Divorcing the TQ from LGB – The Spectator Australia
The LGB is divorcing the TQ and there is a court case. While the world’s eyes are on Britain changing monarchs, those of us who are interested in gender politics are again looking to the British courts for another battle at the business end of what is known as the Culture Wars.
In 2019, a group of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people set up a charity in Britain to forward the interests of same-sex attracted people. The charity, LGB Alliance, is different from the mainstream LGBTQ+ charities because it rejects gender identity ideology at the core of almost all other former gay rights charities.
The LGB Alliance was granted charity status last year and is now having its charity status challenged in court by transgender charity Mermaids, with the backing of an organisation called, The Good Law Project (TGLP). The less I say about TGLP the better, or I will need a lawyer myself.
It is appropriate that the LGB Alliance is headed by two lesbians because at the centre of a massive conflict in the charity sector are lesbians. As I write this, ‘lesbian’ is again trending on Twitter, as it has been doing regularly these last few weeks.
I have to mention that I was permanently suspended from Twitter a few weeks ago for tweeting that men pretending to be lesbians is a form of rape culture. Norwegian feminist Christina Ellingsen has recently been questioned by police for saying that men can’t be lesbians, and may face up to three years in prison.
In August, a lesbian group called, Get the L Out were removed from a Manchester Pride March by police. They held banners that read; ‘lesbians don’t like penises’, ‘trans activism erases lesbians’, and ‘the #CottonCeiling is rape’.
The women in the Manchester parade were filmed speaking with police who were asking them to leave the Pride March. On the video, published by Get the L Out, a woman is speaking to the police saying ‘we are lesbians’ and the policeman actually says ‘whatever you are is causing conflict’. This is a stunningly precise piece of political and cultural commentary there from the copper, because what lesbians ‘are’ is definitely at the core of a major conflict and indeed corruption of our liberal democracies themselves.
Lesbians, just in case there is any doubt about whom I speak, are adult human females who are exclusively romantically and sexually attracted to other adult human females. All major government-funded LGBT charities have redefined lesbians to ‘same gender attracted feminine identifying people’ and insist they maintain dating circles and indeed sex lives that include trans-identified male people.
Unsurprisingly, lesbians are reporting that their dating apps and spaces are being flooded with male sexual predators ‘identifying’ as women.
In upsetting the apple cart, these dissident lesbians and gay men are blowing the whistle on a massively profitable racket and the justification for the widespread censorship of women. At the base of that racket is the corruption of the pluralist and liberal experiment itself.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica: ‘Pluralism, in political science, the view that in liberal democracies power is (or should be) dispersed among a variety of economic and ideological pressure groups and is not (or should not be) held by a single elite or group of elites.’
Collective power groups are not the sole domain of the Left, but it has been left-wing collective power groups that have made themselves so dependent on government funding that they have not just become an arm of the State, they have become the kind of arm of the State that the Church once was.
What used to be a collection of representative lobby groups are now organisations that are paid to develop policy for the government and give advice to capital on managing workplace policy and culture. The advice and policy direction they give is almost exclusively cooked in humanities departments with little relationship to the people these groups purport to represent, and I would argue that the advice that is ‘cooked’ is designed to serve the interests of those who pay for it.
What I am talking about is not a conspiracy theory, but a long observed nature of the bureaucratic structure of states to align with religion or ideology and the use of these ideologies to establish tyranny. This is uncontested liberal thought, and for me, I think it is as much about laziness as it is about power. Having a state arm that produces supportive religion or ideology is a more stable ‘conscience’ for the State than the unruly people to whom the democratic secular state is designed to be accountable.
The capture of ‘lobby’ groups through tied funding is the issue of our time and lesbians are currently the David holding the five smooth stones up against a Goliath that is paid to represent them.
Thankfully for the LGB Alliance, the gender ideology on which the Mermaid case is based, is ethically and intellectually unsustainable. Gender identity ideology is the strange creature that has been cooked with top-down funding from women’s studies, French cultural theory, anthropology, a spattering of sociology with a dash of proper nonsense. It is the proper nonsense that is coming out loud and clear already in the first day of hearings between Mermaids and the Charity Commissioner of England and Wales and the LGB Alliance.
It is clear that what we are hearing from the lesbians’ protesters is not a strange fringe theory, it is the logical extension of the basic premises of gender identity ideology. If sex is unimportant, if what is important are the cultural meaning you adopt, your presentation, how you feel, then lesbians have no moral right to discriminate against males who take of feminine ‘identity’ markers. This is a profoundly moral rather than ‘rights’ based ideology that is used to erode the sexual boundaries of lesbians with shame. As I have said before the erosion of sexual boundaries with social shame is rape culture.
Giving evidence at the Mermaids v LGB Alliance hearing, Paul Roberts of the LGBT Consortium was asked directly if it was inconsistent with the Consortium’s values that ‘someone with a female body attracted to men is a heterosexual woman’. He replied, ‘Yes, that is inconsistent with our values.’
The list of things that Mr Roberts considered ‘transphobic’ are extensive, including setting up an organisation for same-sex attracted people, saying that someone with a female body cannot be a gay man, and having a dating pool that excludes males.
Roberts also said it was transphobic to suggest that the transition of children with pre-indicators for homosexuality was ‘transing away the gay’. Roberts claimed, ‘I don’t believe that transing away the gay happen.’ When he was reminded of these practices in Iran, he conceded that it does happen and it was a human rights issue that everyone should be concerned with. Maybe he means that the British needn’t worry about that particular human rights issue, that only foreign people use the medical procedures of ‘trans-medicine’ inappropriately? Like so many things, this was unclear.
The representatives from Mermaids consistently imply that the ‘gender critical’ belief that sex is immutable and important is a minority belief and that the idea that homosexuals are attracted to the same sex of people is actual hate toward trans people.
Organisations like Mermaids and those linked to the ominously named ‘Consortium’ are all in lockstep on authoritarian gender dictates and LGB Alliance is the outlier. The LGB Alliance is one of the new grassroots organisations that are rising to contest the dominance of authoritarian government-paid policymakers cloaked in social justice, and this case is an important one in the fight.
The hearing continues tonight, and I’ll be watching early into the morning like an English football fan, except I’ll be cheering for the lesbian dissidents and so should every fan of liberal democracy and true pluralism.
Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism. She blogs at ediewyatt.com and substack.
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