Professional Judy at Lesbian and Gay News on that Manchester Pride incident:

As far as I can tell a mob – including self-described “queer woman” April Preston – surrounded Alex, the crowd chanting ‘Trans Lives Matter’ in the same way football hooligans chant their thought-terminating mantras against the other side before using beer bottles to smash their heads in. Preston later tweeted: “Five mins in got a terf removed – happy with that #mcrpride”. 

If you can stomach it, the video is harrowing. You can feel the tension and the naked rage from the crowd whipped up into a frenzy by people like Preston, who is the Liberal Democrat’s candidate for Withington, and I found myself genuinely worried about poor Alex’s safety. He is pushed at one point, his hat is stolen, and the police have to intervene in order to keep him safe.

(Not all that worried, surely, since Alex was known to be safe by the time anyone saw the video. A small detail, but I like accuracy in details.)

What we witnessed happening to him on that video for that crime is the culmination of a campaign of lies and smears that has stretched right back to LGB Alliance’s inception. A vicious war of hate played over social media directed at the only group standing up for same-sex attracted men and women. A group whose crime is to assert the biological reality of sex and to highlight that it’s key to the rights of LGB people. A group who can count among their members trans people, and a group who has spoken in support and defence of trans people around the world when they’ve faced persecution.

Yes but they don’t include the T. That’s literally all that matters.

Of course, in their haste to align themselves with the mob they’ve helped to create, Guardian writer Owen Jones and soap actor David Paisley don’t really mention those sickening tweets directed towards a gay man for being a gay man, but they instead glorify the baying mob and present it as the most wonderful thing they’ve seen.

They are in blood stepped in so far, that, should they wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.