Mick Hartley

Pride month used to be Pride day, and was a celebration of the huge gains made by the gay community in the later decades of last century. Now, though, the battles have been won, and there's no risk or sense of achievement involved – so it's been largely taken over by trans issues and morphed into a bloated feast of drag cross-dressing virtue-signalling.

Simon Edge at UnHerd:

Pride used to be a riot, an opportunity to commemorate our achievements since the Stonewall Inn uprising, and shout about the equalities we still had to fight for. Now it’s a bloated month of pinkwashed flummery, of re-imagined company logos, empty sloganeering and corporate parade float sponsorships — and it’s a drag.

The only fighting lesbians and gays do these days is among ourselves. Some people don’t think the T belongs with the LGB — Get Over It! If only we could. Those of us who insist that the trans movement can be homophobic, because it encourages young people to think they were born in the wrong sex if they are gay or lesbian, have found ourselves marginalised. Told by Pride organisers that we will be thrown out — in the name of inclusion, obviously — if we dare show up to the season’s events, we have little option but to snark from the sidelines. If we haven’t already been blocked by them on Twitter….

How did we get here? A decade ago, it wasn’t obvious what the future of Pride should be. The wide array of discriminatory laws had been dismantled, culminating with the legalisation of same-sex marriage. We had achieved everything we’d asked for, and prejudice seemed to fall away, too. Now, surely, we just had to get on with our lives….

But charities need problems to address, lobbyists need grievances, media publishers need to grow their demographic. In 2015, the lobby group Stonewall — which had surpassed even its own expectations in the effectiveness of its campaigning — extended its remit to campaign on trans issues as well as LGB ones. …

Until that point, the trans movement had been entirely separate, both culturally and politically. As a gay journalist reporting on political developments over two decades, I never met any trans campaigners. But after the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, a merger of the two movements took place, and the rainbow establishment set about pretending that the two camps had already been one. charities need problems to address, lobbyists need grievances, media publishers need to grow their demographic. 

This new movement, a cuckoo in the nest of the campaign for lesbian and gay rights, suddenly had a whole menu full of demands and an agenda that would end up trying to redefine language, reorganise public toilets and changing rooms, kibosh women’s sport and take control of HR departments. At its most baleful, it would try to root out wrong-thinking heretics — such as the think tank consultant Maya Forstater — from every walk of life….

Meanwhile, just look at the rest of the world. Only this week, Uganda rubber-stamped a new law establishing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality“. And in Turkey, a newly re-elected President Erdogan railed throughout his campaign against “LGBT” people — although, once again, the main target seems to be homosexuality, with his interior minister denouncing same-sex relationships and accusing gay people of bestiality.

This, surely, is the stuff that matters. It’s the stuff we once used to care about, before a fragile generation started treating polite disagreement as “genocide” and our rebranded community acquired a reputation for cry-bully tantrums. One day, I hope, the gender wars will end and we can return to those more proportionate values.