Mick Hartley

I posted the other day about the Arts Council, and its problems with the LGB Alliance. The charity had been awarded a £9,000 Arts Council grant to make a film for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee but the grant was withdrawn after an outcry over claims of transphobia. At a staff meeting Simon Mellor, the Arts Council deputy chief executive, said: “LGB Alliance is a divisive organisation with a history of anti-trans exclusionary activity” and it was “a mistake” to have made the funding award. In a subsequent petition circulated by Arts Council staff, a member of the organisation described LGB Alliance as “a cultural parasite and a glorified hate group that has fans and supporters that also happen to be neo-Nazis, homophobes and islamophobes”. It was claimed that the LGB Alliance was a “hate group”, with another unofficial post likening it to the Ku Klux Klan.

Brendan O'Neill weighs in:

The LGB Alliance’s thoughtcrime is well known. It believes that the cult of transgenderism has nothing in common with same-sex attraction, and in fact poses a threat to the rights of the same-sex attracted. Writing off such concerns as ‘transphobia’ is infantile and foolish. Not least because they are correct. The trans idea, in its current manifestation, has ushered in a world where lesbians find themselves branded ‘genital fetishists’ if they refuse to sleep with transwomen (ie, men). Where young people who would very likely grow up to be homosexual are put on a conveyor belt of hormonal treatment and even bodily mutilation to turn them into their ‘real’ gender. Where young lesbians are having utterly unnecessary mastectomies. Where young gay men are being subjected to the kind of medical interventions that were once horribly foisted on people like Alan Turing.

For the crime of his homosexual desires, Turing was made to undergo hormonal correction that feminised his body, rendered him impotent and gave him breasts. Sound familiar? We once viewed such violent meddling in the lives and bodies of gay men as an abomination. Now we call it ‘trans’ and cheer it to the rafters. We put Turing on the £50 as an apology for what we did to him, even as we do the same thing to 18-year-old lads who, just a few years ago, in the pre-trans era, would have grown up to be normal, happy gay men.

The LGB Alliance is absolutely right to talk about these things. We are witnessing the re-pathologisation of homosexuality. A return to the pre-gay-liberation view of same-sex attraction as a disorder to be treated and potentially corrected. A rehabilitation of the backward view of homosexuals as perverts (‘genital fetishists’) and parasites. And a return of the censorious belief that homosexual ‘propaganda’ must be defunded and deplatformed, lest it warp the minds of the young and offend the sensibilities of the elite. Neo-homophobia must be confronted. Shame on the woke lynch mob that is trying to crush the one organisation that is committed to doing precisely that.

Yes, Brendan O'Neill (and Spiked's) relentless contrarianism can be tiresome, but sometimes he gets it just right.