By Gary Powell
16 January 2023. 00.12am

The Telegraph reported on 15 January that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is set to ban both homosexual and transgender conversion therapy, reversing the decision of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson not to include transgender identity in the Conservatives’ conversion therapy bill and ignoring the clear evidence that banning so-called “transgender conversion therapy” will effectively legitimise conversion therapy for lesbian and gay young people and introduce a new era of state-sanctioned homophobia and negligence into the psychotherapeutic treatment of young people.

In this linked piece, Carolyn Mason* shares her distressing account of how her lesbian daughter, a gender-non-conforming teenager who had been subjected to homophobic bullying, decided to identify as “transgender” after a presentation was given at her school by a transgender-identified LGBTQ+ lobby representative.

As is the case with so many lesbian and gay children today, what Lucy* has experienced is a modern form of homophobic conversion therapy. The Government could prevent such harm by beefing up existing child safeguarding legislation, by banning gender ideology promotion from schools, and by ensuring this ban is enforced on pain of severe sanctions.

Instead, Rishi Sunak’s Government is, according to the Telegraph, set to push through a bill that includes a ban on transgender “conversion therapy”, despite the Government having been provided with comprehensive evidence in the 2021 conversion therapy bill consultation of how harmful this would be. It is a completely unnecessary piece of legislation that is now an anachronism: a red-flag measure that is being pushed on to the statute books under pressure from gender activists such as Stonewall UK, Mermaids, and other LGBT+ lobby promoters.

The civil rights campaign group “Sex Matters”, which was set up “to undo the damage done [by gender ideology] to institutions across society, and secure everybody’s human rights” – have produced an excellent and detailed position paper setting out their ten key concerns about the Government’s “conversion therapy” bill proposal, and it is a document that merits a very wide reading and dissemination.

It is clear that the Conservative Party hierarchy is still far too much in thrall to Stonewall UK and its ever-colonising, obsessive transgender ideology.

The cruel and ignorant history of conversion therapy – with a mode called “aversion therapy” that involved electric shocks and emetic injections – overwhelmingly belongs to lesbian and gay history: not to the history of transgender ideology or of any other minority group. Some people really are sexually attracted to members of the same sex: it is an empirical and verifiable fact. By contrast, no one is really the soul of one sex in the body of another.

Any “conversion therapy” ban legislation that refers to “LGBT” is necessarily an affront to the lesbian and gay identity and an appropriation of our unique history, as it force-teams lesbian and gay people with an ideology that seeks to erase our very identity by labelling “same-sex attraction” as a “transphobic” and “bigoted” violation of the “same-gender attraction” label it insists we adopt, and with an ideology that effectively attacks our right to say we are exclusively sexually attracted to people of the same sex.

It used to be the job of religious fundamentalists to condemn lesbian and gay people, and to deny us validation, when we disclosed our sexual orientation. Now the gender ideology fundamentalists have joined them – and to add insult to injury, the Government now seems set on creating a new law that uses the very “LGBT” initialism whose last letter negates the first two, as though we were all in homogeneous agreement with our lesbian and gay identity and rights being erased – including our right even to meet, socialise and organise separately as lesbian and gay people.

Transgender identification has nothing to do with sexual orientation, and new slippery-slope pro-transgender legislation should never be allowed to ride into the statute books on the coat-tails of the historical lesbian and gay rights movement.

Lucy’s experience of social conversion therapy – an increasingly common experience of lesbian and gay teenagers in today’s obsessive identity politics culture – came about because of her youth, her lack of experience, and her vulnerability. However, there is a whole constituency of lesbian and gay adults and our friends, and of concerned parents seeing the propaganda-driven transitioning of their same-sex attracted children, who refuse to collude with the colonisation and revisionism of lesbian and gay history by transgender activists, and who refuse to see children manipulated in this cynical, mendacious, and heavy-handed way.

Transgender identification has nothing to do with sexual orientation, and new slippery-slope pro-transgender legislation should never be allowed to ride into the statute books on the coat-tails of the historical lesbian and gay rights movement.

At the very least, the proposed bill will have a chilling effect on those who wish to support children – including many gay and lesbian children – who have become transgender-identified at the hands of their schools, peers, and Internet groomers. Therapists will be wary of saying anything that could be presented – or misrepresented – by politicised teenage clients who present as transgender-identified, as trying to steer them away from their transgender identity.

The legislation will also assist attempts further down the line by LGBTQ+ lobby groups to demand the criminalisation of anything but “gender-affirming therapy” for transgender-identified people – assuming that this element will not already appear in the Government’s new Act – where the very paradigms of questioning one’s beliefs, and of embracing uncertainty, that underpin all healthy psychotherapeutic approaches, fall victim to cancel culture and coerced speech.

When she was Minister for Women and Equalities, the former Prime Minister, Liz Truss, made a statement on the proposal for the Government’s conversion therapy ban as then envisaged, and indicated that it would become illegal for a therapist to encourage a person not to believe that she is a boy when she is a biological girl yet claims to be a boy, or a girl when he is a biological boy yet claims to be a girl.

A stricture of this kind, which will presumably now find itself realised in Mr Sunak’s new Act, will for the first time make it illegal for a therapist to encourage people to come to terms with immutable empirical facts, when doing so could bring them insight, relief, healing, personal development, and into a closer relationship with reality.

Until recently, prior to the iconoclasm of identity politics, gender dysphoria was universally treated as a pathology: as something that was not good for the patient, and from which he or she needed help to recover. Now, it seems it is to become illegal to give the client or patient the help that he or she needs.

What comes next? Are we to make it illegal for a child who suffers from anorexia nervosa to be encouraged to understand that she is dangerously underweight when she wrongly believes she is fat? Is this really so far removed from making it illegal to encourage a girl not to have her breasts amputated because she is definitely not a boy, and may instead be lesbian, high-functioning autistic, gender-non-conforming, or simply traumatised and depressed?

What a dangerous precedent it sets to inhibit a clinician’s right and responsibility to identify unassailable biological facts when reckless, self-absorbed, political adults have set an immature same-sex-attracted child on a pathway of social transitioning, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones … and even, potentially, surgical procedures.

No wonder the gender lobby is pushing so hard for this legislation. For the first time, “gender identity” will be embedded in British law: a fake concept that only exists in people’s imaginations, that normalises a pathology and pseudo-identity, and that has no true empirical referent. This legislation will also bring about a further consolidation of the “LGBT” initialism, even though it is one that positively harms lesbian and gay people.

It will furnish the slippery slope to more draconian legislation further down the line, as we can be sure that the LGBT+ lobby will never stop pushing for new legislation that panders to their insatiable mindset of perpetual victim identity and elite social status.

What a dangerous precedent it sets to inhibit a clinician’s right and responsibility to identify unassailable biological facts when reckless, self-absorbed, political adults have set an immature same-sex-attracted child on a pathway of social transitioning, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones … and even, potentially, surgical procedures.

Many readers will not remember Section 28, which came into law under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1988. Section 28 was a part of the Local Government Act 1988 that imposed a new obligation on local authorities: that they “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

There were no prosecutions under this Act, and it was local authorities that were caught by its ambit, rather than individual people. The legislation also only forbade the promotion of homosexuality, meaning the depiction of homosexuality as a positive phenomenon, rather than prohibiting any neutral reference to it.

In fact, educational guidelines issued by the Thatcher government with regard to HIV prevention programmes in schools, which were mandatory, stated explicitly that nothing in the Section 28 legislation should be interpreted as preventing clear guidance about the routes of HIV transmission and how to prevent it. So, identification of unprotected anal sex among gay men putting them in a high-risk group for HIV transmission was certainly not intended to be inhibited by Section 28 legislation.

However, Section 28 had appallingly negative consequences that caused serious damage both to the well-being of lesbian and gay young people and to the Conservative Party itself. Despite the public face of the lesbian and gay rights constituency always having been overwhelmingly left-wing, the Conservatives underestimated how many of their own voters and members were lesbian and gay “shy” Conservatives, who lived quiet lives of assimilation and felt deeply resentful about this insult to their sexual orientation and intimate relationships.

These gay Conservatives were alarmed at how Section 28 would increase the stigmatisation of lesbian and gay people and make it even more difficult for same-sex attracted teenagers to access the basic information they needed and deserved in coming to terms with their sexual orientation in a society that was still very markedly homophobic.

Added to this constituency of “shy” lesbian and gay Conservatives were all the friends and family members who loved them, as well as the many Conservative voters and members who regarded this legislation as an unwarranted attack on the Conservative values of individual freedom and of fairness to all.

Section 28 was a very bad move by the Conservative Party, and Margaret Thatcher had been unwise to cede to the religious campaigners who had lobbied her for it. Mrs Thatcher had been one of those who voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, when her instincts had clearly served her much better, and when most of her fellow Conservative MPs had voted against decriminalisation. Section 28 even led to speculation among the Left that Mrs Thatcher was preparing the ground to re-criminalise homosexuality further along the line: such was the level of profound mistrust and suspicion that her government brought upon itself as a result of this legislation.

The main harm caused by Section 28 was the climate of fear that it created. The teaching profession, for all its progressive posturing, conformed slavishly with this new injunction not to “promote” homosexuality. As nobody really knew what would be considered to constitute “promotion”, the legislation had a blanket chilling effect, and educators veered away from mentioning homosexuality at all, even in sex education classes.

Despite the government’s apparent concern that Section 28 should not inhibit accurate HIV prevention information, the legislation certainly had a chilling effect in such health education programmes too, and may even have cost many lives.

In years to come, when the damage caused by their perhaps well-intentioned but certainly ill-advised legislation becomes apparent to the public, the Conservative Party could find itself harshly called to account for its second Section-28-style attack on the lesbian and gay community: an attack fuelled by ignorance, by a desire to appease gender lobby groups…

The Conservatives’ LGBT “conversion therapy” ban could easily become their new Section 28. As the case of teenager Lucy Mason* demonstrates, gender ideology promotion is homophobic conversion therapy by stealth. The proposal bears the clear hallmarks of yet another Section-28-style reckless miscalculation by the Conservative Party that will cause serious harm to current and future generations of lesbian and gay teenagers, who are already being subjected to a modern form of conversion therapy because the Government has allowed schools to be colonised by transgender ideology activists.

As more and more children are damaged by this ideology, both at school and in their psychotherapy sessions, and as more and more people become conscious of this damage whose existence is currently being suppressed by large sections of our media, corporate, and public institutions, there will eventually be a backlash against the Conservative Party from countless affected families, from countless voters concerned about child safeguarding and the protection of gay and lesbian people, and from countless hitherto loyal lesbian and gay supporters of the Conservative Party.

In years to come, when the damage caused by their perhaps well-intentioned but certainly ill-advised legislation becomes apparent to the public, the Conservative Party could find itself harshly called to account for its second Section-28-style attack on the lesbian and gay community: an attack fuelled by ignorance, by a desire to appease gender lobby groups, and by a desire to placate its own internal gender lobby colonisers. An attack that is rendered no less harmful by its status as an unintended consequence, given that the Government has been repeatedly warned not to go ahead with what it now reportedly plans to do.

Gender ideology promotion is homophobic conversion therapy by stealth. Whereas the promotion of gender ideology should be banned from all schools, and politicians should allow therapists to continue treating genuine gender dysphoria as the pathology that it is, the Conservative Party seems to be about to legitimise the claim of gender activists to an inalienable forced-teaming right with the lesbian and gay rights movement, and also to legitimise the absurd, harmful, unverifiable and completely meaningless claim that it really is possible to have the soul of one sex in the body of the other.

Like their original Section 28, this new, highly-camouflaged Section 28 trap, into which the Conservatives are unwisely allowing themselves to be strong-armed, is likely to cause them severe reputational damage among their voter base.

It is an irony that the new “conversion therapy” bill may be an attempt by the Conservative Party to make amends for the harm caused by its Section 28 legislation in 1988. It is this very bill, however, that threatens to backfire on the Conservatives as their new Section 28 moment, for which the electorate will make them pay dearly. Like their original Section 28, this new, highly-camouflaged Section 28 trap, into which the Conservatives are unwisely allowing themselves to be strong-armed, is likely to cause them severe reputational damage among their voter base.

This is yet another poisonous fruit borne of forced teaming between sexual orientation rights and gender ideology demands: two concepts that are completely irreconcilable, and whose relationship in modern society is characterised by increasing homophobic colonisation of the former by the latter, cheered on by the same amoral educational establishment that completely sold out on gay rights once before, in its servile, silent, and self-seeking deference to social prejudices and to Section 28.

What we see here is an inexcusable betrayal of troubled and indoctrinated young people who need and deserve the support and protection of wise and responsible adults – a betrayal of same-sex-attracted, high-functioning autistic, and gender-non-conforming young people. A Government elected with the solemn duty to protect child safeguarding is instead set to betray these young people in an unconscionable act of woke appeasement, and in the face of the clearest evidence and the strongest warnings. The Conservative Party has fallen.

* Names changed.

© 2023 Gary Powell

Updated from Lesbian and Gay News, 22 November 2021

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.

By Gary Powell
13 January 2023. 12.00pm

“What causes homophobia – the dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals – and in the case of homosexuals themselves, self-loathing?” 

This was a question asked by the New York psychologist, Dr George Weinberg, in his 1972 book, “Society and the Healthy Homosexual”. It is a work I re-read before writing this article and that I had read for the first time in my late teens: undoubtedly one of the most helpful and insightful books I encountered during my own journey of coming to terms with being gay.

Weinberg was the pro-gay psychologist who coined the term “homophobia” – widely used in his book, and conceived by him in 1967, when he realised that, far from homosexuality being a psychological illness, it was those who felt an irrational aversion to lesbian and gay people, and who felt the need to denounce and discriminate against us, who were suffering from a psychopathology.

Furthermore, Weinberg identified that we lesbian and gay people ourselves were very prone to internalising the homophobia of our societies, giving rise to destructive self-contempt and self-hatred that would often lead to attempts at compensation, diversion, and self-sabotage. His mission was to encourage self-acceptance among lesbian and gay people and a positive attitude towards our sexual orientation in the service of aspiring to live a happy and fulfilled life – something to which neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality was an automatic barrier per se.

The particular problems experienced by lesbian and gay people, he asserted, were caused by a combination of culturally-inherited environmental homophobia, and the internalisation of that homophobia; and Weinberg’s endeavour was to help free society from both forms.

On re-reading the book, it quickly became clear that I had forgotten just how shockingly anti-gay our society was at the time Weinberg wrote it. Homophobia permeated the psychological, psychiatric, counselling, and psychotherapeutic professions: “Most psychoanalytic training institutes, like most training programs in psychology, would refuse a declared homosexual as a trainee.”

He documents the appallingly ignorant and prejudiced attitudes prevalent in these professions towards lesbian and gay people, including the use of aversion therapy – so-called “therapists” administering dozens of nauseating injections, or electric shocks, in an attempt to make their patients desist from enjoying homoerotic thoughts and feelings.

Weinberg states, with prescience: “If sometime in the future, homosexuality becomes acceptable socially, the behavioural therapists will accept it as no longer being maladaptive. Meanwhile, these therapists are, as a group, punishing homosexuals and not considering their case.”

What spurred me to re-read Weinberg’s book was the very strong suspicion that his identification and analysis of “internalised homophobia” could provide the key to understanding what might otherwise be an impenetrable mystery: the fact that, at the very time when the lesbian and gay rights movement had achieved so much, and when we had such good grounds for optimism about the future, we allowed our movement to be hijacked by a completely different, unrelated, and indeed hostile ideology. We allowed it to be rebranded as a movement that was overwhelmingly heterosexual.

We have also seen many gay and lesbian people actively championing this takeover, attacking those who object to it, and trying to promote gender ideology practices that are seriously harming young gay and lesbian people, with no concern at all for the suffering they are causing. While gender ideologues falsify and revise lesbian and gay history, many same-sex oriented people play along and reinforce this misrepresentation of our gay past.  

A movement that used to fight for lesbian and gay rights […] has succumbed to the self-destruction of low self-esteem.

To me, all this has the distinct flavour of homophobic self-sabotage. Of people giving away their political and social movement to others – from self-loathing, guilt, and a feeling of not deserving their own, dedicated space and ideology. A movement that used to fight for lesbian and gay rights, and that encouraged young lesbian and gay people to accept their sexual orientation and learn to love themselves, has succumbed to the self-destruction of low self-esteem.

This was once a brave and principled movement, and it should be encouraging young lesbian and gay people not to use transgender identification as a fake short-cut to putative heterosexuality. Claiming to be a transgender boy when you are a lesbian girl is, for many vulnerable and insecure young people caught up in Internet grooming and social contagion, too tempting a springboard from homophobic disparagement and marginalisation to high and powerful transgender peer status.

The gay activists of the 1980s would never have allowed this hijacking of our movement, which has been precipitated by large conditional grants to former gay rights charities in the West from wealthy organisations promoting transgender ideology. This is the new ruling class, buttressed by Big Tech, that has even succeeded in duping large sections of the Left, who know they, or their projects, risk being ruined if they dare to speak out against the new, wealthy, governing elite.

In the 1980s, in our struggles for self-acceptance and for social justice, we were very much aware – thanks in large part to George Weinberg – of how our own internalised homophobia, our own socialised self-contempt, always risked sabotaging our personal development, our opportunities, our romantic relationships, and our happiness. It seems to me that internalised homophobia is now back with a vengeance.

Recent generations of lesbian and gay people have lost sight of how easy it is to assimilate other people’s negative evaluations, and the kind of self-acceptance many demonstrate often appears shallow and sham. Should we really be so surprised that the intense and pervasive homophobia of our western societies, which has been culturally baked-in by religious doctrine over hundreds of years, might still have a toxic grip on the psyches of lesbian and gay people in the modern age, despite all the improvements and reforms?

It was only fifty years ago that Weinberg wrote the following description of internalised homophobia:

“The person who from early life has loathed himself for homosexual urges arrives at this attitude by a process exactly like the one occurring in heterosexuals who hold the prejudice against homosexuals. He votes against himself in everyday decisions—just as others vote against him. For instance, he may ridicule himself and other homosexuals, as prejudiced heterosexuals do. He desists from sexual contacts, as they would want him to. He reduces his career aspirations, as the heterosexuals would reduce them for him if they knew he was homosexual. He describes himself as sick, as heterosexuals would, and he direfully announces that all homosexual relationships must come to an unsavory end, in the very language used by heterosexuals who know nothing of such matters.”

Nietzsche’s insight that “Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises,” should provide us with a clue as to how the public expression of internalised homophobia can make a self-oppressed, self-disparaging individual feel temporarily better about himself. The self-loathing and secretly homosexual religious adherent who publicly condemns homosexuality will not only hope that it distracts others from suspecting the truth about his own sexual orientation; he will also get a virtue buzz, an ephemeral respite from his feelings of guilt and shame, as a person who morally condemns the illicit thoughts and feelings to which he himself is repeatedly drawn.

People who were same-sex oriented were no longer permitted to socialise or politically organise as a discrete group […] without being harassed, defamed, lied about, and called “bigots” and “transphobes”.

For all the greater openness and acceptance of lesbian and gay people in the modern age, the willingness of so many people to hand over our movement and our political rights to others who mean us harm, should make us think hard about how genuine and how deep the level of self-acceptance really is in today’s lesbian and gay community.

The lesbian and gay rights movement has now been rebranded as the “LGBT+ movement”, and as I demonstrated in a recent article, the addition of the “+” means that over 80% of those now populating this hypothetical movement are heterosexual. Even before the “+” was added, our movement had already been captured by the transgender lobby, becoming LGBT (where T stood for “transgender”, not “transsexual” – the latter also having experienced their cause being hijacked).

People who were same-sex oriented were no longer permitted to socialise or politically organise as a discrete group, based on the sole characteristic they shared in common, without being harassed, defamed, lied about, and called “bigots” and “transphobes”. Only six years ago, our right to have our own distinct group was unchallenged. What other minority group has been forced to team with a completely unrelated group under threat of vilification?

The same thing has happened to women, of course – a majority of the population, rather than a minority – while those lesbian and gay people who are aligned with the LGBT+ lobby are actively supporting the erasure of women’s sex-based rights and protections.

What other minority group, following massive campaigns by the charities that once represented them, has been forced to accept a redefinition of their group identity in a way that now included over 80% of the general population?

The colonisers of the lesbian and gay movement have now even taken it upon themselves to redefine “homosexuality” itself, peddling the false and blatantly homophobic claim that it means “same-gender attraction” and not “same-sex attraction”. This is an attempt to redefine homosexuality out of existence. A number of lesbian and gay people are endorsing this and pretending that they are heterosexually attracted to people on the basis of their self-defined “gender”. This is not the behaviour of someone who is proud to be gay or lesbian and determined to defend the right to be homosexual.

What other minority group would allow itself to be colonised by a completely different and unrelated group that then redefined the primary group out of existence? And how many members of that colonised group would be aggressively championing the colonisers? What is behind this mentality?

Hundreds – thousands – of years of systemic homophobia do not disappear from a culture in only five decades. The fact that so many lesbian and gay people have colluded with the colonisation of their movement, and continue to do so, is evidence of the degree of self-sabotage and self-deprecating compensation that is embedded in the psyches of Nietzsche’s self-despising virtue-signallers.

My own observations and experiences of the gay male scene and community over many years confirm the barely-hidden self-rejection of so many people who do not seem to have made good progress on their journey of gay self-acceptance. Often, even the in-your-face coming-out of many gay people, and their assertive demand for what they see as inalienable “gay rights”, are behaviours that seem to fall far short of being assertions of mature self-acceptance and self-respect.

They frequently have the character of seeking out, and attempting to severely punish, minor infractions, or minor deviations from the modern gay rights orthodoxy. An endless and aggressive demand for external validation fills the void where the internal validation should be, with egos too damaged, fragile, and angry to accommodate the paradigm of forgiveness, or even of proportionate response.

In this world of redefined language, where gay rights become LGBT+ (and therefore overwhelmingly heterosexual) rights, where homosexuality must contain the profession of an equal preference for heterosexuality, and where genuine, well-meaning disagreement on an issue becomes misrepresented as “hate” and “bigotry”, it is perhaps unsurprising that even George Weinberg’s “homophobia” is now being redefined to mean “anything that questions the current LGBT+ orthodoxy on gay rights”.

The has the result that I am accused of “homophobia” for campaigning against all forms of surrogacy for straight and gay people alike, given that my campaign would prevent some (wealthy) gay men and gay couples from producing children via surrogacy, regardless of the fact that surrogacy is very harmful to, and exploitative of, women and children.

Gay “rights” are increasingly being asserted as having such an elevated status that their satisfaction justifies the infliction of very serious injustices on others. While the LGBT+ lobby tries to enforce fake “gay rights” that cause serious harm to others, it is at the same time working hard to undermine our real gay rights in the service of promoting and centring homophobic gender ideology.

The term “homophobia” is also routinely used these days to automatically describe anyone who does not support gay marriage, and who instead prefers the idea of civil partnerships for lesbian and gay people. Even when, like the former Liberal Democrat MP, Sarah Teather – a Catholic – they have a strong track record of supporting gay rights but have religious, political, or philosophical reasons why they could not support gay marriage.

Sarah Teather was vilified for “homophobia” when she voted against gay marriage, yet her record of support for gay rights demonstrated that she was very far indeed from having an irrational fear of, and aversion to, homosexuals and homosexuality – which is what “homophobia” actually means.

What greater degree of homophobic self-sabotage is there than for a lesbian or gay young person to declare he or she is really transgender, and therefore heterosexual?

The self-image fragility of new generations of LGBT+ lesbian and gay activists expresses itself in an obsession with external validation and doctrinal compliance, and this has replaced the kind of genuine and profound self-acceptance that provides enough psychological stability to ignore or shrug off some minor comment that they don’t like or don’t agree with. The grievance radars are turned up to full whack, and every blip on the screen is triggering and destabilising. Everything is an incoming “hate” missile, launched by an “enemy” who deserves ruthless retaliation.

The prevalence of psychological problems and dysfunctional social behaviour among gay men in particular deserves to be regarded as a matter of serious concern. My impression of this community over many years – a community to which I belong – is  of one that has higher rates of anxiety and depressive disorders, greater consumption of alcohol and use of nicotine, greater use of recreational drugs, and a lot of what seems to be addictive sexual behaviour and risky sexual behaviour.

In addition to this is the difficulty many gay men have in relating to one another on the social, sexual and romantic level, in many cases tending to a hypersexualisation and objectification of others that grants form (especially youthful looks, physical beauty, and fashion) an overwhelming priority over substance (friendship, loyalty, quality of communication, interests and values in common).

This skewing of the value system in social interactions has created a concerning level of alienation, and it has often encouraged a degree of brutality towards, and depersonalisation of, the other, that must be very psychologically damaging both to those on the receiving end, and to those perpetrating it.

I am quite sure that many young lesbians experience their own forms of homophobic self-sabotage resulting from a lack of self-acceptance, in a culture where three-quarters of the children referred to gender clinics are female, and where the Bayswater Support Group reported that, in a recent survey, of the 400 families with a transgender-identified young person that the group supported, over half of these young people had identified as lesbian or gay before coming into contact with transgender ideology.

What greater degree of homophobic self-sabotage is there than for a lesbian or gay young person to declare he or she is really transgender, and therefore heterosexual? All cheered on by LGBT+ lobby-allied lesbian and gay adults who should know better than to betray the very young people they should be protecting.

Was it our own internalised homophobia that allowed the gender lobby to hijack our gay rights movement? As though that’s all we are worth? Weinberg’s identification and analysis of systemic cultural homophobia, and of the harm it also does when it becomes internalised homophobia among lesbian and gay people, provides, in my view, the most compelling explanation for how the lesbian and gay rights movement has allowed itself to be hijacked, marginalised, and redefined out of existence.

Internalised homophobia explains in large part why so many lesbian and gay people have been willing to surrender what they, and their predecessors, had fought so hard to achieve, over several decades. It explains why so many lesbian and gay people who ally with the LGBT+ lobby treat themselves and their own rights with contempt in the service of promoting and centring an irrational and homophobic ideology that has nothing to do with sexual orientation.

All this came about at the very time when things seemed to be going so well for the lesbian and gay community. If, deep down, you regard yourself with contempt, and you can’t cope with the guilt of getting something good that you feel you don’t deserve, then that is the very time when your impulse to self-sabotage, and your craving for a virtue-fix, will be at their most compelling.

In his final paragraph, Weinberg writes: “In the fight against the persistence of homophobia our best hope is something Jung called ‘the antiseptic power of consciousness’.” The lesbian and gay people of today who align themselves with the LGBT+ lobby need Weinberg’s reminder of how insidious internalised homophobia is, and of how harmful it is to well-being.

We do not need to sabotage our rights and our opportunities for happiness, and we must not do so. We deserve to have good things happen to us. We are no less deserving of our rights than any other minority group, including our right to meet and organise independently and separately on the basis of our sole shared characteristic, and to defend ourselves and our community against serious attacks funded and promoted by a pernicious new ruling class. Let us continue to raise Jung’s “antiseptic consciousness” among our lesbian and gay community and work at turning this deplorable situation around.

© 2023 Gary Powell

Republished, with amendments, from Lesbian and Gay News, 26 January 2022

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.

By Gary Powell
11 January 2023. 7.00pm

“At the moment, the other side is winning. Before I die, I want to see a bit of a pushback.” This simple and heartfelt expression of an aspiration to challenge the woke identity politics culture that is currently assailing the West, stuck in my mind when I heard Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, speak at the 2021 launch of his highly topical book: “100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation”. This work explores the history of social engineering that is “delegitimising the foundations of our culture”, where young people are being deliberately and systematically disconnected from the values, norms, and traditions of the past.

A prolific writer, and a political activist throughout his adult life, the many themes Furedi explores range from the sociology of anxiety, including the effects of anxious parenting, to the destruction of important physical, social, and moral boundaries.

Many of us alarmed at the attack by gender ideologues on fundamental child safeguarding will surely find strong resonance with Furedi’s diagnosis of this increasingly zealous modern attempt to reposition or dissolve important barriers separating the concepts of child and adult: an attempt made under the cover of non-judgmentalism, which is an absurd yet popular modern concept that expresses a lack of clarity about the importance of ethical boundaries.

“The Left are denying that there is a culture war,” Furedi declared. “Denialism is a manipulative strategy. The media selects what you and I should be worried about.”

“No political party stands up for parents. The Conservatives are strong on rhetoric. The notion that the Government is fighting for free speech is all rhetoric.”

Furedi went on to assert that the administrative sector in government has become the de facto government in power, and that it enjoys more power than our democratically elected leaders, offering as an example the fact that woke civil servants, in order to promote their gender ideology indoctrination programme, had recently invited Stonewall UK into Government departments to offer “re-education” to staff without the knowledge or consent of the relevant ministers.

In November 2021, Furedi penned a whole article on this topic that carried the heading, “The UK government has lost control of its woke civil service”.

Making reference to “alarming reports of the extent of the influence of the LGBT+ group Stonewall at government departments – seemingly without the knowledge of ministers,” his article begins with the question: “Who is actually running the British state?” While the civil service “is quietly getting on with the project of turning the British state into a woke cultural institution”, Furedi asks whether ineptitude or cowardice on the part of our political leaders has allowed this situation to arise.

No punches are pulled in his description of Stonewall as an “LGBTQ+ lobby group” that is “as woke as it gets”, that has an “illiberal reputation for advocating the policing of language and demanding the usage of pronouns”, and that is “busy re-engineering the culture of the civil service”.

While the civil service “is quietly getting on with the project of turning the British state into a woke cultural institution”, Furedi asks whether ineptitude or cowardice on the part of our political leaders has allowed this situation to arise.

The fact that, in October 2021, Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall, was invited to a Foreign Office event without Foreign Secretary Liz Truss even knowing, indicates that “the practice of civil service accountability to ministers has become a relic of the past”.

In his article, Furedi notes that these attempts by civil servants to keep ministers in the dark about Stonewall’s activities are matched by the even more worrying phenomenon of some ministers clearly feeling indifference about who provides training and education to their civil servants, with the consequence that the British civil service is undergoing a programme of systematic “re-education” into the language, values, and practices of identity politics movements.

An example of this systematic re-education is the transgenderism that is “fast becoming institutionalised in the Ministry of Defence”, demonstrating “public sector bodies in thrall to Stonewall” and with MoD guidance slavishly following Stonewall’s instructions, such as with its declaration that “not all women are biologically female” and that the word “female” should be used with caution in case it “erases gender non-conforming people and members of the trans community”.

MoD staff are also expected to declare their preferred pronouns on email signatures, social media profiles, and at the beginning of meetings. Furedi notes the lack of objection to these measures from the MoD or the ministers in charge of it. In his book launch speech, Furedi referred to the Government as a “willing prisoner”.

It could well, he believes, bode ill for our nation’s defence when our military is re-educated by social engineers to assimilate the language and behaviour of university student activists.

Such is the degree of capture experienced by the American military establishment that Furedi regards them as being “far more invested in promoting the virtues of LGBTQ+ propaganda than in fighting the war in Afghanistan.” He asks: “Is that what the British people can expect of their own armed forces in future?”

Stonewall gets described as a “semi-official ‘Correctorate’”, empowered to dictate acceptable speech and the behaviour of public servants: an issue that has a serious bearing on our democracy.

Although he stated his belief that the woke Left was currently winning the culture war, Furedi emphasised that there was still hope it could be stopped, and he referred to the recent gubernatorial election outcome in Virginia USA, where the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, emerged victorious after making opposition to critical race theory and gender ideology in schools central to his campaign.

There are three factors, according to Furedi, that are essential for a successful fightback against colonisation by woke ideology.

The first factor is to give dissenters a voice and to empower the large number of people in our society who oppose extreme identity politics to speak out against it.

The second factor is to work at reaching young people of fifteen, sixteen and seventeen who still haven’t been indoctrinated into assimilating woke identity politics.

The third factor is to encourage people to find their courage.

Furedi warns against complacency. “Freedom is something you have to fight for,” he declared.

His analysis of wokeism included a reference to “technocratic progressivism”, which I assumed accurately defines the kind of behaviour Furedi described as characterising the UK civil service class. He also referred to “the cultural politics of identity” – otherwise known as “identity politics”, where the personal becomes the political.

Woke ideology is being used by the media as the medium by which big business is establishing dominance, according to Furedi. When he offered this observation, my mind turned to the oppressive saturation to which citizens are regularly subjected during Pride Month by multinational companies, banks, and other institutions, with their Progress Pride flags, their rainbow and trans social media transformations, and their window posters.

Of course, this religious imposition of LGBTQ+ gender ideology on customers only takes place in the West, where these companies and banks have an interest in doing so, and where doing so will cause them no financial detriment. This virtue-signalling is such a convenient distraction from whatever negative behaviours those companies and banks indulge in outside the domain of enforced gender ideology.

Needless to say, when I’ve looked at the social media accounts of the very same multinational companies and banks that they operate in those countries where homosexuality is illegal or deeply stigmatised, there is never a single Pride icon, rainbow flag, or word of Pride solidarity to be seen. The very places where the most downtrodden lesbian and gay people in the world urgently need multinational companies to openly support their rights, are places of corporate betrayal and double standards, where the profit motive can be seen to prevail ruthlessly: evidence enough that LGBTQ+ ideology is being used as a manipulative smokescreen by unethical and hypocritical corporations.

This parallel he draws between gender ideology and Puritanism, with both ideologies characterised by an attempt to colonise our inner lives and by a “lack of joy and smiles” in life, struck me as fascinatingly on-target.

While listening to Frank Furedi speak, and while reading his analysis of woke identity politics culture, a strong impression developed of a courageous and principled man, as well as an exceptional and inspirational intellectual, who has a uniquely accurate and original perception of how Western society has been captured by a toxic ideology and of what is now required in order to liberate it again. The uniqueness of Furedi’s insights was particularly evident during his book launch presentation when he offered some thoughts about the psychology of wokeism’s adherents.

For Frank Furedi, transgenderism and all woke ideology resemble Puritanism. They are a joyless rejection of the sensual and represent a misery we must find the courage to resist. This parallel he draws between gender ideology and Puritanism, with both ideologies characterised by an attempt to colonise our inner lives and by a “lack of joy and smiles” in life, struck me as fascinatingly on-target.

It took my mind back to the 1980s, when the gay rights movement, and the gay community, took great interest in the sensual and the erotic, and when doing so felt liberating to self-repressed souls that had internalised so much guilt and anxiety in relation to forbidden sexual feelings. Furthermore, I recall that there was much camaraderie around, which included tolerance of different political opinions and an openness to humour, fun and friendship.

By contrast, it seems to me that today’s LGBTQ+ lobby has transformed itself into a grievance-obsessed pitchfork mob that is too consumed by anger, neuroticism, hatred, and victim-identity, to live in joy, empathy, and harmony with others. Indeed, today’s obsessive LGBTQ+ lobby focus seems to be on promoting legislative change that would lead to many lesbian and gay young people being put on a transgender medical pathway that will impair their adult capacity for sexual enjoyment, that may even lead to the amputation of their sexual organs, and that will encourage them to mistakenly believe and declare that they are heterosexual.

When I compare the gay community of yesteryear with the grotesque LGBTQ+ gender lobby of today, I see a contrast in attitude towards embracing joy, self-acceptance, and an affirmation of the sensual, that could not be any starker.

This LGBTQ+ Puritan mob, or so it seems to me, will do all it can to destroy the lives of anyone who expresses any dissent from the dogmata fuelling its onward march of quasi-religious fundamentalist colonisation. In contrast to the very different kind of community I encountered as a young gay man, I do indeed now see Joyless Puritans of the Eternally Expanding ­­­­Alphabet, spiritual slaves of identity politics, who like nothing more than to make everyone else as miserable as they are.

For Furedi, citizens need to be able to recognise one another as members of their shared cultural community: something that identity politics emphatically works against with its unyielding emphasis on difference and diversity, on perpetual victims and perpetual perpetrators, all at the expense of homogeneity.

He notes that, “In many areas of life now, the boundary between man and woman appears increasingly illegitimate” […] with those who transgress this boundary “celebrated by the media as brave and inspirational role models”.

The most impressive article I have ever encountered on gender ideology was one written by Frank Furedi. Entitled, “The trans assault on freedom: gender ideology is not about liberation – it is about coercion and control,” Furedi sets out a definition of the specific political objective of transgenderism as “the erosion of the significance of biological sex” which “is undermining long-held cultural assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman”.

He describes transgenderism as “an intolerant, coercive force” that “has been thoroughly embraced by political and cultural elites in both the UK and the US”. It is “the new orthodoxy among members of the political class” that even some Conservatives are promoting.

His article demonstrates a very keen understanding of the dangers posed to women and children by gender ideology, and of the rapidity with which it is capturing institutions, businesses, and even respected scientific publications. He notes that, “In many areas of life now, the boundary between man and woman appears increasingly illegitimate,” and that where this boundary still exists, it is depicted as something that is artificial and even oppressive, with those who transgress this boundary “celebrated by the media as brave and inspirational role models”.

Furedi responds to the coerced speech and lexical redefinitions imposed by gender ideologists and their allies with the reminder that, “As George Orwell warned, taking control of language and redefining the meaning of words is the first step taken by those seeking to control people’s thoughts.”

The article describes a serious threat to civil liberties by transgenderism, giving examples that include the situation in New York City, where an employer or landlord who intentionally addresses a non-binary-identified employee or tenant with the “wrong” pronoun can face fines of up to $250,000. He describes what is happening as thought control that “calls into question both freedom of expression and freedom of thought”. “This is an attempt to control the way people think. As Orwell put it in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’”

The trans activist movement demands what it regards as civil rights for those it claims to represent, while, Furedi observes, at the same time having no hesitation in undermining the rights of others, particularly in the domain of free speech.

A particularly unique and original contribution Furedi makes to the analysis of transgender ideology is that it constitutes an attack on “any form of thinking that involves drawing binary distinctions between things”. He describes this attack as especially dangerous insofar as the act of drawing binary distinctions, so that a discrimination can be made between phenomena in different categories, is indispensable to moral thought and the making of ethical judgements. It is the very act that enables us to distinguish between right and wrong, between good and evil.

Becoming estranged from their culture’s traditions and norms, children who adopt this ideology are tipped into an identity crisis, “messing up (their) lives and diminishing their capacity to make the transition to adulthood.”

This devaluation of binary distinctions is therefore both an attack on reason and also on the ability to exercise moral judgement, and the rejection of binary categories constitutes a questioning of normality itself. Transgenderism also attacks the notions of normality and normativity as a threat to the trans identity: something that Furedi regards as endangering communal life, given that when concepts of normal and abnormal disappear, the capacity to distinguish between desirable and undesirable forms of behaviour disappear with them.

He regards the attack on binary thinking as motivated by an attempt to abolish moral judgement, and he regards the popular paradigm of non-judgmentalism as helping transgender ideology to prevail.

Furedi demonstrates his awareness of the harm caused to women by transgender ideology, but he believes its damaging effect on children to be significantly greater, as it alienates children from their community’s values and norms and undermines their and their community’s understanding of what is normal and what is abnormal. Becoming estranged from their culture’s traditions and norms, children who adopt this ideology are tipped into an identity crisis, “messing up (their) lives and diminishing their capacity to make the transition to adulthood. It is a corrosive worldview that threatens the healthy development of younger generations.”

Furedi describes the “attempt to create a year zero history and to reject the past” as “irredeemably evil”, maintaining that, “if we lose our connection to our past, then we become a prisoner of the present”.

“Western society is in serious trouble” he states, and many people who oppose gender ideology as an attack on our free and tolerant society stay silent through fear. Furedi offers a stark warning that unless it is challenged, this gender authoritarianism will only become worse, “especially given the backing it receives from big business and elite foundations and trusts”. He is adamant that the future of society depends on our willingness to exercise our moral judgement and to challenge gender ideology. Buying into today’s popular paradigm of non-judgmentalism will produce a dire outcome.

While I listened to Frank Furedi at his book launch, I thought about the gender neo-Puritans continuing on their ideological march through our institutions, backed by commercial, social, and political elites, trampling underfoot the safeguarding of children, the sex-based rights of women and of gay people, the normal definitions of words, the concept of objective reality, the concept of moral judgement, our freedom of speech and civil liberties, our right to live in joy and harmony, and our right to defend important boundaries. It struck me that Furedi was right when he said the woke Left is currently winning, and also right when he warned we needed to try to stop them winning by finding our courage and speaking out, by urging others to do the same, and by offering young people alternative ways to interpret their reality and alternative ethics to live by.

To achieve all this, we need the help of exceptional original thinkers who will describe the terrain, point out the way, model courage, and journey with us on our path of resistance. I am convinced Frank Furedi is one of those exceptional people – a key philosopher of our movement who deserves close attention as we watch the West being pushed ever closer to the brink by infantile and sociopathic adults, and as we become increasingly aware of just how much is at stake.

Frank Furedi’s latest book is “The Road to Ukraine: How the West Lost its Way,” (2022) – a book that defends Ukraine and denounces Russia’s invasion. He is on Twitter at @Furedibyte and has a Substack (Roots and Wings with Frank Furedi) at https://frankfuredi.substack.com/. He is the Executive Director of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Brussels and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent.

© 2023 Gary Powell

Republished from Lesbian and Gay News, 8 December 2021.

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.

By Gary Powell
10 January 2023. 12.05pm

Apoplectic accusations come thick and fast from the LGBT+ lobby against people who are same-sex attracted when we publicly assert our right to be gay or lesbian – and also against other gender-critical people who dare to assert biological reality about sex. We are repeatedly told that we are guilty of transphobic “hate” and that our organisations are “hate groups”. Simply insisting that sex is a biological and immutable characteristic, and that the settled definition of “sex” underpins gay rights and women’s rights, is even enough to get you accused of being a terrorist or a neo-Nazi sympathiser, no less. 

However, whilst gagging on their own froth and spittle, these accusers miss the irony of how it is they themselves who are dripping with hate and an overpowering lust for vengeance and domination. They themselves show allegiance to the real anti-gay and anti-women “hate groups”. Devoid of honest evidence and persuasive arguments, they instead resort to lies, calumnies and attempts to silence the heretical voices that are speaking the truth: a common behavioural trait of fundamentalist religious adherents.

The last execution in England for heresy was in 1612, when Edward Wightman was burnt at the stake; and the last successful prosecution for blasphemy was in 1977, when Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, was fined and received a suspended prison sentence for the publication of a poem. How disturbing it is to see the mentality of religious theocracy returning to the West today, with public denunciations and attempts to ruin the lives of people who express even the mildest dissent from the fundamentalist LGBT+ gender credo.

As is so often the case when totalitarian movements take hold, this bullying of heretics has a disturbingly chilling effect on freedom of speech and rational debate across the whole of society.

How disturbing it is to see the mentality of religious theocracy returning to the West today, with public denunciations and attempts to ruin the lives of people who express even the mildest dissent […]

In every cult or fundamentalist religious community, you will find people who are there because they derive some kind of financial benefit or social prestige from being there. There are others who find it difficult to apply a critical mind to what they are being told, and who absorb the instruction without challenge or question. There are others who are driven by their feelings of guilt and inadequacy, and who feel empowered by adherence to a dogmatic and putatively infallible ideology; and yet others still who are lonely, insecure and isolated, and looking for a community where they feel they can belong.

When we look at the LGBT+ lobby, we can see all of those categories. Many members know that allowing themselves to have ideological doubts that they then express could lead to ostracism – excommunication. Humans have evolved to have a primordial fear of banishment from our communities.

We must ask ourselves, however, how much damage the LGBT+ lobby is doing to the mental health of the young lesbian and gay people who gravitate towards it, given that these are people whose experience of being same-sex attracted is being overruled and negated by the lobby, which tells them they are “genital fetishists” if they restrict their partners to members of the same biological sex and if they do not centre extreme demands from a subgroup of the transgender-identified community.

Furthermore, these young people do not benefit from the exclusive lesbian and gay spaces that people of my age could enjoy when we “came out” in our late teens and early twenties: spaces we still had, and that were not disputed, until very recently. Time and again I hear of lesbian dating apps with many male-bodied male members self-defining as lesbians, and of the equivalent development on gay male dating apps.

Our right to meet and organise separately, based on our shared minority characteristic of same-sex sexual orientation, is under attack, and the LGBT+ lobby wants to take it away from us permanently. I wonder what effect this is going to have on the psyches of young lesbian and gay people.

Our right to meet and organise separately, based on our shared minority characteristic of same-sex sexual orientation, is under attack, and the LGBT+ lobby wants to take it away from us permanently.

We must also ask ourselves what self-accepting and properly-informed gay person would sacrifice his or her own authentic gay identity, interests and spaces in order to centre and aggressively promote an extremist gender ideology that is doing so much serious harm to the gay community and especially to gay children.

It looks as though we need to re-read Dr George Weinberg’s groundbreaking 1972 book, “Society and the Healthy Homosexual”, where he coined the term “homophobia”, and where he explained how gay people internalise the homophobia we experience from our environment, with this internalisation harming our self-esteem and causing negative compensatory behaviours.

The self-oppression of enthusiastically centring an ideology that is harming you as a gay person and restricting your opportunities for development and self-acceptance has been very common in the past for those gay people who have got involved in homophobic fundamentalist religions; and the self-oppressive behaviour of those gay people who promote gender-extremist ideology in thrall to the new LGBT+ fundamentalism suggests that the same internalised homophobia is at play there as well.

The viciousness with which gender ideology adherents attack, vilify and defame members of the real gay community displays stark parallels with the anti-gay viciousness meted out a few decades ago by “closeted” gay people who were self-hating, repressed, or primarily concerned about “virtue-signalling” homophobic views to protect their reputations or careers.

Much homophobia of yesteryear was motivated by homophobic self-oppression, and today’s homophobia seems to reveal, among the careerist sell-outs and the brainwashed conformists, a new manifestation of self-rejecting, insecure and frightened hostages, screaming condemnation at others for what they secretly have not come to terms with in themselves, and for the authenticity that they have been ordered to sacrifice for the greater alphabetical good.

In order to compare the homophobic fundamentalism of yesteryear with that of today, let us look more closely at the ideological policy capture of important bodies by the old homophobia and by the new homophobia. When I was eighteen, forty years ago, the police were notoriously and systemically homophobic. My boyfriend – also eighteen – and I were denounced to the police by his mother when she found out her son was gay and that we were in a relationship.

We were lucky that the police did not pursue her complaint, as the age of consent was 21, and we could have been sentenced to two years in prison. Even the Police Federation openly declared that the age of consent for gay men should remain at 21. Gay and lesbian people could not trust the police. There were even “pretty policemen” who used to hang around in gay bars as agents provocateurs, arresting men who propositioned them. The police were the enthusiastic custodians and enforcers of homophobic legislation that derived from religious condemnation of our sexuality.

Today, ignoring the legal requirement to remain politically neutral, Police Federation members brandish rainbows on their uniforms and cars and actively promote LGBT+ ideology. This fealty to the LGBT+ lobby is a fealty to an ideology that denies gay people the right to define ourselves as same-sex attracted, to meet exclusively on the basis of our shared sexual orientation, and that promotes the medical transitioning of children before they have a chance to discover they are actually gay or lesbian.

We have even been at risk of ending up with a disclosable “Non-Crime Hate Incident” police record if denounced for asserting that sex is an immutable biological fact that is at the very heart of our identity and reality. Today’s police homophobia is less blatant, but it is at least as harmful.

The new and ever-escalating attack on gay rights driven by the gender-extremist LGBT+ lobby […] has a pitchfork-mob hatred and viciousness about it of a kind that, even under the old homophobia, no longer existed at such an intensity and at such a widespread level by the 1980s.

The new and ever-escalating attack on gay rights driven by the gender-extremist LGBT+ lobby that we continue to observe and experience in the West, has a pitchfork-mob hatred and viciousness about it of a kind that, even under the old homophobia, no longer existed at such an intensity and at such a widespread level by the 1980s.

Most fundamentalist Christians who regarded homosexuality as a sin, at least preached a maxim of loving gay people as human beings while hating just the “sinful act”. Many of today’s extreme gender religionists do not make any such distinction or hold any such scruples: their hatred is directed unequivocally at people themselves, at those daring to express heretical views instead of genuflecting before the Revered Rainbow and the Angelic Anime Avatars. Efforts are made to ruin the life of the infidel, to destroy her reputation with lies and smears, and to make her unemployable so she may even struggle to feed her children. This is raw medieval theological hatred.

The role of schools in the old and the new homophobia also deserves closer inspection. Pre-homosexual children growing up in the 70s and 80s in a depressingly anti-gay culture were at least spared the blight of schools peddling this new fundamentalist religion of extremist gender ideology with a messianic zeal, reinforced by an ignorant virtue-signalling media and by the influence of peer contagion.

As same-sex attracted children, many of us gender non-conforming, we were not at risk forty years ago of being referred to gender clinics for the construction of a new heterosexual identity via puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even possibly amputations, before we had a chance to come to terms with our sexual orientation.

We were not being groomed online by gender missionaries, and teenage girls were not being sold breast-binders. We were safe from the irreversible and traumatic effects of what is today called, with a nod to Orwell, “gender-affirmative care” – which, for same-sex attracted children, is nothing less than “sexuality-negating abuse” – a new and sickening form of medical conversion therapy. In Western societies today, same-sex attracted children are exposed to a new and very serious risk of harm.

The teachers and educational establishments that collude so willingly with today’s fundamentalist gender homophobia have much in common with the teachers of forty years ago who willingly colluded with traditional religion-derived homophobia. Schoolteachers commonly used to permit homophobic language to be thrown around in the classroom, on the playground, and on the sports field, without any challenge, and teachers even sometimes used it themselves.

When Section 28 was introduced by the Conservative Government in the 1980s, prohibiting in schools the positive presentation of homosexuality and of gay people, the teaching establishment duly and thoroughly complied, with very little protest. I was not aware of any campaigns of civil disobedience in solidarity with same-sex attracted students.

The teachers and teaching unions, who prided themselves on being so progressive, simply sold out and did as they were told. Their jobs could have been at stake, just as their employability and their promotions, are at stake today if they don’t fall in line with the LGBT+ lobby credo. The teaching profession betrayed same-sex attracted children then, and it is once again betraying same-sex attracted children now.

Today, lesbian and gay people who assert our right to be same-sex attracted and our right to meet and organise separately and exclusively […] are once again subjected to witch-hunts – this time by extreme gender ideologues and their allies.

Witch-hunts sometimes used to take place when people were discovered to be gay or lesbian. Those in prominent positions, such as MPs or councillors, or people standing for election, could be hounded remorselessly by the homophobic press.

Today, gay people who assert our right to be same-sex attracted and our right to meet and organise separately and exclusively, based on our sole shared characteristic of same-sex sexual orientation, are once again subjected to witch-hunts – this time by extreme gender ideologues and their allies. There are public denunciations and media condemnations. Employers often fall into line under the duress of possible economic ruin. Plus ça change.

In former times it could be dangerous to meet up as gay people. We had our places, but many of them were hidden away in discreet locations with deliberately unattractive facades. Physical threats towards us were common, religious fundamentalists tried to get our bars and clubs closed, and we often relied on door attendants to protect us from disruption and violence.

This oppression has returned to our community. In 2019 I was invited to a meeting for same-sex attracted people that was organised in response to the colonisation of society, and of the historical gay rights movement, by extremist gender ideology. The time and location of the meeting were announced very shortly before the event to avoid its disruption by aggressive protestors, and all those invited were carefully selected and were asked to be circumspect about the event details. Special security had to be hired for the meeting.

What an appalling state of affairs that this should be happening in a supposedly liberal state in the modern age. It is disgraceful beyond measure that gay people are once again forced to meet secretly and in fear, as though we were still living in the pre-1980s.

A further “then and now” comparison relates to the calumnies, lies, misrepresentations and insults. In the 1980s and previously, the defamation that gay men in particular were fighting to counter was the lie that all gay men are either actual or potential child sexual abusers. This lie was in wide circulation, and time and again, gay rights activists had to challenge it.

Today’s counterpart to this homophobic defamation, when we defend our rights as gay people, is the textbook LGBT+ smear lexicon, which includes the terms “transphobes”, “people who hate trans people”, “bigots”, “members of hate groups”, and as being “allied”, “aligned” or “linked” somehow with this group here or that group there, including even neo-Nazis, such is their desperation.

“No-platforming” then and now is another comparison worth considering. Until around thirty years ago, the lesbian and gay community had great difficulty getting our news and concerns into the media. When the media gave gay issues publicity, or treated us in a sympathetic way, the public response would often include a barrage of complaints and accusations of supporting “depravity” and “degeneracy”, and of undermining public morals. We were effectively no-platformed.

Today, attempts are once again made by the LGBT+ fundamentalists to exclude the voices of the real gay community from local and national media when we speak out in defence of our community and of women’s and children’s rights. Homophobic fundamentalist gender ideology has filled the gap where homophobic fundamentalist Christianity used to be.

Today, we see widespread LGBT+ lobby ideological capture across the main political parties, with the Conservative Party the most resistant but itself gradually succumbing to colonisation.

The behaviour of many of our politicians in their response to homophobia was then true to form, and is so once again today. Then, setting aside the closeted gay men who entered into marriages of convenience so they could get elected as MPs, there were also many MPs who were quietly sympathetic to gay rights but who feared to speak out.

Today, we see widespread LGBT+ lobby ideological capture across the main political parties, with the Conservative Party the most resistant but itself gradually succumbing to colonisation. There are so many intelligent people in Parliament who are pretending to support stupid, irrational and profoundly harmful ideologies, simply to avoid becoming victims of the LGBT+ lobby’s modern-day witch-hunters.

Only few MPs, so far, are willing to speak out and to put the good of the country, and the rights and welfare of vulnerable people, before their own political careers and wish to avoid unwanted attention and targeting. That was true then, and it is true once again today.

The medical profession was also captured by homophobic ideology back in the day. Cruel attempts at medical “conversion therapy” for homosexuality continued until the early 1970s in the UK, and the medical profession colluded with this. The lesbian and gay rights movement was making some progress, however, with changing public opinion, and some doctors were more enlightened and sympathetic than others.

Today, we are once again seeing widespread homophobic capture of the medical profession – this time by extreme gender ideology. BBC Newsnight, and brave individuals such as Keira Bell, have exposed how dangerous this medical colonisation is to children – particularly same-sex attracted children. Medical professionals now risk dismissal if they fail to bow to their LGBT+ overlords.

As a result, medical conversion therapy for same-sex attracted children is starting to return via the back door across the West, and the threat of irreversible harm to young lesbian and gay people is now far worse than it was four decades ago, with LGBT+ lobby campaigns to write the extreme “gender-affirming care” model into law.

Today, as a result of the LGBT+ lobby’s institutional colonisation, this sense of mistrust in core societal institutions is returning for the real gay community, and with it the sense of pervasive alienation we used to feel decades ago.

As young gay and lesbian people growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, we were unable to trust many key people and key institutions in our lives. “Coming out” carried a significant risk of negative consequences. That mistrust was directed at the police, the medical establishment, the educational establishment, our employers, the political establishment, and other entities.

Today, as a result of the LGBT+ lobby’s institutional colonisation, this sense of mistrust in core societal institutions is returning for the real gay community, and with it the sense of pervasive alienation we used to feel decades ago. This is what happens to heretics and dissenters when a bullying totalitarian ideology has made their society hostile, fearful and irrational.

The “bystanders” of former times also have their counterparts today. These are the onlookers who do not actually share the extreme and unconscionable views of those doing the bullying, but who choose to say nothing and to simply observe with a disquieting sense of mauvaise foi, given that speaking out could carry a personal cost they are not willing to bear. Forty years ago, these bystanders would remain tight-lipped and simply observe as others insulted and humiliated lesbian and gay people.

Today, they silently watch extreme gender ideologues throw heretics and natal women under buses, and quietly observe the campaign for children to be given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The silence of the bystanders comes at an immense price: both to their own self-respect, and to the well-being of others.

In the 1980s, the expression “in the closet” had the specific meaning of concealing one’s gay or lesbian identity. “Coming out” was regarded as an important political action – not least because it encouraged others to “come out” as well, and it promoted gay visibility and confidence. “Coming out” carried risks, of course: of losing friends, of rejection by strangers, of being cast out by one’s family, or of losing one’s job, simply for being gay or lesbian.

Today, homophobic oppression by gender extremists has pushed many gay people – and others – into a different kind of closet. People have been intimidated into concealing their rejection of extreme gender ideology. And once again, people fear losing friends, suffering rejection, or even losing their job.

What a lamentable state of affairs that people have suffered employment discrimination simply for asserting the existence of an insuperable biological difference between males and females, for defending gay rights, or for defending the rights of women and children. It is time for us to “come out” once again: this time as biological realists and as being unwilling to accept the LGBT+ lobby groupthink.

Today, homophobic oppression by gender extremists has pushed many gay people – and others – into a different kind of closet. People have been intimidated into concealing their rejection of extreme gender ideology.

In the West, we are witnessing the most serious attack on gay people and gay rights of modern times. This homophobic attack, by the gender-extremist LGBT+ lobby, is all the more insidious for its pretence that it has the interests of gay people at heart – a claim also made, of course, by other fundamentalist religious ideologies that attempt to erase homosexuality and convert us to something that accords with their belief system.

The fact that this attack is being made under the hijacked rainbow banner is duping people into the belief that, by jumping on to the LGBT+ bandwagon, they are helping the gay community, when instead they are harming us and, in the process, colluding with the creation of a hateful, intolerant and authoritarian culture in society at large: a culture that is also casually eviscerating women’s and girls’ sex-based rights and protections. Religious homophobia is back; but the new fundamentalist religion that drives this oppression drapes itself in the flags of extreme gender ideology and LGBT+ lobby overreach.

The real gay community in the West is now fighting back, just as we fought back against deeply-ingrained religious homophobia all those years ago. We are forming alliances with other affected and concerned groups – including many moderate, independent-thinking and socially responsible people who identify as transsexual (not “transgender”) and who are horrified at what is being demanded in their name. These gender-critical, biological-realist alliances are being formed across the political spectrum, and we are gradually building up our support base and building up people’s confidence to speak out.

Despite the new role of Big Tech in censoring biological-realist voices and policing our language in a coercive way, we are still managing to have those important conversations and to expose the lies and the harm that are undermining both the civil rights of vulnerable groups and the basic freedoms of Western societies. We are “coming out” of our closets once again and encouraging others to do the same – and it is profoundly liberating. It is just as liberating for gay people today as it was to come out decades ago, when we refused to allow oppressive ideologies and people to negate our identities and bully us into submission and hiding. But it takes courage.

As lesbian and gay people, we have proved time and again what we can achieve with courage, compassion, solidarity, and sound organisation. The new challenges of this modern homophobic age present us with an opportunity to draw on our past accomplishments and to demonstrate, yet again, that we will not allow our community and our rights to be trampled over with impunity by an extremist fundamentalist ideology propagated by means of manipulation, hatred, coercion and lies.

© 2023 Gary Powell

Republished, with amendments, from Lesbian and Gay News, 24 June 2021.

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.

By Gary Powell
7 January 2023. 3.30pm

In 2021 I spoke to Carolyn Mason*, the mother of three children, who shared with me a harrowing account of the devastation visited on the Mason family since her daughter, Lucy*, saw a presentation from a transgender ideology charity in the second year of her secondary schooling. Lucy – fifteen at the time of the interview with her mother – is gender-non-conforming, same-sex attracted, and had been subjected to homophobic bullying in her primary school that continued into her secondary schooling: a profile many of us will recognise. ­­­­

It has been necessary to protect the identity of both Lucy and her mother for reasons of privacy and safeguarding; and the identities of the lamentably unhelpful MP and local authority are also withheld to obscure regional identification. The appalling experience of the Mason family is one currently blighting the lives of so many families as a result of gender ideology promotion in schools.

When Lucy “came out” as lesbian at the age of twelve, her parents were supportive. However, the homophobic bullying that had begun at primary school, and that had been poorly dealt with by the school, continued after she arrived at her secondary school.

Shortly after a gender lobby organisation sent a visitor to give a presentation at the school – a transgender-identified person who depicted transition as a route for the possible resolution of confusion and emotional pain – Lucy spent two weeks on the Internet in her bedroom, after which time she informed her mother that she now identified as male and requested a visit to her GP surgery for a gender clinic referral. She seemed to be very well informed about the procedures. Lucy was thirteen.

The doctor’s appointment took place a month later, and Carolyn accompanied her daughter to it. By this point, Lucy had developed an eating disorder. Carolyn was surprised at how easily Lucy met the criteria for a referral to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock Clinic, and they were informed of an 18- to 24-month waiting list. Carolyn hoped Lucy would change her mind in the meantime. Later, the referring GP privately shared with Carolyn her own misgivings and explained that doctors risk losing their jobs if they do not comply with making the referrals.

From that point, Carolyn dreaded the arrival of the GIDS appointment letter. (Update: Tavistock GIDS is now set to close in spring this year.) An interim letter arrived, addressed to Lucy, asking whether she wished to remain on the appointment list: which she did. Carolyn was informed that the appointment cannot be cancelled without Lucy’s consent.

Unsurprisingly, Carolyn rapidly lost faith in social institutions – schools, the NHS, local government – in which she had previously placed significant trust.

Her local council subscribes to Stonewall UK’s Children & Young People’s Services Champions Programme, which provides “training” for headteachers, school governors, safeguarding leads, and CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services) therapists. Carolyn informed her council of the harm being caused to children and families by the promotion of gender ideology in local schools. Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 and section 175 of the Education Act 2002 oblige local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. The same child safeguarding duties are imposed on maintained schools, independent schools, academies, free schools, and technology colleges, by section 157 of the Education Act 2002.

The response received by Carolyn from the Council’s Director of Learning not only failed to appreciate her concerns; it also revealed a staggering lack of knowledge about what gender ideology teaches, simply confusing it with the rejection of gender stereotypes. This is the very opposite of what gender ideology does, given the primacy it accords to gender stereotypes for defining male and female identity. The letter ended with an invitation for Carolyn to attend a Council “LGBTQ+ session”.

Unsurprisingly, Carolyn rapidly lost faith in social institutions – schools, the NHS, local government – in which she had previously placed significant trust. Her Stonewall-captured MP also gave her the brush-off when presented with her account of events. Who is there left to stand up for children?

When gender ideology encourages vulnerable children to present with a transgender identity, suicide threats may soon follow. Last spring, Lucy responded to her parents’ scepticism about transgender identity by threatening to take her own life. Carolyn has gained the impression, from talking to other affected parents, that there is a formulaic element to the suicide threats, as though the children are being groomed in what to say in order to get what they think they want.

Lucy had also begun to self-harm: and perhaps it is not surprising that children who are repeatedly told by adults that transgender-identified people are at high risk of suicide might feel that self-harm is a natural, normal, and reasonable step to take if their parents do not comply. The suicide threats plunged her parents into such an intense state of anxiety that Carolyn felt compelled to make regular checks on Lucy during the night to make sure she was still alive.

Carolyn has gained the impression that there is a formulaic element to the suicide threats, as though the children are being groomed in what to say in order to get what they think they want.

This appalling case, however, also provides evidence that protest can result in some positive outcomes. Eighteen months after receiving the results of Carolyn’s research on the legal and medical risks of gender ideology, Lucy’s school decided to end their Stonewall subscription, to end their promotion of Mermaids, and to stop teaching “gender identity theory”, as the school now describes it. There is still a mountain to climb in the school, nonetheless, as it has individual teachers who continue to promote gender ideology, who “correct” Carolyn when she uses her daughter’s legal name, and who raise the prospect of making a referral to social services for her parents’ “abusive” non-compliance with Lucy’s declared gender identity.

Her two other children, attending two different schools, were also being taught gender ideology, and Carolyn worked strategically to share her research with these schools also. In one Zoom lesson during lockdown, Carolyn heard her twelve-year-old being taught that parents are guilty of a hate crime if they do not affirm the self-identified “gender” of their children.

Lucy is now receiving objective, non-affirmative-model counselling for gender dysphoria, and this Zoom lesson characterised such counselling as “conversion therapy” and called for it to be illegal. The siblings of trans-identified youths are therefore being actively conscripted into this ideological war that targets the parental right and responsibility to protect children from harm.

Carolyn’s youngest attends a school that misrepresents the Equality Act on its website and that is very creative in declaring ostensible protected characteristics that do not exist in law. Lucy’s parents are now exploring potential Sixth Form possibilities for her, and four of the five Sixth Form departments they have visited prominently display materials that promote gender identity, LGBT+ clubs, and Mermaids. Carolyn is understandably at a loss as to how to protect her children from this ideology.

Lucy’s school also undermined parental rights with secretive behaviour in a way that would be unthinkable if applied to other domains. Transgender ideology promotion is commonly accorded a status that trumps normal professional standards and legal requirements. The school changed Lucy’s name and pronouns without her parents’ consent, implying an unquestioning acceptance of the child’s self-diagnosis and conferring on it an authority that disregarded the views or wishes of her parents. Contrast with this, for example, the fact that Carolyn still has to provide written consent for such banal events as enrichment trips.

The school suggested to Carolyn that she join an LGBT+ parents’ group to help her come to terms with the new “reality”.

The frequent culture-concealment in schools with respect to transgender issues was reflected in the fact that the presentation by the gender lobby representative was not disclosed to parents, whereas parents at Lucy’s school are routinely informed when speakers such as politicians come to visit.

The school suggested to Carolyn that she join an LGBT+ parents’ group to help her come to terms with the new “reality”. Despite the greater caution now exercised by the school, Carolyn nonetheless learned that gender identity has been integrated into some subject lessons, and she was informed by another parent that every child bar three in one specific class is now identifying as trans, non-binary, or as another letter in the “T+” section of the gender lobby initialism. Teachers are all complying with the children’s new, preferred names and pronouns. A further parent reports having been instructed to call her daughter’s friend “it”: her preferred pronoun.

Carolyn insists that schools must do more to protect children who are subjected to homophobic bullying: something that other affected parents have confirmed as a factor that can encourage children to believe they would be better off identifying as “trans” (and therefore as putatively heterosexual) rather than seeing themselves as lesbian or gay.

After her daughter had experienced so much homophobic bullying, Carolyn can completely understand why she decided to declare that she identifies as transgender rather than lesbian: “Where were all the LGBT lobby groups when my daughter was subjected to years of homophobic bullying? The anti-bullying policies they promote only seemed to snap into place once she was trans. What’s more, because the trans identity is perceived by other kids as cool, the bullying seemed to stop anyway.”

She is also keen for schools to understand that the LGBT+ initialism is invalid, and that sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender identity. She believes that teachers promoting gender ideology may mistakenly regard their allegiance as a simple extension of supporting gay rights: especially if they are gay or lesbian themselves.

…she has been informed by another parent that every child bar three in one specific class is now identifying as trans, non-binary, or as another letter in the “T+” section of the gender lobby initialism.

LGBT+ clubs in schools are also, in Carolyn’s view, in need of more supervision, as they are often forums where children advise one another on transgender and non-binary identities, as well as on how to pursue such objectives as breast-binders, puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones. Furthermore, she would like to see teachers desisting from diagnosing gender dysphoria when they lack any medical or psychological qualifications to do so. 

“There is nothing kind or accepting about social transitioning,” Carolyn asserts. “Instead, it is a measure that sets children – often gay and lesbian children – on a pathway towards making irreversible changes to their bodies. Schools should also desist from celebrating transgender holidays, such as Transgender Awareness Week and the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and schools should not allow LGBT History Month and Pride Month to be hijacked by gender ideology.”

The false and dangerous claims about 48% of transgender-identified children attempting suicide, frequently used as a weapon to shut down debate and emotionally blackmail parents, should not continue to be proclaimed by schools, Carolyn asserts. In addition, schools should restrict themselves to an accurate representation of the protected characteristics in the Equality Act. “Schools must remember that children are not ‘mini-adults’: they need guidance and protection from responsible adults. It is unacceptable for outcomes to be ‘led by the child’ when it comes to making informed decisions where only adults have competence.”

Carolyn continues to be put through the mill as she and her husband attempt to restore an emotionally healthy equilibrium to their family. Fighting this battle on several fronts, including at three different ideologically-captured schools, is something that she describes as akin to “playing whack-a-mole”, and she dreads the prospect of having to battle on further fronts still when her children attend Sixth Form.

For this nightmare to end, she believes that policy changes must happen at state level, beginning with the Department for Education, which seems to have shown no interest in enforcing the policy declared in September 2020 that was supposed to ban schools from telling children they could have been born in the wrong body and from using resources that promote such ideology from outside organisations. Carolyn called on Nadhim Zahawi, the then Secretary of State for Education, to issue stronger guidance, and for Ofsted to be required to identify and penalise schools that fail to follow it.

LGBT+ clubs in schools […] are often forums where children advise one another on transgender and non-binary identities, as well as on how to pursue such objectives as breast-binders, puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones.

It is crucial, Carolyn feels, that more parents be enabled to understand what is being taught in schools to their children. From other parents, she has also heard of children being radicalised who do not identify as trans or non-binary, and that this is causing arguments and conflicts in family homes. Even if parents’ own children do not come to identify as transgender as a result of the school gender ideology curriculum, they may still bring identity politics warfare back to their homes and families.

Distress can also be caused to the siblings of trans-identified children when the former are taught gender ideology at school and are encouraged to believe that their parents are abusive and committing human rights violations if they do not believe in the ideology and fail to affirm their sibling’s transgender identity.

Carolyn refers to the clamp-down that has happened in Sweden on surgical and medical transitioning for minors, after which trans-identified people began to visit schools to warn children of the dangers associated with transitioning and to encourage them to accept themselves as they are, rather than embrace the mistaken concept of ontological disjunction with their biological sex. Carolyn would like to see a similar deradicalisation programme take hold in the UK.

She believes that teachers and politicians need to make a greater effort to understand how transgender ideology propaganda in schools destroys family bonds, and that new partnerships with parents must be forged to support children who are in distress, instead of engaging in, or colluding with, machinations that deliberately exclude children’s primary caregivers. Portraying parents as abusive or bigoted simply for defending their child’s right to be lesbian or gay, or gender-non-conforming, or protected from an adult political agenda, is a depiction Carolyn believes to be highly damaging.

Carolyn would like gender ideology to be identified as unambiguously political, asserting that the outrage that would attend the aggressive promotion of any other political ideology in schools needs to start being directed at gender lobby propaganda also. It is a political ideology that is psychologically harmful to children, creating mental health problems that school counsellors and CAMHS do not have the resources to address – even if they were not actively promoting the ideology themselves, as is so often the case today.

Many parents in Carolyn’s situation are discouraged from seeking a therapist for themselves, given that most therapists are these days trained to affirm transgender identities and may suffer sanctions from their agencies or professional organisations if they fail to fall in line.

The capture of children by gender ideology can have a devastating impact on families, including on the emotional health of parents who are trying to protect them from harm. Carolyn’s own health has taken a battering over the past two years as a result of the crisis inflicted on her family by Lucy’s school. Despite her considerable reluctance, she has now begun a course of antidepressants, hoping they will alleviate her current reliance on the support of empathic friends and relatives: “I feel really guilty about subjecting friends and family to my woes and rants. It has been more than two years, and I feel like such a burden.”

Many parents in Carolyn’s situation are discouraged from seeking a therapist for themselves, given that most therapists are these days trained to affirm transgender identities and may suffer sanctions from their agencies or professional organisations if they fail to fall in line. “Because most parents are looking for a safe space to vent their fears and anxieties, where they can share their experiences of constant gaslighting by the very people and authorities meant to help our children, having a therapist tell you that your child’s situation is all your fault because you don’t affirm them is very upsetting and totally counterproductive.” One therapist Carolyn consulted for help with her anxiety even told her: “Well, you must have always known she was a boy”.

There is a particular organisation that Carolyn describes as a “lifeline” and that has continued to provide her with much-needed support: the Bayswater Support Group. On its website, the Group describes its purpose and ethos as follows: “We offer parents whose children have a transgender identity somewhere to talk, share and be understood. We are wary of medical solutions to gender dysphoria, when exploring gender roles is part of normal child development. We also work to educate public bodies about adolescent gender dysphoria. Our members come from all walks of life including teaching, the NHS, the law and media and from all regions of the UK.”

Carolyn explains that Bayswater Group parents frequently report similar experiences to her own, and that the organisation provides a network where parents can find crucial information and support, and break out of their isolation.

While, at the time we spoke, Carolyn dreaded the arrival of the Tavistock letter, we must surely ask ourselves how, in modern Britain, the very people who should be promoting and enforcing child safeguarding in schools are instead promoting transgender ideology that is capturing the identities of vulnerable lesbian and gay schoolchildren and providing them with an alluring escape into faux-heterosexuality, new social status, and protection from bullying.

This is the new gay conversion therapy: with pressure still on the Government to introduce legislation that would, for the first time, embed the highly-disputed concept of “gender identity” into law and, at the very least, have a chilling effect on counsellors and psychotherapists who will fear the prospect of any words they utter being presented as an attempt to dissuade a client that he or she is “transgender”. Carolyn is in no doubt about the harmful reality underlying such legislative measures, and she asks a crucial question:

“The Government conversion therapy consultation (in 2021) seemed to focus on horrific treatments to stop people from being gay. I would argue that trans ideology, and the extreme medical and surgical alterations adolescents are encouraged to demand, are in fact conversion therapy. Many of these kids are same-sex attracted. Why aren’t they being left alone?”

Today, in spite of legal equality having been achieved for lesbian and gay people, and in spite of the sea-change in social acceptance from which all same-sex attracted people benefit, something very harmful has emerged that threatens to dismantle hard-won gay rights. This insidious emanation is focusing its efforts at the very point where we are most vulnerable – our insecure childhood years. At the very time when we need supportive and affirming adult voices, dogmatic adults now emerge who are derailing same-sex attracted children into pseudo-heterosexuality and even doing so under the false cloak of promoting gay rights.

*Name changed

Republished, with amendments, from Lesbian and Gay News, 22 November 2021

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.

By Gary Powell
4 January 2023. 10.30am

Perhaps you have seen one of the surrogacy puff-pieces already: a woman agrees to “give the gift of life to others” who are unable (or unwilling) to bear their own child, by carrying a child formed from a (sometimes very expensive) “donated” egg that has been fertilised in vitro by the sperm of one of the intended parents. This is gestational surrogacy – the most common form of the practice today. The surface picture presented is normally entirely positive and uncritical and it is either a contribution to mindless celebrity news, or else, in the case of gay parents, the trumpeting of another victory for “LGBT+ rights”. A glossy “happy families” portrait.

Or perhaps you have read one of the more recent LGBT+ media accounts about gay men having children via surrogacy, where the word “surrogacy” is banished from the page, together with any reference to the involvement of a woman in the process somewhere. The Ministry of Alphabetical Truth seems to like creating the illusion of men not needing women in order to produce children. Motherhood is erased, and perhaps we are to believe that it is replaced by obliging rainbow storks. Not a woman in sight.

What about these “peripheral” women working behind the scenes? In gestational surrogacy, the baby will be biologically unrelated to his or her birth mother (surrogate mother). Carrying a foetus with alien genetic material can cause serious complications and difficulties. All surrogacy pregnancies are high-risk pregnancies, both to the birth mother and to the baby. In all pregnancies there is a risk that the mother could die. When surrogacy is involved, that risk is increased.

On 15 January 2020, Michelle Reaves of San Diego, California, tragically died from an amniotic embolism whilst carrying a baby as a surrogate. Studies in the medical literature indicate higher rates of pre-term birth and low birth weight babies in gestational surrogacy pregnancies, as well as higher rates of pre-eclampsia (maternal hypertension), placenta previa and maternal gestational diabetes. Surrogacy pregnancies also involve a higher rate of C-section deliveries, which constitute a greater risk to both mother and baby.

This is all quite apart from the emerging evidence of a link between fertility drugs and cancer. Women are at higher risk of amniotic embolism, a condition with a frighteningly high mortality rate for both mother and child, if they experience the placental problems described above, or if they have a C-section: all risks associated with surrogacy pregnancies. The baby was, fortunately, saved; but Michelle Reaves lost her life, two young children lost their mother, and a husband lost his wife. Women risk their lives when they sign surrogacy contracts.

In the UK, surrogacy for commercial payment is supposed to be illegal, and those who wish to pursue blatant commercial surrogacy, and are wealthy enough to do so, can go abroad to where it is legal – such as to California, where commercial surrogacy frequently involves six-figure sums. Surrogacy tourism. The LGBT+ lobby thinks all this is great.

Is commercial surrogacy – buying babies – so different from paying someone for their kidney, though? The sale of human organs by living donors is illegal worldwide, except for in Iran: the same country that subsidises gender-reassignment as a conversion “therapy” for LGB people and that hangs people from cranes for homosexuality. There are solid grounds for prohibiting the sale of living organs. It is an unacceptable form of instrumentalisation that creates a harvesting class among those on lower incomes, who will be sacrificing their physical integrity and jeopardising their health and life under financial duress. It will be the wealthy buying liver lobes and kidneys, and the poor selling them. Not the other way round.

Compare this to commercial surrogacy. Surrogacy carries serious risks to the women. It is those on lower incomes, and not the wealthy, who are allowing the rich to rent their wombs. Babies born of surrogacy are also at higher risk of poor health outcomes. Most importantly, unlike a kidney, or a liver section, babies are human beings with rights and needs. Is it really likely that a baby will be emotionally unaffected by being immediately and permanently removed from her mother at birth and handed over to others? Is that what normally happens to mammals when we are born? Has nature prepared us to expect the warmth, love and care of our mothers to be immediately withdrawn when we are at our most vulnerable and have just emerged into the world? We don’t even treat dogs like that: the Kennel Club insists that puppies should not be removed from their mothers for at least six weeks following birth. If the global consensus is to ban living organ sales, then why don’t we also ban commercial surrogacy, which is probably even more harmful?

Commercial surrogacy is being gradually rainbow-washed, and Big Fertility is galloping into western statute books on the coat-tails of an aggressive and misogynistic LGBT+ lobby that no-one is allowed to offend, upset or even question.

Big Fertility, a multi-billion-dollar global industry, has been given a shot in the arm by the rainbow-washing of the LGBT+ lobby: a lobby that promotes “fertility equality” for gay men, (or perhaps the usual description these days is “LGBT+ men”, given the colonisation of the LGB identity by extreme gender ideology activists). However, so-called “fertility equality” comes at the cost of the rights and equality of women and children. Not only does surrogacy instrumentalise women and babies in a dehumanising way: it is also a physically dangerous process that can lead to serious illness, psychological trauma and death.

Although commercial surrogacy is theoretically illegal in the UK, the legislation that prohibits it – the Surrogacy Arrangements Act 1985 – appears to be a paper tiger. So far, I have been unable to identify a single prosecution – successful or unsuccessful – under the Act. Furthermore, on 1 April 2020, the outgoing President of the UK Supreme Court, Lady Hale (the Spider Lady no less, of Brexit prorogation fame) handed down a Judgment awarding an individual over half a million pounds against the NHS to pursue commercial surrogacy arrangements in California that would result in the four babies she said that she wanted to have.

This was a clear case of judicial overreach, and Lord Reed, now the new Supreme Court President, and two other judges, dissented, describing the decision as “contrary to public policy”, given that Lady Hale was awarding over half a million pounds of taxpayers’ money specifically for an individual to pursue actions abroad that are illegal in the UK. In 1985, UK lawmakers decided that commercial surrogacy was unethical and banned it.

There is surely something perverse and obscene about a court awarding public money to an individual specifically to pursue something abroad that is banned as unethical in the UK. (This generous surrogacy award was in addition to another, separate award of over half a million pounds for clinical negligence.)

Included in the justification for her Judgment, Lady Hale referred to the fact that commercial surrogacy is a route by which gay men can have children: again, we see here the influence of the “fertility equality” principle that has no ethical foundation, and evidence of LGBT+ institutional policy capture. Commercial surrogacy is being gradually rainbow-washed, and Big Fertility is galloping into western statute books on the coat-tails of an aggressive and misogynistic LGBT+ lobby that no-one is allowed to offend, upset or even question.

Yet there exists no universal human right to be a parent, any more than there is a universal human right to buy a human organ from a living donor. Can you imagine the outrage if Lady Hale had awarded a six-figure sum so that an individual could travel to Iran to buy a kidney from a lower-income donor who needs to pay off his debts? So why should such an award for commercial surrogacy be made that could endanger the life, health and well-being of lower-income women abroad? People will die as a result of not being able to buy a kidney; but they will not die as a result of not being able to buy a baby. Yet it is the latter demand that gets appeased. The surrogacy industry is no more capable of being regulated than the living organ sales industry: profoundly unethical and dehumanising practices must be stopped, not regulated.

Both egg “donors” and birth mothers are also put at risk by the hormone injections they receive as a component of the processes to which they commit. Women are expected to sign burdensome surrogacy contracts that often include micro-control and undermine their reproductive rights by giving commissioning parents the ultimate say over whether or not a foetus should be aborted. A woman may well discover that she feels unable to go through with an abortion demanded by the commissioning parents: for example, when a minor physical imperfection is detected in the foetus, and the commissioning parents expect some kind of flawless designer baby for their huge financial outlay.

Yet there is a form of “commercial surrogacy lite” going on under the radar in the UK, despite the prohibition. It gets called “altruistic surrogacy” […]

Any refusal by the birth mother to comply with an abortion request will lead to a very serious predicament. After all, the foetus is biologically related to one of the commissioning parents, and not to her. If she refuses to have the abortion, the surrogacy contract will be void, she will not be paid, and she will give birth to a child unrelated to her, possibly raising the child as her own if she feels unable to give her up for adoption. A woman in financial need may end up with another mouth to feed and hospital bills to pay from her own resources if she does not comply: and if she does comply, she may have a traumatic values-incongruent decision on her conscience for the rest of her life. Surrogacy is a moral minefield.

There is a trail of misery and devastated lives behind the “happy families” narrative, behind the glib mantra of “giving the gift of life to others”: evidence of human suffering that will take some time to penetrate the smokescreen thrown up by Big Fertility, the LGBT+ lobby, and the woefully conformist, craven and uncritical media.

Yet there is a form of “commercial surrogacy lite” going on under the radar in the UK, despite the prohibition. It gets called “altruistic surrogacy”, and it is ostensibly permitted so long as the birth mother only receives “reasonable expenses” rather than a commercial payment. However, “reasonable expenses” are not defined in law, and they normally seem to range between £12,000 and £20,000. At least, they are the visible sums, and we can see from Lady Hale’s Judgment above that sections of the judiciary are sympathetic to commercial surrogacy, even though it is meant to be illegal here.

A sum of £12,000 to £20,000 looks to me rather like a wage, albeit a low one. When you add to this the fact that the birth mother will have an additional right to maternity pay and maternity leave (even though there will be no baby to look after), we end up with a rather attractive package for something that legally is not supposed to attract more than “reasonable expenses”. The High Court recently estimated the cost of an altruistic surrogacy in the UK to be £37,000. (In fact, £74,000 had been offered to Lady Hale’s claimant, to pursue two “altruistic” surrogacies in the UK, but the claimant had turned it down.) “Altruism” can clearly be an expensive business for those on the receiving end.

The six-figure sums required for commercial surrogacy tourism to the USA are clearly beyond the reach of all but the significantly wealthy. But how many working-class gay men in the UK can even afford to pay £37,000 for a so-called “altruistic” surrogacy arrangement? Many people on ordinary salaries – including many gay men – struggle to make ends meet from one month to the next, and unless a sum like that arrived as an unexpected legacy or windfall, they would not be able to afford to pay such “expenses”. So, who is it who benefits when surrogacy – whether “altruistic” or commercial – is canonised as an “LGBT+ right”? It is primarily the wealthy. It is surely a very strange “LGBT+ right” or “gay right” that normally can’t be enjoyed unless you are wealthy. “Fertility equality”, but only for those who can afford it. And that’s quite apart from the fact that surrogacy is as exploitative and as unethical as buying living people’s organs and should not be available to anyone.

Surrendering a baby has the potential to be a far more harrowing experience than surrendering a kidney. Understandably, birth mothers can experience a great deal of grief when they hand over the baby. Some still pine after the child, wondering how she is getting on, years after she has been born and whisked away. This becomes an even more harrowing experience in those cases where the birth mother gradually discovers during the pregnancy that the commissioning parents are cold-hearted and untrustworthy people, (sometimes matched by equally cold-hearted and untrustworthy commercial surrogacy agencies). She may bitterly regret ever having entered into a contract with them, when it is too late to do anything about it. She may fear for the child’s future in the hands of the commissioning parents who have shown themselves in their true colours.

As also applies to gender extremism, it is very much the case that women and children are casually thrown under the bus by the LGBT+ lobby in the service of “fertility equality” ideology that is inimical to fundamental human rights.

This physical, legal, ethical and psychological minefield, which overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy at the expense of the vulnerable, justifies a worldwide ban on surrogacy. How can this be permitted and even encouraged, when the buying of living organs is quite correctly condemned? Can we not still hear in the noisy clamouring of pro-surrogacy activists a misogynistic whisper that says: “It’s only women”? And in the case of surrogacy tourism, the misogynistic and xenophobic whisper, “It’s only foreign women”?

Apart from the potentially traumatic separation of a baby from her mother at birth, there is also the risk of “genealogical bewilderment”, where the child may feel a sense of abandonment and of not being properly anchored in the world as a result of not knowing the identity of one or both of her genetic parents, or of her birth mother. There is the challenge of coming to terms with having started life as a purchasable commodity, and of not knowing whether the mother who bore her is in need of help, or whether she had been compelled by financial circumstances or a coercive man to enter into the surrogacy arrangement that resulted in the child’s very existence. That can be a great deal for a child to process, and a great burden.

As also applies to gender extremism, it is very much the case that women and children are casually thrown under the bus by the LGBT+ lobby in the service of “fertility equality” ideology that is inimical to fundamental human rights. The frequent reaction of LGBT+ lobby actors to those who speak out against surrogacy is also very similar to the reaction meted out to those who oppose extreme gender ideology. It is mud-slinging; misleading and sly half-truths; and hatred. The lobby of activists that is the first to accuse others of “hate” at any opportunity, is itself a body thoroughly toxified by hatred and wilful ignorance.

One of the accusations gurgled at me from the bubbling cess-pits of juvenile LGBT+ hit-pieces is that I “campaign against the right of gay men to have children via surrogacy”, whereas everything I write and say makes it absolutely clear that I oppose all forms of surrogacy for all people, gay or straight. Neither do they share the inconvenient detail that I am a longstanding gay rights activist; as such, it is natural for me to focus my voice against surrogacy in the gay community, where I am more likely to have an impact, given how surrogacy is a human rights violation that the LGBT+ lobby is actively promoting.

Surrogacy is a serious human rights violation, and no amount of rainbow-washing will ever alter that fact. 

Although I oppose surrogacy, I still support non-surrogacy parenting by appropriate gay and lesbian people, just as I support non-surrogacy parenting by appropriate straight people. I applaud LGB people, and indeed all people, who, instead of pursuing surrogacy, put themselves through a thorough vetting procedure in order to adopt children from local authorities or to pursue a permanent care arrangement such as exists in some Australian states.

The LGBT+ lobby’s pro-surrogacy lobbying primarily benefits wealthy gay men, and the surrogacy market is likely to see an increasing demand from the surge in transgender-identified people who have been caused fertility problems from the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Misogynistic pro-surrogacy campaigning is paralleled by the LGBT+ lobby’s attempt to remove women’s and girls’ sex-based rights and protections in the service of extreme gender ideology, opening up female domains to any biological man who claims (in good or bad faith) to identify as a woman.

With the rights of women and children under such insidious and callous attack across the western world, we need to challenge the ideology of this new low-grade totalitarianism. The LGBT+ lobby has hijacked the historic LGB rights movement and is now hawking the dehumanising values of Big Fertility in the name of “fertility equality”: a concept that can only be realised by eviscerating the rights of women and children. Surrogacy is a serious human rights violation, and no amount of rainbow-washing will ever alter that fact. 

Please consider joining the global campaign to end surrogacy by signing the petition at #StopSurrogacyNow and registering for the SSN newsletter. Let’s work for that day when women’s wombs are no longer for rent and babies are no longer for sale.

© 2023 Gary Powell

Republished from Lesbian and Gay News, 24 June 2022.

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.

By Gary Powell
1 January 2023. 9.00pm

The gender lobby insists on a complete redefinition of core language. This subversion of language is also buttressed by a subversion of logic. If the identity politics totalitarians prevail, the disastrous paradigm of “might is right” will become the new unspoken foundation for western values.

Without the rainbow-coloured coat-tails of the historical male gay rights movement to jump onto, the gender division of the West’s identity politics charade would have failed to gain traction. However, the historical gay rights movement, initially fuelled by courage as well as by compassion for our fellow same-sex-attracted people, managed to lose its way over the years in a vortex of commercially-fuelled, devil-take-the-hindmost hedonism and nihilism, losing its important boundaries in the process. It was this loss of boundaries – this loss of a sense of appropriate limits and of responsibilities to people in their own community as well as to the wider community – that made it so ripe for colonisation by a gender lobby that was going to turn the gay rights clock back by decades.

(I)n order for the gender lobby to get what it wants, it needs to undermine the whole concept of biological sex […]

Gender ideology asserts that a person has an inner sense of being male or female – something it refers to as “gender” – and claims that, for some people, their “gender” will be different from their biological sex. Well, that’s how the theory is supposed to go: but in order for the gender lobby to get what it wants, it needs to undermine the whole concept of biological sex, and redefine the terms “male” and “female”, “boy” and “girl”, “man” and “woman” to be determined only by a person’s subjective perception of “gender”, and for the facticity of dimorphic biological sex to become erased out of existence for this purpose. Which is why gender activists and their corporate acolytes refer to babies being “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth”.

It goes without saying that humans are observed to be one sex or the other at birth, and that there is no question of anyone legitimately “assigning” any description other than that which is readily observed and scientifically verifiable. (Intersex people are also either genetically male or female.) What the gender activists are attempting is a complete redefinition of the words “male/boy/man” and “female/girl/woman”, so that the traditional, historical, and globally-recognised biological basis for the definition of these words is jettisoned for a completely new definition that bears no relation to the established and settled meanings of those words in the verbal community.

This absurd and intellectually masturbatory self-indulgence has emerged from woke, left-wing, middle-class elites in university departments masticating all sense and meaning out of the common-sense propositions on which our civilisation and ability to function as an advanced society are based, and doing so for cash and prestige. One thing is for certain, though: working-class communities across the western world – across the globe – will never buy into this and will never allow themselves to be bullied into pretending they believe post-modernist claptrap. And when working-class parents begin to see the harm that is being inflicted on their pre-homosexual, high-functioning autistic, or simply gender-non-conforming children, they will fight back with a vengeance against the brainwashing media, corporations, politicians, schools, and government departments that are peddling this toxic ideology to the impressionable and vulnerable young.

What has become clear from considering the assertions of transgender-identified people, is that their sense of “gender” is informed by the male/female stereotypes that were so strongly reinforced only a few decades ago. Many of us have painful memories of punishing words from narrow-minded adults, delivered to us in our childhood when we failed to conform to sex stereotype norms. I recall, when I was ten years old, a teacher reprimanding me in front of the whole class for spending my time playing with girls during breaks, declaring that I should “come to school in a dress if I want to play with the girls”. At the age of five I was a page boy at my sister’s wedding, and I recall an unkind uncle mocking me for the frilly white silk shirt that was part of my costume, telling me that I “looked like a girl”. These were painful experiences for a young child, and it is galling to see a constituency of self-described progressives now aiming to elevate sexual stereotypes to such a position of primacy that gender-non-conforming children today even risk getting dispatched to the puberty-blocker clinic.

Language, truth, and logic are the very tools by which oppressed groups come to win their fundamental civil rights, and to defend them once they are won. They are the very foundations of justice and of moral insights and campaigns.

The gender lobby is attempting to effect a wholesale attack on language, truth, and logic. The danger represented by this movement cannot be overstated. Language, truth, and logic are the very tools by which oppressed groups come to win their fundamental civil rights, and to defend them once they are won. They are the very foundations of justice and of moral insights and campaigns. They are the essentials for every scientific and philosophical advancement made by humanity over thousands of years of experience, demonstration, and debate. They are the sine qua non of a free and just society, and the antidote to claims by Orwellian totalitarians that 2 + 2 = 5. If we fail to defend them, a future of nightmares is only a few steps away.

The gender lobby is so homophobic that it is also attempting, after colonising our movement, to redefine lesbian and gay people out of existence. Instead of being “same-sex attracted”, we are now described as “same-gender attracted”. Which means we lesbian and gay people are expected to pretend that we are not lesbian or  gay after all: that lesbians are also sexually attracted to men who declare they identify as women, and that gay men are also sexually attracted to women who declare they are men. The result of this is that the words “gay” and “lesbian”, with their globally-understood meanings, are both now supposed to mean “bisexual”. But they do not mean “bisexual”, and they never will.

The right of lesbian and gay people to define ourselves as same-sex attracted, and to behave as exclusively same-sex attracted and describe ourselves as such, form the very foundation of our human rights as lesbian and gay people. The gender activists are trying to take that away from us and to force us to accept members of the opposite sex who declare (with whatever degree of integrity) that they “identify” as members of our sex, into our dating pool. This is disturbingly redolent of the insistence not so long ago that the “right man” would “cure” a woman of lesbianism, or the “right woman” a man of homosexuality.

Even in a hypothetical universe where there were gendered male/female/non-binary souls, if indeed such an idea can be framed in any meaningful way, no one would ever be able to know which one of the three they had.

There is no empirical evidence at all that the primordial human consciousness with which we emerge into this world is “gendered” in some way. Even in a hypothetical universe where there were gendered male/female/non-binary souls, if indeed such an idea can be framed in any meaningful way, no one would ever be able to know which one of the three they had. Introspection only ever allows access to experience of our own individual consciousness, so a biological male who claimed he had a female consciousness would also have had to have experienced introspectively a male ontology in order to know that he didn’t have the latter: something that would be logically impossible.

What is far from logically impossible is that he instead has the same fundamental consciousness as everyone else, but that he enjoys and feels comfortable presenting himself culturally according to traditional female stereotypes, or with the approximate physical appearance of a woman; or that he has identified as transgender (and therefore supposedly as heterosexual) in order to short-circuit the often harrowing process of coming to terms with being gay; or that, as a high-functioning autistic person, he has been sold a pig in a poke and encouraged to believe his feelings of alienation are attributable to a transgender identity that he needs to embrace. Or a number of other plausible explanations.

But we can no more assert that we have a consciousness of being a specific “internal gender”, than we can assert that, when we eat strawberries, they always taste to us like dragon fruit and not strawberries, if we have never eaten a dragon fruit, and if we cannot intuit what other people experience when they eat strawberries.

Logic is the antidote to identity politics, and that is why the woke post-modernist movement prefers veridical relativism to reason and verifiable empirical facts. (Until, of course, something happens to them personally in this empirical world that motivates them to accord to reality and logic the respect they deserve.) Once our verbal means of communication are undermined, together with the systems of logic that underpin our ability to make sound and accurate judgements, the outcome will be that views and laws will come to prevail not because they are true or just, but instead because they are asserted and pronounced by the powerful, the violent, the new establishment with vested interests in control and subjugation. This is a battle we cannot allow the gender totalitarians and their self-serving, morally-bankrupt enablers and cowardly lickspittles to win.

© 2023 Gary Powell

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.

By Gary Powell
31 December 2022. 3.00pm

The new year will present the opportunity for a ratcheting-up and a sharpening-up of the campaign against homophobic gender ideology from within the gender-critical, biological-realist lesbian and gay community. There have been many successes to celebrate during the past twelve months, but we still have a long way to go.

Although the “Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual” (LGB) grouping is useful when we want to pool resources or join forces in the pursuit of common goals, what we really need now is the establishment of separate lesbian groups, gay men’s groups, and bisexual groups, that serve to best meet the specific emotional, social and political needs of the three different arms of our same-sex attracted constituency.

At the very least, our rejection of the LGBT+ label that gender ideologues insist on imposing on us, represents an important and decisive statement of our right to autonomy. Even though I feel that the replacement of “LGBT+” with “LGB” still does not go far enough, it is still certainly an enormous improvement and a distinct step in the right direction.

Perhaps this new year will usher in a determination to pay even greater attention to calling out the homophobic LGBT+ initialism and to give greater political weight to exposing what that initialism actually means, how absurd it is, how invalid it is, and how harmful it is to the lesbian and gay community.

Below I share some thoughts about the ever-dilating LGBT+/ LGBTQIA+ letter-chain that has colonised the lesbian and gay rights movement, that has tried to redefine homosexuality out of existence, and that has created in its place a campaign that overwhelmingly centres notional heterosexuals. Below, I share some thoughts about this letter-chain and what it has become, as well as some thoughts about why the lesbian and gay community has been so ineffectual in preventing this takeover, and indeed why many lesbian and gay people still actively and even aggressively collude in it.

Asserting the right to set up, or belong to, a group that consists exclusively of people who are members of the same minority group – or disadvantaged group – as oneself, is entirely a question of the right to assert appropriate boundaries. In that respect, there is a striking parallel between the assertion of political boundaries and the assertion of personal boundaries. In the case of both, the impediments to setting healthy and appropriate boundaries are strikingly similar.

The concept of personal boundaries is a simple one at the abstract level: asserting boundaries means saying “yes” to some things and “no” to other things. But essentially, it also means being willing to take action to align one’s “yesses” and “noes” with external reality in direct opposition to people who have crossed, or are attempting to cross, our important red lines.

This aggressive, expanding initialism has hijacked the lesbian and gay rights movement, added lots of people who are neither lesbian nor gay, redefined homosexuality out of existence, and is unashamedly using indoctrination and intimidation to persuade lesbian and gay people to campaign against their own interests.

Paradigmatic of the contempt for proper political boundaries are the deliberate assimilation, redefinition, and effective erasure of lesbian and gay people by the LGBT+ lobby: an amorphous and unrelenting demand-and-grievance machine, constructed and directed by self-rebranded gender-identity activists and charities that contort themselves horribly in order to follow the money or to follow the safe path of least resistance.

This aggressive, expanding initialism has hijacked the lesbian and gay rights movement, added lots of people who are neither lesbian nor gay, redefined homosexuality out of existence, and is unashamedly using indoctrination and intimidation to persuade lesbian and gay people to campaign against their own interests.

If the self-esteem of so many lesbian and gay people were not at such a low ebb – and this has been a very serious problem in our community for a long time – I do not believe that gender activists would have succeeded in turning so many lesbian and gay people into campaigners against their own rights and interests. This is a paradigm of internalised homophobia of the kind written about by Dr George Weinberg in the 1970s, who coined the term “homophobia”, and it is akin to the behaviour of self-oppressed and closeted gay adherents of fundamentalist religions, who are often driven by their guilt and self-contempt to be the most ardent fulminators against homosexuality.

In the lesbian and gay wing of the gender-critical movement, we are all pretty clear that homosexual attraction continues to mean same-sex attraction and not the “same-gender attraction” that the gender lobby insists we buy into and promote. We are also clear that the LGB of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual (sexual orientation) have nothing to do with the T+ (“gender identity” – and whatever else – see below). In order to enjoy the same right that every other discriminated-against minority group enjoys – to be permitted to meet and organise separately and on the basis of our shared minority characteristic alone, without fear of persecution and harassment – we must continue to assert a clear and firm boundary around our right to convene as same-sex attracted people.

For anyone who rejects the gender lobby’s preposterous redefinition of homosexuality, and who rejects its attempt to colonise and redefine the lesbian and gay rights movement in a way that is unambiguously homophobic, the suggestion that the LGB should detach from the T+ is not in dispute. After all, a decade ago, no one was challenging the right of same-sex attracted people not to have to cede our movement and identity to other, completely unrelated, and mostly abstract groups.

The LGBT+ constituency, by the way, as defined by its own lobby group, is no longer even a minority group. Not since it added the plus sign. A US study carried out in 2011 by the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute entitled How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender? concluded that 1.7% of US adults identified as lesbian or gay and 1.8% as bisexual. Those identifying as transgender were recorded at 0.3%.

A later study, dated 2016, by the same Williams Institute, indicated that the number of adult Americans who identified as transgender had increased to roughly 0.6%. Given the social contagion we are witnessing, combined with media and educational indoctrination, the most recent transgender-identity figures are likely to be significantly higher still.

If we take the 2011 Williams Institute figures, we have an LGB and T population that amounts to roughly just over 3.5% of the general population.

But that is just the LGB population, added to the T constituency. The ever-expanding initialism has kept on adding letters to eventually become LGBTQIA+, often abbreviated to LGBT+. How much larger does the LGBT+ constituency become after you have added the “+” or the “QIA+”? And what do all those letters even mean? In my discombobulation, I turned to the dictionary for enlightenment:

“QIA stands for questioning/queer, intersex, and asexual. Dive into the meanings of these letters in the acronym.”

Let’s dive, then. But specifically into the definition offered of “questioning/ queer”:

“Questioning: when a person is exploring their sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression. Queer: this term can have various definitions but can be seen as an inclusive term or as a unique celebration of not molding to social norms.”

You therefore automatically become a notional member of the LGBT+ community if you are “exploring your gender expression”. As gender, if it means anything meaningful at all, can’t be anything other than a measure of the degree to which an individual conforms with traditional male or female stereotypes, any person who explores his or her identity and decides where they fall with regard to sex stereotypes, becomes by default a member of the “LGBT+ community”. Which, it could reasonably be argued, might now, as a result, contain every adolescent on the planet.

If “queer” includes the category of people into BDSM or another fetish, then a full 75% of the adult population suddenly becomes co-opted into the LGBT+ “community”. […] (I)t results in heterosexuals swamping the number of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people included in the LGBT+ initialism.

Now look at that execrable word “queer” that is associated in so many of our minds with the homophobic abuse and taunting we experienced in our adolescence and beyond. It is indeed a vague enough word to lend itself to “various definitions”. I’ve often seen it used to include people who have some kind of sexual fetish or other, regardless of whether they are heterosexual or same-sex attracted. I don’t care in the slightest what consenting adults do sexually and legally in the privacy of their own homes. However, I do care about lesbian and gay people being forced-teamed with any group outside the same-sex attracted constituency, as it is politically, socially, and therefore psychologically, very harmful to our community.

A 2017 survey carried out by the retailer Ann Summers of over 2,300 respondents revealed that 75% reported having a sexual fetish, with BDSM polling top place at 74%. If “queer” includes the category of people into BDSM or another fetish, then a full 75% of the adult population suddenly becomes co-opted into the LGBT+ “community”. If that figure is even remotely accurate, it results in heterosexuals swamping the number of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people included in the LGBT+ initialism.

At over 75% of the adult human population, the LGBT+ constituency is not a minority group any more. It is a majority group, and by a significant margin. Who is doing all the oppressing of this perpetually victimised LGBT+ majority, we may well ask ourselves?

But it gets even worse. The definition continues:

“LGBTQIA+ Meaning: To be inclusive to everyone, the LGBTQ full acronym has changed to add the plus at the end. This works to allow the acronym to cover new subsects of the community like [ally; pansexual/ omnisexual; androgynous; genderqueer; two-spirit; demisexual; polyamorous].”

It doesn’t even stop there. It is open season on lesbians and gay people as far as forced-teaming and swamping are concerned:

“While this works to cover some of the different initials in LGBTQIA+, it is far from an all-inclusive list. New terms can be added under the “umbrella” of the plus at the end of the acronym.”

So the LGBT+ constituency is expanded still further by the inclusion of even more heterosexual people – including those who like to have sexual and romantic relationships with more than one person at the same time, and even including “allies”. Who exactly are these “allies”? Back to the dictionary:

“Ally: A term for individuals that support and rally the cause even though they don’t identify within the community.”

Just how big would that “ally” addition make the LGBT+ “community” now – the community in which allies are still paradoxically included, even when they do not identify as actual members of that community? Well, in large parts of the world – the parts where they still imprison, flog, and execute people for homosexuality while the western LGBT+ lobby busies itself promoting compelled pronouns and the removal of women’s and girls’ protected spaces – the “allies” component would be very small. However, in the liberal West, the “allies” component would be very large.

We lesbian and gay people have been diluted, hijacked, redefined, censored, intimidated, and disappeared beyond recognition. How could this have happened to our political and social movement?

According to a 2021 YouGov poll, “Some 85% of Britons would be supportive if their family member came out as lesbian, gay or bisexual, while 71% would feel the same if the person said they were transgender or non-binary”. Therefore, in addition to all the heterosexuals who “question their gender”, who like to have more than one romantic or sexual relationship going at the same time, and who have some kind of fetish, we must now also include all these “allies” in the LGBT+ numbers. 

When we try to work out who is actually included in the LGBT+ constituency, we are certainly looking at a significant majority of the whole human population, of which the vast majority are indisputably heterosexual. We lesbian and gay people have been diluted, hijacked, redefined, censored, intimidated, and disappeared beyond recognition. How could this have happened to our political and social movement?

Furthermore, far too many members of our own lesbian and gay community have been brainwashed or browbeaten into behaving like Christmas turkeys that cheerlead, condone, and enforce the takeover of our community and movement by people outside our community with their own agenda. An agenda that is positively hostile to lesbian and gay rights.

Of course, the larger the LGBT+ grievance community becomes, the bigger the funding pool for LGBT+ charities and rebranded activists. And the more numerous those identifying as LGBT+ become, the greater is the power-shift towards the identitarian political agenda that seeks to tear down our cultural inheritance and foundational values – including those that led to better treatment and greater inclusion of lesbian and gay people as a result of a decades-long struggle in the West. The LGBT+ agenda is part and parcel of a movement that is antithetical to lesbian and gay rights, yet that falsely claims to be speaking and acting on our behalf.

To understand how our movement has come to be hijacked, we could do worse than to consider our own personal journeys towards self-acceptance and the setting of healthy interpersonal boundaries. One of the most crucial developmental insights I had as a young gay man entailed the setting of a solid boundary between my own self-acceptance as a gay man, and the homophobic environment whose messages I had internalised over many years at great cost to my emotional well-being and self-respect. I had to learn to say both an internalised and an externalised “no” to anti-gay messages, and this was a very important turning-point.

We are more malleable to manipulation and bullying at the hands of others when we are feeling insecure, frightened, guilty, or depressed. When we have been made to feel that we are not worth very much, and that our views, wishes, and feelings are unimportant, it is so much harder to assert firm and healthy boundaries that are predicated on the very concept of self-worth. The line of least resistance is simply to keep quiet and to do as we are told, and we may not have the energy or emotional resources to say “no” and assert good boundaries when we are feeling so low and undeserving.

A rare high point during my French A-level course at school was the exposure to existentialist literature, and an inspirational quotation from Sartre encouraged me to construct solid boundaries around the positive acceptance of my sexuality: “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated rejection of that which others have made of us”. This maxim is one that could serve the lesbian and gay rights movement well as we profoundly reject the homophobic definitions and the political shackles that the LGBT+ lobby has imposed on us.

A defining characteristic of the LGBT+ lobby is its unwillingness to respect important social boundaries. Instead, it is motivated by a bullying paradigm of colonisation and appropriation, where the rights and boundaries of other people and groups are subordinated to the selfish interests of the LGBT+ lobby’s protagonists.

In order to set our important personal and political boundaries, we need courage. It can help us immensely to find our courage if we are part of a supportive and encouraging group with which we can closely identify, and that shares our aims and interests.

A defining characteristic of the LGBT+ lobby is its unwillingness to respect important social boundaries. Instead, it is motivated by a bullying paradigm of colonisation and appropriation, where the rights and boundaries of other people and groups are subordinated to the selfish interests of the LGBT+ lobby’s protagonists.

Its failure to stop the expansion or to heed objections has resulted in its transformation into a notional campaign that now includes a significant majority of the population, most of whom are in fact heterosexual, and into a campaign that harms children, women, gay people, and freedom of speech. It has turned itself into a toxic and sociopathic absurdity, and the more harm it causes, the more opposition it is generating against itself.

This new year, let’s keep opposing the homophobic LGBT+ lobby for its betrayal of lesbian and gay people. The Alphabet Activists have redefined homosexuality out of existence, and its expanding letter-string now represents a constituency that is overwhelmingly heterosexual, where the interests of lesbian and gay people compete with the promotion of straight “LGBT+ allies” and straight people with fetishes. As if that were not enough, the gender identity pushers expect lesbian and gay people, on pain of banishment, to comply with feigning sexual attraction towards members of the opposite sex who say they self-identify as transgender.  

Gender ideology has been able to exploit the low self-esteem of lesbian and gay people in order to capture and sabotage the historical lesbian and gay rights movement. That ever-expanding string of letters has proved to be a curse on the lesbian and gay community, and a curse on western society. As lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, we need to go back to basics and once again form the fundamental, distinct, and separate lesbian groups, gay men’s groups, and bisexual groups that we need in order to find our tribe, to heal, and to grow.

© 2022 Gary Powell

Republished, with amendments, from Lesbian and Gay News, 5 January 2022.

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California.