🧵 Yesterday Linda Riley, who owns what was once the UK's premier lesbian mag (now a platform for people who think men can be lesbians) and claims to have invented #LesbianVisibilityWeek, launched an attack on @jk_rowling for daring to praise black lesbian activist Allison Bailey
Linda's tweet has so far received 28k likes – 28k people (many of them men with beards or people with anime avatars who weren't born when that pic of Allison was taken) who think it's 'hateful' to celebrate a veteran campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in #lesbianvisibilityweek
Also yesterday, Owen Jones tweeted that 'transphobes' – by which he means people who think sex is real, gender ideology is harmful and lesbians and gays have the right to organise separately from the trans movement – should be banned from 'every lgbtq bar'
That's the same Owen Jones who, just three weeks earlier, insisted there was no 'significant division' within 'Britain's LGBTQ communities' and anyone who said otherwise was lying.
He should make up his mind. Either there are hordes of dangerous heretics who need banning from the venues they themselves pioneered, or there is no dissent. Both can't both be true.
Actually, of course, in OJ's casuistical universe, they can. Note he talked about 'Britain's LGBTQ communities'. We who reject forced teaming with the trans movement and think 'queer' is narcissistic hogwash aren't members of the LGBTQ community anyway. Ergo it's not divided.
But anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty knows that's nonsense. We are divided by a massive fault line that has pitted lifelong friends against each other and threatens to wreck lives.
That's the real reason Riley tried to silence JKR: yesterday was also the first day of @BluskyeAllison's court case against Stonewall, the charity which once fought brilliantly for lesbian and gay rights but now victimises anyone who challenges its dogma telegraph.co.uk/columnists/202…
This is a community at war with itself – with ex Stonewall insiders Matthew Parris, Anya Palmer, Kate Harris and Simon Fanshawe all saying the charity has become a danger to lesbians and gay men – but where one side is desperate to keep that war a secret.
For example, the LGBT+ Consortium is an umbrella group comprising hundreds of organisations. They can be marshalled to sign joint letters whenever Stonewall asks, and it looks like stunning display of unanimity, with only the hated LGB Alliance in the carpers' corner.
But it's more casuistry. You're only allowed into the LGBT+ Consortium if you support the official line. These organisations form a bloated establishment with a massive vested interest in convincing their funders – overwhelmingly the taxpayer – that they represent their community
Pretending dissent doesn't exist, except when it's useful to have an enemy, is a familiar Stalinist tactic. Orwell satirised it in Animal Farm. Napoleon (pictured L) and his enforcer Squealer (pic R) wrote Snowball out of history but then blamed him for anything that went wrong.
Is there any other minority community where this has happened? Do black and other minority ethnic organisations turn on each other, call for each other to be banned, and decry each other as hate organisations if one doesn't dance to the other's tune?
Has it happened with disability organisations? Actually the only real parallel I can think of is the way women's organisations and institutions – from the Fawcett Society to Woman's Hour – have tried to freeze out the wrong kind of feminist for having the wrong opinions.
I'll leave you to work out the connection there. But in the meantime, I wish the national media would write about this civil war. It's an issue of national importance because the toxic ideology that caused it is in every school, university and hospital in the land.
ENDS
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The media ought to report on the civil war in the lesbian and gay community. The woman who started #lesbianvisibilityweek says it's hateful to mention a particular lesbian activist who dared challenge Stonewall. @BluskyeAllison is the wrong kind of lesbian and must stay invisible
Whichever side you support in a conflict that has pitted lifelong friends against each other, it's newsworthy. Unfortunately it isn't being reported by embedded 'LGBTQ+' correspondents because they're tied to one side and have a vested interest in pretending the war doesn't exist
It would upset the business model (aka grift) of the bloated LGBTQ+ charity sector if they were forced to acknowledge that they don't, in fact, speak for a whole community, therefore they pretend this conflict doesn't exist and savagely suppress any dissent
Our bloated LGBTQ+ organisations are weirdly relaxed about the established church refusing to marry same-sex couples and sacking gay & lesbian clergy. The Church of England is institutionally homophobic. The zeal with which these clerics now embrace transing is positively Iranian
Lesbians & gay men are now totally equal before the law – apart from the laws relating to the Church of England. The established church is there for everyone. Yet I couldn't marry my (ex-priest) husband in one. Instead of challenging this, Stonewall bleats about 'asexual' rights.
It has long been clear that the Church of England is more comfortable with trans people than homosexuals. And the LGBTQ+ establishment is more than happy to embrace institutional homophobia if it's a way of advancing the sacred trans agenda.
A little story about Stonewall in the pre-lunacy years, told to me at the time by a friend who worked there. I've been thinking about it in the past few days and I think it's illuminating.
It must have been around 2014, when the Cameron/Clegg government had surprised everyone by legalising same-sex marriage. This, remember, was something Tony Blair insisted would never happen: he repeatedly said civil partnerships were a good thing but marriage was a step too far.
Stonewall themselves had got into a tangle on the issue. Since there was almost no practical difference between civil partnership and marriage, they badly underestimated the appetite for marriage proper. An aggressive campaign by Pink News made them look remote and out of touch.
For those of us who were in London in July 2005, the events of that month are unforgettable. But that was 17 years ago, and younger people may be completely unaware of them. In light of this week's political events, that awful time is worth revisiting.
It started on a high, on 6 July, when London was awarded the right to stage the 2012 Olympics. It was a surprise victory – Paris had been the clear favourite – and caused massive excitement. Hundreds celebrated in Trafalgar Square that night. But the joy didn't last.
The next morning, terrorists set off rush-hour bombs on three tube trains and a bus. 52 people died, all UK residents, of 18 nationalities. More than 700 were injured. It was the UK's worst terrorist attack since Lockerbie in 1988 and the country's first Islamist suicide attack.
I've read some exaggerations re law on homosexuality in the Gulf state of Qatar so I thought I'd check for myself. I consulted an expert authority, which classifies Qatar as a Zone 3 country (out of 3), where sexual acts between people of the same sex are illegal. More details 👇
Sexual acts between people of the same sex are illegal
according to the Articles 296 (3) and 285 of Qatar's Penal Code. Punishments include imprisonment for between one and five years.
Qatar also runs Sharia courts, where technically it is possible that Muslim men could face the death penalty for same-sex sexual activity, although there is no record of this actually happening. That means Qatar isn't Saudi Arabia or Iran. But it's not exactly gay-friendly.
Nancy Kelley's interview on Woman's Hour did indeed seem like 'a Wizard of Oz moment'. But it raises an interesting question. If the CEO of Stonewall isn't the malign genius behind this breathtakingly efficient capture of the public and private realm by gender ideology, who is?
In my fictional take, to which @M4rtyman alludes here, there's a nutjob US billionaire providing unlimited cash for the flat-earth takeover, with a sinister lobbyist in a Bond villain lair at the top of a Bermondsey council block directing strategy.
That's strictly fiction. To tell stories, you need a small number of players in easily defined roles, and you also need a way of resolving the story neatly. If only real life were so simple.