Lgbt

Thursday

Jarvis Dupont

It’s not ME, it’s YOU

I wake up each morning and take a good long look in the mirror. ‘Wow! You are AMAZING!’ I say to my reflection. And I mean it. I truly mean it. I am literally gobsmacked at how incredible I am — and in so many ways. As a trans woman I am FIERCE. As an activist I am FEARLESS. As a human being I am empathy personified. Yet the moment I step out of my boudoir and into the virtual world of online social media, I am bombarded by negativity. Why is this? I know it’s not me. It’s YOU. Yes. I am sorry dear reader, but the fact that you are unable to handle me and all my perfections is a YOU problem. As an online influencer I am no stranger to violence. My viral videos often bring with them a torrent of abuse.

narcissist online

Saturday

Debbie Hayton

In praise of the LGB Alliance

From our UK edition

Once upon a time an organisation was established to campaign for gay and lesbian rights. They faced opposition from the outset. They were widely condemned, even called out as a hate group when they talked about same-sex attraction. When they sought charitable status, a petition was launched, urging the Charities Commission to reject the application. Tens of thousands of people signed it. But this was not the dark days of the 1980s, when Section 28 stopped councils and schools 'promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship'. This is now. LGB Alliance was formed in 2019 to promote the elimination of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Starmer will regret his submission to liberal intolerance

From our UK edition

Keir Starmer obviously regrets visiting Jesus House last week because of the furore it has caused in his own party. But he will likely come to regret his reaction even more. The Labour leader posted a full apology for the Pentecostal church visit, saying: ‘I completely disagree with Jesus House’s beliefs on LGBT+ rights, which I was not aware of before my visit. I apologise for the hurt my visit caused and have taken down the video. It was a mistake and I accept that.’ The whole thing is, as Brendan O’Neill points out, rather awkward, given Starmer chose to visit this church during a key Christian festival and given non-mainstream views on homosexuality are a feature not just of many churches but many other religious groups.

Wednesday

Cockburn

If you must be white, try to be LGBTQ

Poor Colin Kahl. The Stanford professor is qualified, experienced, and shares President Biden’s views on defense and foreign policy. Ordinarily, that would be enough to get confirmed to a job like undersecretary of defense for policy. But no more! Three and a half years after #MeToo, the casting couch has migrated from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, thanks to Sen. Tammy Duckworth. On Tuesday, Sen. Duckworth announced that, since President Biden’s political appointees were insufficiently diverse, she would be voting against any Biden nominees with white skin color, starting with Kahl. The only exception, Duckworth said, would be for LGBTQ nominees. Well, Kahl will have a hard time pulling off a racial rebranding this late.

lgbtq

Sunday

Mark Piggott

Brexit and gender are off limits for aspiring authors

From our UK edition

When a small US publisher accepted my first book for young adults, 'Crosstrack', it wasn't long before things went pear shaped. The novel follows two teenage athletes, one a middle class American, the other a young Syrian refugee. Apart from cycling ability, they have another thing in common: both are trans.  I’d anticipated a backlash at having the temerity to describe someone outside my own experience, and expected it to involve the Middle Eastern migrant (a la Jeanine Cummings). Yet when my publisher passed the book to a new editor for a final edit, she took exception to some of the views expressed by the other main character, and in particular a comment where she refers to 'trannies'.

Saturday

Holly Lawford-Smith

A warning from Australia on the transgender debate

From our UK edition

It’s great that Britain’s high court has ruled that children can’t give informed consent to receive puberty blockers. I only wish that we had made that sort of progress here in Australia. But we haven’t — we’ve gone the other way. Not only are we still handing out puberty blockers to children, we have also introduced ‘self-identification’ for legal sex status in multiple states. What's more, there are serious attempts under way to introduce legislation that could be used to make it an offence to fail to affirm people’s chosen gender identities. This is happening under the banner of expanding hate speech protections and prohibiting conversion therapy. I’m not writing this to pat Britain on the back.

Sunday

Debbie Hayton

Is the past being rewritten in LGBT+ history month?

From our UK edition

Did you know that February is LGBT+ history month? If you have a 'progressive' employer you probably do. Banks, universities, local councils, NHS services and train operators are all getting on board. Rainbow flags are flying high above buildings across Britain. But do lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people really need their own month to reflect on the past? Or is this more an occasion to virtue signal in the present? To be fair to the Bank of England, when it raised the rainbow flag on Threadneedle Street on 1 February, it was also commemorating Alan Turing. A war hero, who was gay, it is believed Turing took his own life after undergoing chemical castration following his 1952 conviction for 'gross indecency'.

Tuesday

Jamie Gillies

The SNP was wrong to back down to the transgender mob

From our UK edition

The SNP’s hate crime bill has done plenty of damage to the party’s credibility. But it seems the party leadership is determined to make matters even worse. The Scottish government has announced that it will withdraw an amendment to the bill that would have permitted free speech on transgender issues. This move, a capitulation to activists, puts fears about the legislation back at an all-time high. The trans debate is already one in which it is difficult to speak out for fear of being abused, so providing for free speech on this topic is critical.

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

Biden’s trans rights agenda is bad news for women and girls

From our UK edition

Joe Biden has wasted little time grabbing rights from women and girls across America. On day one, he signed an Executive Order on 'Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation'. This is being hailed as a pivotal moment for transgender rights. But it's nothing of the sort.  The mention of 'Gender Identity' alone is enough to raise the alarm about the consequences of this proposal. Gender identity might be a popular concept right now, but it isn't even clear what it means. Put simply, it's a concept which refers to a person's individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth.

Wednesday

Debbie Hayton

2020 was the year the tide turned in the trans wars

From our UK edition

2020 will, of course, be remembered as the year in which Covid-19 was unleashed on the world. But it is one in which another menace – gender identity ideology – was put firmly in its place, in the UK at least.  Perhaps the tipping point was the deranged response to JK Rowling’s essay on sex and gender, which she published back in June. For taking issue with 'language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’,' Rowling suffered widespread and predictable condemnation.

Monday

Andrew Sullivan

Where have all the lesbians gone?

From our UK edition

I miss lesbians. It is true that most homosexual men don’t have too many integrated in our lives, but most of us have a few. And we need them. They check our sometimes tenuous grasp of reality, they roll their eyes at our hedonism, they show us how marriages can last, and take care of us when we get sick. I generalise, of course. Many lesbians have little or nothing to do with men, including gay men. But there is a special chemistry between the men and women in the gay and lesbian worlds that it’s sad to see dissipate. Same-sex worlds can get unbalanced fast. We both need a bit of ballast from each other.

Saturday

Julie Bindel

When did everyone become ‘queer’?

Is anybody straight these days? When I came out as a lesbian in the 1970s the guesstimates for numbers of those of us that shop around the corner veered between 5 and 10 percent. Later, both within the US and UK those figures were disputed as ‘too high’. In the US National Survey of Men estimated that only 2.3 percent said that they had not been exclusively heterosexual, while only 1.1 percent said they had been exclusively homosexual. Now, everywhere I look people that wish to be seen as edgy are identifying as ‘Queer’. The problem is, ‘Queer’ means absolutely nothing, or rather, anything anyone wishes it to be. And according to a recent piece in the Washington Post on how Trump lost and Biden won, the Queers did it.

queer

Friday

Stephen Daisley

Andy Wightman and the limits of trans tolerance

From our UK edition

Andy Wightman is — or, as of this afternoon, was — the most independent-minded Green member of the Scottish parliament. A staunch man of the left and pursuer of land reform and tenants’ rights, he nonetheless practises an increasingly old-fashioned respect for opposing views and those who hold them. One of the subjects on which he has sought to keep an open mind is that of trans rights. Under the leadership of Patrick Harvie, a sacristan in the church of identity politics, the Scottish Greens have taken a gender-fundamentalist line with scant tolerance for heretical thinking.

Tuesday

Debbie Hayton

Should it be left to a teenager to fight back against gender ideology?

From our UK edition

As we reflect on the Keira Bell case last week, spare a thought for another young person who is challenging an authority that has been bewitched by gender identity ideology.  A 14-year-old schoolgirl, known only as Miss B, believes sex is distinct from gender identity. Many others agree with her. But unlike those who have been silenced or learned to self-censor in what is so often a malicious and nasty debate, this teenager is not prepared to stay quiet.

Friday

Chadwick Moore

Hey Elleniot, aren’t you a bit too old for this?

Americans found themselves divided into two camps this week — the mildly skeptical and the fervently disinterested — when the actress formally known as Ellen Page announced she was a boy called Elliot and, in fact, always has been a boy.In the proclamation, posted to Instagram, Page not only came out as transgender — meaning she was born one sex but identifies as the other — but also as non-binary — which means she actually has no sex. Yes, it makes no sense. But try not to think too much about, she clearly hasn’t either.You’re forgiven if you might be hesitant to rewrite the science textbooks for a 33-year-old actress so gullible she wept on national television over the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax.

elleniot ellen elliot page

Friday

Meghan Murphy

The subtle sexism of ‘feminist’ Democrats

Over the past five years, we’ve seen an endless stream of hand-wringing and hysteria around the misogyny of Donald Trump. The President is the White Patriarchy epitomized: a man who believes women are objects for his grabbing, useless unless they are pretty to look at or satisfying their husbands. What a jerk!To be fair, Trump is a jerk. And, in my opinion, a misogynist. But he’s not the only one. There’s a group that prides itself on #MeTooing the world, tweeting the words cishetero patriarchy as much as possible in an effort to really stick it to the man (Jack Dorsey must be tormented) and repeating, ad nauseam, that Trump’s win is proof that Americans just loooove their bigotry. Yet they don’t seem to have much respect for women themselves.

feminist

Thursday

Jarvis Dupont

Cisgendered menstruators want to erase my identity

A worrying trend has emerged recently of non-trans uterus owners demanding the removal of inclusive language when dealing with gender-related issues. This is extremely harmful to the trans community as it is a blatant attempt to invalidate our existence as trans women and trans men. Many organizations have been making a valiant effort to respect trans and non-binary people by using more progressive and inclusive terms or phrases when advertising their products and services. This has been seen as a positive step forward in the struggle for validation for those of us who identify as non-cisgender.

menstruators cisgendered

Monday

Chadwick Moore

The Pride Boys

‘They thought they were being gay as in homosexual but they were just being gay as in lame,’ Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, tells me. Since Saturday night the #ProudBoys hashtag has trended on Twitter — accompanied by photos of gay couples snogging, LGBTs flaunting their gayness, and a fresh dump of those milquetoast, cringe-inducing memes of the political left. The ‘real proud boys’ gay campaign comes after the Proud Boys group made national headlines last week. During the first presidential debate on Tuesday, Democrat nominee Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace insisted that Trump condemned the multi-ethnic, pro-Trump men’s group as an example of rampant ‘white supremacy’.

proud boys

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Hollywood’s transrace hypocrisy

It is an article of fashionable faith that genetic differences in sex are meaningless and malleable, but genetic differences in race are so profound and meaningful that they must not be tinkered with at all, even though race, we are told, is a ‘social construct’. Hence it is positively progressive to sneak a cheeky penis into a women’s changing room, providing the penis is attached to a ‘trans woman’. But it was despicably racist of the disgraced professor Jessica Krug, who was born white and Jewish, to have masqueraded as a woman of color.The gaps in this logic are so big that you could drive a bus through them, whether you’re sitting at the back or the front.

hollywood

Friday

Jarvis Dupont

The Matrix isn’t the only classic film secretly about the trans experience

After years of speculation, Lilly Wachowski has finally given us confirmation that The Matrix trilogy is an allegory of the transgender experience. Although it is obvious to anyone who filters popular media through the lens of woke issues that Neo’s struggle to understand and accept his identity represented the conflict every transgender person faces, to have it verified by one of the writers is a significant step forward in the fight for equality. Some might question the reason as to why it’s taken so long for Lilly, who is herself transgender, to speak up about this and why she chose to highlight it now: ‘(In 1999) …the world just wasn’t ready for it’ she explains in a video.

matrix