A fiction that can make you grind your teeth
You hear talk of “identities” but your gay identity overlaps with so many others you feel that it needn’t define you. Nevertheless, as “a member of the gay community” (a fiction that can make you grind your teeth) you may feel there’s still a need for an organisation to speak up for gay men and lesbian women’s rights and needs: to do “outreach” work in British schools and workplaces, and maybe abroad where your fellowgays still face the gallows. You might join and pay your subs to such an organisation.
I did — until last year. I was one of that organisation’s fourteen founders. Stonewall, formed on May 24, 1989, was set up during the furore over Section 28 of the local government act, engineered by a Tory government to ban the “promotion” of homosexuality…
I remember, too, the sense of solidarity between stalwarts such as Ian McKellen (kindly, conciliatory and shrewd) and Lisa Power (punchy, motherly and fun). I remember Michael Cashman (he of the first gay kiss in EastEnders): thoughtful, civil, and empathetic. We didn’t always agree on aims (I was for reducing the age of male homosexual consent from 21 to 18; the majority were for full equality at 16, so 16 it was) but the big thing we wanted — for gay men and lesbian women to come out of the shadows and into the sun — was so clear and strong that our differences melted in its glare. We rented a little office, engaged a CEO, and Stonewall was launched.
Monday marks the 32nd anniversary of that Wednesday in 1989. But Stonewall has lost its way. The sun we all thought we saw has gone behind clouds of anger, intolerance and partisanship. The organisation is tangled up in the trans issue, cornered into an extremist stance on a debate that a charity formed to help gay men, lesbian women and bisexual people should never have got itself into.
Oh but it’s the LGBTQ+ community, you see, so you’re not allowed to say no. (This is why the LGB Alliance is so necessary.)
What is the charity I helped to found doing, getting entangled in attempts to deny free speech at a university? This column should avoid getting into the trans debate itself. My single, tight focus is on this question: why Stonewall?
There’s something perversely 20th-century about linking gays to trans. Gay men do not want to be women. We like being men. I doubt that being a lesbian is about not wanting to be a woman. Our issues have nothing to do with identification or changing our bodies: we know what we are and nobody disputes it. Most gay men would strongly resist the suggestion we’re boys who want to be girls. I can’t think of anything I’d like less. The whole history of the gay liberation movement is inseparable from what people do rather than what they are. Central to trans concerns is being, not doing.
Also central is not being. It’s about magic. It’s about pretending that pretending changes reality. It’s about insisting, and even mandating, that pretending to be something actually makes you that something. It’s about insisting that you are what you are not, and that everyone else has to agree.
Perhaps the truth is that, after success in our great 20th-century drive for equality, Stonewall was left with bricks and mortar, an admirable staff, a CEO and a fund-raising team and, unconsciously, craved another big, newsworthy cause.
That. I think that’s a big part of it, and not just for Stonewall. I think people got bored with the old familiar causes, and younger ones wanted their own new cause, and trans is it.
Maybe it will bethe Enbies’ turn next, and the NB and T can fight it out over who gets to tell everyone else what to do. Or maybe the Enbies will be skipped altogether, and Furries/Otherkin will be the next cause du jour. Poor Enbies!
It’s not just “mission creep” either. It’s more like a 180° turn. The T agenda is not just different from the LGB one, but actively hostile. As I have previously written, who would have guessed just 10 years ago that we would live to see the day when “LGBT-rights” would be taken to imply that same sex attraction (as opposed to attraction to people who think or feel in certain unspecified ways, call themselves by certain names, use certain pronouns etc.) is the pinnacle of bigotry and evil? Or, for that matter, the day when “feminism” would be taken to imply that discrimination against biological females has never even been a thing, let alone a problem worth addressing in it’s own right?
Despite the insistence of TRAs that there is nothing analogous between their cause and “trans-racialism”, it’s exactly as if a minority of loud and aggressive white people had decided that being “black” has never had anything to do with physical trait like skin color, that racism has only ever meant discrimination against people who “identify as black” regardless of skin color, that anti-racism has only ever been about protecting people who think and feel like “blacks”, that light-skinned blacks were the most oppressed minority ever, that “dark skinned privilege” were a thing etc., and that only the most loathsome, abominable bigots and haters imaginable could possibly arrive at any other conclusion.
And another thing I’ve been wondering lately –
Is this, in fact, pushback against women invading “male spaces” since the 1970s?
Gradually male-exclusive clubs were forced to open themselves to female membership in the name of equality. And it was a necessary thing to do as it was so many of those male-only clubs where men patted each other on the backs, arranged business deals, and decided who would be the next CEO of Big Companies. Their existence was a major hindrance to women’s professional advancement. If you couldn’t get into the room you couldn’t join the dance.
Are there still men smarting from their loss of privilege, from having to learn to share? Is this their attempt at revenge on those uppity women? It certainly smells of revenge to me.
The lumping of anti-trans hostility with homophobia comes from the homophobes. All that paranoia about pedophiles and ‘recruiting’ really did generate a movement in the Right. Which doesn’t mean that a sensible response should mirror their errors.