Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch in The Critic, on Gareth Roberts' analysis of how trans activists took over the gay rights struggle:

Have you ever seen footage of a beetle moving under the control of a parasite? Hollowed out, the horrifying, brainless critter stumbles forward as a hostile entity compels its legs to take stilted steps. This is the grisly picture that comes to mind reading Gareth Roberts’ Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia. 

In his riotously funny yet gravely depressing polemic, Roberts charts how trans activists took over the once worthy gay rights struggle, devouring the hosts from the inside out and setting the animated corpse on a path to oblivion. 

Roberts is ruthless in his appraisal of gay male culture, dissecting it with the withering accuracy of a queen critiquing the sartorial choices of passers-by from a Soho café. And he displays basalt balls when taking on his brethren by facing up to gay male misogyny and tweaking the plastic nipples of drag queens. 

He is explicit about the “percolating resentment and sexual jealousy of women” of many homosexual men. He traces these sentiments from the closed male communities of his youth where “open disgust for women’s bodies and anatomy” was the norm, through to Ru Paul’s Drag Race, where gay men make jokes about women’s sexual organs for a mass television audience.

This deep-rooted, unspoken envy of womanhood that many gay men harbour is why, Roberts says, so many cheer on the young women chopping off their breasts to become simulacra of men. It is also, he argues, behind the attitudes of men such as Owen Jones, who profess to believe that “trans women are women” until they decide to find a surrogate to start a family. 

He pithily notes that to such gay male trans activists “a man becomes a woman with a click of his fingers; and a womb is a free-floating commercial service that some people just happen to possess”.

The book follows the illogical logic of transgenderism to its end point: the “elimination of homosexuality — as taken to the extreme in the ideology of the Iranian state”.

Queers for Palestine, anyone?