Clearly, many gay people have empathy with trans people, a tiny percentage of the population, but feel theirs is a different struggle. So lesbians can have penises and gay men can have vaginas, and there can simply be no debate about this. Of late, it has campaigned for something completely different – to convince us that innate gender identity somehow trumps sex. It was formed to fight for the rights of same-sex-attracted people having campaigned for an equal age of consent, lifting the ban on lesbian and gay people serving in the military and adoption rights for same-sex couples, equal marriage was achieved in 2013.īut it has now widened its remit beyond representing lesbians, gays and bisexuals, alienating many of its natural supporters in the process, as Simon Callow pointed out last week, when he condemned its “strange turn to the tyrannical”. In 2015, its most famous lobby group, Stonewall – under its previous CEO, Ruth Hunt, who now sits in the Lords – took a £90,000 donation for it to become more trans-inclusive. But he is, we must conclude, a bear of very little brain.įor those who don’t know, there is more than one organisation that gay people can join. This Witchfinder General of Twitter, who has elected himself king of all gays, speaks in increasingly Trumpian proclamations about good and evil. Yet the video was circulated approvingly on social media by a well-know zealot and part-time hack. The horrible scene was made more astonishing when trans activists routinely wear T-shirts and wave banners saying things such as “Terfs must die”. But he is the wrong kind of gay, as he was marching in an “LGB Alliance” T-shirt the absence of a ‘T’ in the acronym is the mortal sin. The man being hassled was Alexander Bramham, who says he is proud to be gay. (‘Terf’ stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, but has become a shorthand for “transphobic bigot”.) One of the people shouting at him was April Preston, a Liberal Democrat candidate for Withington she later boasted on Twitter about having had “a terf removed” from the march. A crowd surrounded him, chanting “Trans lives matter”, before he was escorted away by police, for his own protection. But then this weekend, I saw a video online of a young man being harassed at the Manchester Pride march. I am so used to this, I didn’t think I could be shocked. Now someone on social media calls you a bigot, and people who have replaced having a personality with an “interesting” gender insult you. Dante’s sixth circle of hell was Heresy, where one would spend eternity in flaming crypts. Complication has been replaced by compliance to simplistic dogma that must be swallowed whole, or one is cast out. We may all have different politics or beliefs. It is a truth self-evident that sexuality, whether that is a preference for the same sex, the opposite sex or a bit of both, does not mean that one identifies with everyone who has the same preference.
So pervasive is a kind of groupthink, often fuelled by social media, there is now a tyranny of policing ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways of being homosexual. These days, not only can you be physically attacked for being gay, you can be attacked for being the wrong kind of gay. A lot more go unreported.Īlthough we like to think things have progressed, not all in the garden is rosy. In July, a married gay couple were kicked and punched in the street in Edinburgh, and in Liverpool there have been several attacks on young gay men. Earlier this month, a 50-year-old man was killed in Tower Hamlets, east London, in what police described as a “suspected homophobic attack”.Ī day earlier, a gay couple were attacked with broken bottles in Birmingham. Right now, gay people have several things to worry about, not least a marked rise in hate crime.