So Jolyon Maugham loses again. The crusading barrister is now almost as famous for losing cases as he is for battering to death a defenceless fox. And he hasn’t disappointed with his latest legal shenanigans. The appeal against the LGB Alliance’s charitable status, which was spearheaded by troubled trans charity Mermaids and backed by Maugham’s Good Law Project, has been comprehensively dismissed. Clearly the gays are not as easy to beat as a fox.
We must be grateful for every flash of sanity in these strange times. And the tribunal’s decision not to rescind the LGB Alliance’s charitable status is very sane indeed. The judges ruled that Mermaids and the various other LGTBQ+ groups who threw their lot in with this daft crusade against the LGB Alliance had no legal right to appeal any organisation’s charitable status. So the alliance lives to see another day. Homosexuals continue to enjoy the freedom of association.
I find the identitarian left’s loathing for the LGB Alliance deeply disturbing. The alliance’s sin, in the eyes of those hellbent on tearing it down, is to believe in biological sex. Its aim is to defend the interests of people who are attracted to the same sex – lesbians, gay men, bisexuals – and thus it thinks the reality of sex is a pretty important thing to acknowledge. As its mission statement says, ‘sex is binary, female and male’ and it is ‘determined at conception, observed at birth (or in utero), and recorded’. For millennia, that’s what everyone believed. Now it’s tantamount to blasphemy, in this weird era of ceaseless gender play where you can change your sex like you change your socks.
The Mermaids/ Maugham case shone an accidental light on how nuts the gender ideology has become
The LGB Alliance is devoted to defending the rights and dignity of same-sex-attracted people. For example, it stands with lesbians who feel under pressure to accept ‘men who define themselves as women’ into their spaces and even into their beds. To my mind, this is an enlightened and honourable defence of an essential liberty: the right of lesbians to associate with other lesbians. To the alphabet bros of the modern LGBTQetc lobby, however, it’s ‘transphobia’. Yes, a lesbian who refuses to handle a penis is a bigot now, haven’t you heard?
I’m old enough to remember when the bigots were the blokes who told lesbians they should sleep with men. ‘You’ll enjoy it, love!’ Now those blokes are the heroes, it seems, and the lesbians who say ‘No, thank you’ are uppity, hateful ‘genital fetishists’. The LGB Alliance is absolutely right to confront such neo-homophobic nonsense. How have we arrived at a situation where it is controversial, ‘hate speech’ no less, to say that genderfluid Gary with his beard and testicles is not a lesbian and never will be?
The Mermaids/ Maugham case shone an accidental light on how nuts the gender ideology has become. At one point the LGB Alliance’s Kate Harris was asked why biological males cannot transition into being lesbians. She was understandably distressed by this crackers line of questioning.
‘I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world who are lesbians because we love other women’, she said. ‘We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.’
That a lesbian could be grilled in a court of law on the very meaning of lesbianism, with the implication that she was in some way being unfair and prejudiced by refusing to accept born blokes as lesbians, is testament to the existential threat that today’s gender hysteria poses to gay rights. Thank God the LGB Alliance is fighting for scientific truth and homosexual freedom against this tsunami of unreason.
Of course, for its troubles, the alliance is damned as a ‘hate group’. To the trans lobby and its army of allies in political and media circles, the alliance is basically a sexual KKK. They petition for it to be blacklisted, demonetised, stripped of its charitable status. They are guilty of the very thing they accuse the alliance of: bigotry. That a gay-liberation movement can be defamed and hounded like this in 2023 should concern all of us who rather liked the march of social progress, including for gay people, in recent decades.
Mermaids vs LGB Alliance is like a microcosm of the ‘culture war’. On one side, a rather strange charity that has drunk from the identitarian cup and which supports social insanities like the blocking of puberty. On the other, a charity that understands science, defends free association and free speech, and promotes rights for gay people. It’s irrationalism vs reason. The dead end of identity politics vs the light of gay liberation. Overgrown children vs sensible adults. I know whose side I’m on.
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