London Pride 2018: Fearless Feminists vs Misogynists & Lesbophobes

Much as I welcomed my week-long suspension from Twitter, it got a bit frustrating being unable to challenge the nonsense I was reading about the protest at London Pride 2018 by a courageous group of women campaigning to Get the L out of Pride. The cartoon drawn by the wonderful Sandy Manning is spot on as always. One of the banners carried by the women bore the apparently outrageous assertion that lesbian=female homosexual. In the perverse world of trans activism, this is “transphobic”.

For the benefit of those who don’t know much about this stuff, which is most people I meet in my ordinary, everyday life, I’d like to share a paragraph from an article I came across earlier this year, the content of which was a revelation to me.

According to Miranda Yardley, lesbian sections of dating sites are “rammed with blokes”. WTF? (It’s a splendid video – do watch it to the end.)

Although I’m not a lesbian, I have sufficient human empathy to understand the anger behind the Get The L Out campaign and to be disgusted at some of the responses from those whose empathy doesn’t extend to lesbian feminists. As usual, when it comes to dealing with transgender ideology, there is no intellectual challenge here. This response in the form of a light projection is absolutely typical of the trans cult. ‘Do not think for yourselves, just repeat after us.’

Calling on all mindless morons to repeat after them…

Critics have not engaged with the arguments presented by the women – they have simply asserted that the eight protesters are “anti-trans activists” who “forced their way” to the front of the 30,000-strong parade in order to “spread anti-trans hatred” and – heaven forbid – made some people feel “threatened“!

In the blistering heat, the panic-stricken organisers didn’t know how to get rid of them, especially when they lay down on the ground – a sight that delighted their supporters, including me. Eventually the organisers stopped trying to get them to go away and the group ended up walking ahead of the parade, appearing to lead it. Result!

The object of the protest was, as with all such protests, primarily to raise awareness and garner support. But what are they actually protesting and why have they – and, apparently, even the Pride’s organisers for their kid-glove handling of them – been the target of such hatred?

The leaflets they distributed inform us that they believe lesbian rights are under attack by the transactivism with the uncritical support from the rest of LGBT movement. The campaign urges “lesbians everywhere to leave the LGBT and form their own independent movement”.

They say that lesbians are being encouraged to become transgender “men” – with all that entails in terms of changing their healthy bodies by means of hormones and surgery. Goodness knows there is enough anecdotal evidence online to confirm that this is indeed the case. It is also the case that vast numbers of trans activists and allies see nothing wrong with this. To suggest there is something wrong with encouraging young women to think of themselves as men, with telling them to bind their breasts and have them removed and to resign themselves to a life of taking hormones, is “transphobia”.

Calling it “conversion therapy” that contributes to lesbian erasure, pointing out that puberty blockers and hormones may carry health risks or suggesting that, because there is a high desistance rate in girls who declare themselves transgender while still in adolescence, it’s better not to “affirm their gender” (as trans ideologues put it) too soon – is all “transphobia”.

(Of course, accusations of “transphobia” are levelled at anyone who disagrees with any part of transgender ideology – look at what happened to Alison Moyet just for rejecting the descriptor ‘cis’, for example.)

The protesters also argued that the heterosexual men who “identify” as women and, by extension, as lesbians, are being supported by the LGBT movement in their utterly ludicrous claim that a penis can be a female organ and that lesbians who don’t want to get intimate with a penis are transphobes and “vagina fetishists”.

Again there is an abundance of evidence for this all over the web and I’ve collected some of it on this page about lesbian and gay erasure.

And yet… people seem to be in denial about this and are saying that the very allegation is transphobic. Some are interpreting the words “coercing lesbians to accept the penis as a female organ” as being about physically forcing lesbians to have sex with people they don’t want to. I say that, at best, they are not engaging their brains; at worst they are being deliberately disingenuous. “Coercion” doesn’t necessarily mean physical force, it can just as easily mean force through intimidation and exploitation of fear of isolation, doxing and violence.

It beggars belief that a male-born transgender person now evidently claims the right to adjudicate on what a “real lesbian” is. Can people really not see why lesbians – and I do mean real ones – might get angry at this? And if Anne Ruzylo is not a real lesbian, what is she? Straight? Um, kay.

Notably, not one of the people I saw condemning the alleged “transphobia” of the protesters said why they thought it was transphobic; not even the high profile critics like Piers Morgan, Stephen Fry (who at least deleted his appalling tweet on being challenged) and Sadiq Khan. Nobody.

Exploitation of people’s emotions is the most effective weapon in the trans activists’ armoury. I might be too charitable but I’m still inclined to believe that most of those who give their wholehearted and unquestioning support to the trans movement come from a good place, a place of compassion and one that – perhaps unconsciously – behoves them to suspend whatever faculty they might have for critical thinking. That is why, when they hear a trans activist shout “transphobe”, “bigot”, etc, they just accept without question that the target of the name-calling deserves it. This means they often become complicit in bullying that they would play no part in if they’d only look at what those targeted are actually saying. I also suspect many such individuals are anxious about the possibility of ever being on the receiving end of suchlike abuse themselves, especially in a climate when a suggestion of transphobia is enough to cost someone their livelihood.

This brings me to the matter that prompted me to write this particular blog, which was the attempted doxing by several trans activists of one of the protesters, who has an impeccable history of feminist activism and who happens to be one of my humanist celebrant colleagues.

That these bullies should stoop to trying to get an uppity woman “sacked” doesn’t surprise me in the slightest but the reaction from Humanists UK, an organisation I’ve been a member of for about 25 years, appalled me.

Again trying to be charitable, I suspect it was something akin to a knee-jerk reaction from whoever operates the Twitter account and it came from that same place of compassion and fear that makes normally reasonable people come down on the side of bullies without engaging their brains – in this case bullies trying to bring down a courageous woman fighting misogyny and lesbophobia.

At the very least, it would have been more appropriate to point out that complaints about individuals should be made privately. The response from Humanists UK seemed designed to encourage further public targeting of named individuals and I think the individual concerned is owed an apology and a public affirmation of her right to protest.

I certainly don’t believe that, once investigated, any action will be taken against her. At the time of writing, they hadn’t even contacted her. But if they so much as suggest what she did was in any way wrong or contrary to humanist principles, I will have no hesitation in resigning both as a funeral celebrant and a member of the organisation.

That lesbians are female homosexuals is a fact, not a phobia. The charge of “transphobia” is so often misused that, for many of us who are passionate about defending women’s rights against male entitlement, its usage has lost its power as a way to intimidate and manipulate. In the glaring absence of any rational arguments, the cowardly bullies of the trans activist movement and their hapless allies can keep abusing lesbians who are fighting lesbian erasure as “transphobes”.

They don’t care and neither do I.

More articles on the heroic protesters at London Pride 2018 plus videos can be found here.

Published 15 July 2018