Lgbt

Americans support ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, poll shows

From our US edition

A new poll found that Americans overwhelmingly support the language of the Parental Rights in Education bill signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis this week. Celebrities at the Oscars on Sunday night shrieked about the alleged attack on LGBT rights and Disney executives were caught on tape promising to create more queer content for children in response to the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill. A poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies indicates that these woke institutions are wholly out of step with the concerns of normal Americans. When registered voters were shown the actual language of the bill, which prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate sexual education in pre-K through third grade, they supported it by more than a two-to-one margin.

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Attacks on the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law are about control

From our US edition

The alphabet people screamed in bloodcurdling unison Monday as Florida governor Ron DeSantis coolly signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed, in lockstep, by activists and the mainstream media the "Don’t Say Gay" bill, the words "gay," "homosexual" or anything similar don’t appear anywhere in the six-page law. Quite clearly, the law states that "a school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." A few things to note here: "primary grade levels" are defined in Florida as age three to grade three.

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The trans debate shows we’re all supremacists

From our US edition

Why did Lia Thomas bother changing his name? According to the gender-studies mavens, it wasn’t strictly necessary. A trans woman doesn’t need a vaginoplasty or breast implants. He doesn’t even need to wear dresses. He doesn’t have to date men, or watch Downton Abbey or merge into traffic without checking his blind spots. Those are all socially constructed ideas of femininity. Trans women don’t have to conform to these sexist, patriarchal norms. Womanhood is a state of mind. The question, of course, is: what kind of state? The LGBT lobby refuses to answer that question. The official line is that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman. If Hugh Jackman came out today and said, “Oi, mate, I’m a sheila,” a sheila he’d be. Fair dinkum.

President Stacey Abrams gives Star Trek its far-left final frontier

From our US edition

Star Trek: Discovery took one giant leap for the leftist ideology that defines it in its fourth season finale this week. Enter President Stacey Abrams, leader of the thirty-second century’s United Earth. Perhaps deliberately, the sci-fi show’s writers left viewers ignorant as to whether President Abrams was democratically elected to her fictional role. Star Trek’s democratic ideals, after all, seem poorly matched to a politician who lost an election and then claimed that it had been “stolen from the voters of Georgia.” No worries, however: Abrams’s future is bright. Concluding her cameo, Abrams asks Discovery’s star Sonequa Martin-Green, “there's a lot of work to do, are you ready for that?

stacey abrams star trek

Sam Brinton and the dorkification of kink

From our US edition

Remember when gay people were cool? Libertines and romantics, reviled, spat-upon, defiant and irreverent? Gay life could be sexy and thrilling, tragic and shameful. If the homosexual offered nothing else, he carried an arsenal of bawdy tales that left any housewife glued and dithering at a cocktail party. Judge his life as you may, but never call it ordinary. The mystique is gone. That dusky boundary between the dark and dirty and the workaday has evaporated. Assimilation has meant the faces of gay are either vapid, Instagram-famous semen receptacles, complete goobers or repulsive shrills. And they’ve dragged the rest of us, by association, into their orbit of cringe. The Forces of Biden particularly love the latter two.

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Drinking your way through the Chinese Olympics

From our US edition

The thing I am looking forward to the least right now is the Olympics, and I have a colonoscopy scheduled. The only answer is a drinking game. Enough with "politics by sportscasters for those who only care about politics." I threw away my Mao (and Che) T-shirts sophomore year. We all know Beijing is not a democratic regime. So for some sort of balance, can we all agree that for every hundred references to the Uighurs, Tibet and Hong Kong, we make one to where and how Covid all began? Or will the mainstream media continue their coverage détente? Bottoms up for every reference to bats, pangolins and Chinese wet markets. Speaking of Covid, a drink every time announcers insist China's Covid crackdown is autocratic draconianism while ignoring that much of the same was done in America.

No love for the gays at the Beijing Winter Olympics

From our US edition

The nights are about to get a lot colder for men’s figure skaters at the Winter Games. Gay hookup app Grindr was removed from app stores in China this month just ahead of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. Olympians are famously hot to trot. As far back as 1988, the International Olympic Committee banned outdoor sex after condoms were found littering the rooftops of the Olympic Village in Seoul. Complimentary condoms remained a staple at the Games, reaching a record at Rio in 2016 where 450,000 "little shirts," as they’re called in local slang, were supplied to the Olympic Village — that’s forty-two per athlete.

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Glee gives us a lesson in wokeness

From our US edition

YouTube just sent me down a spiral rewatching old Glee clips. I was never a Glee fan per se, but it was one of a handful of shows I watched when my kids were in Peak Mode, old enough to be interesting as people but not yet old enough to realize I was not interesting. My kids are adults now; did TV help form them? It did. And what we all learned, and especially how we learned it, is a lesson on the failure of 2021 wokeness to achieve change and instead just piss people off. In 2021, Glee strikes me as influential. When it first aired, it was thought of as, at least in a suburban way, edgy. I’m sure eyes all across Brooklyn are rolling but they miss the point. Glee being suburban was the point.

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Man of Sssssssteel

From our US edition

So — Superman has come out. He’s gay. I know, stop the presses, another figure of the comic book universe is being stripped of his straight, white, maleness and tossed into the volcano of intersectionality. It’s about as edgy and groundbreaking as a consumer-product survey. I was less surprised to learn Superman was getting pinkwashed than I was to find out Superman isn’t Superman anymore. There’s a new Superman, apparently, and it’s Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s son, Jonathan Kent. According to DC Comics sometime this month he’s going to kiss a dude and, poof, be gay, or bisexual, or whatever. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a pillow-biter! What it isn’t is believable. I mean, have you met any of us gay men?

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Is Kemi Badenoch’s leaked audio a set-up?

The headline reads, ‘UK Equalities Minister Goes on Anti-LGBTQ Rant in Leaked Audio'. Oh dear, I thought. As a lesbian and a harsh critic of the Tory government, I wondered what had been said. I scoured the piece in Vice, expecting something along the lines of ‘pervert’ and ‘unnatural’ and something about how we will be marrying our vacuum cleaners next. But it was all rather tame and boring. Badenoch said: It’s now, you know like, it’s not even about sexuality now, it’s now like the whole transgender movement, where, OK well we’ve got gay marriage and civil partnerships, so what are transsexuals looking for?

The trans war on the body

From our US edition

'Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Some people choose their family And they love each other so proudly And they all go marching in The Big Parade!' In June, the Journal of Medical Ethics spelled out what it means in practice to teach children that family bonds are optional. If the world is to ‘take LGBT testimony seriously,’ argued Maura Priest, a bioethicist at the Arizona State University, then ‘parents should lose veto power over most transition-related pediatric care’. In many states, this is already well-established. In 2015, Oregon passed a law giving minors the right to receive transgender medical interventions at taxpayers’ expense, and without their parents’ consent.

trans jessica yaniv progressive misogyny

How the gender debate is dividing Germany

Pronoun politics can be something of a minefield. But if you think the gender debate is confusing, spare a thought for our German cousins. The quirks of the language make it hard to avoid causing offence, even for those determined to tread carefully. German, as with French and Spanish, has different noun endings for masculine and feminine words. For example, eine Ärztin specifically refers to a female doctor and ein Arzt to a male doctor. The masculine form is used most frequently and as a sort of gender catch-all. And it's here that the issue arises. The language has, to be fair, adapted to cater for modern sensitivities. In modern German, the title Fräulein (Miss) is no longer widely used, following criticism from feminists in the second half of the 20th century.

Viktor Orbán is winning his culture war

From our US edition

Budapest Even supporters of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán acknowledge privately that the Pegasus scandal is a hard blow to the embattled leader. Last month’s news that government spies had employed Israeli software to commandeer the smartphones of journalists, activists and government opponents confirmed the worst authoritarian stereotypes of Orbán, who will be running for his fourth consecutive term in 2022. These allegations, if true — and many Orbán backers with whom I spoke assume that they are — will likely displace what was Orbán’s greatest liability heading into next year’s vote: that he and his Fidesz party oversee a vast web of public corruption.

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Floods you with fascinating facts: Trees A Crowd reviewed

Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s great mysteries for me. Why, when you plant a pip from one type of apple, does it grow into a completely different type of apple tree? The answer — one kind of apple tree will typically cross-pollinate with another variety to pass on a different set of genes — is less interesting than the next bit. Which is that if you do plant, say, a Braeburn seed, and it takes, you’re likely to end up with crab apples.

Let’s be honest about birthing people

From our US edition

Thrusting women who identify as men and then have babies into the spotlight has been a strange priority during the first few months of Biden’s America. Just three days before Mother’s Day, Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, sent Twitter ablaze while testifying before the Democratic Oversight Committee on some conspiracy theory called the 'Black [sic] maternal health crisis’. The crisis, it turns out, isn’t that community’s abortion epidemic but the country’s legion of racist OB/GYNs, apparently. ‘Every day, Black [sic] birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don't believe our pain. My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic,’ Bush wrote on Twitter ahead of her video testimony.

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Joe Biden’s Afghan Pride

From our US edition

President Joe Biden will honor Pride Month this Friday — just before meeting with the leader of a country where the maximum penalty for sodomy is death. Biden 'will deliver remarks to commemorate LGBTQ+ Pride Month,' the White House announced this week. And later, 'the President will welcome Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani and Afghanistan High Commission for National Reconciliation chair Abdullah Abdullah to the White House to highlight the enduring partnership between the United States and Afghanistan as the military drawdown continues’. Staffers will undoubtedly rush to box up the rainbow neck beads and Pride flags when Biden steps off stage to avoid an awkward bump in the hall when Ghani rolls up to the West Wing.

afghan pride

Is the EU breaching its UK treaty by failing to protect LGBT rights?

Has the EU Commission lost any sense of moral value? This week, Hungary, an EU member state, voted to impose bigoted and oppressive laws on its LGBT citizens. This amounted to a clear breach of many of our domestic laws – and it is a breach of the shared Human Rights laws. Yet the EU's response has been dismal. Is it time for Britain to show solidarity with LGBT Hungarians – and walk away from its treaty with the EU? The EU Commission said it is aware of what is unfolding in Hungary and that:  'When protecting children from harmful content it is important for member states to find the right balance of relevant fundamental rights, such as the freedom of expression and non-discrimination' But this falls far short of what it needed to say.

What are Loudoun County schools teaching your kids?

From our US edition

Tensions ran high at the Loudoun County School Board meeting on Tuesday evening, following a Virginia judge’s decision to reinstate an elementary school teacher suspended for refusing to call transgender students by their preferred pronouns. Earlier, Circuit Judge James E. Plowman Jr ordered the school district to ‘immediately reinstate’ Tanner Cross as a physical education instructor at Leesburg Elementary School. Cross was suspended for speaking out at a board meeting in late May against a proposed policy that required teachers to use transgender students' preferred pronouns and names. On June 1, Cross filed a lawsuit against the district's superintendent Scott A.

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God loves flags, apparently

From our US edition

When it comes to former president Trump and the gays, one of the innumerable enduring myths perpetrated by media claims he banned US embassies from flying the rainbow gay Pride flag during the month of June. This lie is a personal favorite as a radiant example of the media’s pettiness during the Trump years and the degree to which they’ll just make something up or, at the very least, refuse to conduct the tiniest bit of due diligence to fact-check a falsehood they want so badly to be true. Here’s what really happened: in 2019, of the 307 US embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions around the world, three requested to fly the rainbow gay Pride flag during the month of June.

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Happy corporate wokewash month!

From our US edition

It’s June and the biggest corporations on the planet want you to know that they are celebrating gay Pride — unless you live somewhere like Saudi Arabia in which case they couldn’t care less. On their main Twitter page, Procter & Gamble have put a Pride flag in their banner and in their pinned Tweet they proudly proclaim: 'We strive to be a champion of #LGBTQVisibility year-round, using our voice to drive acceptance, inclusion and a love for humanity.' I guess there are no gay people in Saudi Arabia to champion, which must be why P&G’s Saudi Twitter handle has not a single rainbow flag in sight and a pinned tweet simply wishing people a blessed Ramadan. But that is the beauty of corporate wokewashing.

pride wokewashing corporate