Mick Hartley

After the latest trans outrage – the disruption of Michael Foran’s Oxford lectures – Graham Linehan points out a pattern that’s been largely ignored. Trans activists and their recurring target: gay people:

Fred Sargeant was at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969. The following year he co-founded the first Pride march in New York. In September 2022, at the age of 74, he went to a Pride event in Burlington, Vermont, carrying a sign, and a crowd of trans activists slapped him about the head, poured coffee on him, stole his belongings and shoved him to the ground. He went to hospital for a CT scan. The local gay organisations said nothing.

Hold that image while you read about last week’s news from Oxford. Dr Michael Foran, an associate professor of law whose work was cited by the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland ruling, has cancelled his own lecture series. Twice in a fortnight, activists planted themselves in front of his lectern and told the audience he was a bigot hiding transphobia behind “a thin veneer of academia”. Foran called it off because he couldn’t promise his students they’d be able to sit in a lecture theatre without being harassed. An expert in equality law, run out of a lecture hall at one of the world’s great universities, for the crime of explaining what the law says.

The standard reading of all this, the one I’ve spent years making myself, is that it’s a war on women. And it is. But line up the casualties and another pattern emerges, one that almost nobody in the legacy gay press will touch. Over and over, the people in front of the mob are gay….

And the objective isn’t any gay person in particular. It’s homosexuality itself. Gender ideology says the body is irrelevant and self-declaration is everything. Homosexuality says the body is the whole point. A lesbian’s no is the one thing the ideology cannot survive, which is why the slur for it, “genital preferences”, treats same-sex attraction as a bigotry to be trained out.

So yes, it’s a war on women, and women have borne the worst of it, but it was never only that. The activists understood from the beginning that the two groups who could falsify the doctrine were women, whose lives depend on the difference, and gay people, whose desires turn on it. That’s why the same fists keep finding the same faces. Kathleen Stock and Allison Bailey and Fred Sargeant and Michael Foran aren’t collateral damage in this so-called ‘culture war’. Gay people, lesbians especially, are key targets, and the tell is that nobody who claims to speak for them will do so.