudice of them all). By the time someone posted an audio recording of one of my detractors saying that she would enjoy murdering gay men, I was out.

And of course, transactivists noticed the abuse I was receiving and were quick to weaponise the situation. One of them emailed me directly: “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ but… ha.” Many have since boasted on social media that the attacks were karma for my stupidity in associating with this brood of reactionaries. They have shared screenshots of the worst tweets and taken this as confirmation of what they have been alleging all along: that the gender-critical movement is a front for far-Right homophobes.

My experiences this week have certainly alerted me to a dark element within gender-critical circles, one that has become a source of considerable concern for many women in the fight. I have retreated from Twitter and instead launched a Substack, in the hope that I may continue these conversations with those who are able to remain civil even while robustly disagreeing. I now understand that serious discussions about this issue are simply not possible on Twitter, and my mental health has to come first.

For all that, gender-critical feminism remains an essential force in protecting our rights in these maddening times. The genuinely bigoted elements of the movement may be aberrations, but they are increasingly being perceived as the norm. If this cannot be rectified, it will prove a disaster not just for women and gay people, but for truth and sanity itself.

Things are different now. Every TV show has a gay character of one kind or another. The days of scouring the Hollyoaks omnibus for the John Paul storyline are long gone. The world is brimming with “LGBTQ+ content”. So it is odd that the range of film and TV about gay men doesn’t feel much broader than it was when I was young. Higher volume does not seem to have led to greater variety. Instead, we find a careful curation of how gay men are presented on screen, even when such presentation flies in the face of reality. An example of this curation occurred last year. Netflix’s Dahmer caused a minor online fracas when it premiered. The issue was not only that yet another 10-part series about yet another brutal serial killer is a tasteless way for a streaming service to win eyeballs. No, the problem was that Netflix had categorised its gory new show as “LGBTQ”.

Dahmer is a long way from Will & Grace, but you can see why some hapless Netflix worker slapped the LGBTQ tag on the show. Jeffrey Dahmer haunted gay clubs and preyed on gay men. His particular sickness was bound up with young male bodies. And it can’t be denied that Dahmer highlights the risks inherent in the anonymous hook-up culture that many gay men will dabble in at some point. Such risks are perhaps even greater in today’s world of lengthening digital shadows, as illustrated by murders of gay men in Sligo and London, where the killers found their victims not in bars, but on Grindr. Dahmer makes for grim viewing, but it is of gay interest — if only as a reminder that evil doesn’t wear a sandwich board.

I don’t have a strong view on whether or not Netflix was right to classify Dahmer as “LGBTQ”. If anything, the fact that the debate happened at all struck me as faintly comic. The effort to police the content of one sub-category on one streaming service feels misplaced — if the image of gay men is so easily tarnished, then there are bigger problems to deal with. Today, Dahmer is categorised under “US TV Programmes”. Jeffrey Dahmer might not have been the right kind of gay man, but you can’t deny that he was American.

So what is the right kind of gay man? What sort of show does qualify for inclusion in the LGBTQ category? One popular offering on Netflix is Heartstopper, a series that focuses on a burgeoning romance between two teenage boys. If John Lewis made a LGBTQ television show, the result would look a lot like Heartstopper. Fluffy jumpers. Snow angels. Awkward smiles. It’s all very sweet. Characters endure some implausibly vanilla bullying, but spend most of their time exchanging emojis and shy little kisses.

More from this author

People are still being buried alive

By Alexander Poots

I am not the first to observe that Heartstopper is an oddly chaste affair given that the central protagonists are teenage boys, hardly a demographic famed for sexual restraint. But Heartstopper isn’t made for teenage boys. It’s not even for gay teenage boys, although I’m sure that many of them watch and enjoy it. This show unfolds in the rigidly ordered territory of the tweenage girl, a dreamscape in which young men are desirable precisely because they are unattainable, meaning that there is no risk of being desired in return. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean you have to look elsewhere for contemporary TV or film that is interested in gay men for their own sake.

This is surprisingly difficult at the moment. Young Royals is a Netflix drama based on one of Hollywood’s ropier elevator pitches: what if the heir to the Swedish throne was gay? Over on Amazon we find Red, White & Royal Blue, a film which asks the question: what if the heir to the British throne was gay? These are fun, silly productions, and are beloved by thousands. But again, they use male homosexuality to advance plot. They feature gay men, but they are not about them.

Naturally, there have been more serious attempts to capture gay male experiences in recent years. Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name have both entered the glitter canon; the former celebrated for its story of memory and survival, the latter for its tinted, self-absorbed charm. They are beautiful films, but neither made me laugh, and a gay film without humour isn’t very gay at all. To my mind, one of the better recent gay films is The Happy Prince, in which an extravagantly fat-suited Rupert Everett portrays Oscar Wilde’s last days in Parisian exile. Everett’s Wilde rolls down the boulevards, guzzles champagne, falls off tables and leaks brown bile. The film succeeds because it is bleak and because it is funny.

Bleak and funny. These are the qualities that I want from a film about gay men. Humour is especially important. If there’s one common thread to the films and TV in the Netflix LGBTQ category, it is an absence of laughter. Until recently, I had come to believe that this humourlessness was total. Gay men on screen would be forever trapped on a continuum with Call Me By Your Name at one end and Heartstopper at the other, doomed to be either a melancholy, piano-playing twink or an improbably earnest YA character. So when Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun premiered last summer, I was delighted. The film is a crime thriller and a wince-inducing critique of contemporary gay culture. Above all, it is extremely funny. Here was the cackling in the dark I had been craving.

Suggested reading

What's the point of a gay dating show?

By John Maier

The film stars Silva and Jordan Firstman, both playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Sebastián is a gay man of the Von Aschenbach school. An artist — a filmmaker, in this case — who thinks about death a lot. He lazes around his Mexico City apartment and researches suicide methods while his maid does the dishes. Every so often he opens the fridge. There isn’t any food in there, just two bottles of amyl nitrate. Sebastián takes a deep huff and goes back to bed. Later, he’ll enjoy some plump lines of ketamine for dessert.

Sebastián goes to a gay beach for a change of scene. Naked men grunt and gargle in the dunes. Sebastián sits on the sand reading E. M. Cioran (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy). Tadzio never makes an appearance. Instead he meets Jordan, an American tourist and professional Instagram influencer. Things go downhill from there. It is difficult to describe what makes Jordan so irritating. There is an immediate presumption of total intimacy with Sebastián that is alarming, almost psychotic. There is the ceaseless chatter, countless words advancing like the Golden Horde across the steppe. There is the lack of content, let alone meaning, to anything that he says. Even his smile is annoying.

Silva does annoying very well. Rotting in the Sun is as much about irritation as anything else. The film opens on a public square in which rival buskers create a nightmarish mashup of “Jingle Bells” and “Zombie” by The Cranberries. A random woman accuses Sebastián of abusing his coprophage dog. His apartment complex is a chaotic building site. Work is a series of voice notes and juddering Zoom calls. Even his gay beach holiday is a source of vexation. Press about the film focused on the large number of male genitals on display, but there is nothing titillating about any of them. They are obtrusive and ridiculous. Far from evidence of liberation, all of those cocks feel like an imposition to Sebastián. It all begs the question of what he is doing there in the first place. This is a hell of his own devising.

Jordan is a social barnacle, and Sebastián is his chosen rock. “I love you,” he says, five minutes into their acquaintance. He wants Sebastián to work on a film with him — a film about him. When Sebastián finally lashes out, Jordan responds: “You can’t hurt me, because I’m happy.” He is almost convincing. Rotting in the Sun is a bleak, hilarious satire. Like all true satire, the film is resolutely focused on the world as it actually is. There are no snow angels, no golden Italian summers. Part of the film’s strength comes from its focus on men in their thirties. Illusions have departed. For Sebastián, this means a retreat into comfortable angst. Jordan is the true realist. Instagram for money, drugs and sex for fun.

More from this author

Artists have forgotten how to draw

By Alexander Poots

As Silva has been at pains to point out in interviews, this is not a portrayal of all gay men. Still, these are types — stunted wallower, fragile clown — that are instantly recognisable to many of us. To see them lampooned is a pleasure. But this is more than a piss-take. Both characters are vindicated by the end of the film. A Cioran-esque twist confirms Sebastián’s bleak worldview, while Jordan’s forcefulness becomes an endearing strength. These men are ridiculous, but that doesn’t make them wrong. Not entirely, anyway.

I enjoyed Rotting in the Sun for its comedy and its honesty. The two go together, I think. If the kind of gay men we see on screen are for the most part bland and humourless, it is because most filmmakers aren’t especially interested in gay lives as they are actually lived. Of course, there will always be a place for shows like Heartstopper and Young Royals. Cosy Teen Nonsense has been a recognisable genre since the days of Dawson’s Creek, and there is no reason why there shouldn’t be the occasional gay iteration.

But there needs to be room for honesty, too. At times I wonder if we have exchanged the predictability of Canal+ gay films for the predictability of a safe teen romance, eternally retold. I want more than that. I want annoying gay men in my gay films, and I want to be invited to laugh at them. And if there’s a bicycle ride followed by a beautifully lit sex scene in there too, well, I won’t complain.

In pursuing this outcome, Stonewall has resurrected a set of complaints about the equality watchdog that it first co-authored with Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project and sent to GANHRI last year. In a lawyer’s letter also made public at the time, the two organisations claimed that there had been various murky political appointments of EHRC Commissioners “broadly supportive” of government, which had then produced a lack of “pluralism” in the organisation. As a result of these and other perceived infractions, it was claimed that the EHRC now insufficiently complied with the Paris Principles, first formulated in 1993 and described by GANHRI as the “minimum standards” a national human rights organisation must meet “in order to be considered credible and to operate effectively”.

This first attempt at forcing a special review failed; but this week it emerged that, in May, along with 29 other transactivist organisations, Stonewall once again complained to GANHRI and this time succeeded. The new ingredient appeared to be an explicit allegation that the EHRC’s recent attempts to make some women-only spaces genuinely single-sex — disingenuously described by Stonewall as seeking “to enable greater exclusion of trans women” — are “actively harming trans people”. Like thousands of organisations and individuals before them, when faced with the magic words “exclusion” and “trans women” in some combination, GANHRI appears to have succumbed immediately, without much reflection on why physical exclusion of males from a place where women undress, sleep, or play sport might be perfectly justified.

Stonewall bosses are probably now wondering why they didn’t cut to the chase sooner. Certainly, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that their pique at the EHRC’s rejection of the transactivist position on single-sex spaces was the reason behind such superficially high-minded interventions all along. If they really cared about the upholding of the Paris Principles and the knock-on effects for the rights of LGBT people, one assumes they might also have had something critical to say about the fact that GANHRI has awarded coveted A-list status to such homosexual havens as Qatar (where gay sex is illegal, and potentially a capital offence); Indonesia (where gay sex is illegal under Sharia law in one province, and frowned upon everywhere else); and Egypt (where gay sex is de facto criminalised under morality laws).

Instead, GANHRI is now operating psychically for Stonewall as the latest saintly supranational authority figure to be appealed to without question; no doubt pictured by its employees as standing shoulder-to-shoulder beside them in their ongoing battle with whichever nasty bigoted haters are currently standing in the organisation’s way. And this is quite amusing — because historically, Stonewall used to think of both the Conservative government and the EHRC as playing precisely that authority figure role for them at a national level. In fact, when it comes to cheek-by-jowl relationships between human rights organisations and UK government, Stonewall wrote the playbook.

More from this author

Inside Britain's new trans clinics

By Kathleen Stock

This, after all, is the organisation that became accustomed to seeing Home Secretaries speak at its award ceremonies; ministers and committee chairs mindlessly parroting its campaign objectives; and government departments vying for top spot in its Workplace awards scheme. In that light, then, we should read Stonewall’s complaint to GANHRI not so much as motivated by a genuine concern for liberal neutrality in human rights organisations, but more like the vengeful retribution of a jilted lover, trying to cause problems for an ex’s new relationship by complaining vociferously to the ex’s mum.

This charity didn’t seem to care about the close relationship between the UK government and the EHRC as long as it was able to give orders to both. For a good while, it seems that it had the run of the EHRC in particular. The chair of that organisation from 2016-2020 was David Isaac, a former chair of Stonewall appointed by Conservative minister Nicky Morgan. This was an appointment criticised at the time for the fact that Isaac’s law firm Pinsent Masons was the recipient of millions of pounds worth of contracts from the government, thereby potentially reducing the EHRC’s ability to hold them to account. It is also clear from FOI requests that the relationship between Stonewall and the EHRC both during and after Isaac’s tenure was extremely chummy, with Stonewall assuming they could review EHRC documents before publication and instructing its office-holders to officially adopt their policy on self-ID. The EHRC was also a Stonewall Diversity Champion until 2021, which in practice means that it would have received every piece of campaign propaganda going, with the usual expectation that it would all be effortlessly ingested and then regurgitated.

Suggested reading

The toppling of the trans extremists

By Julie Bindel

In sum: for Stonewall to have the effrontery to complain to GANHRI about a “lack of political independence” demonstrates as much brass neck as you would expect from the very same organisation that, in 2022, petulantly withdrew at the last minute from partnering the Government in a major international conference on global LGBT human rights — thereby ensuring that the conference, and any resultant progress, could not happen at all — simply because the Government would not endorse their preferred stance on criminalising talking therapy for gender-confused teens. As is so often the case, Stonewall officials have apparently redefined a familiar phrase to mean its exact opposite. In future, when they complain about a lack of political independence, the reader should probably understand that the institution in question has finally found the balls to become politically independent from them.

And it also seems that Stonewall bosses have an idiosyncratic understanding of certain other keywords from GANHRI’s Paris Principles. At one point, the Principles state that a national human rights body should demonstrate “pluralism” in the sense of ensuring an adequate reflection of the “social forces (of civilian society) involved in the promotion and protection of human rights”. Indeed, this seems an eminently reasonable requirement. Yet Stonewall complains in its letter to GANHRI that there is a lack of pluralism at the EHRC, apparently on the grounds that some EHRC Commissioners “adhere to regressive views… out of step with the vast majority of equality and human rights bodies”. Quite obviously, these two things are not equivalent.

Leaving aside the tendentious use of “regressive”, spouting the latest fashionable social justice-speak in lockstep with every other mainstream equality organisation is clearly not the same as reflecting a healthy diversity of thought about the adjudication and balancing of human rights. In their original complaint, Stonewall and the Good Law Project presented examples of what they apparently thought were manifestly heinous opinions expressed by recently appointed EHRC office-holders: a reference to the Chair Baroness Falkner’s alleged “gender-critical” views; David Goodhart’s statement that complaints about systemic racism are “statistically naïve” and his belief that “white self-interest is not the same thing as racism”; and Jessica Butcher’s claim that “feminism, like other forms of identity politics, has become obsessed with female victimhood”. Such thoughts were presented by the complainants as if the mere statement of such heresies demonstrated the thesis that the EHRC was insufficiently pluralist — but of course they do precisely the opposite.

More from this author

The gender wars are not a gift to the Right

By Kathleen Stock

What Stonewall and other scions of the modern charity-industrial complex seem to have lost sight of is the basic philosophical point that human rights and their relations to other morality claims are not identified and listed like cells under a microscope, but are essentially contested. Even if you believe there are such things as natural rights, you still have to think hard about what exactly those are, and how best to protect them in practice. Meanwhile, if you think of rights as in any way socially constructed — and presumably they must be, since LGBT groups keep discovering new ones every five minutes — then, given their political currency, it follows that you can’t leave special interest groups to dominate conversations about them. Viewed in this light, the views of Falkner, Goodhart, Butcher and others about the meaning and consequences of rights claims are not extraneous to pluralist discourse about rights but are an essential part of it.

Of course, it is not in the interests of those at Stonewall to acknowledge such complexity. Admitting they might not have the last word on how to assess rights claims on behalf of trans people, wherever these compete with claims from other groups, would go against their simple but highly effective business model to date (roughly: transwomen 10; actual women 0). What we really need, then, is a national equalities watchdog, pluralistic enough in composition that it can effectively do this for them. And thank goodness, it looks like we finally might have one.

There are other ways to read this scene, of course, including as a metaphor for the adolescent search for one’s most authentic self: these Taylors must be destroyed so that the one true Taylor can rise in their place. It’s also a clear aesthetic precursor to her current, worldwide “Eras” tour, in which Swift cosplays her way through her twenties, performing hits from throughout her career.

But the squabbling Swifts are also an apt representation of the life cycle of any American pop star, whose survival in an ever-shifting culture relies on continuous self-reinvention. It’s not enough to keep writing, singing, performing; she also has to metamorphose, emerging every few years as something enticingly but not entirely different. Remaining nimble, fresh and hungry is paramount. There are, after all, a thousand slavering ingenues ready to take her place.

This cycle is inescapable, whether the pop star is a young woman at the height of her power, like Swift, or a grande dame looking back at a career that has spanned five decades, eight presidential administrations, and the dawn of a new millennium. Madonna, who stepped back onstage last weekend for a six-month “Celebration” tour across Europe and the US, is joined during the performance by lookalikes sporting her most iconic outfits from albums and tours past: the Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra from “Blonde Ambition”, the diamond drip of “Material Girl”, the Marie Antoinette getup from “Vogue”. Unlike Swift, Madonna doesn’t fight with the ghosts of her former selves. She flirts with them, fondles them, welcomes them like old friends.

This is an extraordinary moment in musical history: two of the most powerful and successful female musicians ever to exist, each back onstage in a blockbuster, career-spanning spectacle centred on her own timeless status. The obvious difference is that only one of these women has been around long enough to merit such a sweeping retrospective; the unspoken absurdity of Swift’s tour is that she’s not just revisiting her past artistic personas, but also acting like a far older, more seasoned performer than she is.

At 33, Swift doesn’t have eras to look back on; she has phases. And while her adolescence may not have been typical — professionally, at least, she’s accomplished more in the last 10 years than many people will in a lifetime — precociousness is not a substitute for the perspective that comes with age and experience. It certainly doesn’t put her in the same league as the 65-year-old Madonna, a mother of adult children who performs with a face shot full of dermal fillers and a brace on her arthritic knee.

More from this author

Barbie is Fight Club for women

By Kat Rosenfield

As a product of the Xennial microgeneration born between 1978 and 1984, I’m almost exactly the same age as Madonna’s career, which also makes me young enough to remember when Taylor Swift was a teenage country singer whose song-writing skills were superior to her singing voice by an order of magnitude. What strikes me most now, comparing them, is that neither would have thrived in the other’s time. Madonna, with the physicality of a modern dancer and the sensuality of a teenager in the throes of sexual awakening, was made in and for the Eighties. Swift, a famously bad dancer but extraordinary lyricist, understood intuitively how to exploit the power of both online fandoms and the new tabloid press, titillating both with songs that may or may not have been cryptic diss tracks aimed at the famous men she’d dated.

With their sexual politics, both women know how to manipulate their particular cultural moment: in her mid-20s, Madonna was triggering the prudes with “Like a Virgin”, not to mention the Pope with “Like a Prayer”; at the same age, Swift shrouded her sexuality in a high school-style coyness that coincided perfectly with the neo-chaste mores of the #MeToo movement. Even now, in the midst of a high-profile romance with NFL player Travis Kelce that saw reporters staking out Kelce’s home in order to breathlessly report that Swift had spent the night, her public persona is still, to borrow a phrase, like a virgin.

This dichotomy also extends to their wardrobes for their respective tours: Madonna has fully leaned into the dominatrix aesthetic with which she’s been flirting since her 1992 Erotica album. She showed up at the Grammys this year carrying an actual riding crop. Swift, meanwhile, takes the stage wearing spangled leotards that look like adult-sized reproductions of the outfits the contestants wear on Toddlers and Tiaras.

And then, there’s their actual politics — or conspicuous lack thereof. Madonna was an icon for gay men at a time when doing so was politically unpopular if not artistically risky: her new show features a video memorial to all the friends she lost to the Aids epidemic. For Swift, meanwhile, it was remaining apolitical that attracted criticism; her refusal even to signal her leanings eventually became something of a media obsession. The Christian conservative Moral Majority that commanded Madonna to shut up in the Eighties was replaced in the 2010s by an equally powerful cabal of influencers on the now-culturally-dominant Left for whom Taylor Swift’s political silence was taken as an affront. Madonna was banned by MTV and excommunicated by the Catholic Church; Swift, who had the bad luck to be wildly successful at the precise moment that the culture declared war on basic white women, was accused of courting white supremacists and neo-Nazis as fans — and perhaps being a closet fascist herself. Finally, she “came out” as a Democrat.

But you could tell she didn’t want to — nor has her heart really been in her subsequent, tepid engagements with the culture wars. Even the rainbow-spangled video for “You Need to Calm Down”, which stars various Queer Eye cast members and is the closest Swift has ever come to an anthem for the LGBT community, feels more like a Walmart Pride Month commercial than a bold political statement.

After all, Swift is far more interested in her own career than its cultural backdrop. And in that respect, she has a lot to brag about: 12 Grammy awards, nine number one hit singles, a $740 million fortune. But the one thing she doesn’t have, at least not yet, is a cultural legacy that merits a three-hour celebration of her eras. Even the music she performs on this tour has no broader relevance, no anchor point outside the artist’s own life. The only way to identify a given Taylor Swift era is to look at Swift herself: who she was dating, what she was wearing, which ex or fellow artist was she beefing with.

Madonna’s music, meanwhile, is inextricable from its historical context; her concert is a journey through time from the excesses of the Eighties, through Y2K, and into the glittering now that is also the twilight of her career. Although she doesn’t say so outright, and although she’s certainly in great shape for a nearly-septuagenarian, it seems likely that this is Madonna’s last tour. Even her eerie waxwork appearance, the object of almost as much scrutiny as the music itself, ironically highlights just how long she’s been with us; in 2023, a preternaturally smooth face is as much a marker of age as a wrinkled one. Looking at her, we understand: this is the face of a woman who has seen some shit.

Suggested reading

Why I broke up with Dua Lipa

By Kathleen Stock

What has Taylor Swift seen? Not much, but maybe enough to know that she doesn’t want to be a Madonna, that surviving for decades in this industry isn’t always a blessing. Consider the personas of her “Eras” tour, and what they truly represent — not the musical evolution of a veteran artist, but a young woman’s multi-year battle for control over her public image. All these different Taylors — the princess, the rebel, the baby feminist, the hipster — are less a creative product than a reactionary one, an attempt to wrestle her identity back from a hostile media apparatus that wants to conscript her unwillingly into the culture wars and define her in the most unflattering possible terms. “No, this is who I am.” And yet, Swift must also be aware that if she sticks around long enough, that battle will eventually end.

The new challenge, as the years go by and the culture evolves, will be convincing people to care about her at all. You could forgive Swift for deciding she would prefer not to do this — that she would rather take her eras in the form of a 15-year retrospective than one three times that long — especially when Madonna is onstage as the living, breathing, knee-braced embodiment of what it takes to stay in the game. Swift has been around long enough to reinvent herself a few times, but she hasn’t experienced the brutal highs and lows that come from a lifetime in the spotlight, the devastation when, say, the album you poured your soul into becomes a critical disappointment. Or when Patti Lupone tells the world you can’t act. Or when your ageing body becomes an object of mockery — but then so does whatever you do to address it. When nothing will ever be good enough for the people who want to see you fail, and the only person who believes in you is you. Madonna is an icon, a queen, a goddess — but she’s also a 65-year-old woman in a leather bustier, saying, I deserve this. Saying: Look at me.

And if you’re a young star, perhaps you do look. You look at her life. Look at her face. Look at the risks she’s had to take, the hardships she’s had to endure; look at what it looks like, what it really looks like, to try, and fail, and flop, and finally claw your way back to relevance. It’s audacious. It’s awesome. It can even be sexy. But it’s not pretty.

Under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, Canadian policy has hewn quite close to the transactivist’s ideal: gender identity has become a protected characteristic under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and gender reassignment surgery is now often covered by the country’s universal healthcare system. Meanwhile, school boards and teachers’ unions have been quick to adopt some of the most extreme tenets of gender ideology — for instance, not telling parents when their children start to socially transition. 

Now, parents are pushing back. Last month, parents marched in almost 100 cities under the banner of #1MillionMarch4Children calling for the removal of material from school curriculums that sexualises children. Trudeau had claimed the protests were being “fuelled by the American right-wing”, but the alliance includes all political stances — from Liberty Coalition Canada, a Christian conservative advocacy group, to Blueprint for Canada, a non-partisan platform advocating “classical liberal” values. Some are issue-based, such as Our Duty Canada, a support network for families struggling with the impact of gender ideology. Plenty are grassroots, springing up in villages and towns in response to specific local events.

More from this author

Why Trudeau got tough on immigration

By Hina Husain

The protests, though they have been criticised for being anti-LGBT, are actually about protecting minors from harmful content in schools. At the protest I attended — in Durham, just outside Toronto — there were marchers of all races and religions. And their motives varied. Two young moms with children going to kindergarten soon held up placards that read “Education, not indoctrination” and “Stop sexualizing our kids”. A young girl sat next to a poster that read, “No boys in my bathroom!” A father of five children under the age of 15 was there with his wife and kids to protest against Ontario’s sex education curriculum, which he felt introduces material on sexual orientation and gender identity to children too young to understand the concepts. And three Pakistani brothers — one in high school and the other two in university — gave an interview to a local media outlet about why they felt they should not be required to partake in pride activities that went against their beliefs as Muslims.

Conservative Muslims have been overrepresented at recent protests, with a noticeable number of women in hijabs or niqabs. And as a result the movement as a whole has received accusations of being motivated by Muslim extremism. Protests against gender ideology in schools took place over the summer in Ottawa and Calgary, organised by local Muslim parents groups, with reports of young Arab boys stomping on rainbow pride flags while others cheered them on. There was a flurry of progressives questioning Muslim values and attitudes that clash with their beliefs in multicultural Canada. Several hundred people were present at the march I attended, and I’d estimate that 60-70% of them were Muslims.

It would not be fair to assume that all these Muslims were marching in opposition to same-sex relationships as well as in support of parents’ rights; but the Canadian Muslim community is known to have more negative views of LGBT rights than the general population. One transgender protestor I spoke to was in Durham because the chapter in her own town — led by conservative Muslims — was advocating not only for parental rights, which she supports, but also for the eradication of all gay and transgender people. So, the accusation that the movement has an anti-LGBT strain is not entirely unfounded.

There was also a conspiratorial minority at the protests. Anti-vaxxers complained about “shot deaths”, and told tales of what “really” happened during the pandemic. One former nurse who lost her job because she wouldn’t get vaccinated, believed that people were getting sick because of radiation poisoning from 5G towers. The trucker Freedom Convey was also present, waving “Fuck Trudeau” flags; one vehicle was covered in news stories about people who died after getting the Covid vaccines. These conspiracists were not representative; most people really were there to protest against the school boards and advocate for reform of the education system. Indeed, some parents were surprised to see people discussing vaccines and lockdowns. One mom told me: “It’s a free country, they can come here and protest too if they like.” But these fringe elements could be undermining a movement that should, in theory, have mainstream support.

The presence of more extreme groups has doubtless contributed to the Conservative Party of Canada keeping its distance from the march. The more Right-wing, less popular People’s Party of Canada did participate — which would have given the Conservatives another reason not to engage. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, sent a memo out to his caucus before the march warning them not to speak publicly about the issue — even though, at the recent convention in Quebec City, delegates voted in favour of a future Conservative government prohibiting “life-altering” medical and surgical interventions for gender-diverse and transgender people under the age of 18.

Poilievre is trying to strike a delicate balance here: he has indicated to his base that he’s on the same page as them about parents’ rights and gender ideology, but he doesn’t want his party to be associated with unsavoury characters. It might threaten his current lead over Trudeau in the polls. Poilievre tweeted in support of parents’ rights without explicitly mentioning the protests, which have continued across cities in Canada. Trudeau meanwhile came out firmly in opposition to the march, claiming it was promoting hate against “2SLGBTQI+ Canadians across the country”. It seems that for now, parents are going to have to fight it out with local governments, teachers’ unions and school boards, without the explicit backing of a national party.

The march, for all its issues and contradictions, has managed to unite a huge range of Canadians to come together in support of a common cause: a right to have a say in their children’s education. Most of the participants are trying to stay laser-focused on this cause, putting aside their differences to help pass legislation that will protect kids from being exposed to what they see as inappropriate content — and, in some places, from irreversible surgeries. Public opinion is on their side, but it remains to be seen whether party politics will catch up.

The answer, it seems, lies in a shift in the global HIV response, one that the United Nations hopes will finally “end Aids by 2030”. To push HIV out of the “crisis” stage, in which it has been stuck for decades, and shrink the rate of new infections, health practitioners want a massive roll-out of the preventative medications that are no longer protected by drug company patents or exclusivities. And they want to target that specific sub-population that is disproportionately affected by HIV: transwomen who have sex with men.

In parts of the world, trans prostitutes are up to 80 times more likely than anyone else to be HIV-positive. It is estimated, for example, that in Brazil, as many as a third of travestis — male prostitutes with a female identity — are HIV-positive. Elsewhere, hijra, kathoeys and waria — names used in different cultures for males who adopt female names, clothing, hairstyles and pronouns — are a significant concern for health officials, since they are tricky to monitor and tend to have risky sex with men who often have a female partner at home.

To encourage these at-risk individuals to take part in HIV testing and treatment programmes, global health experts want to offer them a form of integrated care, which could include hormones, reassignment surgery referrals, and other “affirming” services alongside PrEP. As a study in The Journal of the International Aids Society made clear as far back as 2016: in scaling up PrEP for trans women, it is essential to engage trans communities, utilise trans-inclusive research and marketing strategies and identify and/or train healthcare providers to provide gender-affirming healthcare to trans women.”

In India, for instance, a recent white paper detailed a scheme to incentivise hijra and “transgender persons” to take part in HIV screening that involves a comprehensive package of services including gender-affirming care. In Thailand, one programme found that kathoeys were more likely to show up to clinics if they were staffed by transwomen — inspiring trials of similar initiatives in the Philippines, Myanmar and Nepal. It is a strategy that has been adopted in the developed West, too, albeit one that lacks transparency. In 2021, the US Department of Health and Human Services ordered HIV clinics to start offering “gender-affirming care” — a move celebrated in March this year, when the White House made clear that the federal government’s strategy “to end the HIV epidemic” included providing “access to gender affirming care and treatment services to transgender and gender diverse individuals with HIV”.

More from this author

The plot to redefine conversion therapy

By Róisín Michaux

It is not unusual for health authorities to group services together, or incentivise individuals to make healthy choices. But we have known for at least two decades that transwomen are inordinately at risk of being exposed to HIV. As long ago as 2009, doctors in community clinics in California reported that the availability of hormones and other affirming care would make trans patients more likely to show up to clinics for prevention.

The shift in attention may be down to the fact that, in recent years, with lesbian and gay equality effectively secured in much of the West, LGBT organisations have started to champion transgender causes. But it may also be down to the fact that, in some countries, HIV transmission is beginning to occur at a faster rate among heterosexuals than gay and bisexual men. And this is perhaps in part due to a subsection of heterosexuals, who have transwomen as partners.

Gynandromorphophilia was first coined in 1984 to describe the sexual preferences of ostensibly heterosexual men who are also attracted to males with exaggerated female features, such as big breasts, hips and lips. Gynandromorphophilic males (or Gamps for short) play a role in the transmission of HIV to the general population because their sexual relations with these often high-risk men put their own female partners at risk, which can also result in the virus being passed to unborn babies. We know, too, that heterosexuals tend to be diagnosed late, once their immune system has already been compromised. This also applies to their female partners, who might never suspect that they have been exposed.

In 1995, when Belgian virologist Peter Piot was entrusted with leading the global Aids response at UNAids, it didn’t take him long to realise that stigma relating to sex was the real barrier to ending the epidemic. Shaming “people with diverse sexuality”, Piot said, forces them into the shadows and keeps the virus in circulation.

Further reading

Why gay men ignored MeToo

By Jarryd Bartle

In an effort to address the estimated 4,500 undiagnosed HIV cases in the UK and halt the virus, the NHS now recommends that certain at-risk groups “may benefit” from taking the now widely and freely available PrEP medication. These at-risk groups include “trans or non-binary person [who] are regularly having condomless sex”. And with this group, “gender-affirming” incentives will increasingly be a part of that medicalising strategy.

While there is an urgent and noble objective here — the eradication of HIV — my worry is that it is taking place without any serious public debate about the consequences. With so much still unknown about the effects of transitioning, gender-affirming therapy is being made more accessible. And at what cost? Only when the HIV epidemic finally ends, will it become clear how subtly it has reshaped the world it’s left behind.

Gids had been established in 1989, to help distressed teenagers navigate their feelings of gender dysphoria, but changes in leadership along the way led to a dramatic shift in its clinical approach. In recent years children routinely found themselves on a medical conveyor belt before the psychological effects of early adverse experiences were fully explored. Much has been written about the blanket application of an “affirmation-only” approach to a complex caseload, which too often put children on a single pathway to life-long medicalisation. By 2020, Gids had prescribed puberty blockers to more than a thousand children. 

In most academic discourse, a “no-debate” approach, such as the one described at Gids, will be stifling and unproductive — but in medicine, it will inevitably result in harm. All clinical practice should be centred around the careful consideration of competing possibilities. It is unsurprising that children were harmed at Gids when a single-minded certainty usurped clinical curiosity.

One year on, Gids remains open, although it no longer accepts new referrals. The plan is to replace the moribund service with regional hubs offering the holistic care required by young people struggling with their gender identity. The promised new services are still taking shape, but before they have even opened their doors to the ever-accumulating backlog of referrals — last rumoured to be upwards of 8,000 young people — concerns have been raised about history repeating itself. Some of the senior clinicians from Gids have seamlessly transferred into new leadership positions, despite appearing to have learned little from its terminal failings.

In April 2023, Prof Gary Butler, the lead endocrinologist at Gids and a clinician appointed to a leadership role in its replacement service, questioned any need to rethink the model. He told a conference audience that Gids was already working in “exactly” the way that Dr Hilary Cass had called for in her thorough review of services for children and young people with gender incongruence. It is difficult to see how anyone could reconcile the service described in Time to Think — BBC Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes’s careful and balanced account of the failings reported by multiple Gids clinicians — with the holistic approach recommended by the Cass Review.

Its recommendations tear down the exceptionalism that allowed things to go so wrong at Gids; evidence-based practice will be the bedrock of the new service, just as it is in every other NHS clinic.  Those working within the new services will be contractually committed to follow Dr Cass’s recommendations, which place a new emphasis on integrated models of care and evidence-based treatments, recommendations that should be as uncontroversial as motherhood and apple pie.

But, then, motherhood and apple pie aren’t quite as uncontroversial as they used to be. And an evidence-based practice may not be quite the unifying foundation if the clinicians involved cannot agree on the evidence base.

Suggested reading

Doctors have failed detransitioners

By Sallie Baxendale

Earlier this month, a group of 21 eminent clinicians working across nine countries in the field of gender distress wrote an excoriating open letter in response to a bold claim from Stephen Hammes, president of the Endocrine Society. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Hammes had stated that more than 2,000 studies had provided a clear picture that gender-affirming care improved the well-being of gender diverse people and reduced the risk of suicide; if that were true, it would be very reassuring and closer to certainty than we often get in many medical specialities. The authors of the response, who included Dr Anna Hutchinson and Dr Anastassis Spiliadis, two of the original whistleblowers at Gids, noted that this claim had been contradicted by every single systematic review of the evidence, not least one published by the Endocrine Society itself. They noted that recommendations for clinical practice should be aligned with the best available evidence, rather than a position that exaggerated the benefits and minimised the risks.

Not all evidence is equal. There are hierarchies of evidence in science, often represented as a pyramid. The lowest level is “expert consensus”, which is barely evidence at all. Who decides who is an expert? The process of reaching a consensus can result in a compromise where lots of people agree collectively what nobody actually believes individually. Consensus may have nothing to do with empirical truth. Expert medical consensus can be very wide of the mark, sometimes disastrously so: in the early 1900s, it was expert medical consensus that smoking cured asthma and other lung diseases. It is well within living memory that the expert consensus for treating back pain was bed rest and plenty of it. We now know this is likely to increase pain and prolong recovery.

The history of medicine is littered with these examples, and there are treatments we are recommending now with the full blessing of expert consensus that will eventually prove to be ineffectual at best, fatal at worst. But perhaps the biggest problem with consensus, particularly in the area of gender medicine is the chilling effect it has on debate. As Michael Crichton, the physician and author of Jurassic Park, said: “The claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”

Suggested reading

Why the Tavistock had to fall

By Kathleen Stock

Fortunately, most branches of medicine now rely on more rigorous forms of evidence to inform their practice. Further up the “evidence pyramid” are case reports and studies that compare the outcomes in patient groups before and after treatment, with and without control groups. Close to the top of the evidence pyramid are the results from randomised controlled trials. All of these kinds of research can provide valuable information (some more than others) but no study is perfect and no study design can control for all of the biases that might have influenced the results. So sitting right at the top of the evidence pyramid are the meta-analyses and systematic reviews. These studies systematically evaluate the quality and quantity of all of the relevant evidence that has been published in peer-reviewed journals. These independent reviews summarise what we really know and how confident we can be in that knowledge. Bodies such as the National Institute for Health & Care Excellence (Nice) produce the gold standard in clinical practice guidelines based on these kinds of independent meta-analyses.

In 2020, Nice examined the evidence for puberty blockers. They concluded that “the results of the studies that reported impact on […] outcomes of gender dysphoria and mental health (depression, anger and anxiety), and […] body image and psychosocial impact (global and psychosocial functioning), in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria were of very low certainty”. In other words, there is no good quality evidence supporting the use of these drugs on these outcomes.

Suggested reading

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

It seems likely in the heated debates that surround gender medicine that many people are confusing “expert consensus” — the evidence right at the bottom of the pyramid — for the gold standard in clinical practice guidelines, which are based on evidence and right at the top.

This conflation appears to have been responsible for the mutual bafflement in the heated exchange between Republican Dan Crenshaw and Dr Meredithe McNamara earlier this month, in a debate in the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce on gender-affirming care. While Dr McNamara insisted trans healthcare was based on “standards of care”, the senator countered with the stark lack of evidence from any systematic reviews. Both appeared exasperated with the failure of the other to grasp the importance of their incontrovertible evidence. Just as not all evidence is equal, neither are all clinical guidelines or standards of care. They can be developed from evidence at the top of the pyramid (as in Nice guidelines), but more often come from the bottom and simply represent expert consensus with all its inherent flaws and biases. The stamp of approval from a learned society does not trump the rigours of a Nice review.

Since no high-quality evidence for the benefits of puberty blockers has been found in systematic reviews, it is unsurprising that even the doctors who work in this field have described themselves as building the plane while flying it. With mounting concerns for the possible harms associated with medical pathway of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones (including reduced bone density, disruptions to neurodevelopment, impaired sexual function and infertility) — not to mention the growing numbers of detransitioners for whom this was never an appropriate treatment pathway, one might extend their aviation metaphor as an attempt to build a plane while flying it while someone else throws out all the parachutes and sets an engine on fire.

Who would put any children on that plane? Or volunteer to pilot it?

The only rational response in such a situation would be to ground the plane immediately. The interim recommendations of the Cass Review combined with the upcoming closure of Gids effectively do this, but the pressures on a new service to immediately take to the metaphorical skies again will be significant.

However, there is another way. Practice guidelines based on expert consensus cannot be mistaken for those based on systematic reviews. Where the systematic reviews indicate little evidence for benefit and potential for significant harm, the service should proceed with the caution that would be applied in any other branch of medicine.

Suggested reading

What if you regret transitioning?

By Julie Bindel

Cass has emphasised that just as there are many pathways into gender dysphoria for young people, so there could be many ways out. For some, that may still be a medical pathway, with its unevidenced outcomes and multiple inherent risks. The new teams will be tasked with explaining these uncertainties in uncompromising detail to ensure the truly informed consent of those who wish to embark on this experimental approach. Fortunately, the new service model means that other treatment pathways will now also be available.

Bringing gender distress firmly back into the fold of mainstream mental health services for children and adolescents means that these vulnerable children can finally begin to benefit from the therapeutic input and safeguards they have been denied for far too long. It can’t begin soon enough.

Trepanning (drilling a hole in someone’s skull) has been conducted for millennia, with evidence of the oldest procedure dating back several thousand years. Archaeological finds of skulls with multiple holes in various states of repair indicate that at least some of our ancestors survived these treatments and came back for more. Opening a space to let the demons out of someone’s head makes sense, if you believe the pesky things have taken up residence and are running amok inside. At least this treatment was in the right anatomical ballpark, according to our current understanding of epilepsy as a neurological condition. Less than 130 years ago, surgery for epilepsy had “advanced” (or regressed) to the extent that the head was no longer the sole target of the surgeon’s scalpel.

They had branched out to recommend limb amputation. The rationale was straightforward: if someone’s arm keeps shaking, what more effective cure than to cut it off? Other surgical approaches to epilepsy in the 1890s included clitoridectomy and castration — both attempts to curb the immoral sexual appetites that were “well known” to cause epilepsy at the time. For the squeamish patients who wished to retain their sexual organs, alternative treatments included admonitions to avoid coffee, chocolate and amorous love songs. Late Victorian treatments for epilepsy were nothing if not eclectic.

Into the mid-20th century, people with epilepsy were once again the unwitting participants in a dark era of medical experimentation. In an enterprising spin-off, the radical surgical techniques developed in the Forties’ psychosurgery movement were trialled as treatments for epilepsy. All undergraduate psychology students (and fans of the film Memento) will be aware of Henry Molaison, better known by his initials. In October 1953, Mr Molaison underwent surgical excision of the right and left temporal lobes of his brain. In a short paper delivered six weeks after the surgery, his surgeon reported that the operation had resulted in no real changes, “with the exception of a very grave recent memory loss”; H.M. was unable to remember where his room was in the hospital, or how to find the toilet.

Suggested reading

Why the Tavistock won't talk to me

By Hadley Freeman

H.M.’s profoundly disabling amnesia persisted for the next 55 years, until his death in 2008. He became the most famous neuropsychological case study in the history of the profession. But he was not the first person to undergo this procedure and suffer this devastating outcome. Scores of others were discovered in a retrospective review, triggered by Mr Molaison’s case. His memory loss could have been anticipated and prevented if the outcome of this procedure had been fully evaluated in his predecessors. More shocking still is that a similar fate was allowed to befall a number of other patients after his amnesia was discovered. Ignorance is one thing, inertia something entirely different.

The lessons from this sobering history are clear. When doctors fundamentally misunderstand the cause of a condition and treat the symptoms instead, and fail to properly monitor outcomes, and modify their practice in response to known adverse outcomes, our patients suffer — often greatly and for the rest of their lives — if indeed they survive. These fundamental errors underpin the depressingly regular scandals that punctuate the history of medicine. (The stakes are particularly high if surgery is involved.)

It is naïve to think that all these scandals are in the past. Our descendants will look back at some aspects of our current medical practice and wonder that we could have been so stupid. They will shudder at how barbaric and crude some of our current treatments are. So where might the next medical scandal be brewing?

The increasing visibility of detransitioners suggests it may lie in wait in gender-affirming medicine. Many detransitioners are young women who underwent treatment for psychological distress that has left them with irreversible, life-long changes to their bodies: a deep voice, a beard, and compromised sexual function. Some have had their breasts surgically removed; some may be infertile. Others are young men who have been castrated.

Suggested reading

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

This is not an argument about the pros and cons of these treatments for trans-identified young people. Nor is it an argument about the percentage of people who may “regret” undergoing these procedures. The existence of just one detransitioner suggests that an individual was not offered the correct treatment for their condition by the doctors charged with their care. It is a clear case where the medical profession caused harm. We are ethically bound to learn, and widely disseminate, the lessons from these cases.

For many detransitioners, the cause of their distress as a teenager was misattributed by their clinicians to the notion that they had been born in the wrong body, and that they would be helped by the surgical creation of the “correct” body. Regardless of the validity of this treatment for some — on which I make no comment — this assumption was incorrect in the case of many detransitioners. Once these fundamental errors of misattribution had been made by the treating clinicians (who in the case of GIDS were primarily psychologists, and not medically qualified), surgeons and endocrinologists embarked on a procedure akin to that of limb amputation for epileptic seizures. The detransitioners’ discomfort with their body was a symptom of psychological distress, not a cause, but their medical team prescribed treatments with an irreversible impact and surgically removed healthy tissue in an effort to cure their symptoms.

In most other fields of surgery, this would be classified as a “never event”, and an exhaustive investigation would be launched. But in the case of many detransitioners, their treating medical team has failed their patient at every stage. They have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the condition the patient has presented with and have treated the symptom rather than the cause. The astonishing failure of the Tavistock & Portman NHS trust to monitor even primary outcomes were laid bare in the original trial of Bell vs Tavistock, with further shocking details subsequently presented in Hannah Barnes forensic account of the collapse of the service. This failure means there is no opportunity to modify practice in response. It is unsurprising that the results have been catastrophic for some.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

However, in the case of detransitioners, there is an additional, darker layer to this cascade of medical errors. The patients themselves are being held responsible, by the very doctors who made them. The term “post-treatment regret” appears to abrogate any responsibility on behalf of the treating clinicians for these outcomes. Some argue that there is some degree of regret associated with every medical procedure. However, there is a fundamental difference between patients who are unhappy with the outcome of elective treatments recommended for their condition, and those who have been misdiagnosed, and have had healthy tissue surgically removed as a result. Many detransitioners were given the wrong treatment for their condition. These people are not experiencing post-treatment regret, they are responding appropriately to the consequences of a grave medical failure.

Advocates of gender-affirming care argue that “no one can know whether post-treatment regret will occur; therefore what matters ethically is whether an individual has a good enough reason for wanting treatment”. This is a remarkable position to take. Surely what matters ethically is that the medical profession offers appropriate, evidence-based treatment to patients who will benefit from them. Others argue that young trans people have “the right to be wrong”. They do indeed; doctors, less so, particularly when they are wielding a scalpel. Just as trans youth deserve access to the very best in evidence-based medicine, so doctors have a fundamental duty not to offer harmful treatments to young people who will not benefit from them. It is not good enough to shrug and say, “no one knows whether this will occur”. We know that poor outcomes do occur, and are duty-bound to find out as much as we can about these in order to predict and prevent them.

Since 2014, there has been a phenomenal increase in young women referred to specialist services for gender dysphoria. There is, therefore, a greater number of people who are at potential risk of receiving inappropriate treatments. To respond by creating a “fast-track” to medical transition is to ignore everything history has to teach us. Meticulous assessment of a young person’s symptoms is not transphobic, nor does it invalidate anyone’s identity. It is good medicine, and ensures that the right treatment is given to the right patient.

No branch of medicine can be exempt from rigour. Exceptionalism lies at the heart of many medical scandals. That way catastrophe lies and, as ever, it will be our patients who suffer. This is not hypothetical: detransitioners stand before us as living, breathing examples of people who have been harmed. To change nothing as the result of their experience — or, even worse, to make changes that mean similar errors could potentially harm even more people — is immoral. Upholding scientific principles is the least we can do to protect our current patients and honour the thousands who have been failed by the medical profession in the past. The history of surgery can teach us that much. It is our responsibility to take note.

The two groups, yoked together under an uglier-than-ever rainbow flag, have diametrically opposed objectives. For the LGB wing to achieve progress, the only tool we have is visibility. We have to come out. We have the constant advantage or penalty, depending on circumstance, of the closet. Years ago I wrote a joke which reflects a profound truth about gay life: the difference between being gay and being black is that if you’re black you don’t have to tell your mother. 

But what trans people need, want and campaigned for is the opposite. They fight for invisibility. That was the explicit objective of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which was designed to enable trans people to live quiet lives, precisely without being noticed as different. As so many trans people have told me, they transitioned in order to “pass”.

The background to that 2004 Act was the case of Christine Goodwin. She argued in the European Court of Human Rights that — and this was before gay civil partnership and equal marriage would have allowed him to do so — she was being discriminated against because, among other issues, she couldn’t marry her boyfriend. Without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) that the Act would grant, every time she needed to show her birth certificate she’d be outed as male and, therefore, as trans; her privacy would be breached. Which was the exact opposite of what she — who had undergone sex reassignment surgery more than a decade earlier — actually wanted. 

The GRA was a direct consequence of Goodwin’s ECHR win. It included an explicit provision to safeguard this essential privacy for transgender people. It made it an offence for any official who knew the birth sex of a trans person to disclose it. The GRA gave trans people the comfort of a legal fiction, on which they could rely fully, that they could be treated as the opposite sex. And more than that, it guaranteed that they would not have to come out as trans. It was a political triumph for invisibility. 

The effect of this was to create a social contract. Society would pretty happily go along with the GRA’s legal fiction because, as remains the case today, the majority of people think that transgender people should be free from discrimination. But that deal has been broken by the current generation of transactivists — often to the horror of many trans people, especially those who, under the auspices of the GRA, have fully transitioned. Those transactivists are making a fundamental error by enforcing the coupling of the LGB and the T: they have seen the campaigning success of lesbians and gays through coming out, and mistakenly think they should copy it. 

But unthinkingly merging the two makes little sense. As an idea, it is based on nothing more than the rather flimsy notion that “alphabet” people are united under a banner of similar oppression. And other letters, increasingly opaque in their relevance, are added daily to the Ts & Qs. Not long ago I was sent a leaflet circulated by the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario which invited to an “inclusiveness training” session for those who were “LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP”.  To be fair, the leaders of the group did subsequently say they were trying to be “a bit tongue-in-cheek” — but the current fashion for salami-slicing personal identities made it depressingly believable.

The fact that prejudice, in its stupidity, cannot tell the difference between anyone who is gender non-conforming, trans or gay, and in their eyes is just a “poof” or a “lezza”, is no reason for us to copy their idiocy by lazily conjoining the two under some generalised feeling of discrimination.

Suggested reading

The perversion of lesbian envy

By Julie Burchill

There is an obvious disparity. Sexual orientation — the sex or sexes to whom you are attracted — is a totally separate phenomenon from gender identity, a subjective feeling of who you think or claim you are. The specific needs and disadvantages of each are markedly different. Unless gays wear our badges and T-shirts and tell people that we’re gay, we can go about the world unnoticed, wearing what a friend of mine calls “heterosexual drag”. But to gain equality, we had to wave our flag and drop our disguise. We needed to march in protest and to lobby politicians, we had to show our difference in order for us to win the rights to marry, to adopt, to serve in the military, to have an equal age of consent. 

But transactivists muddle these different requirements of visibility and invisibility for the LGB versus the T. As we saw in Scotland, they want society to accommodate an even wider extension of the GRA’s legal fiction, an even more public profile, to those who, without any kind of diagnosis or process of actual physical transition, can simply self-identify as the opposite sex. However, they also then want everyone to ignore completely the very obvious differences — sporting advantages where they occur, and visual clues, especially in the transwomen who have chosen to remain physically unchanged in any way.

The case of Adam Graham, the Scottish rapist who claimed trans status as Isla Bryson in order to be housed in a women’s prison, graphically illustrated the problem, with Scottish politicians tying themselves in linguistic knots trying to justify their legislation. Transactivists have threatened women with guns if they question their right to using a women’s loo. Amara Vasquez, a trans social media influencer, shouted at feminists on a march in 2022 that “these titties are more real than you, bitch…” These may be particularly egregious examples, but they are not untypical of the kind of belligerently conspicuous behaviour rejected by those who have fully transitioned. 

What the Gender Recognition Act did for those who needed to live as the opposite sex was provide them with a way of doing it, without being unmasked or forced to admit their history. But the ideological insistence of transactivists that “transwomen are women” has blown that apart. They have opened every trans person’s history to scrutiny, while at the same time insisting that the rest of society turn a blind eye to it.

Suggested reading

What's the point of a gay dating show?

By John Maier

The great success of the Stonewall campaigns — I was one of the charity’s six co-founders in 1989 — came from creating a shared goal with the rest of society. The wider population agreed that it was damaging to democracy and all of us for any one group of people to be discriminated against under the law. The accomplishment was not just to right a wrong, but to create a platform from which lesbians and gays could contribute fully to a society in which we all could live well together.

But for those born male now to push themselves into women’s sport, spaces and services was never the intention of the Gender Recognition Act. It was to give dignity to people whose lives would be immeasurably improved, psychologically and socially, if they took the enormous step of transition. Society responded by accepting that shared goal and the contract which that implied. But activists are trying to trash that social bond which was created by their own campaigning legacy.

By trying to copy the successes of the lesbian and gay movement, transactivists misunderstand their own history and drag trans people into the unwelcome glare of exposure. They should be unsurprised that the rest of society is now pushing back — and that the LGB seeks separation from the T.

The exchange became a famous WTF? moment in France. Very few took it seriously. No one realised back then that Gauthier-Fawas was the future.

Last October, I was invited onto a TV show called Quelle Époque to debate Marie Cau, France’s first transgender woman mayor. I say “debate”; I wasn’t listened to. I was described as “hysterical” by one guest for saying that I didn’t believe that Cau was a woman and my rhetoric was described as fascistic. Not one of the eight-strong panel agreed with me, and the studio audience applauded every time someone mocked me.

When I did get the chance to speak, I said: “For me, Marie Cau is a man. A transfeminine man — a person who is biologically a male but who has tastes that match with what people call ‘the woman gender’.” For this, I was branded a transphobe and I am currently being sued by Cau and three LGBT lobby groups for “hate speech”.

After the show was broadcast, the French politicians weighed in. Isabelle Rome, the minister for gender equality, diversity and equal opportunities, shared a clip of my debate on Twitter, saying: “These words are very violent. Every person needs to be respected for their gender identity or for their sexual orientation. It’s not others who have to define the contours. To use the words of Amin Maalouf: ‘It’s our gaze who liberates.’” She then invited Cau to meet her, and posted a photo of the two saying: “We need to build a fraternal society where each person is respected beyond his gender identity or sexual orientation.”

Having raged for years in the UK and US, the transgender debate has finally hit France. And you might say we deserve it; even that we are partly to blame. Back in the Sixties, a group of postmodern French philosophers introduced “French theory” to the world. It was a challenge to the idea that there is a single innate meaning in anything: we should, they assert, deconstruct language, science, even our human nature. We’ve got Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault to thank for the idea that there is no objective truth.

So far, so interesting. In France, we are philosophers. We enjoy ideas for their own sake and have no problem with letting a concept stay as it is – conceptual. But Americans are different. Their activists like to apply theory to the real world. So when Americans, such as Judith Butler, got hold of “French theory”, they applied it to American culture and political activism, which gave birth to post-colonial theory, gender theory and, inevitably, transgender ideology: the idea that language and biological sex can be deconstructed so that women become “menstruating people” and men can be mothers.

Then, the Americans threw it back at us. And that language and ideology is seeping into French culture and taking hold of young imaginations.

Suggested reading

Is France too sexy for the trans wars?

By Kathleen Stock

Only last year, Le Planning Familial (PF), a state-funded network of organisations providing sex education and reproductive services, launched a campaign with an illustration of a “pregnant man”. The poster read: “At Planning, we know that men can get pregnant, too.” The PF also stated that sex is a social construct, a gay man can have a vulva, a penis is not a male organ, and the use of the words “female and male” should be banned. This is an organisation that is providing sex education in schools across France.

French children are no different from those the world over: curious, vulnerable, easily influenced. And the more they absorb, the more they are choosing to reject the traditional gender binary and asserting their right to identify as trans or non-binary. Marry this with the move in medicine to champion a child’s right to self-determine, and we’re in dangerous waters. According to Jean Chambry, a child psychiatrist in charge of the CIAPA (Intersectoral Centre for Adolescents in Paris), a decade or so ago there were about 10 requests for gender reassignment per year; in 2020, it was 10 requests per month, in the Île-de-France region alone.

Chambry has spoken of a worrying acceleration of medical responses to these transition requests; that, as demand surges, barriers to treatment are being significantly weakened. It is currently possible for children and adolescents to be prescribed puberty blockers and hormones if their parents agree — though surgery isn’t supposed to take place before the age of 18. Yet, since last November, those wishing to commence the transitioning process no longer need a psychiatric follow-up. Medical insurance will also now cover the entire cost of a transition (including mastectomy and phalloplasty). And a new law against “conversion therapy for sexual orientation or gender identity” has made it incredibly hard for psychiatrists and psychologists to counsel gender-confused children or adults.

Today, in France, any criticism of this new orthodoxy is quickly shut down. Even our dictionary, Le Robert, has included “iel” — a gender-neutral pronoun, like “they” in English — in its online version. The word has yet to find favour with the general public.

Suggested reading

The sexual revolution killed feminism

By Mary Harrington

Elsewhere, activists have also infiltrated anti-discrimination boards, which are now prioritising transphobia over racism. Consider Dilcrah, the Interministerial Delegation for the Fight Against Racism, Antisemitism and Anti-LGBT Hatred, a government body responsible for guiding public policy on discrimination. In January, it was quietly closed down. The party line is that it was dissolved because the team was inefficient. Certainly, it was inefficient when it came to finding common ground on gender ideology. Former president, Smaïn Laacher, is a member of L’Observatoire de la Petite Sirène an association set up by psychiatrists and researchers concerned about the number of children being given hormone treatment, and — despite its name: The Little Mermaid’s Observatory — absolutely not to be confused with the UK’s controversial child transgender group, Mermaids.

This proved problematic for the transactivist sociologist Karine Espineira, who dramatically resigned from Dilcrah last May to protest against Laacher’s membership. There then came a welter of accusations of transphobia against L’Observatoire, after which, in September, Dilcrah decided to file a complaint against the organisation for their recommendation of a cautious approach towards trans children — something deemed to be “conversion therapy”, now forbidden by French law. This complaint was rejected. But in January, Dilcrah was disbanded. Its dissolution arguably exemplifies the French government’s response to the current identity debate — having been captured, they fold.

Amid this growing scandal, in which any attempts at scientific discussion or any urging of caution against accepting the new status quo are shut down, where is the resistance? And where, with our grand tradition of feminist thought, are the feminists? In the UK, you have Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock and J.K. Rowling. In France, it seems, we no longer have feminists in the traditional sense: we have neo-feminists and “queerists”. They aren’t worried about women’s spaces being kept safe, they don’t blink an eye at women’s sports being debauched, and they think it’s perfectly fine for lesbians to date women with penises. These feminists are, as Germaine Greer said, “being persuaded to deny their own existence”.

Suggested reading

How we all became prisoners of gender

By Mary Harrington

Since 2019, “Nous Toutes” — a group with the specific aim of stopping violence against women and girls — have organised feminist marches in towns across France. But their Instagram feed is now alive with anger and posts reading “Terfs out of our fights” and “You don’t need a vagina to be a woman”. It seems even they have lost sight of what our universalist feminism was about — a collective struggle, not an individual one. Such is the vehemence of their feeling against old-school feminist views that when Marguerite Stern, a prominent gender-critical activist and colleague of mine, marched with the sign “Female Sex Matters”, an egg was thrown in her face. This struggle is not a collective one.

How did French feminism become corrupted? Perhaps because of our obsession with Simone de Beauvoir. She believed that female biology was real, but also that it hampered women; she saw it as a constraint. She also believed that women are shaped by society and men into accepting a passive, subjugated position. In Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), she writes: “One is not born but, rather becomes, a woman.” She talked about how we are forced into becoming housewives or mothers. But neofeminists, led by Butler, have deconstructed this and now brandish the slogan as though de Beauvoir were talking about transwomen.

These neofeminists have also co-opted Monique Wittig, the French radical feminist and lesbian who wrote: “There is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed, and sex that oppresses. It is the oppression that creates sex, and not the contrary.” The neofeminists parrot the handy Instagrammable statement “there is no sex” out of context and without understanding.

Resist these misreadings, though, and you will be tarred as a Terf. And it is dangerous to be a Terf in France. In March, on International Women’s Day, the walls of Paris were daubed with “Kill the Terfs” graffiti. A conference in Nantes was cancelled because transactivists threatened speakers with eggs and baseball bats, and cowardly local politicians bowed to that pressure. Last year, a class given at the prestigious Sciences Po school was shelved amid concerns over its topic: Darwinism, evolutive psychology and differences between the sexes. If our scientists have been captured, what hope is there?

Suggested reading

Why we French love to hate the English

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

At last, though, there are signs of a French resistance. In January — after three years of harassment, insults and cancellations – Marguerite Stern and I launched Femelliste, an online platform and NGO for “the female of the species”, a place where women can voice their concerns about transgenderism. Here we assert things such as: being a human female is neither a shame nor a weakness; it is not a feeling but a biological and sexual reality. We truly sympathise with those dealing with gender dysphoria, but see transgender activism, and its language, as an attempt to reduce women’s rights.

We are fighting for freedom of expression and pluralism of ideas. And for this, we are currently being sued, accused of “hate speech”. But we Femellistes are not transphobes. On the contrary, in our manifesto, we state explicitly that we recognise the suffering of dysphoric people, as well as the violence that trans people experience. We absolutely understand that.

But we also understand that, in France, feminism is dying. In France, today, if you dare to go on a feminist march and protest for women’s rights, you will be abused. In France, if you write or talk about women’s rights, you will be blacklisted. In France, the birthplace of philosophical feminism, the answer to the question “What is it to be a woman?” is no longer obvious to everyone. But in France, some women are finally daring to fight back.

But enough of my mash note. Dr Stock is such a fascinating figure because she represents everything about being a lesbian that men — no matter how much they stamp their massive feet in their stripper heels — can never possess. It’s nothing to do with pornography and lipstick, the twin pillars of this strange new faith; she highlights the profound emptiness of their performative fantasy of femininity.

Where once society was defined by Penis Envy, Lesbian Envy is today’s driving force. So much performative thespian-lesbianism has taken place in popular culture that you’d think every woman was at it, but if we regard the history of lesbianism, most of it has gone on in secret.

Many lesbians point out that, historically, there has been little overlap between the problems and pleasures of lesbians and homosexual men. Men are reviled for it in the Scriptures and have had laws passed against them, while women are more likely to simply be ignored, culminating in Queen’s Victoria’s refusal to believe that lesbianism existed. Yet, at the same time, homosexuals had great power in the Greek and Roman empires, while lesbians certainly didn’t. While Oscar Wilde could be a tragic martyr to The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, lesbianism has long been easy to reduce to titillation and entertainment. If you admire the female form, the onanist logic goes, why not admire it times-two? And, unlike with straight porn, there won’t be any well-hung male hanging around to make you feel bad about yourself.

This can lead a certain type of man to feel that, even for them, lesbianism can be a little something on the side, even something which adds to their own appeal. In the Nineties, I had an idea for a Bateman-style cartoon that portrayed a man being shunned by his contemporaries: The Man Whose Wife Wouldn’t Do Girl-On-Girl. It was around this time, during my second marriage, when I fell for a woman and my second husband gave me “permission” to see her, even doing a humorous routine for his friends: “Lesbians make such fascinating wives!” He wasn’t laughing when I left him for her, whereupon I uttered the classic line to the Evening Standard gossip column: “Miss Raven and I are not lesbians — we are simply in love.”

I wasn’t being super-straight or shy in saying this. Rather, I was aware that being the capricious creature I am, I didn’t feel morally worthy of bearing a name which brave women had suffered for, simply because I was following a whim which I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be indulging in for long. (Sure enough, I soon ran off with her brother.) Today, by contrast, straight people stampede to call themselves queer, so prevalent is the idea that “heterosexual equals bad” and “homosexual equals good”. There are so many young women holding up their baby boys on social media and pronouncing them “Gay!” that I’ve often thought that if a certain sort of young woman could be guaranteed to have a gay baby, the moribund birthrate of the West would shoot up.

But lesbianism has been ditched by those with the most claim to it and who could be most inspired by its history — a dirty word among young girls who prefer to be acceptably queer or trans. As the young American pop and reality TV star JoJo Siwa said last year: “I don’t like the word [lesbian] itself. It’s just like a lot. At the end of the day, that’s what I am… but it’s like the word moist. It’s just like… ugh!”

Meanwhile, contemporary gender activists do their very best to make lesbianism sound not “sexy fun”, as it was from Tallulah to Tatu, but just another workaday drudgery of dealing with the worst sort of pervy, grope men. As no less than John Hopkins University this month noted in its online glossary of LGTBQ terms, a “lesbian” is someone who is a “non-man attracted to non-men”.

Amid this erasure of women from lesbianism, there was something particularly lovely — and not just for lechers — about the case of the lesbian beauty queens Miss Argentina Mariana Varela and Miss Puerto Rico Fabiola Valentin who met at the Miss Grand International pageant in 2020 and married last year; supernaturally beautiful, both had surveyed the men of the entire planet and found them inadequate. And yes, of course it’s a proper pay-day for capitalism when two brides decide to outdo each other in the grandeur of their marital meringues — but it’s also gorgeous to see femininity unbound.

Suggested reading

Why should lesbians sleep with men?

By Kathleen Stock

It confirmed that modern lesbianism, far from being the furtive trauma of the past, has the potential to be a hen-night that never ends, avoiding that morning-after let-down when one of the giddy girls is given away by one sober suit to another and must now knuckle down to the humdrum habits of adult life. Even when lesbianism begins as little more than a cheap thrill or a style tip, it has the power to bring down worthless heterosexual unions, which can only be a relief all round. All that disposable income and free time can’t help but give a happy couple a head start when it comes to fun — and, of course, the unshakeable advantage of doing something that society doesn’t really approve of, which has a way of keeping people young like nothing else. Which is all the more reason why it must be guarded from incursion from the male sex. When I was a youngster, the sure sign of a creepy man was that he would refer to himself as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body; it still is, only this time they don’t slink away nursing their semi when you laugh at them, but call you a fascist.

So, back to my adored Doc Stock, hated so often not for her words but because she shows what a woman is; not the way you dress, or sit, or present. It can’t be bought. A woman is whatever a woman wants to be — and what a man cannot be. And, most of all, what a man cannot be is a lesbian.

At the start of November, an assortment of 29 high-profile UN representatives, human rights lawyers, academics and LGBTQ lobbyists flocked to the sultanate city to attend a conference at the Gadjah Mada university. There, over four days, they hunkered down to craft a document they would call the Yogyakarta Principles.

Having tried and failed to convince conservative countries to include protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in UN resolutions, the drafters, led by Irish ex-priest Michael O’Flaherty, sought to demonstrate how any country that had signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was obliged to grant them anyway. Their ambitious interpretation claimed “the right to recognition as a person before the law” automatically included the right to legal gender self-ID, while “the right to health” obliged states to “facilitate access by those seeking body modifications related to gender reassignment”.

The Principles were not legally binding, nor did they cite any legislation. Indeed, according to one of its signatories, O’Flaherty insisted that his fellow drafters ignore the legal reality. The Yogyakarta Principles, then, were simply a wish list. Perhaps it was hoped that the heft of the reputations of the drafters would be enough to cajole NGOs, legal professionals and governments into taking them seriously. If so, they seem to have been right.

Sonia Onufer Corrêa, a Brazilian activist and one of the attendees, later admitted that Indonesia was only chosen because the drafters wanted a Muslim country, so as to avoid the impression that the edicts came from the decadent West. It bears noting that the Sultan of Yogyakarta himself never adopted the Principles for his own city; in fact, the situation for LGBT people there had become so untenable by the time the Principles came up for review in 2017 that they had to find a friendlier host city, Bangkok.

Never mind. The location was always just a smokescreen. The real unveiling of the Yogyakarta Principles came in 2007, when they were officially launched in New York and Geneva. It was undoubtedly a triumph. While O’Flaherty and his crew were unable to convince conservative African and Islamic countries to adopt the Principles, Western nations were more than eager to get on board. Pick a country and evidence abounds; from legal self-ID, to hate speech laws, to conversion therapy bans, the drafters have had more success than they surely could have hoped for.

At the heart of their campaign was a raft of evidence alleging to show the use of torture against gay, lesbian and trans-identifying people. Such abuse had been reported as early as 2001 by Amnesty International, who described the brutal violence suffered by the travestis of Central and South America at the hands of police and the johns who paid them (or not) for sex.

According to Article 5 of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. The Yogyakarta drafters interpreted this to cover conversion therapies based not just on sexual orientation or sex characteristics, but also gender identity and even gender expression. Expanding on their rather short interpretation, one of the key organisations behind the Principles, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), helpfully provided a more detailed technical guide for legal professionals in 2009.

There was one problem, however. “International human rights systems,” warned the ICJ, “have not yet dealt with an individual petition or communication specifically relating to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity in relation with the prohibition of torture.” In other words, there wasn’t sufficient evidence.

But a group of lawyers in the US, led by the National Council for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) in collaboration with the Trevor Project, was working on it. Since 2009, a movement to expose the horrific practice of conversion therapy against gays and lesbians (though not trans-identifying people) had been underway in America. And in 2013, the NCLR began planning a campaign to convince lawmakers that conversion therapy constituted a breach of the Convention against torture, to which the US was a signatory.

With the support of the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, who had just issued a report on ill-treatment in healthcare settings that included “reparative therapies” carried out on LGBT people, they sought an audience with the bodies that oversee the UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). These were made up of committees of experts in torture from around the world, one of whom was Victor Madrigal-Borloz.

At the time, Madrigal-Borloz was secretary-general of a Danish NGO called the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims. According to an anonymous source, once in the job, he began planning an expensive multi-day showcase event in Mexico City which plunged the NGO into an extremely precarious financial situation. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the NGO was not producing results, and funders were pulling out.

Suggested reading

Why should lesbians sleep with men?

By Kathleen Stock

An FOI request by journalist Dorte Toft later found that the Danish development ministry, DANIDA, ordered an external investigation that concluded IRCT’s travel budget didn’t make sense based on the activities of the organisation. They also said the secretary-general’s salary was too high and that he had too much power over budget decisions. Overall, they concluded, the management of IRCT — financial and otherwise — was a disaster. By this point, however, Madrigal-Borloz had skipped off to this next appointment as the UN’s “independent expert”.

In November 2014, around the same time that the IRCT was haemorrhaging money intended for torture victims, the NCLR had been granted an audience with Convention Against Torture treaty experts in Geneva. They brought along a star witness, who tearfully spoke of the horrific electric shocks and beatings that his therapists and parents had subjected him to in an effort to turn him straight. His name was Samuel Brinton, and he would later become known as the non-binary Biden staffer caught stealing women’s suitcases from airports.

According to one of the lawyers who brought Brinton to Geneva, his testimony elicited gasps from the UN panel. How could this still be going on in 2014? After all, state-level efforts were already underway to outlaw conversion therapy. And media reports from the time suggest that existing bans covered “ex-gay” practices familiar to most people: the religious ministries and pseudotherapy sessions that sought to turn homosexuals straight.

But this wasn’t just about gay conversion therapy. “Gender identity” had also started to appear in legal texts around the subject, despite the fact there was scant evidence that praying away gender identity was a thing. This was about to change. Just a few weeks after Brinton’s performance in Geneva, the contents of which journalist Wayne Besen has convincingly called into question, a trans-identifying teenage boy allegedly walked out in front of a tractor-trailer on a highway in Ohio. In a Tumblr suicide note, Leelah (born Joshua) Alcorn criticised his parents, who chose “biased” Christian therapists to help him deal with depression, and who wouldn’t allow him to medically transition.

His mother, a Christian, was vilified for misgendering and deadnaming him. She told reporters that he had only mentioned being transgender once, that she had never even heard him use the name “Leelah”. She also claimed that he was deeply depressed. His neighbour, apparently a close friend, also used male pronouns throughout his TV interview.

But while it wasn’t the Brinton-style torture story the transactivists had perhaps been waiting for, it was enough. A few days after his death, a White House petition calling for “Leelah’s Law” was launched. By March 2015, Obama said he would support a federal ban. By September, UN agencies officially began officially referencing torture in relation to violence against LGBT people.

Malta was first out of the gate in December 2015 with a ban; Germany, France, Belgium and some parts of Spain have all since followed. Mardrigal-Borloz, who had by this point taken up a gig as the UN’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, immediately started pushing for states to legislate for conversion therapy bans.

Suggested reading

Trans counselling is not conversion therapy

By Tom Chivers

In 2017, the UK first commissioned research into the practice. Organisations such as Stonewall exaggerated the results of that research, even leading their coverage of polling on the subject with the claim that one in five trans people have suffered conversion therapy, when the data reveals nothing of the sort. The proportion, according to the survey results, of LGBT people “pressured to access services to question or change their sexual orientation when accessing healthcare services” was 5%.

Interestingly, after a failed first attempt to introduce a ban in 2018, Ireland is now having another go. This time it is backed up by an all-island (including Northern Ireland) group called the Anti-Conversion Therapy Coalition. While, from the outside, this might look like an inspiring cross-border initiative, it’s more likely to be because no evidence was found in the Republic, leading Irish activists to look forlornly to the North’s fire-and-brimstone protestants who have been known to offer (though not force) pray-away-the-gay services.

In France, things were even more weird. Lawmakers wanted proof that the country was suffering from an epidemic of conversion therapy that would necessitate a new law. In response, Laurence Vanceunebrock, parliament’s rapporteur on the subject, insisted that they had to pass the law in order to reveal the crime. As evidence, Vanceunebrock repeatedly claimed that there was a secret clinic carrying out electroconvulsive therapy on homosexuals in Montpellier. This drew the ire of the region’s medical association, which claimed that such a clinic would require specialised equipment and expertise that couldn’t possibly have passed under their radar. No witnesses ever came forward, despite an appeal.

Suggested reading

Biden's cowardly war on conversion therapy

By Kat Rosenfield

Then, in 2021, when the law was already a done deal but not yet in force, a teenage trans-identifying female called Enzo was kidnapped, brought to a barn in the French countryside and tortured, in order to exorcise her of her transness. The rainbow NGOs kicked into high gear; #LiberezEnzo trended on social media, activists scoured the countryside looking for the barn, and Vanceunebrock was finally vindicated.

It soon transpired, however, that Enzo was at his grandmother’s house the whole time, and the family were working through their issues. The police, and Enzo, asked everyone to calm down and leave them alone. The barn was never found. Yet the law is now in force in France; efforts to modify or reprimand a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity can be punished by up to €45,000.

As for the Yogyakarta Principles, they received an upgrade in 2017, when Victor Madrigal-Borloz came on board as a signatory. And the newer version is even more extreme; it explicitly calls for an end to sex registration at birth.

Madrigal-Borloz, meanwhile, will step down from his UN mandate at the end of this year, and the extent of his success is currently being evaluated. All the signs suggest he will be lavished with praise. But as the 16 years since that fateful meeting in Yogyakarta have demonstrated, making a crime out of conventional therapy for gender-distressed teens has hardly been a victory.

Part of the show’s appeal, I take it, lies in the near-hallucinogenic spectacle of watching minute variations on a theme playing out within a largely unchanging structure. But failure to change even a winning formula draws criticism. In 2021, when asked whether the programme’s producers would ever consider including non-heterosexual contestants, ITV commissioner Amanda Stavri said — presumably while panicking a little — that although “it goes without saying that we want to encourage greater inclusivity and diversity”, including gay or lesbian islanders might create “logistical difficulties”.

That such a change would lead to “logistical difficulties” is an obviously sound consideration, and so predictably enough was immediately identified by critics as evidence of rigidly enforced bigotry on the part of ITV and the television industry at large. It was a strange diagnosis; television executives don’t seem the kind to make a stand on a point of principle, even a deeply cherished bigoted principle, if abandoning it could earn them costless approval.

Presumably, the logistical difficulties Stavri had in mind concerned the underlying selection mechanisms on which the drama of Love Island largely depends. Among reality-TV subgenres, Love Island operates firmly within the “state-of-nature” model. Contestants are removed from society, deprived of almost anything that makes life worthwhile — notably intelligent conversation and alcohol — and made to interact. Under these lawless conditions, the threat of forced “recoupling” and manipulative tests of loyalty artificially speeds up the cycles of relationship and break-up, as islanders are forced to divide and unite under close observation, like material in a petri dish.

The ceaseless pressure to find a mate results in a market of romantic goods and, as the intrusive night-vision footage occasionally implies, services. That one sex is interested exclusively in buying what the other is selling, and vice versa, is crucial to the extended dynamic. For example, when a new male “bombshell” hits the island, the calculated effect is that the bargaining power of all the men suddenly decreases. To introduce men who sometimes prefer men to women, or women who sometimes prefer women to men, would likely frustrate some of these effects, and not necessarily in ways that would be congenial to those who were hoping for a progressive display of “inclusivity”.

For one thing, it might alter contestants’ incentives to tactically reveal or conceal information about themselves. Events could make it expedient to match against one’s actual sexual preference, or even to strategically feign or deny a settled sexual preference: not an obviously edifying spectacle. But any alternative to this — for example, a format which offered same-sex pairing options only to certain contestants — would disunify the market, undermining the sense in which all islanders face equal options.

Suggested reading

Being gay is not biological

By Jarryd Bartle

An easy way to bypass these problems, as the producers of I Kissed A Boy, which concluded on Sunday, evidently saw, is to populate the island exclusively with gay men. Like its inspiration Love Island, I Kissed A Boy also exemplifies the state-of-nature paradigm, though it does fleetingly concede something to that other monolithic sub-genre of reality TV: the “sexual re-engineering” format. These programmes — such as Naked Attraction or Married At First Sight — humiliate their contestants under the guise of helping them, usually by violating some obviously sound norm of social life (norms such as “Don’t pick your prospective partner out of a naked human cattle-auction being run by Anna Richardson”, or “Don’t marry strangers”). Their modus operandi is to establish the vague thought that modern romantic life is somehow subtly dysfunctional, misdiagnose the problem, and propose a wilfully ill-motivated solution.

I Kissed A Boy’s twist is to have all the prospective couples, whom they match initially for compatibility, make out with each other before exchanging even a single word upon arrival at the villa. “No small talk, no swiping — it’s all about the first kiss.” It is an oddly confused premise, at least when presented under the guise of a supposed remedy. What alleged problem of gay life is it supposed to be a remedy to? It has never seemed to me that 20-something male homosexuals need any encouragement adopting the shoot first, ask questions later strategy. Unsurprisingly, almost all of the couples hook up sight-unseen without much difficulty, some so extravagantly that one almost expects a comedy crooked-cane to appear jauntily from off camera to drag them discreetly out of shot.

While the BBC-produced I Kissed A Boy neatly dodges ITV’s much-feared logistical problems, it does encounter some telling new ones. A little self-conscious about being the “UK’s first gay dating show”, the programme veers chaotically between meeting the perennial progressive challenges of celebrating difference while emphasising sameness. In the first mode, the show risks being immensely trivial, in the second, oppressively sincere. Celebrating diversity, the producers seem to think, largely involves quite a lot of mandatory dressing-up and catwalk posing in feather-bowers and chapless pants. The sincerity quotient is provided by way of the usual tearful disclosures contestants are obliged to make about trauma in their upbringing, or personal lives, or whatever, which invariably conclude with reflections on the vast importance to society of the work being done on the show.

The problem of subjecting a distinctive group — gay men — to the demeaning attention of reality TV is that it can end up distinctively demeaning them. We watch as the contestants are made to play games like “yas or pass” where they reveal their authoritative judgment on such questions as “Is Lady Gaga a better artist than Beyoncé?” or “Is it fine to send a dick-pic as the first message?”. Later, in a scene so explicit as to leave nothing left to imply, the “boys” take part in a relay race, the crucial stage of which involves each taking turns at clamping a cream-filled éclair between his thighs and thrusting it, through a glory hole, into his blindfolded partner’s open mouth, as the delighted others improvise a crude commentary (“Gareth, are you sure you’re not a bottom?”). Is this, what the final stages of social equality look like? To be fair to them, I suppose, straight people have been forced to do this kind of humiliating stuff on television for years.

The show also struggles to accommodate a rather more interesting kind of challenge. Somewhere in his early diaries, Alan Bennett observes that when a straight couple goes out to dinner and one of them flirts with the waiter, it ruins the evening; when the same thing happens to a gay couple, it becomes part of the shared fun. Bennett’s insight, characteristically well-judged, is that gay life cannot always be relied upon to reproduce the same tensions and obstructions that exist in its heterosexual analogue.

One plausible explanation for this points to a fact more basic than sexuality: it is not that those involved are gay men, but more basically that they are simply men. When it comes to studying evolved mating preferences — factors such as appetite for casual sex, readiness to arousal, the importance attached to a partner’s status or age, susceptibility to sexual jealousy — evolutionary-psychological studies reveal substantive divergence between men and women, but suggest comparatively little between homosexual and heterosexual men. An environment such as that on I Kissed a Boy, where everyone shares characteristically male preferences — and moreover knows that everyone else does — should be predicted to differ in basic ways from the mixed-sex heterosexual alternative. In some respects it might be a much simpler environment to negotiate.

The uneventful course of I Kissed a Boy provides a fair amount of anecdotal data for this prediction. Implicitly co-operative, unpicky about their options, and pragmatically sex-oriented. There is none of the coyness of Love Island. The men realise that pooling all relevant information in a fairly collegiate way makes life easier for everyone. That is to say, they get behind each other. “I want to know who’s tops and who’s bottoms”, one demands as a sensible opening-move. “Get me some cock!” shouts another to no one in particular, first thing in the morning.

Suggested reading

Why do progressives watch porn?

By John Maier

Of course, the uncomplicated dynamic that follows means that equilibrium is very quickly reached, and the show’s producers must, in an occasionally haphazard way, introduce more contestants to the house in the hope of restoring novelty and “drama”. The remedy is always short-lived: the new boys are just as willing to cut to the chase as others were. A new arrival, asked to identify his “type”, replies “Can I say all of you?”. (“She’s into group — fair play” is the inevitable, gleeful response.) Another new arrival, asked to select among the men for a date that evening, cuts out the middleman entirely: “Right boys, get your willies out!” he orders, rubbing his hands together.

The uninterrupted atmosphere of bawdy, flamboyant directness is one that is simply impossible to imagine being replicated in an environment also containing women. The men freely joke about “topping” and “spit-roasting” each other, on the understanding that there is, as one puts it delicately, “a whole world of cock to explore”. One pair excitedly realise they live near each other in the UK (“how many metres on Grindr?”). Another two are certain they’ve met before: “I’ve probably sent you dick-pics at some point,” says the first, with a non-committal shrug. No, that’s not it, the other persists — “Do you ever go cruising?” he whispers, covering up his mic in a quite unprecedented show of discretion.

It is much to their credit that the cast of I Kissed a Boy largely defeat the genre’s complacent expectations — more interested in paying lip-service to one another than to the lacklustre conventions of the format. Many of the routes to “drama” and dysfunction are simply short-circuited; the moments of conflict largely anomalous or apparently manufactured; the atmosphere of intrigue that depends on mutual-incomprehension diffused by too much mutual-understanding. It is an amusing spectacle, one which the show’s producers cannot possibly have intended, as it contributes to the show not conforming very well to the Love Island model and its tropes. The “differences” the programme attempts to “celebrate” end up running deeper and in somewhat different directions from those it naively anticipates. It is a satisfying failure, one well worth celebrating.

Last year’s contenders included the bank Halifax, which told customers to close their accounts if they disagreed with staff being asked to wear pronoun badges, and the Natural History Museum, which decided it was progressive to liken homosexuals to self-cloning lizards. The winner, though, was Nottingham City Council, which celebrated Pride by banning the lesbian activist Julie Bindel from giving a talk on violence against women, her “crime” (entirely unrelated to her talk) being her belief that humans can’t change sex.

Setting up the award — it’s named after Guardian editor Kath Viner, who knows a thing or two about trashing a treasured brand by pandering to gender extremists — was my way of giving vent to the frustrations that many lesbians and gay men of the old-fashioned sort feel at this time of year. Pride used to be a riot, an opportunity to commemorate our achievements since the Stonewall Inn uprising, and shout about the equalities we still had to fight for. Now it’s a bloated month of pinkwashed flummery, of re-imagined company logos, empty sloganeering and corporate parade float sponsorships — and it’s a drag. 

The only fighting lesbians and gays do these days is among ourselves. Some people don’t think the T belongs with the LGB — Get Over It! If only we could. Those of us who insist that the trans movement can be homophobic, because it encourages young people to think they were born in the wrong sex if they are gay or lesbian, have found ourselves marginalised. Told by Pride organisers that we will be thrown out — in the name of inclusion, obviously — if we dare show up to the season’s events, we have little option but to snark from the sidelines. If we haven’t already been blocked by them on Twitter. 

When I worked on the London paper Capital Gay in the Nineties, a colleague used to call Pride “all our birthdays and Christmases rolled into one”. Back then, it was one day of the year, not an entire season. I have in front of me the last edition I edited of that paper, from June 1995, which reported on a march of 75,000 lesbians and gay men through central London, followed by a party with a record turnout of 200,000 people at Victoria Park. In the previous year, we had achieved the first legislative victory on our long path to legal equality, when MPs had reduced the age of consent for gay men from 21 to 18; but politicians had voted against reducing it to 16, in line with the heterosexual age of consent, reinforcing our status as second-class citizens in the eyes of the law.

Getting together in a park was a way of feeling that, for one day only, we had just as much right as anyone else to be ourselves in the capital. Nowadays, we no longer need that kind of refuge, because life no longer treats us so cruelly. That’s why today’s Pride, to me, feels so overblown and excessive.

On one level, of course, I’m old and jaded, which may explain my cultural cringe at the BBC’s new boy-meets-boy reality show, I Kissed a Boy. To me, all that hand-flapping and “yaas kween” campery harks uncomfortably back to the Seventies model of male homosexuality on TV, as personified by Larry Grayson and John Inman. Not for the first time, I notice the irony of the generation that believes it is reinventing gender taking such ready refuge in regressive stereotypes.

Meanwhile, the fashion world has decided to portray our lives as a circus freak-show. Consider Calvin Klein’s last Pride campaign, which features a bearded, hairy-chested, plus-sized female model wearing a sports bra over the breasts that she hasn’t yet got round to removing. In another age, Calvin Klein put a topless Mark Wahlberg on giant billboards around the world, and gay men convinced ourselves we, too, could be Marky Mark if we bought Y-fronts.

Suggested reading

Being gay is not biological

By Jarryd Bartle

How did we get here? A decade ago, it wasn’t obvious what the future of Pride should be. The wide array of discriminatory laws had been dismantled, culminating with the legalisation of same-sex marriage. We had achieved everything we’d asked for, and prejudice seemed to fall away, too. Now, surely, we just had to get on with our lives.

At the time, I had a naive idea that we could progress on South Africa’s “truth and reconciliation” model. Having achieved equality, we could afford to be magnanimous about those who had opposed us along the way. Homophobia had been so widespread that there was no point in bearing grudges over past slights. We simply had to embrace the chance to play the full role in civil society that had previously been denied us. And, having won our own campaigns, perhaps we could now turn our attention abroad — to help stop young Iranian gay men being hanged or thrown off rooftops by the state, or the corrective rape of lesbians in Cameroon and elsewhere. Maybe also try to help lesbian and gay communities shrug off UK-inherited anti-gay laws in many Commonwealth countries?

But charities need problems to address, lobbyists need grievances, media publishers need to grow their demographic. In 2015, the lobby group Stonewall — which had surpassed even its own expectations in the effectiveness of its campaigning — extended its remit to campaign on trans issues as well as LGB ones. (It’s a development I satirise in my novel The End of the World is Flat, when a charity set up to correct minor map-making anomalies embarks on a campaign of fully fledged flat-earthery.)

Suggested reading

The mystery of gay animals

By Kathleen Stock

Until that point, the trans movement had been entirely separate, both culturally and politically. As a gay journalist reporting on political developments over two decades, I never met any trans campaigners. But after the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, a merger of the two movements took place, and the rainbow establishment set about pretending that the two camps had already been one.

This new movement, a cuckoo in the nest of the campaign for lesbian and gay rights, suddenly had a whole menu full of demands and an agenda that would end up trying to redefine language, reorganise public toilets and changing rooms, kibosh women’s sport and take control of HR departments. At its most baleful, it would try to root out wrong-thinking heretics — such as the think tank consultant Maya Forstater — from every walk of life.

This year, however, it feels like the tide is turning. Only last week, when British cycling authorities announced that male-bodied riders will henceforth have to compete in their own sex class, the overreaction from the UK’s most prominent trans cyclist made as many headlines as the decision itself. Emily Bridges — who used to compete as a male at junior level — announced that British Cycling’s new policy was “a violent act” which furthered “genocide”. At a less elite level, the news that the women’s record in sport-for-all Parkrun races belongs to a male-bodied trans runner has furthered the impression that men who say they’re women — and retain the physical benefits conferred by male puberty — are snatching prizes unfairly.

Suggested reading

The mystery of gay animals

By Ellen Pasternack

And there’s further evidence that sanity may soon prevail. Last month, Baroness Falkner, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, faced down a palace coup by transactivist staff members. And by keeping her cool in the face of hostility at the Oxford Union on Tuesday, Kathleen Stock has made her antagonists look like a bunch of entitled brats. As Sall Grover, an Australian businesswoman taken to court by transactivists for creating a female-only social media network, observed earlier this week: “It certainly does feel like we’re 90 seconds to midnight for everyone admitting ‘the Terfs were right’.”

With a bit of luck, then, the corporate world won’t be quite so quick to listen to those in their ranks who insist on pursuing marketing campaigns that don’t tally with their actual audiences. One day, the stock price collapses at Bud Light, Target and Gillette, following their various LGBT backfires, will be taught at business schools as cautionary tales.  

Meanwhile, just look at the rest of the world. Only this week, Uganda rubber-stamped a new law establishing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality“. And in Turkey, a newly re-elected President Erdogan railed throughout his campaign against “LGBT” people — although, once again, the main target seems to be homosexuality, with his interior minister denouncing same-sex relationships and accusing gay people of bestiality.

This, surely, is the stuff that matters. It’s the stuff we once used to care about, before a fragile generation started treating polite disagreement as “genocide” and our rebranded community acquired a reputation for cry-bully tantrums. One day, I hope, the gender wars will end and we can return to those more proportionate values.

Ceri-Lee is a bright and confident 24-year-old who juggles taking care of her young child with training to be a paramedic. In contrast to the loving family and happy life she now has, her childhood was pure hell. For nine bleak years, she was sexually abused and raped by her father, an ordeal that began when she was just eight years old.

But Clive Bundy, the man that subjected Ceri-Lee to unimaginable hurt and terror, has recently discarded his old life and now identifies as a woman. Ceri-Lee has felt compelled to speak out, in condemnation of a justice system that helps dangerous sexual predators to evade detection and to potentially target other child victims in female-only facilities.

In 2016, Bundy was arrested by police that had been monitoring his activities online. When they searched his laptop, they found numerous child abuse images, including a record of his abuse of Ceri-Lee. Bundy was jailed for 15 years but served half of that sentence, before being released a few weeks ago on licence.

Prior to his release, Bundy announced his decision to leave prison as a woman, stating that he has changed his name to Claire Fox.

Suggested reading

Did City Uni censor my gender research?

By Julie Bindel

It may not be coincidence that his chosen name is that of a high-profile campaigner who has used her seat in the House of Lords to argue that transgender activism endangers free speech and women’s rights.

Last month, Baroness Fox asked — in an online article entitled “A ‘Trans’ Paedophile Stole My Name” — why Bundy chose to troll her in this way. “I can only speculate. One commentator suggests that sex offenders, specifically paedophiles, select the names of well-known people so that an internet search will only turn up the famous person, and not them.”

There is, however, she explained, one small consolation in what she sees as Bundy’s trolling. “Should Clive Bundy ever start using social media under the name Claire Fox, he might find himself subjected to anti-Terf trolls, who routinely target gender-critical women like me, barraging us with misogynistic abuse.”

It is largely thanks to a second British parliamentarian that Bundy’s new name is in the public domain at all. Under Section 22 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, it is against the law to expose the former name of a person that has changed gender. But in March this year, Labour MP and women’s rights campaigner Sarah Champion raised the case in the House of Commons, where legislators are granted protection against civil and criminal liability.

Feminists have long pointed out that men who wish to sexually abuse women and children will seek out and exploit loopholes and opportunities in order to find new victims. Former convicts have been known to change their name by deed poll, for instance, and while they are required to inform the authorities immediately on doing so, many do not, and simply build new identities.

Suggested reading

Why should lesbians sleep with men?

By Kathleen Stock

With gender reassignment more commonplace — and easy — than ever, it offers a new opportunity for dangerous sexual predators to change both their name and their sex, and then to hide in plain sight.

These fears are well founded and well documented. Look, for example, at the case of Karen White, a convicted child sex offender and rapist who, while legally still a man, was put in a female-only prison where he went on to sexually assault two inmates.

Then there is the more recent case of double rapist Adam Graham who, prior to his conviction, declared himself to be a woman and changed his name to Isla Bryson. Having been sent to Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only all-women’s prison, he was only moved as a result of a massive feminist protest.

Ceri-Lee wants the names of Clive Bundy and Claire Fox to be linked on official records. But the law requires us all to pretend that no such link exists — that, essentially, the convicted serial child sex offender no longer exists.

Since hearing about her rapist’s release, Ceri-Lee has experienced flashbacks to her own abuse. “Him doing this has caused me terrible anxiety,” she tells me. “I am worried about the girls in my family being targeted by him.”

She is also distressed that, yet again, Bundy has successfully manipulated the system. When she was told about his decision to assume a new identity as a woman, “it was a real shock”, she says. “I had no idea that he would be allowed to change his name and his identity in law when he was on the Sex Offender Register.”

Before this child rapist declared his intention to live as a woman, Ceri-Lee was “fairly liberal” about gender reassignment, taking a “live and let live” approach. More recently, however, she has discovered for herself the implications and unintended consequences of self-ID, the law that permits adults to change their gender without a medical diagnosis. In a world in which men can now legally enter single-sex spaces once earmarked for women and girls, Ceri-Lee’s opinions have shifted.

When she told her family members about Bundy’s transition, “at first, all we could do was laugh”, she says. “It’s so ridiculous… There’s just no way a man like him feels like he is a woman. He is so macho. He was always very proud of how manly he was.”

At the time of his arrest, Bundy denied every offence he was charged with. “The police said they’d never been faced with anyone as manipulative and coercive,” says Ceri-Lee. “Why can’t they see this is just him, again, trying to trick the system?”

Ceri-Lee was at home with her child when the Victim Support Officer called her out of the blue to let her know her father hadn’t been considered for parole because of an altercation in prison, before casually adding: “‘Oh, and by the way, he’s given us permission to tell you that he’s now female and calling himself Claire Fox…’ It was as if [the officer] was telling me what was for dinner.”

Suggested reading

Women don't need another girlboss

By Kathleen Stock

Had Bundy not given permission for Ceri-Lee to know his new identity — more power-play, and an example of his coercive and controlling tactics — neither she or the rest of her family would have had any idea that Bundy had “disappeared”, replaced by a woman called Claire.

Inevitably, Ceri-Lee has been accused of transphobia. “Somebody asked on Twitter how long it’s going to be before I’m convicted of a hate crime,” she says, “because I will never, ever refer to him as female. When he made me handle his male genitalia, he definitely wasn’t a female then — and he will never be a female in my eyes.”

Horrified that a sex offender such as Bundy could now freely visit a public swimming pool full of children, Ceri-Lee asks: “He didn’t abuse little boys, he abused girls — why should he ever be allowed to go into female-only spaces?”

She insists her motivation is not transphobic — “in fact, I feel an affinity with these people: I know what it’s like to be a child faced with a secret that feels wrong but [you] can’t tell anyone. I know the bravery it takes to come out and say something. I felt wrong in my body because of being sexually abused, so I understand what it feels like to want to escape it.”

Suggested reading

The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

Aware that to criticise anything to do with transgender ideology can have adverse consequences, Ceri-Lee admits she was worried about the effect that going public might have on her medical career. She was hoping to go to university to become a paramedic when she was told of her father’s release from jail.

The NHS has certainly been captured by trans ideology, with some Trusts having issued guidance which states that patients should be admitted based on the ‘gender they identify with’ and therefore can choose which ward, toilet and shower facilities they use.

Ceri-Lee is determined to continue her campaign, but waiving her right to anonymity, in order to go public about the identity of her abuser, has already cost her dearly. “It was the most difficult decision I have ever made. I think of myself as quite a confident person. I can walk the streets and people don’t know about the little girl that was abused and who wanted to kill herself.

“He told me I could never reveal what he was doing to me, or other family members would get hurt,” she says. “But I am done with being scared of him.”

Appalled that Bundy’s new persona has, with the stroke of a pronoun, all but erased from the public record what he did to her, Ceri-Lee is now determined to ensure that any medical transition will not give him access to vulnerable female victims. “He will do it to other girls,” she says, “I just know he will. I have to get the message out. But if I can stop one girl from having to go through this then it’ll be worth it.”

The concepts of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” didn’t actually come into being until the late 19th century. As soon as they did, people who were homoerotically inclined were compelled to consider the meaning of their desires, where earlier generations might have simply acted on them. For the followers of Der Eigene, who were predominately men, homosexuality was best understood not as an identity — as we now understand it — but as a form of refined taste, and an extension of male friendship. In a kind of “manifesto” for the journal, its founder Adolf Brand wrote that he strove for, “beside the sense of female beauty, also the sense for male beauty, and by again setting friend-love beside woman-love as having completely equal rights”.

As with later gay liberation movements, the first gay rights groups were motivated more by shared enemies than affinities. In Germany at the time, many widely different groups were united in campaigns to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalised sodomy. But homosexuals differed greatly in their conceptualisation of homoerotic desire. The intellectual strand most opposed to the ideas of Der Eigene, followed the physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee who pioneered the idea that homosexuality (and transsexuality) were an innate condition traceable to biological cause. Gay people, in Hirschfeld’s view, were a “third sex” whose hermaphroditic nature gave rise to unique differences in attitude and behaviour. While these ideas have evolved greatly over time, we can hear echoes of Hirschfeld in the supposedly progressive scientific obsession with biologically classifying those who are sexually diverse, leading to the questionable notion of “gay genes”.

For the homosexuals who wrote and contributed to Der Eigene, which included many prominent men of the day — including political journalist Kurt Hiller and the novelist Thomas Mann — all this talk of an inherent hermaphroditic soul was ahistorical and wrongheaded. From Greek antiquity to European aristocracy, they argued, sexual acts between men could be seen as a natural extension of passionate male friendship. To describe this worldview, artist and scholar Elisar von Kupffer coined the term “Lieblingminne” in Der Eigene, combining the virtues of Freundesliebe, love of friends, with Minne, chivalric love.

Many German homosexuals were inspired by von Kupffer’s collections of homoerotic literature, which highlighted that same-sex desires had been felt by many historically-significant figures, from Zeno of Citium to Alexander The Great to Michelangelo. Rather than supporting Hirschfeld’s theory of innate homosexuality, this was seen as key evidence against a medical model. As sexologist Benedict Friedländer, wrote in Der Eigene:

“[To accept Hirschfeld’s view] in ancient Hellas in particular most of the generals, artists and thinkers would have to have been hermaphrodites. Every people from whose initiative in all higher human endeavours every later European culture fed must have consisted in great part of sick, hybrid individuals.”

For the contributors to Der Eigene, it seemed only natural that strong male friendship would occasionally incorporate an erotic component. But for them, sexual desire was culturally contingent: homoerotic desire has waxed and waned over time, driven by the sentiments and spirit of the age. Dutch author Peter Hamecher wrote in the journal that, “I altogether hold the sexual instinct, in all its apparent determinacy, to be something very intangible, something swinging back and forth between extremes”.

More from this author

Michel Houellebecq is a hopeless romantic

By Jarryd Bartle

Male friendship was particularly sentimental in the 19th century. Expressions of love between friends bordered on the outright romantic — the letters exchanged by Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed being a prime example. Given the gender segregation in many aspects of life, and the strict heterosexual courting rituals, sexual contact between young men was also relatively common. It was in cultures which prioritised beauty, whether physical or spiritual, that the homoerotic sentiment was most cultivated in the wider population.

The decriminalisation of homosexuality, for Der Eigene, was therefore not about protecting a minority, but rather invigorating Germany’s potential for homoeroticism. The journal’s ideals were tied closely to naturist movements of the time — focused on nudism, bodybuilding, and co-existence with nature. Homoeroticism is presented as a way to raise oneself above the pedestrian, bourgeois ideals of industry and production.

Contemporary LGBT scholars are often quick to dismiss Der Eigene as “masculinist” in orientation and even “proto-fascist” in its aesthetics, despite the fact that the journal was a target of Nazi purges. Professor Andrew Stewart from the University of Toronto caricatures Brand’s ideas as calling for a racially pure, bisexual Ubermensch to replace the tainted, effeminate homosexual:

“The importance of physical health and fitness, hyper-masculinity, and white supremacy find modern parallels in the experiences of some queer people of colour, trans people, and others who do not achieve the standards of beauty as set by a white, cisgender, and masculine gay culture.”

These accusations aren’t entirely baseless. Brand and Friedländer were not what we would now call “intersectional”. They criticised early feminist movements, viewing women’s calls for men to take greater responsibility for family life as being contrary to the journal’s goal of re-establishing a homoerotic male culture. Further, unlike the early Swiss gay journal Der Kreis, which they inspired, Der Eigene rarely published lesbian writers.

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to throw out the unique perspective of early gay rights activists, merely because some prominent members had outdated views — especially because their views were not universal across Der Eigene. Frequent contributor Edwin Bab held strong feminist sympathies, writing:

“I assert that there is no difference between man and woman in the psychic and intellectual characteristics … only our customs, which make every productive activity highly difficult for the woman, are to blame for the fact that the number of productive women is relatively small.”

Attempts to connect the journal to National Socialism are even more spurious: Brand, who leant Left politically, was never a supporter of the Nazi Party and was highly critical of homosexual members such as Ernst Röhm, calling him a “hypocrite and a traitor”. However, as scholar Harry Oosterhuis has pointed out, Brand was not as discriminating as he should have been when publishing people who criticised Hirschfeld — who, it should be noted, was Jewish. He ran an article by Röhm’s friend, the Nazi Karl Günther Heimsoth, who gave us the phrase “homophile”. Heimsoth criticised Hirschfeld, Oosterhuis writes, by “asserting that the ‘homosexual feminism’ of the ‘Jewish Committee’ was dangerous to the ‘German eros’”. And, Oosterhuis goes on, “instead of refusing the article or expunging the anti-Semitic phrases, Brand only wrote a preface stating that he did not agree with all of the author’s views”.

Nevertheless, Der Eigene is forgotten today less because the original contributors are deemed “problematic” than their views on homosexuality running counter to how modern gays and lesbians have been taught to see themselves. That one is “born this way” is a key pillar of contemporary LGBT thinking. But in the pages of the first gay journal, sexual desire is better conceptualised as a taste — an appreciation of beauty cultivated through early experience and culture. One is not born homosexual (or heterosexual) but with a capacity to perceive aesthetics; over time, this capacity, combined with experience, shapes sexual preferences.

Despite now being lost to time, these ideas still had currency amongst mid-20th century gay rights activists both in the US and Europe. For example, American gay activist Carl Whitman’s influential 1970 “A Gay Manifesto” notes that:

“Homosexuality is not a lot of things. It is not a makeshift in the absence of the opposite sex; it is not hatred or rejection of the opposite sex; it is not genetic; it is not the result of broken homes except inasmuch as we could see the shame of American marriage. Homosexuality is the capacity to love someone of the same sex.”

Michel Foucault also echoed the goals of Der Eigene in his comments during an interview with The Advocate 1984, where he notes: “I think what the gay movement needs is much more the art of life than a science … Sexuality is something that we ourselves create — it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire.”

While some contemporary “queer” academics take up this anti-essentialist mantle, they do so without appreciating homoerotic desire as a beautifying force. Theorists such as Lee Edelman are quick to frame homosexuality as inherently “transgressive”: the Freudian death drive in opposition to procreative sexual desire. The contributors to Der Eigene, however, understood homoeroticism as constructive — a practice that encouraged healthy and flourishing individuals. Whereas today’s nihilistic queer theory is libertarian, Der Eigene’s was restrained. “Every sexual excess and every sexual dissolution is of course decidedly to be advised against,” wrote Brand in one of the journal’s early issues.

Rather than advocating a full liberation of desire, contributors to Der Eigene often expressed concern about, say, the effects of excessive masturbation, the spread of venereal disease, or the predatory behaviour of men towards young women. Homoeroticism was seen as a cure for the social ills of male sexual desire run amok.

It’s a shame that this view of homosexuality, as neither fixed biological orientation nor “radical” disruptive force, has been forgotten. Key victories in gay rights have not given way to a “post-gay” moment of self-reflection for those who feel predominantly same-sex desire see themselves not as “other” but as universally human. Instead, we see a doubling down of identitarianism, particularly online, where every kink, feeling and sexual experience is ripe for categorisation. The New Left notions of “authenticity” and “finding oneself”, which shaped early gay rights movements have evolved with the internet into what philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio call “profilicity”, where one’s identity is a process of obsessive self-marketing. There are now labels for those who want both love and sex (demisexuals), who prefer just masturbating to porn (technosexuals), and who don’t like having sex at all (asexuals).

The brilliance of Brand and the other contributors to Der Eigene was that they could move beyond the delusions of sexual identity, while advocating and defending homoeroticism. The group tackled moralist tirades that equated same-sex desire with degeneracy by pointing to the historical and aesthetic evidence that cultures of homosexuality and cultures of greatness were one in the same. It’s precisely at this current time of sexual hysteria, when intimacy has been declared dead and queer theory diffuse, that our current paradigms of homosexuality should be questioned — and we should look to the past to inform our sexual future.

Arguably the most important tradition is Tradition 10: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” The Washingtonians, a group of recovering alcoholics that preceded AA by about a century, disbanded due to infighting over its involvement in social reforms like prohibition, religion and slavery abolition. AA’s founders, William Wilson and Dr Robert Smith (Bill and Dr Bob), didn’t want AA to suffer the same fate. Best their organisation remain neutral, they thought, so as to be welcoming for alcoholics from every walk of life. For nearly 88 years, AA has never weighed in on foreign or domestic policies, nor has it endorsed political candidates or legislative proposals. And so desperate drunks of every race, colour and creed have kept on coming and — together — got sober.

It is up to every individual AA meeting to uphold the programme principles. (Tradition 4: “Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole”). But where many struggle, I’ve found, over the 20 years I’ve been going to meetings, is with Tradition 10. In AA, alcoholics are free to share about anything they like, so long as it pertains to alcoholism; politics and the culture wars, they can leave at the door. And yet, a lot of recovering alcoholics can’t resist hot takes when they’ve been handed a mic. I noticed this particularly after Donald Trump was elected, and especially in New York City. Members started sharing about a fight they’d had that day with their idiotic, MAGA-hat-wearing uncle on Facebook — apparently unaware of newcomers, desperate to get sober, who might now feel unwelcome because they had voted for the wrong guy.

In 2020, violations of Tradition 10 reached a fever pitch. After George Floyd’s murder, institutions across the nation absorbed progressive ideals into their mission statements. I was finishing my last year of study at Columbia University. Having entered the university in 2017 as a self-described radical progressive planning a career in LGBT activism, I was graduating an exile. I had become disillusioned with, and spoken out against, my fellow progressives’ tactics: suppressing free speech, purity policing and reducing every individual to his or her skin colour, gender and sexual orientation. During my last semester, which was moved online due to the pandemic, I’d sign on to virtual AA meetings after class, and immediately be struck by how similar the two spaces had become. Pronouns lit up the screen. Whereas opening readings once consisted of the AA preamble, the 12 Steps and 12 traditions, and details about the meeting, now some groups chose to add a thinly veiled threat: “We will not tolerate racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic rhetoric in this space.”

From my experience of post-Trump academia, I knew these proclamations wouldn’t so much prevent inappropriate speech as put everyone on high alert, encouraging an atmosphere of self-censorship. Recovering alcoholics carry a lot of guilt about the harm their drinking has caused others; they are often irrationally fearful of causing any more. If they feel like they’re traversing a mine field of potential triggers that could set off listeners in the room, they may be reluctant to admit shameful details about the past, which they want and need to get off their chests. Recovering alcoholics’ lives depend on their ability to share honestly, and to feel like they will be accepted by AA no matter their histories or their personal views. Increasingly, certain opinions — although you could never be totally sure which ones — were no longer worthy of respect in a democratic society. Meetings were not unlike my university classes, where the silence during discussions would extend for what felt like an eternity, as so many students stayed quiet rather than risk transgressing.

Suggested reading

Why would you demonise Alcoholics Anonymous?

By Tanya Gold

But even silence could get alcoholics in trouble. In June 2020, Toby N. had been in the programme in New York for six years. He was raised in the Mormon church, but left it when he was 24 and came out as gay a couple of years later. On #BlackoutTuesday, when white people committed to posting nothing but a black square on Instagram for a full 24 hours, Toby decided not to partake. “I didn’t feel like it was going to do anything,” he said. Then he got a direct message from a friend — another gay man in AA — who asked: why hadn’t Toby posted anything about racial justice on social media? He accused Toby of inadequate allyship. (Toby had donated to Black Lives Matter.) In meetings, he would hear people whispering about other members’ “white privilege”.

Toby was generally in alignment with them about social justice issues, but he found the manner in which they spoke about them exceedingly “toxic”. But a line had been drawn in the sand, he told me: “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Exclusively attending meetings for gay alcoholics, Toby had previously found acceptance in AA, but now he felt like a stranger in the programme that had for years been like a second home. He decided to leave. The 12 steps worked for him, but the dogma and the groupthink, he felt he could do without. “It feels like I’m a man without a country,” he said. “I don’t have the gay community that I thought I did.”

For many years, I also attended affinity AA groups for gay and lesbian alcoholics. In these meetings, we felt no need to use coded language when sharing: we could say “my boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, rather than “my other half” or “significant other”. We could be honest about our difficulties with various spiritual aspects of the programme (Step Three: A decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him): the only God many of us had ever understood was one who despised us. It may seem like affinity groups violate Tradition 10, since some of the topics discussed in these meetings are technically “outside issues”. However, they are always spoken about as they pertain to alcoholism. And because these meetings are clearly labelled in the directory, straight members who attend are aware that some of the issues discussed might not pertain to them.

Sometime over the past decade, gay and lesbian meetings became “LGBTQ” meetings. After “intersectionality” leapt from university campuses into the mainstream, these meetings became the most ideological of them all. Suddenly, a whole range of difficulties had to be acknowledged. “If you suffer from chronic fatigue and don’t feel like you can make it until the end of the meeting to share, please alert me and I will call on your early,” the host of one LGBTQ meeting in New York I attended read aloud. Then: “If you want to share but you have difficulty speaking, please write what you would like to share in the chat and I will read it aloud for you.” I still can’t fathom how any member in attendance could have interpreted these announcements as anything other than disturbingly infantilising: one of the key ingredients for sobriety is personal responsibility.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the language of one of AA’s best-known readings changed. The preamble has always read: “Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other.” On the last day of the 71st General Service Conference for the US and Canada, held virtually in April 2021, a vote was held on whether to change the wording of the Preamble from “a fellowship of men and women” to “a fellowship of people”. The motion passed. Many members were shocked. Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for its stubborn resistance to change: the first 164 pages of the Big Book have barely been amended since they were written nearly a century ago. The literature has saved thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” is one of AA’s unofficial mottos. Why risk changing something that works?

Another member, Justin D., says that another reason changes should rarely occur is that they are hard to reverse. At an LGBTQ meeting he attends in Baltimore, which began as a meeting for gays and lesbians, a young woman joined the group and began demanding changes to the opening literature because people were being misgendered. She called for a directive stating that only gender-neutral language should be used when calling on members to share. Group members reluctantly acquiesced to the woman’s demands. Not long afterwards, she stopped attending. Now, if members wanted to return the readings to their original form, they would have to propose it to the group and initiate a vote — which could result in accusations that they are trying to reintroduce trans-exclusionary language.

Suggested reading

The twilight of identity politics

By Park Macdougald

Elizabeth S. said that at a “queer-identified” meeting she attended, all of the opening readings were amended to include only gender-neutral language. However, she told me, one gender-specific pronoun had apparently managed to slip through the editing process. When the woman who read that particular announcement aloud arrived at the pronoun, Elizabeth said, she began to trip over her words and look nervously about the room, as if she was uncertain how to proceed.

Another member I spoke to, Bernadette R., remarked that for decades women have bristled at the male pronouns used in AA’s literature to describe God, or a Higher Power. “The female demographic is much bigger than the non-binary demographic. So why are they getting a space faster than women are?” She also mentioned her frustration with the new gender-neutral restrooms at the meeting she attends every week, which make many women feel uncomfortable. “Women deserve to feel safe,” she said.

And yet it has long been a principle in AA that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe, or what wrongs you’ve committed — AA says “You belong here.” The only requirement for membership is “a desire to stop drinking” (Tradition Three). Critical social justice ideology, which scoffs at the idea of redemption for those who may have transgressed, is inimical to AA’s core mission. If the programme doesn’t recommit to upholding Tradition 10, it could go the same way as the Washingtonians. In the meantime, many alcoholics with the “wrong politics” might choose not to join a group that could shun them for their problematic views. And, as it is said in AA, for a real alcoholic, “to drink is to die”.

Names have been changed to respect AA members’ anonymity. All agreed to participate in this article. 

Such is the message of Robyn Exton, CEO of lesbian dating app HER, mostly aimed at 20-to-30-somethings. Robyn is very enthusiastic about the cause of lesbianism for all. Last week, in honour of Lesbian Visibility Day, she wrote a combative statement on her business’s website, asserting that attempts to confine the category of lesbians to “only those assigned female at birth” involves a “twisted and erroneous” belief “about what being a lesbian can or cannot entail”. “The future of lesbian is trans”, she continued, before declaring: “we must all affirm trans and nonbinary lesbians… we must all become better informed and put in the work”. She concluded: “On Lesbian Visibility Day, let’s ensure that all lesbians are seen, celebrated, and embraced — regardless of their gender. There’s no such thing as a ‘real lesbian’.” Later, she sent out a message to all users to delete the HER app if they disagreed, and made a TikTok video to the same effect.

Based on an Ellen episode drawing on popular stereotypes about voracious lesbians stealing men’s wives, there’s a joke that whenever you recruit enough women to the sapphic cause, you win a toaster. Exton seems to think she can win a toaster for her preferred version of lesbianism by hurling insults at the unconvinced. If you fall into this category, she suggests, you are a “irrelevant has-been lez-bean”, a “fascist”, a “transphobic bigot full of hatred”, and a “sad, hateful clown”. As seduction techniques go, it’s a bold one.

More from this author

Is France too sexy for the trans wars?

By Kathleen Stock

By redrawing the maps of womanhood and manhood, so fundamental to human life in numerous ways, transactivists such as Exton have redrawn several other maps. One of these represents sexual orientations — heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual — once understood as involving distinctive patterns of attraction between the biological sexes by definition, but now no longer. Ignoring everything that we know about human sexuality, primary and secondary sex characteristics are now treated as the negligibly important physical wrapping for the irresistibly hot gender identities pulsing away within.

According to this demented sexual metaphysics, if a male identifies as a woman and is also attracted to women, he counts as a “trans lesbian” — which also means he is a lesbian, and you had better not object to him popping up in the app you just paid for. The head of Stonewall, Nancy Kelley, agrees; the difference between female and male “lesbians” is now treated by LGBTQ+ authority figures as no more important than the difference between Scottish and English ones.

Queer culture still allows you, a hapless female seeking females, the right to reject any given “trans lesbian” purely on individual grounds of preference or taste. Maybe you don’t like his politics, or shade of lipstick, or something. This is treated as a straightforward matter of consent. But woe betide you if you reject him on the grounds that he is the wrong sex, or otherwise indicate on your dating profile that you only want to have sex with females, accurately construed. In the latter case, you are likely to get banned from whatever queer app you are using — as you also would be for using the pronouns I just used, for the sake of clarity.

In theory, the map of sexual orientations should get redrawn for each orientation equally, but in practice it has been altered for lesbians most of all. Swiping through the apps and looking for love, you are now bound to come across photos of what are obviously adult human males, dressed extravagantly in florals and hairclips, adopting the sort of girlish head-tilts last seen on Shirley Temple in the Forties. “Putting in the work” to “affirm” these people, as Exton grimly urges lesbians to do, mostly involves dating and sleeping with them.

Many “trans lesbians” are autogynephiles, for whom the adoption of a lesbian identity can be added to a long list of fetishised pleasures about womanhood. To those who are not chronically naïve, there’s no mystery as to why fetishists would do this; but it is a mystery why so many lesbians, in the old-fashioned sense, seem delighted to collude with them. Why are they so keen to try to bully and shame female peers into sleeping with males with the right pronouns? The number of people who identify as “LGBTQ+ women” vastly outnumbers that of same-sex-attracted females, so it probably makes sense for a business like a dating app to cast its net as widely as possible in order to maximise the number of potential consumers. But this can’t be the explanation for everyone.

One underappreciated strand of the current discourse about lesbianism seems to be the weird idea floating about that committing yourself to loving females, as a female yourself, is some sort of moral vocation. Effectively, Exton and Kelley are acting as if, once you have come out as a lesbian (however that’s defined), you then have some moral duty not to sexually reject any woman (or “woman”), simply on the grounds of her womanhood. If you can appeal to some other less sweeping and more individual personal preference to get yourself off the hook, that’s different.

Now, you can argue with their underlying account of womanhood — and I do — but you can also disagree with the implication that being a lesbian ethically commits you to a “no woman left behind” attitude, at least in theory. In fact, morality has nothing to do with it. If, as a woman yourself, you do ever end up sexually rejecting another woman simply because she is a woman — and for no other reason — then you haven’t failed morally, though you might have just ceased to be a lesbian.

To conceive of your sexual orientation as a kind of missionary work may seem strange — and perhaps especially so to many heterosexuals — but it is also shored up by a popular contemporary conception of desire. In this view, sexual desires can be morally criticised and potentially perfected. This is not the mundane claim that you can choose not to act on deviant fantasies. Rather, it’s the idea that, simply on ethical grounds, you can work hard to breathe fire into your loins where there was none previously; or alternatively, extinguish it altogether. As a result, gay men should stop wanting “no fats, no femmes” on Grindr; black men should desire black women more often; it is wrong to feel sexual repulsion simply on grounds of weight; and so on.

Suggested reading

Is it racist to like big butts?

By Kat Rosenfield

Ironically, early adopters of the idea that desire could answer directly to one’s conscience were so-called “political lesbians”, arguing that any woman could become a lesbian in theory, and urging straight women to do so on the ethical grounds of fighting the patriarchy. Popularly understood as the idea that you could choose to feel aroused by a woman on political grounds, this is daft. Generally speaking, you can’t berate yourself into feeling turned on by something or someone that would otherwise leave you cold — unless, of course, berating yourself is already your kink.

In often conflict-filled discussions of the validity of political lesbianism, it’s sometimes assumed that there are only two choices — “born this way” or choice – and if the idea of a single genetic determinant is false, then your sexuality must be freely chosen. But that’s a false alternative. There is no single gay gene, and sexuality can and obviously does have environmental causes. But it doesn’t follow that you can choose what to like or not like in bed. You can’t choose your environment, and you can’t choose its complex effects on you. Yes, you might decide to leave your husband and shack up with a woman in order to stick it to the patriarchy. But you can’t choose what you’ll feel when she touches you.

Such points seem lost on the likes of Exton and Kelley, pointlessly and destructively intent on converting lesbians out of their homosexuality by shaming them into sleeping with males as a form of charity work. I’ve no doubt that, as a result of such pressure tactics, some lesbians will end up in bed with males. But they won’t like it. That fact of them not liking it is neither a moral victory for lesbianism, nor is it a defeat. It’s a simple description of lesbian sexuality. And if they do end up liking it, they probably aren’t lesbians.

This particular romance may have ended in heartbreak, but Silo and Roy aren’t unique: over half a dozen zoos around the world are home to pairs of “gay penguins”, many of which have successfully reared chicks. Wild seabirds may also be that way inclined: a study of Laysan albatrosses in Hawaii reports that 31% of pairs were female-female, raising chicks that had been fathered elsewhere. A few years ago, Labour MP Dawn Butler stated that “90% of giraffes are gay”; though this claim was roundly trashed, it seems to contain a kernel of truth, in that male giraffes have indeed been seen engaging in behaviour that looks a lot like gay sex — at least as often as they have been observed mating with females.

Same-sex couplings are everywhere in the animal kingdom, as I learned this month at a Royal Society conference dedicated to discussing possible explanations for the seeming biological paradox of same-sex sex. On the face of it, it’s a behaviour that doesn’t make sense in evolutionary terms: an exclusive preference for the same sex is a trait that’s not likely to be passed on to offspring. Even opting for same-sex partners just some of the time requires an explanation: there would seem to be a huge evolutionary advantage in focusing one’s attentions towards the opposite sex, since it would make you more efficient than a competitor who mates indiscriminately.

Theories vary hugely depending on the species and context. Insects, for instance, just may not have particularly sophisticated methods of detecting partners of the opposite sex. If your entire brain is little more than a cluster of nerves, then some cases of mistaken identity are perhaps inevitable. At the other end of the spectrum, sex has a complex social function in species like primates. Our close relatives the bonobos frequently have group sex sessions that make human attempts at polyamory and pansexuality pale in comparison. In this species, what was once an adaptation purely for reproduction has taken on an additional role in maintaining both opposite-sex and same-sex social bonds, a bit like how our tongues initially evolved for tasting and swallowing food, but are now also indispensable in allowing us to speak. It’s different again in seabirds, where the care of chicks is a co-operative enterprise requiring hard work and trust between two pair-bonded adults. If “lesbian” albatross couples are effective at raising their chicks together when there aren’t enough males to go round, then why shouldn’t they?

More from this author

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

This abundance of teachable examples has been valuable to those wishing to refute claims that same-sex attraction is “unnatural”: clearly, it’s anything but. But there’s only so much we can learn from animals about why humans are sometimes gay. Although lots of animals mate or form partnerships with members of the same sex, this generally seems to be a flexible behaviour — as demonstrated by the fickle Silo. Our species is almost unique in that, across cultures, a small but consistent proportion of people seem biologically hardwired from a young age to desire only same-sex partners.

We know this is partially genetic: if your identical twin is gay, there’s roughly a 30-40% chance that you will be gay as well, compared with 1-2% in the general population. But how this gene manages to be passed on is a mystery, given that historically same-sex attracted people are significantly less likely to reproduce. For a while, a popular idea was that perhaps genes which predispose men to be attracted to other men or women to women persist because their relatives, who also carry the gene, somehow have more offspring as a result; either because the gene itself helps them somehow, or if childless gay uncles and aunts help to look after children. This idea was always quite far-fetched though, and unsurprisingly it has very little empirical support.

Another explanation could have something to do with reducing competition between siblings: if your brother is gay, you can be sure he’s not going to steal your girlfriend. It’s thought that this could be mediated in utero through the maternal immune system, since men who have older brothers are significantly more likely to be gay. There isn’t really any direct evidence supporting the hypothesis, either.

To me, this is one of the most fascinating unsolved mysteries of evolutionary biology. But not all biologists think so. The paradox of same-sex orientation receives disproportionately little attention from academic biology. Not only that, but some seem to be actively averse to researching why some animals are same-sex attracted. (This summary of research at Yale notes that “scientists rarely if ever actively study how often [same-sex behaviours] occur compared with different-sex sexual behaviours”.) So I was intrigued when I saw the Royal Society conference advertised. So much so that I shared it in a WhatsApp group of researchers from my department, in case it was of interest to others.

If I had given it a moment’s thought, I could have predicted the response. The event did not go down well. It “raised alarm bells”. Some discussed writing a letter to complain to the Royal Society. Other biologists wrote on Twitter that the event “could very easily go into YIKES territory” and “sent some red flags up” due to the Royal Society’s track record of giving an award to “a TERF” — referring, I assume, to neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott, who won the prestigious Michael Faraday prize in 2021. (The conference was tiny, with only about 30 people in attendance, including the speakers and organisers.)

One reason many biologists think the discipline should steer well clear of this area is to avoid any politically inconvenient results. The finding that sexual orientation seems to be innate — in other words, not a choice — has been a core part of the gay rights movement. It turned a debate about whether certain behaviours were moral into a debate about civil rights for a marginalised group. Our support for gay marriage shouldn’t depend on how sexual orientation is determined, of course; but pragmatically speaking, the message that people are “born this way” has been enormously effective at changing hearts and minds. The wide range of “gay animals” in nature has been key in shoring up this argument: the internet is full of listicles like this one by PETA entitled, “Gay Animals Who Prove Same-Sex Love Is Natural”.

In my experience, academic biologists with adjacent specialties tend to see it as not their place to comment on this area, and view it as potentially suspect to show too much interest in it. To some, asking why some people — or even animals — are attracted to the same sex is the same as asking them to justify themselves, which gay people shouldn’t have to do of course. (One comment I saw in response to the Royal Society conference made exactly this claim.) On top of this, there is a perception that the relevant groups must be deferred to as the ultimate authority on any social issue. Taken to the extreme, this can mean that anyone else who presumes to scientifically study their characteristics is seen as politically incorrect. See, for instance, controversies in archaeology where genetic research becomes problematic if it threatens to contradict the origin myths of indigenous groups. Research into sexual orientation is similar, in that it challenges the moral right for LGBT people to have the final word on LGBT issues.

Suggested reading

The world after Trump

By Stone Age Herbalist

Of course, it’s much easier to let others who care more decide what the facts are than to weigh in yourself. Many biologists, I think, would rather their work were relevant only in the academic niche in which they find themselves; few are comfortable commenting on politically sensitive subjects. But biology — the science of who we are and what our place is in the world — has much to say about the most pressing political and moral debates of our age. It is a shame if some of the people most qualified to contribute — often qualified at great public expense — are opting out of the conversation because they see it as too political.

Science is meant to be about striving to better understand our world, just because it’s interesting, “because it’s there”, because we can. For politicised areas, a dose of plain, unmotivated interest is especially needed. If we stigmatise whole realms of research, well-meaning scientists will avoid showing an interest in sensitive topics, and only those with an axe to grind remain. Scientists must actively commit to protecting curiosity for curiosity’s sake. Asking why the sky is blue need not carry the subtext that it ought to be some other colour instead.

For many women though, both in the UK and elsewhere, things are very different. Whether in Uganda, where same-sex encounters are a criminal offence, in Iran, where some lesbians have been threatened with state execution, or within the religious enclaves that exist in a number of US states and in which lesbian conversion therapy is widespread, being a lesbian can mean a hard, lonely life. I am keenly aware that 45 years after coming out, and despite decades of campaigning for lesbian rights, much remains to be done before lesbians can feel truly liberated. Which is why, with Kathleen Stock and Martina Navratilova, I have set up the Lesbian Project. The idea has been brewing for a number of years — ever since I began to realise that the word “lesbian” was yet again becoming a dirty one, as many gay men and trans activists accused us of bigotry for seeking out our own spaces and setting boundaries.

We want to explore why our needs and issues have been so thoroughly deprioritised that we are ignored, presumed indivisible from gay men and heterosexual “queer”-identified kinksters, and even — according to other “letters” of the ever-growing alphabet – the baddies?

The rot started to set in when the Gay Liberation Front split. Lesbians, despite having taken the lead in many ways, soon found that their own concerns were coming second to those of men. Sick of being marginalised and asked to make the tea, after three years the majority of the women walked out and began organising independently. These lesbians had become the stuff of legend by the end of the Seventies. And their struggle for liberation was indivisible from that of women everywhere: one of the seven demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement was “The Right to a Self-Defined Sexuality. An End to Discrimination Against Lesbians”.

Suggested reading

The emptiness of being queer

By Kathleen Stock

I was at the first autonomous public lesbian event — the Lesbian Strength March — in London, in 1981, and the exhilaration that my 19-year-old self felt is hard to describe. Back then we understood that the one thing we did have in common with our gay brothers was discrimination on the basis of our same-sex attraction. We also recognised that one common anti-gay trope, namely the suggestion that gay men were not to be trusted around children, was also said of lesbians. But we were also well aware that a number of gay male campaigns, such as those targeting the legal penalties against cottaging and cruising, did not concern us.

Our issues included resisting what the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality. Many of us were feeling coerced into marriage with men. I know I was. As a working-class girl hitting my teens in the mid-Seventies, my life had already been mapped out. I was supposed to marry and have kids with one of the men on my estate, and stay with him regardless of how unhappy or unfulfilled it made me.

At that time, and indeed well into the Eighties, it was commonplace to hear of lesbians who, having split with their husbands, then lost custody of their children through the family courts because they were lesbians. At one stage, up to 80% of the women dragged through the courts by disgruntled ex-husbands lost their children this way. It was clear that the issues affecting lesbians were worlds apart from those affecting gay men.

Coming out as a teenager was not my choice. Every girl at my school was deemed either a lezzer or a slag. And because I had rejected the boys in my class, and was clearly more interested in my female friends, by the bullies’ logic I must be a lezzer, so they stared to call me it. For once, they happened to be right. I was bullied and threatened, until my older brother stepped in. But being a teenaged lesbian was also a joy: going to nightclubs with the gay boys and observing the older butch/femme couples was fascinating.

The Lesbian Project is seeking an amicable divorce from our gay brothers. Being lumped in with men is neither appropriate nor useful when it comes to our priorities, and we can no longer pretend that it is. We have only once been targeted by the same legislation — Section 28 — and as women we need to ask ourselves whether we are being afforded the same attention as our male counterparts.

More from this author

The return of lesbian pride

By Julie Bindel

Not that all the issues affecting lesbians are the same. We are not a hegemonic group. If I were cast away on a desert island, with 50 indiscriminately chosen lesbians, we would fight like cat and dog and agree on next to nothing. But we would still share something precious and fundamental: our resistance to the path set out for us by whichever community and nation we were raised in.

There are other things we share. We are all gender nonconforming (despite the fact that prior to queer theory and trans ideology we didn’t ever use that term). We have defied sex stereotypes, and all of us have been major disappointments to those hoping we would grow up looking to marry a handsome, successful man and produce a brace of children. We were supposed to behave differently, even if raised within liberal or socially progressive families. We weren’t supposed to wear scruffy dungarees and play pool in backstreet bars.

Many lesbians will disagree with, even actively dislike, my views on certain issues. Some lesbians won’t be feminist. Others might prefer the term “queer” or “gay” — terms I won’t use to describe myself. But like it or not, we are a tribe. Our enemies are not discerning. We are bound together by our refusal to play by the rules. Every out lesbian has defied sex stereotypes and taken a huge risk in being public. Heterosexuality is not just the norm — it is also the method by which patriarchy flourishes. Whether or not we are conscious of it, lesbians are both a threat and a direct challenge to men’s superiority over women.

Today, I live a privileged, middle-class life, with a media career and a supportive family and friendship circle. Although I am relatively safe from bigotry and violence, I still feel that knot in my stomach when asked by a stranger, “What does your husband do?” Then there are the times I hear direct anti-lesbian sentiments expressed by colleagues, neighbours and others, and I can’t keep quiet. If we can come together to fight the oppression that affects us all, our differences will matter less than they otherwise might. A few weeks ago I was walking my dog in the park when a man, resplendent in tattoos, biker jacket and shaven head, approached me. For a split second, I wondered if he was friend or foe. But as we stood face-to-face, he broke into a big smile, and told me he recognised me “off the telly” and that “my mum loves you! She’s a lesbian too.” I was walking on air for the rest of the day.

Everyone involved in this project has their own history and perspective on what it means to be a lesbian. Joanna Cherry, one of the Scottish National Party’s most high-profile MPs, has been treated appallingly within her own party over her views on single-sex spaces (not just for lesbians but also for women facing domestic and sexual abuse). And Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter turned barrister, has spoken out about biological men identifying as lesbians on online dating apps, for which she was labelled a “bigot” and a “transphobe”.

These women join a long list of those who are fighting back against the new bigotry that has rebranded lesbians as irrelevant or not deserving of attention. Our enemies are the same as when I came out decades ago: misogynists. Above all, men who hate the fact that we reject them sexually and get on just fine without them. Some of our enemies are, unfortunately, young women, although we would never condemn or reject them. Having spoken to dozens of them, I fear these women are motivated by a desire to stay on the right side of the men in the LGBTQ+ rainbow, so they put their own needs aside in order to be accepted. One day they may come to us older lesbians for advice and support. We are here for them if they do.

The Lesbian Project will put us back on the map. Lesbians who are able to be out and proud share bravery, tenacity — and enemies. Whatever our differences, we all want things to be better for future generations of girls. Being a lesbian is to refuse to bow to convention. It is an act of resistance and resilience. And I for one am proud to use that label.

While one of the stars of Joyland is a trans actor, whose character has a budding romantic relationship, focusing on this aspect of the movie misses the larger themes its creators were looking to highlight: the soul-crushing demands made of women in Pakistan — particularly mothers — and the tragic choices some make to escape their desolate circumstances. Questions of masculinity, familial responsibility, and the struggles of working-class Pakistani families are all presented with care and nuance, as is the discrimination faced by transgender people. The latter, though, is not the crux of the story.

One wouldn’t describe John Wick as a movie about animal cruelty, or Jurassic Park as a tale of corporate negligence, even though those themes are present. But amplifying LGBT-related content in movies has recently become a trend in the West — partly fuelled by a marketing industry that has wholeheartedly adopted identity politics as a way to sell cinema tickets. It is, of course, encouraging that LGBT minorities in Western societies are increasingly accepted and visible in popular culture. But in nations where they are not, exaggerating their centrality to a storyline can spell disaster for struggling artists who are treading a line, carefully weaving overlooked narratives into their works.

Last August, Pakistan’s censor boards approved Joyland for release, but backtracked after receiving complaints from religious politicians that the film “contains highly objectionable material which do not conform with the social values and moral standards of our society”. It was banned until November, but was cleared for release after a government committee was set up to investigate the film. The hard work of local journalists, and a social media campaign in Pakistan with the hashtag #ReleaseJoyland, helped reverse the ban, and the film has enjoyed a successful run in cinemas. Still, the more sexual elements of the movie were censored for domestic audiences, and it is not being screened in the nation’s most populous province of Punjab.

More from this author

Pakistani child sex abuse is an open secret

By Hina Husain

In all this, Western discourse has probably been more of a hindrance than a help. Pakistan’s traditionalist circles tend to be biased against anything given the stamp of approval by Western progressives. Maria Butt, for instance, one of the nation’s most influential and successful fashion designers, has vehemently spoken out against the promotion and screening of Joyland in Pakistan, accusing it of promoting a “trans agenda”. Given that she supports boycotting the film, we can safely assume that she hasn’t actually watched it. But her response is still useful, in that it reveals what happens when Western ideology is imposed on works of art set in more socially conservative nations. Here, the labels of “trans” and “LGBT” can easily discourage a local audience from engaging with a work’s more subtle themes, potentially prejudicing moviegoers before they’ve had a chance to watch it.

The implications of this are profound. It’s not a big deal for Disney if Thor: Love and Thunder is blocked for release in Malaysia due to its blink-and-you-miss-it allusions to bisexuality. But for indie production companies such as Khoosat Films — creators of Joyland — local audiences being put off their work can prevent a project breaking even, as well as discourage up-and-coming directors from pursuing more risqué stories. Filmmakers in Pakistan know this, which is why Joyland’s official trailers don’t mention the Queer Palm awarded to the film, instead only highlighting its Jury Prize at Cannes. (News of the award still made its way to Pakistan, with one politician responding: “Obviously if it’s received the Queer Palm award what kind of film must it be?”)

But where reviews in the West consistently describe the film as a “trans-cis” love story or a “trans drama”, Pakistani viewers rarely single out this plot point, focussing instead on its more universally accessible themes of loneliness and despair. Meanwhile, not all films with LGBT characters are met with condemnation in Pakistan. In 2019, Joyland’s director, Saim Sadiq, and trans star, Alina Khan, worked together on Darling. It’s possible that Sadiq was testing the waters with this 16-minute short film, which follows Khan as she tries to make it as an erotic dancer in Lahore, but faces pushback and discrimination. It was the first Pakistani film to be screened at Venice Film Festival and won the award for Best Short Film, but otherwise received little attention in the West. In Pakistan, however, it was heralded as a “landmark moment for queer cinema”.

More from this author

The hijacking of Pakistani feminism

By Hina Husain

The myopia of Western critics also ignores some of Joyland‘s more tragic themes, which involve its non-trans female characters: the pressure to produce a male heir; the discouragement to pursue meaningful work outside the domestic realm; the feeling of powerlessness as the men in your life are free to explore and “find themselves”, sexually or otherwise. The despondency and desperation that millions of Pakistani women experience in their daily lives is not relatable for the average North American or European moviegoer. What Western audiences are well-acquainted with, however, is the claim that transgender people face discrimination in society. And as a result, the film’s layered exposés of Pakistani society are reduced to the latest progressive cause: trans activism. The mistreatment of women in Pakistan, meanwhile, is largely glossed over. 

This is part of a wider and worrying cultural trend. Last month, I wrote about how Pakistan’s annual International Women’s Day march, due to take place in Lahore today, had been hijacked by causes more palatable to Western progressives. The Aurat March organisers’ foregrounding of trans issues made it more controversial in its country of origin, to the point where, over the weekend, it was banned. Here, surely, is a sign that those seeking change in Pakistan must reach out to social conservatives — the nation is home to so many, both male and female — or face being outlawed. It may be unfortunate that some of the LGBT lifestyles presented by the Western media would be viewed as scandalous to the average Pakistani, but that is the reality. Pushing a unipolar idea of what “progress” looks like won’t remedy this. What’s needed are films such as Joyland — films which are doing the hard work of trying to change hearts and minds by presenting subtle, nuanced stories that encourage the viewer to come to a different understanding of what it means to be gay or transgender.

Despite the negative press and attempts at censorship, Joyland has received enormous support from Pakistanis who recognise how necessary the film is, not just for the country’s struggling movie industry, but also for its social culture. It deftly handles domestic challenges that devastate the lives of far too many in the country — men, women and transgender people. It’s a movie by Pakistanis for Pakistanis that reflects back to us a more complete representation of our society than we’re used to seeing on screen. By the time the credits roll, your heart swells — and, when viewed as its creators intended, it doesn’t occur to you that what you’ve just watched is an award-winning “trans romance”.