It’s one of a number of lines that makes its way from Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film Pride into the fabulous new stage adaptation at the National Theatre. Beresford and his co-writer, Matthew Warchus, have transformed the classic Brit-flick portraying the then-unlikely union between working-class communities and metropolitan progressives during the miners’ strike into a piece of bombastic and campy musical theater. It lands in a political milieu markedly different from the 2014 film — and certainly from LGSM’s Eighties heyday. In recent years, the story recounted quite faithfully in Pride has become a political fable of the kind beloved on the Left. Like the Jarrow Crusade, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the Paris Commune, and the Spanish Civil War before it, it is a somewhat melancholic story of a social movement that is said to have succeeded in history’s long vista — in spite of near-term defeat.

But where Pride’s story differs from the parables of the Left canon is in the split fortunes of the LGSM coalition. Britain now is a far-cry from the widespread homophobia of the Eighties, whose officials responded so shamefully to the HIV epidemic. When the young today are told of how Manchester’s chief constable James Anderton — “God’s copper” — described gay men affected by HIV as “swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making”, they are rightly disgusted. Thatcherism failed to suppress gay rights. Within a generation, her Conservative successors would go on to denounce Section 28 and legalize gay marriage, David Cameron declaring this — in an admittedly small pool — to be “one of the things of which I’m proudest”.

But Thatcher and her heirs did succeed in shuttering British heavy industry and neutering the political weight of organized labor. Britain’s breakneck deindustrialization process was faster than any other nation; even the collapsing Soviet Union wasn’t so extreme. It is now a country where skilled manual work has become a niche career choice. Outside London are countless communities that have never recovered from the offshoring of their local industry.

It’s hard not to wonder how LGSM’s visionary founding member Mark Ashton would feel about how things turned out. Mischievous as well as driven, as a young man he spent a six-month stint in the King’s Cross Conservative Club undercover in drag. Played by Jhon Lumsden in Pride, he radiates a manic confrontational energy, simultaneously pithy, erudite, roguish and possessed of a rare moral clarity. When asked why a group of gay people should come to the aid of people who persecuted them growing up, he phlegmatically retorts: “Because miners dig for coal, which produces power, which allows gay people like you to dance to Bananarama till three o’clock in the morning.”

Ashton instinctively connected social liberty and class struggle. Millions of Brits were gay and millions worked in industry, and it was clear how contributions to the economy and social life of Britain linked the two. It would be difficult to draw the same threads together today. How does one link a piebald economy of casualized work, AI data centers, Deliveroo riders, vape shops and photovoltaic cell installers with the remaining contested battlegrounds of social liberty? It isn’t quite so clear how each of us contributes to the life of the other anymore.

Still, it is worth challenging the narrative that has emerged, particularly since the Brexit referendum, that these two core components of the old Labour vote — the urban progressives and the traditional working class — are somehow fundamentally opposed. The commonplace bigotry that I encountered at comprehensive school in a former pit community in the Nineties is dying. Indeed, polling by the likes of YouGov consistently disproves the stereotype of the bigoted, provincial “gammon” who has bewitched progressives since Brexit. People living in Britain’s social mobility cold-spots, characterized by the ghosts of production lines and shipyards, are no more likely to feel animosity towards the non-straight population than people anywhere else. Where homophobia is more prevalent is within religious communities, which leaves the modern progressive with difficult scales to balance, as those people often don’t resemble the middle-aged men of post-industrial England who have become their Ur-baddie.

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I saw the heartbreaking effects of this homophobia first-hand in 2014 — the year the movie Pride was first released. I was a key-worker in various homeless hostels in London. One was for young people in Sydenham where roughly half of my young charges were the disowned teenage children of homophobic parents — all of whom had been taught by their religious leaders that their children’s sexuality made them evil. Each case file would come with a letter from a parent containing words to the effect of: “I do not support my child’s lifestyle. They are no longer my child.” This social and familial ostracization used to be a common part of the gay experience in Britain; activists like Ashton fought so hard to overcome it.

The continuation of such attitudes within highly religious communities is a reality that most modern progressives mostly prefer to ignore. When, in 2019, a school in Birmingham was subject to a months-long campaign of picketing by Muslim parents outraged at a curriculum encouraging acceptance of LGBT+ relationships, most progressives seemed keen to shuffle the episode under the carpet. False claims that mimicked the worst of post-war-era bigotry whirled around social media: the school had a “paedophile agenda”, staff were “teaching children to masturbate”, and children were “being indoctrinated” into homosexuality. The campaigner Amir Ahmed said that children were being “conditioned to accept (gay relationships) as a normal way of life”, while the Imam Mullah Bahm pronounced the school’s headteacher was a “shatani” (a devil) who “needed to be broken”.

There is little sign at present that Left progressives are prepared to challenge such bigotry today; those who did turn up, tying messages of solidarity to the school gates, later went to the police after being pelted with eggs by the protestors. If Zack Polanski, whose Green Party is buoyed by a defecting Muslim vote after Labour’s Gaza failings, is following LGSM’s lead of building solidarity partly as means to a cultural end, he’s doing so very quietly. Meanwhile, Tribune, the magazine built by pioneering feminists like Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Barbara Castle, is now owned by the same religious-conservative businessman whose Islam Channel has been fined by Ofcom for, among other things, advocating acquiescing to marital rape as a religious duty.

In this light, the ethical ethos that Ashton and his comrades held themselves to seems almost alien. LGSM were willing to put in hard yards to convince others they were on their side. Today, according to the pollsters More In Common (and anyone else who has spent any time in progressive circles), the group denoted as “Progressive Activists” are now the most insular citizens in Britain. They almost exclusively socialize with people who agree with them — and they are also the ones most likely to think those who don’t agree with them are morally deficient.

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Rather than drive hundreds of miles with donations for the skeptical but depressed villages of Britain, contemporary progressives stick to their own. They are the type to respond to national news of racial tensions in the depressed estates of Teesside by organizing a night-time vigil on the other side of the country in Walthamstow. They write, read and display dense, self-flagellating books about the difficult and intellectually taxing work of “not being a racist”. They swap Labour councillors for Green councillors in cities already full of Low-Traffic Neighborhoods and car-use penalties, reacting with shock when the small council budget allocations that aren’t already taken by elderly care don’t allow much in the way of revolutionary change.

In many ways, this is a politics of resigned indignation. One that has given up on Britain’s potential and instead built a members-only club inside of her major cities. The Mark Ashton of 1983 would surely feel a sense of disappointment. Progressivism may hold the kind of cultural dominance that previous generations could only have dreamed of — but it has also become an insular subculture. Outsiders are, if not the enemy, irrelevant.

Pride’s relevance today is in the contrast it sets out between LGSM and the modern activist. Rather than cultivating the necessary humility to find common purpose between groups of people, a culture of social media-incentivized extremism and righteous indignation has turned many on the Left into sniffy inquisitors, not entirely convinced that the poor are good enough people to be worth helping.

The National Theatre is Pride’s second stop after a stint in Cardiff. It isn’t clear whether the play will then go on tour, but it’s worth noting that if it does, it’s unlikely to visit the parts of Britain permanently broken by the end of the miners’ strike. Though it is a play that would be ideal for neglected England, it might be almost exclusively applauded by an audience of comfortable Londoners. I wonder whether that is what Ashton would have wanted.

***

Pride is at the National Theatre until 12 September. Friday Rush tickets are available.

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. 

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.

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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.

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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?

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”.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

This month, media organisations and mega corporations will bend over backwards to find an LGBTQ angle to cover. But what you won’t see or hear is the underside of Pride: a culture of intense social and sexual pressure that’s pushing some lesbians back into the closet and encouraging others to identify out of womanhood altogether. 

It started with the push to redefine “lesbian” to be inclusive of heterosexual males who identify as women. But it didn’t stop there. Now same-sex attraction is out, redefined as a problematic “genital preference”. A surprising number of hardline activists vilify lesbians as “genital fetishists” and accuse them of practising “sexual apartheid”.

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Meanwhile, lesbians are bombarded with suggestions on “how to have lesbian sex with a trans woman”. Safe-sex guides for lesbians provide information on avoiding pregnancy and performing blowjobs. Healthline’s “How Do Lesbians Have Sex?” guide, which targets sexually inexperienced women and girls, reminds readers that “any person can have any type of sex”. “[D]on’t apply assumptions you apply to cis men to us, our body works in different ways,” a columnist for Allure scolded readers: “Keep an open mind, and remember you’re having sex with a woman who knows more about her body than you do about hers.”

Not convinced yet? “Estrogenized dicks are… a lot like if a vagina was shaped like a dick and testes… Sex with an estrogenized dick is its own experience, but it’s MUCH MORE like sex with a vagina than sex with a man’s dick!” This remarkable advertisement concludes with a denial of what’s being pushed and why: 

“Don’t have sex with anyone you don’t want to! You don’t ever have to give a reason why you don’t want to have sex with someone… But if you go out of your way to tell everyone that you won’t have sex with trans women, and your reasoning is that you think trans women are men, and that sex with us is like sex with men, don’t be surprised when people call you out as an uninformed bigot!” 

Or, as one “trans lesbian” put it: “Being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts.”

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Somehow, telling lesbians that they “just haven’t tried the right dick yet” went woke.

Young lesbians get the message — from their peers in the “queer” community, their role models in arts and culture, the media, and medical providers — that their discomfort with any of this means that they may really be straight men trapped in gay women’s bodies. Sometimes, adopting an idiosyncratic gender identity — like “transmasc non-binary who’s attracted to women” or “feminamoric” — may be the only way a young woman can set boundaries around her sex life.

Last year, two friends and I launched Unspeakable LGBTQ. We asked: What do you wish you could say about your experiences as a woman in the LGBTQ community? 

Some women talked about intense pressure to identify out of womanhood. When femininity — not sex — makes someone a “woman”, women who don’t conform to stereotypes come under scrutiny: “I wish I could talk about how non-conforming women are being pressured to identify as a different gender to validate transwomen’s ‘femininity,’” wrote one respondent. “Feeling alienated by femininity is a near-universal female experience, especially for gay and bisexual women — not something that means you’re not a woman at all,” wrote another. Another respondent confessed that she now feels “​more comfortable around my conservative neighbors than I do in ‘queer’ liberal circles because my neighbors call me a lesbian and a woman… [in the LGBTQ community] I’ve had people ask me if I am truly non-binary or a trans man because I have short hair and don’t wear makeup or dresses.” 

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Relentless policing of lesbians’ sexual orientation and self-expression run through these stories. One woman compared the LGBTQ community today to her experience growing up in the Mormon religion, “where women are subservient in every way that matters”:

“We are allowed to have no leadership positions without the permission or surveillance of men, even in our own organizations… I was excited to join LGBT spaces and meet people like me. But it wasn’t like that. I left one cult and found out that what awaited me was another. In LGBT and other “progressive” circles, women don’t have the right to assemble without the presence of males who, by nature of being male, have no ability to relate to the experiences of female people. Just like my old religion, you aren’t allowed to question the ideology (in this case transgenderism) without being ostracized… Just like my old religion, men’s feelings and sensibilities must be taken into account in everything that women do.”

Another recalled her evangelical upbringing, writing: “I’d really really like, as a lesbian woman, to no longer be surrounded by transwomen who parrot the same talking points and shame tactics used, nearly word for word, by the youth pastor that tried to help me ‘pull away from sin’,” one woman wrote. “I never thought I would have to defend my sexuality against people in the community”, said another. “I get to feel wrong for how I am and how I love all over again.”

One university student described her brief involvement with the LGBTQ community on campus: “I hoped to meet other same-sex attracted people in the ‘lgbtq+’ club at my new university. It was not a community. There were some gay men and some lesbians, but there were also men who told me to my face that they were lesbians. That I should ‘be open to penis’. That I was a bad person for being a lesbian. I didn’t stay.” Another respondent admitted, “I forced myself to date trans women because I was made to feel like I was a bigot for not being attracted to them as a lesbian. It was incredibly traumatic and I was treated like utter crap.”

Responding to a climate where women who dissent from gender identity ideology face threats of violence, one woman wrote: “I want to talk about the incredible setbacks we’ve made in both women’s rights and same-sex rights without people threatening to beat, rape, or kill me.” 

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For women who have firsthand experience identifying as transgender or transitioning — before deciding to desist or detransition — the LGBTQ community reinforces patterns of thinking that caused distress and harm. One detransitioned woman reflected: 

“I spent years running from being a butch lesbian. I transitioned in order to escape the shame & fear I had. When I finally came to terms with the fact that transition had not really helped & I was still the same me I detransitioned… I wanted community more then anything. But there isn’t a place for me anymore. Before I transitioned there were several lesbian groups in my area. They aren’t here anymore. As far as I can tell there is no lesbian space or group anywhere in my area… I can not express how painful it is to not have a place to belong.”

One of the most wrenching submissions was also the simplest and shortest — speaking to something the community at large seems to have forgotten: “there is nothing wrong with women who are only attracted to the female body.” An LGBTQ community in thrall to gender identity and “trans inclusivity” necessarily sacrifices belonging and acceptance for same-sex attracted women.  

For women who want to be part of the LGBTQ community, there’s no escaping gender identity ideology. “The problem with leaving the ‘trans cult’ as a lesbian is that you can never really leave,” one young desisted woman wrote. “The ideology is in every LGBT space, every LGBT charity, every dating site, on the front page of our news sites every single day.” 

In other words, you can accept yourself as a lesbian. You can desist or detransition from a trans identity. You can accept your sex and your sexual orientation. But if you want to stand under that rainbow flag, you’re not allowed to say so.

In premodern England, processions were mostly connected to the liturgical calendar: events often both celebratory and of deep moral significance, marking saints’ days and Holy Week, accompanied with chanting, song or enactment of Bible stories. Perhaps the first monarch to use public spectacle as a political tool was our reigning Queen’s namesake, Elizabeth I, whose annual Queen’s Progress would see her take the whole court on the road over the summer, passing slowly and in great splendour through every part of her kingdom, where her subjects would put on pageants and feasts in her honour. She embarked on 23 in her 44 years as Queen, extending the glamour of her reign well beyond the narrow circle of her immediate court.

But what does a procession mean in the 21st Century? And who is it for? If Elizabeth I used pageantry to project her image and soft political power across her kingdom, the time between her reign and the arrival of her namesake, Elizabeth II, has delivered technologies that — in theory at least — render such efforts obsolete.

What’s the point of taking your entire court on the road, at vast effort and expense, when you can broadcast images of yourself everywhere with little to no effort? Meanwhile, for participants, the idea that your procession is being watched by journalists or TV cameras gives it a whole different set of meanings and potentials. No longer something you do with the other participants, it becomes something you do for an imagined audience, and whose meaning is outside the event itself.

If that sounds abstract, think about the idea of “peaceful protest”. This has been extensively used by progressive movements throughout the 20th Century, to effect political change with minimal violence by inspiring public sympathy for a cause. The Indian independence campaigner Mahatma Gandhi was a trailblazer in the format: between March and April 1930, he led a 240-mile march across India to collect salt from the coast, in protest against the 1882 Salt Act, a British colonial law which prohibited Indians from gathering or selling salt.

Gandhi was joined by thousands of his fellow-countrymen, some 60,000 of whom were arrested for their involvment. The march helped tilt public sympathy in favour of independence both on the subcontinent and – via newspaper reports – elsewhere in the world, and contributed to the movement for independence that came to fruition in 1948, four years before our reigning Elizabeth was crowned. Barely over a decade after that coronation, in 1963, Martin Luther King led some 250,000 sympathisers in another historic political procession in Washington, this time for racial equality: the scene of his “I Have A Dream” speech.

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Both these peaceful mass protests changed the course of history. But their political force relied on the presence of journalists to report on them. Before the mass-media age – that is, well into the 18th Century – any crowd of people with a political grievance was less likely to be treated as a noble political protest than as an incipient riot, not least because in most cases that’s what it was. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt didn’t sit about with placards waiting for the world to sympathise with their dislike of wage caps and the poll tax. They marched on London, where they massacred Flemish merchants and demolished John O’Gaunt’s palace.

By the same token, who cares about some people walking 240 miles to get salt, unless the world at large reads about it in the papers and understands the symbolic meaning? And as for 250,000 people gathering near the seat of government in a country of (then) 189 million people, unless the press is there to record the stirring speeches and report on its orderliness, that’s not a peaceful protest, it’s merely a public order problem. As it was, these events proved pivotal at a time when mass media was becoming increasingly important.

The digital age has changed the calculus again, though. On social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, you can get a sense of which ideas, causes or moods are swirling across the collective consciousness by seeing which hashtags are popular. Meanwhile, protests like those led by Gandhi and King have increasingly given way to something more nebulous and feel-good: the physical manifestation of a trending hashtag.

These such events may gesture at concrete political change but (like the clicktivism they mirror) often land instead on something far more nebulous: emotional gestures of “standing with” some oppressed group, or “raising awareness” of the most broad-brush issues, with very little in the way of concrete policy attached.

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In this view, political voice isn’t something individual; it’s weilded collectively, by a swarm. That is: if you want to be heard, you need to make sure the imagined observer can see that there are lots of you. And to achieve that, you have to ensure the hashtag trends, and add your body to the physical swarm of people all gathered in one place to support that cause.

But the trouble with trending-hashtag approach to mass politics is that, much like hashtags themselves, such physical gatherings are markedly less connected with concrete political action than their 20th-Century forebears. Gandhi wanted an independent India; King wanted equal legal standing for all Americans regardless of skin colour. Both achieved their aim. But since the turn of the century and rise of the internet, this has steadily broken down: in 2003, a million Not In My Name marchers did nothing to deter Tony Blair from invading Iraq.

The 2017 Women’s March, meanwhile, took place across some 600 locations and 81 countries – itself impossible without social media – and had an estimated 3.2 million participants in the US alone, making it the largest single-day protest in US history. It was hailed as transformational; but it’s far less clear what the march as a whole was for, let alone what it achieved.

It swiftly became roiled by anti-semitism scandals, and saw participants falling away to more issue-specific campaigning. And if 3.2 million Americans in pink hats marched in outrage at the election of a pussy-grabber to the White House, it appears the weight of their numbers has had little impact on The Donald’s reported determination to have another crack at the US Presidency.

For what might such a swarm campaign do after its collective voice has been heard? This reflects, maybe, the parallel rise of an ecosystem one commentator has called the “NGOcracy”: a body of non-governmental agencies concerned with driving social change, in line with how they have chosen to interpret popular opinion as seen in trending-hashtags. That is: in the digital age the job of mass processions is simply to emote.

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Processing alongside my flag-waving daughter on Thursday evening, though, I found myself wondering: is that all it can be — an emotional pressure-valve for a politically defanged public square whose claim to agency has been colonised by professionalised NGOs? One of the most striking criticisms I saw of the Jubilee celebration seemed to me to map nationwide Jubilee events, large and small, onto this social-media-age paradigm of hashtag activism. Based on the turnout of supporters at the Mall, this commentator suggested, the Queen is not popular nationwide. And, furthermore, anyone who really cared about the monarchy could easily make the journey into London to add their body to this single swarm in the Queen’s honour.

Implicitly, in this view, none of the local processions was meaningful unless it added to the royalist body-count visible in drone footage of Central London. But does this make sense? I struggle to imagine another cause that could turn out a thousand small-town citizens of Bedfordshire, of all ages, after dinner on a Thursday night. I also know that other processions of a similar kind took place all over the country. I imagine very few of them were filmed by drone, so their body-count couldn’t be evaluated by media commentators for trending-hashtag status.

Does it follow that each of these events was meaningless? Only if you believe that the value of a gathering, event or procession lies in its ability to make a contribution to the trending-hashtag emotional life of the nation as a whole. But what I found hopeful and heart-warming about my modest local celebration was the reminder that great swathes of the country really don’t care much about what’s happening on the internet.

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For me this was salutary. Especially in the face of in-person interactions mostly banned or tightly constrained during lockdown, and ever more of our public life accordingly forced online, it can feel difficult to escape an increasingly noisy, divisive and overheated digital public discourse. And it’s this discourse that prefers to emote en masse, whether online or in the real world, via the kind of hashtag-protest we saw in the Women’s March. Last Thursday reminded me that away from all the shouting, plenty of communities still gather with and for one another, and with only the faintest of nods to the noisy and increasingly self-absorbed parallel universe of digital-era mass politics.

It’s too early to tell whether such events will persist once Her Majesty is gone, and with her, our last national tether to the 20th Century. As for those ritual moments of collective moral communion that are all we have left of the political protests of yore, perhaps we need to stop thinking of them as protests. Instead, we can call them what they are: liturgical events more akin to the medieval processions that pre-dated Elizabeth I than anything between her age and Tony Blair. Religious gatherings, in praise of new (or perhaps long-forgotten) gods whose outlines we’re only just starting to discern.

At the time, in Noughties London, I really believed that what I was doing was radical and creative: embracing fluidity, self-construction and impermanence, against the rigid constraints of a single-sex environment and the gender binary.

I blame some of this insufferability on queer theory, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate. From (among others) Judith Butler I learned that the identity categories of sex and sexuality are imposed on us by oppressive outside forces, while (confusingly) also being open to constant individual reinvention.

In this worldview ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ aren’t stable categories, and neither are ‘man’ and ‘woman’, except inasmuch as they’re imposed by un-hip Forces of Bad: the oppressive ‘cisheteropatriarchal status quo’. And the only way to stick two fingers up at this dread hegemon is to mess about with the categories. Hence feeling so pleased with myself, 15 years ago, for doing something as ground-breakingly subversive as calling myself a lesbian, moving in with a bunch of lesbians and then hooking up with a man.

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I share this not especially stellar episode not just as belated apology to my ex-housemates, but because since then queer theory has eaten culture. Everyone’s subverting identity categories now. The abbreviation ‘LGB’, which seemed more than expansive enough in the late nineties when I started university, has ballooned to ‘LGBTQQIAAP’ with activists still pushing for further inclusions. Facebook offers an ever-lengthening list of genders to put on your profile (71 at the last count). And the rainbow flag associated with the Pride marches has multiplied, with at least 24 different ones now available to wave, including a ‘Pup Pride’ one for people who like to roleplay as dogs.

Anyone boring enough to simply accept the identity assigned them by the ‘heteropatriarchy’ is marked with the (supposedly descriptive but really derogatory) epithet ‘cishet’. This is a mark of ignominy, as one Reddit user made clear, asking: “What is a ‘cishet’ and why is it bad?’. “I keep seeing the word cishet in the context of tumblr and my SJW type acquaintances,” the post explains, “usually with them saying that the cishets cause all of their problems and need to die.” One reply cuts to the chase: using cishet is “like derisively calling someone else a ‘normie’.”

In this ‘anti-normie-ism’ we hear echoes not just of the name, but also the ideas, contained in the Reformation-era Christian heresy of ‘antinomianism’. This doctrine held that salvation is available solely through faith and divine grace, and true believers are under no obligation to follow rules, laws or traditions. While antinomianism was rejected by mainstream Protestantism, it ended up having the last laugh: for today the heretics are those who resist the wholesale attack on rules, norms and traditions that characterises anti-normie-ism.

Far from being condemned as heresy, like antinomianism, anti-normie-ism is celebrated in the annual festival of Pride Month, during which millions join in a peculiarly modern ritual of simultaneously celebrating and subverting shared identity. Big brands fall over themselves to monetise the festival.

This moment, and movement, has been some time in the making. In 1793, having defeated the Ancien Régime, the victors in the French Revolution set out to sweep away all the irrational and traditionalist remnants of reactionary Catholicism in favour of a new, atheistic religion of rationality. To this end, they held a Festival of Reason in Notre Dame; where the altar had stood, a papier-mâché mountain was raised on which an actress dressed as Liberty bowed to the flame of Reason.

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In that moment, anti-normie-ism dispensed even with the polite antinomian fiction of having God on direct-dial as justification for binning the rules. The Catholic political theorist Adrian Vermeule characterises the subsequent history of our fight against normie-dom, and in favour of individual freedom and self-expression, as continuing the tradition of that 1793 Festival. The Festival of Reason is ongoing: the old must be smashed, traditions swept away, sacred items burned and the march of progress celebrated, a dynamic and relentless drive which “constantly, and at an ever-increasing tempo, disrupts deeply-cherished traditions among its subject populations”.

But over time, as once-edgy positions become mainstream, the Festival’s appetite turns cannibal. Having solidified into social norms, progressive victories become in turn targets for demolition. And this is the position in which many formerly progressive gay and lesbian people find themselves today.

The onward march of same-sex equality has been steady over the last half-century: gay sex was decriminalised in 1967, when the Conservative peer Lord Arran explained that his reason for sponsoring the Sexual Offences Act was his two life goals “to stop people buggering badgers, and to stop people badgering buggers”. The same-sex age of consent was 21 when I was a teenager in the Nineties, and is now equalised at 16 with the heterosexual one. Thanks to another Conservative, David Cameron, same-sex marriage today has the same civil standing as the heterosexual sort.

But the march of progress hasn’t stopped. The word queer, once a term of abuse, was first reclaimed by gay and lesbian people — and is now the territory of anyone, including heterosexuals, who don’t want to be shamed as cishet.

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The actor Nico Tortorella, for example, has been in what to me looks suspiciously like a heterosexual relationship for some 14 years, with the ‘lifestyle entrepreneur and LGBTQ activist’ Bethany Meyers. The couple even married in 2018. But Tortorella identifies as non-binary and prefers to be referred to as ‘they’ and ‘them’, while Meyers identifies as a lesbian. Thus despite having an (in the biological sense) entirely ordinary heterosexual relationship, Tortorella and Meyers are celebrated as a ‘queer couple’.

And their embrace of polyamory means that Tortorella and Meyer arguably are more anti-normie than of those stodgy gay people who prefer dull old monogamy. And Meyer’s re-interpretation of ‘lesbian’ is expansive enough to survive a 14-year relationship with a biological male, a fact that surely queers our understanding of sex and gender far more radically than those reactionary homos who insist on excluding people from their pool of potential partners on the grounds of anatomy.

Thus, by queering ‘queer’, the new heteroqueers have wrestled the baton of queerness from those lesbian and gay people who might once have been targeted for ‘queer-bashing’. And thanks to the ongoing Festival of Reason, the exclusively same-sex-attracted sexuality that launched the whole ‘queer rights’ enterprise has in turn come to seem conservative, if not outright bigoted.

My late great-aunt epitomised this kind of non-queer gayness. She was a staunch Tory and local councillor, wore trouser suits and kept her hair short, and lived her entire adult life with the same ‘friend’, in a relationship that was indistinguishable from any other petit-bourgeois marriage except that both of them were women. They went on cruises, finished each other’s sentences, were pillars of the local community — and didn’t have a ‘rainbow’ bone in their bodies.

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She died around the same time as I was misbehaving in houseshares, and I never discussed my own reflections on queer theory with her. I wish I had, as it would have given me much to think about. For my great-aunt was many things: a public servant, a citizen, a lesbian (though I don’t think she would have used that word) but one thing her devoted relationship absolutely wasn’t was ‘queer’.

And this in turn gives us a clue to the nature of ‘queerness’ as it’s celebrated today. “Love is love”, claims the Pride slogan, merrily sweeping aside millennia of philosophical and theological thought on the ways love may in fact differ from love. In his influential 1936 theological work Agape and Eros, for example, the Swedish bishop Anders Nygren unpicks the distinction between eros, the ego-centric, acquisitive and desire-based version of love first delineated in Plato’s Symposium, and agape, the Christian understanding of a love based in self-giving and a willingness to sacrifice self for others.

To complicate things further, the ancient Greeks had three words for love: eros, agape and philia, love for friends and family. Nygren argued that over time, even in Christian theology, agape became subordinate to eros — that is, to desire; while Nygren was criticised by other theologians for himself ignoring philia. But today, the juggernaut of Queer Theory, for all that it claims the mantle of ‘love’, ignores both philia and agape. Instead, ‘love’ in the queer theory sense is pure eros: desire.

And this is the bait-and-switch at the heart of queer theory. Decent, compassionate mainstream people hear ‘love’ and think of those same-sex couples they know whose lives embrace all three — the passionate eros, the sociable philia and selfless agape. Few in modern Britain would disagree that these can and do flourish just as well in same-sex as opposite-sex partnerships. Having won sympathy by gesturing at philia and agape, though, the juggernaut of queerness aggressively promotes only an eros increasingly impatient of any constraint.

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This means monogamists of all orientations go under the bus: for inasmuch as monogamy constrains desire, it’s by definition un-queer. We see this reflex, for example, in the brickbats flung at too-monogamous-to-be-queer Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg; or sneery terms like ‘homonormativity’. And all such jibes share the same loathing of any social structure that calls not for unchained desire but fellow-feeling (philia) or self-sacrifice (agape).

And in this way, the political campaign for gay acceptance has been colonised, cannibalised and ultimately displaced by a consumer marketing campaign for the limitless expansion of desire. It was 2004 when the Pride march in London stopped being classified as a political protest and became a ‘parade’; that change, questioned by many LGB people at the time, marks the decisive shift in balance of power from gay acceptance to anti-normie-ism. And this is a problem for gay normies.

For as Vermeule points out, the Festival’s inexorable appetite foments “unrest, animosity, and eventually political reaction and backlash”. And indeed, evidence suggests that support for LGBTQ rights has peaked and is now falling again. The marketing campaign for unchained eros is today actively undermining public acceptance of same-sex relationships.

The campaign to de-stigmatise same-sex relationships was a huge gain for human dignity. I don’t want to see that reversed by the oncoming reaction against our now established religion of anti-normie-ism. The only beneficiaries of the takeover are brands selling rainbow leisurewear in Pride Month. But the front-line casualties, when the reaction begins in earnest, will be those gay normies who only ever wanted to be left in peace.

This year, an endless string of physical attacks has been reported in the news. In London, for example, a group of young men assaulted a lesbian couple on a bus after the two women refused to kiss for their entertainment. The teenagers responsible were charged last week. Then, Ellie-Mae Mulholland, an 18-year-old lesbian from Walsall Garth, was beaten black and blue by assailants who told her “you and your girlfriend are going to get it 10 times worse next time”. In Chile’s Fifth region, multiple butch lesbians have been assaulted and murdered.

Lesbians need as much support now as we ever did. But even within LGBT spheres, where we are – at least theoretically – part of the community, lesbians are now being vilified. For decades, gay and lesbian rights advocates fought for our sexualities to be accepted as legitimate.

But on Twitter the word lesbian has become a suspicious ‘TERF dogwhistle’. TERF is a nasty term. It stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist and is used, in particular, to describe lesbian feminists, because we aren’t always willing to toe the latest ideological line when it comes to gender. It has also become synonymous with being subhuman.

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How transgender turf wars put lives in danger

By Julie Bindel

A quick search online will give the uninitiated an idea of the inflammatory language that has become typical. “Punch a TERF.” “Knife a TERF.” “Burn a TERF.” Whatever the initial intentions behind the acronym, it has quickly become shorthand for ‘women deserving of violence’:

“Somebody slap this TERF c**t across the face.”

“TERFs can choke on my girl dick.”

“Pop quiz: if you kill a TERF, is it considered a crime? Answer: it is not. They are not considered lifeforms.”

There are countless more examples across social media platforms. And this dehumanisation has real life consequences. At the Edinburgh Pride March this year, lesbians were sworn at and shamed. It wasn’t social conservatives or religious Right-wingers who made them feel unsafe at Pride, but other members of the LGBT community.

Women carrying a banner proclaiming “Lesbian Equality” were told that they’re “an embarrassment to homosexuality.” People on the official Pride bus gave the middle finger to the women holding a banner that read “Lesbian, Not Queer.”

One woman gave a devastating personal account of the hostility lesbians experienced at Edinburgh Pride:

“As a migrant and lesbian who was born in a totalitarian state it was really shocking to come to the Scottish Pride, where we carried a banner ‘Lesbian visibility’, and be shouted at, by a group of mostly male white teenagers with the transgender flags, that we need to be “fucked”, “ashamed” and “get the fuck out”.

“I am not sure what this Pride is supposed to represent, but what I experienced was very simple and uncovered misogyny – and a specific misogyny towards homosexual women who dare to define and defend their sexuality without men telling us what it should be – clearly sanctioned by the Pride organisers.”

Similar incidents have taken place at Pride Marches across the country.

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Could homophobia be on the rise?

By Douglas Murray

And in Edinburgh, during the run up to Pride Month, a lesbian, Julie Bindel, was physically attacked. She had come up to Edinburgh to join in a panel discussion about the rights of women as a political class. On her way out of the lecture theatre, only the intervention of campus security kept Julie from being beaten.

Her detractors have argued that Julie was speaking against the rights of transgender people. They used this claim to justify the attack on her. But I spoke alongside Julie on the panel – having been terrified out of my wits by the security drill beforehand – and listened closely to her talk. She did not say anything about or against transgender people.

And you need not take my word for it. Last week, a full video of the event was posted online. Anyone can watch Julie’s passionate speech about the importance of challenging male violence against women. She talked about the harms that result from treating every part of women’s bodies – be it wombs, hair, breast milk, or sexual organs – as commodities to be bought and sold. And she spoke about what it meant to grow up in a working-class community where the police didn’t care about women’s safety; about realising that there was no town, county, region, or country where women were entirely free from the fear of male violence. Her talk was powerful.

And it was free from transphobic prejudice. When she Tweeted the video last week, Julie challenged her detractors: “Those of you making those allegations, watch and listen if you dare.”

I had 'asked for it'. Go on, challenge yourselves, you brave social justice warriors, and tell me if one of these brilliant panellists spouted hate: https://t.co/oDBnoqlzyE

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) July 25, 2019

According to Julie’s account, it took three security guards to stop her attacker. Thanks to the intervention of campus security, she made it to the airport safely. But the fact remains: someone attempted to attack her – someone who had previously Tweeted “beat them up” about lesbian protestors attending London Pride last year.

“Any trans allies at #PrideLondon right now need to step the fuck up and take out the TERF trash. Get in their faces. Make them afraid. Debate never works so fuck them up.”

This assailant has repeatedly incited violence against women, targeting lesbians in particular, using the language of misogyny and lesbophobia.

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Can you be trans and Christian?

By Christopher Rhodes

This attack was an example of how the persistent strain of violent sexism in conversations surrounding gender is making lesbians particularly vulnerable. Meanwhile, most of the local feminist community failed to condemn the attack – perhaps they were afraid of being tarred by the same TERF brush. Yet it is precisely because I am a feminist that I believe we must challenge male violence whenever and however it manifests.

As the late, great Audre Lorde said: “Your silence will not protect you.”

Julie’s assailant is male. No matter how this person identifies, their actions are woven into a wider pattern of male violence against women and girls that feminists call patriarchy. There are some who would class this statement as an act of violence on a par with the attempted assault. But it is a statement I stand by. If we cannot name and identify male violence, we cannot challenge it in any meaningful way.

The critique of this position is easy to make. It is true that in the period since the 19th century, Western societies in particular have seen a steady increase in standards of living and an increase in the accumulation of personal freedoms. Of course there were at least two very serious interregnums in that steady march – namely World Wars One and Two. And in many non-Western societies (not least central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century), the idea that history moves in one direction might look especially fanciful.

Still, a version of the progressive fallacy seems almost embedded in the modern Western mind. For such people when a piece of territory is conquered and occupied by liberal attitudes it is then held for all time. It is not hard to see the idea’s attraction. What is hard to see is why it is so little refuted. Or rather, why when evidence emerges for its possible refutation, it is reacted to as though it is no evidence at all.

Further reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

Take the example of gay rights. In the last half a century the situation for gay people in western democracies improved immeasurably. From relations between people of the same sex being illegal in countries such as Britain, we have arrived at a position where gay people are able to marry, where the visibility of gay people in public life has never been greater and where corporations and arms of government positively fall over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to gay rights.

This last element – a positive bragging about a commitment to gay rights (sometimes described as ‘woke capitalism’) – is one that disturbs some of us who do not share the presumptions of inevitable progress. As Pride day has moved into Pride week and now Pride month there has (in the UK at least) emerged a sense of over-reach. This is a personal feeling, obviously, and not one that everybody will share. But I might as well express how it prickles in me.

I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.

Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym.

The sense of slight over-reach, or over-protesting, in part comes from the sense that some bigger picture may be being missed. And sure enough this year’s newly-released British Social Attitudes Survey gives a good jolt to this instinct.

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The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

For the new BSA report includes an interesting statistic. Over the last 30 years there has been a steady change in attitudes towards gay sex among the majority of the population. In 1987, (when the AIDS crisis was at its height) nine out of 10 people thought that there was something wrong with sexual activity between adults of the same sex. Each year since then the figures have shown an increasing tolerance of same-sex relations.

Until now. At the end of this 30 year movement in one direction, there has been a change. The data suggests acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships.

There might be many reasons for this shift. Not all will be caused by an objection to the M+S sandwich counter. But it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes.

For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.

In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic).

Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?

Further reading

Bigotry dressed as victimhood

By James Bloodworth

Again the press coverage is of little help. But there’s one reason that does spring to mind, which is that the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one.

Lest this be thought to be the observation of some terrible hater, it is worth mentioning the facts. A poll carried out in the UK 10 years ago found that exactly 0% of British Muslims had ‘tolerance’ for homosexuality. Some research shows that this figure may be shifting. But a survey carried out three years ago for Channel 4 found that a majority of British Muslims wanted being gay to be made illegal in Britain now.

Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.

But here we return to that liberal presumption about ground occupied being ground held. Amid the Pride Month celebrations and the woke capitalism and much more, I see no special reason to regard the accumulation of further rights by gay people or any other group in society as being inevitable, even where it is desirable.

Indeed, I can see plenty of reasons to reflect that in the lifetimes of many of us now living, we could see a significant deterioration in public (and eventually political) support for the rights in question. But over the years, I have always been struck by how unnecessarily hard and painful it has been to make this point.