Trans activists and their recurring target: gay people

Time and again the targets of trans activists are gay men and women

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

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

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

Start with the lesbians, because they got it first and they got it worst. Kathleen Stock, lesbian, hounded out of Sussex in 2021, then heckled at the Oxford Union two years later by a protester who glued herself to the floor. Jo Phoenix, lesbian, professor of criminology, compared by a colleague to a racist uncle at Christmas dinner and harassed out of the Open University that same year. A tribunal found 23 separate incidents of harassment and awarded her the win on nearly every count. One detail from that judgment deserves to be famous: a senior academic said he’d contact the local LGBT centre to stop Phoenix researching lesbian erasure. An LGBT centre, deployed against a lesbian.

Allison Bailey is a black lesbian who spent more than twenty years as a criminal defence barrister. When she helped found LGB Alliance in 2019 she received a torrent of abuse including threats of sexual violence. Rather than rushing to her defence, Stonewall complained to her chambers. Garden Court announced an investigation on Twitter, and a tribunal later found she’d been discriminated against and victimised for her beliefs. Julie Bindel, lesbian, gave a talk in Edinburgh in 2019 about male violence against women in which she never mentioned trans people. A trans activist waited outside and tried to punch her. Three years later Nottingham council banned her from speaking in its libraries, citing its commitment to Stonewall.

And you don’t need a lectern to qualify. At Pride Cymru in 2022, police escorted lesbians out of the march for carrying banners saying trans activism erases lesbians. One of the women asked the officer to confirm what was happening. “You are removing lesbians from an LGBT march, is that what you’re doing?” Yes, he said. For your safety.

Now widen the lens, because this isn’t a British eccentricity. In Australia in 2023, the Lesbian Action Group asked the Human Rights Commission for permission to hold a lesbian-only event on International Lesbian Day at the publicly funded Victorian Pride Centre. Permission. To meet. The Commission said no, on the grounds that excluding men who identify as lesbians would be discrimination. Three years before that, Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras dropped its one lesbian-focused panel because the lesbian on it, the YouTuber Arielle Scarcella, holds the view that lesbians are female. Scarcella says she’s never been more cancelled and tormented than by her own community.

In Canada in 2023, Robert Wintemute, a gay professor of human rights law who spent his career litigating for gay rights across Europe, returned to his alma mater, McGill, to give a talk. A hundred protesters chanted that he was Nazi scum, stormed the room, threw flour over him and forced him to shelter in the dean’s office. In France, at Bordeaux Pride in September 2021, a trans-identified male lit a flare and aimed it at lesbians from the collectif Résistance Lesbienne. Their banner read “lesbians don’t have penises”. For stating the defining fact of female homosexuality, someone tried to set them on fire.

And then there are the crickets. In October 2024, at the annual conference of LGB Alliance, the only charity in Britain that exists solely for same-sex attracted people, six activists smuggled in around 6,000 live crickets and dumped them into a hall of 600 people. The talk they sabotaged was by Jamie Reed, the whistleblower from an American gender clinic. An Austrian Green MP due to speak called the attack what it was: homophobia, plain and simple, because it’s unbearable to them when lesbians and gays meet to discuss their rights. Not one mainstream gay charity defended the victims. Insects, released on homosexuals, at their own conference, in Westminster, and Stonewall couldn’t find its voice.

Call it what it is. This is a war on gay people, and like any war it has its targets, its weapons and its objective.

The targets run from the elders to the youngest lesbian who won’t date a man. Sargeant was at Stonewall itself. Simon Fanshawe co-founded Stonewall UK, and when Edinburgh students elected him rector, academics drafted a letter of denunciation within hours. Bev Jackson founded the Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and co-founded LGB Alliance because Stonewall quietly swapped “same-sex attracted” for “same-gender attracted” in 2015, a one-word edit that defined homosexuality out of existence. Martina Navratilova came out as a lesbian in 1981, when doing so cost her millions in endorsements. Thirty-eight years later, Athlete Ally, a charity set up to support gay athletes, threw her off its board for saying men shouldn’t compete in women’s sport. These are the people who won every freedom the movement now enjoys, and it beats them in the street. Behind them stand the working generation, the Stocks and Baileys and Phoenixes, sacked, sued and shouted down for knowing what their elders knew. A movement that does this has not evolved. It has been occupied.

The weapons are gay people’s own institutions. Stonewall, founded to defend gay people from persecution, filed the complaint against Bailey. Athlete Ally, set up to support gay athletes, expelled the most famous gay athlete alive. Sydney’s Mardi Gras began in 1978 as a march the police broke up with batons and arrests, and now it cancels lesbians on behalf of men. Build a replacement for these corrupted institutions and they come for them too. Mermaids dragged LGB Alliance through a quarter-million-pound legal fight over its right to exist as a charity, while Australia’s Human Rights Commission decided that lesbians meeting without men present would be discrimination. Women at least know the institutions were never theirs. Gay people watched thirty years of their own infrastructure get captured and turned around to fire on them.

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

Fred Sargeant, a hero betrayed.

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

The people who threw flour at a gay rights lawyer, who beat a Stonewall veteran, who released a plague of insects on a hall full of homosexuals, call everyone else homophobic. At some point you have to stop arguing the toss and count the bodies on the floor. The bodies are gay. They keep being gay. And the organisations with rainbows in their logos keep stepping over them.

The flag says it plainly enough. They took the colours Fred Sargeant marched under and rammed a chevron through the flank, new colours, pointed like an arrowhead, advancing. It's a victory standard now, flying over the territory he fought for, while he and those he fought for are left face down underneath it.