My thoughts after the LGB Alliance conference
Why do you only care about one of my protected characteristics?
*I have written a letter to my MP about my experience and concerns. I would like to make it open for all so here it is.
Dear *****
I hope you are well,
I am writing to you again because I believe we are at a point in time that we will look back on in horror.
We will wonder why so few people spoke out, why so many people were silent or worse openly compliant with the destruction of women's rights, homosexuals' rights and safeguarding of children.
I am a 36 year old working class black lesbian who has lived in the London Borough of **************** my whole life.
During my childhood me & my family faced a great deal of racism from people on the street,my neighbor's & right up to the institutions including my primary school.
The only person my family received help from was the MP for ******* at the time. For that I am eternally grateful.
Now I am a adult and I'm writing to you for help. I hope you can provide me with some.
I am a lesbian, I am a adult human female. I have a biological sex. I know for a fact that sex cannot be changed in humans. I am gender critical.
I have rights under the law due to my protected characteristics. I have the right to hold gender critical beliefs as has been established in the Maya Forstater case.
However for many years my rights have been ignored or even worse lied about by an organisation that was originally set up to support my needs as a homosexual. That organisation is Stonewall.
I am a lesbian and I do not stand with Stonewall. And Stonewall do not stand with me.
I'm sure you are aware of a recent podcast on the BBC called Nolan Investigates that has exposed the true nature of Stonewall, that it is a lobby group who has been advising organisation on the law as it would like it to be not as the law actually stands, in my eyes this is criminal especially considering the massively damaging effect it has had on women & children & homosexuals like myself.
If you have yet to listen to the report, I beg you please do. Here is a link to it
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p09yjmph
As I understand many organisations have recently pulled out of the Stonewall diversity scheme. For that I am grateful but I know the damage has already been done.
The damage Stonewalls ideology causes shows up in many ways, I came face to face with one this week.
Currently there is only one charity in the whole of the UK that exclusively supports homosexuals, that charity is The LGB ALLIANCE.
They held their second conference on Thursday 21st Oct 2021 at Queen Elizabeth 2nd conference hall which I attended.
It was a wonderful event with many amazing speakers and important topics discussed. It was also attended by several MPs, journalists and other people of importance as well as hundreds of lesbian gay and bisexual people and our straight allies. They also received a letter of support from Boris Johnson himself.
However, outside the conference building we were meet with a group of extremely angry people protesting our right to be there. Our right as homosexuals.
They held signs that told us to "fuck off" and chanted songs calling us "bastards" among other things.
They were also supported by people of note including T.V personality India Willoughby and MP Kirsty Blackman who posted about her support of the protest against us Lesbian Gay Bisexual people via Twitter.
As I stood and watched this mob scream and curse at us what struck me was the hatred in their eyes, the tone in their voices, I've experienced it before.
I remember seeing that hate in the eyes of the racists from my childhood.
Hearing the way they curse at you, it's like they think they are literally spitting daggers. They make each word count.
It's hard to describe but if you've ever been on the receiving end of you will remember it for life.
Its reminds me of the type of protests The Westbro Baptist Church in American hold. Angry people shouting vile things with signs telling the other side that they are hated and to fuck off.
The similarities are striking.
Its pure hate, the kind of hate that makes the person physically shake, the kind of hate that makes them finger jab the air at you while they scream “die”. The kind of hate that makes a person very dangerous.
As I said I've known these types of people before. They use to hate me because of my skin colour, now they hate me because my sexuality.
What has shocked me even more then their behaviour is that one of these types of hates is now acceptable, even celebrated by institutions, M.Ps and celebrities like the ones I've mentioned.
The protesters feel enabled and empowered to openly hate us, a group of homosexuals at a charity conference, so much so that they can viciously protest us in the shadow of Westminster itself without any shame or fear of being called out for the homophobia they displayed. They know they are free to abuse us.
If the conference I attended was for BAME people and I faced the same anti protest outside I would think this country had regressed back to the time my grandparents stepped off the Windrush.
And I would expect people of power to have spoken out about sure a terrible racist thing happening.
So that's where I'm stuck, what's the difference between these types of hate? They are both based on things I can't change, they are both things the law says I need extra protections because of, Race and Sexuality.
The people at that protest honestly believe protesting a homosexual charity, calling homosexuals "bastards" "scum" "nazis" ect puts them on the right side of history,
I don’t know if these people will see the error of their ways but I would like to think one day they will.
What I do know is that they must be people who see this error now ? The people that know it's wrong? The people in power that have a voice?
The people that would be quick to speak out in solidarity and express their outrage if those protesting outside the conference had been calling me “scum” and saying “I wasn’t welcome” because of my skin colour? Where are those people?
Do they not care about us? I like to think that isn't the case.
I think the reason they haven't spoken up is because Stonewall has convinced them that they can't or shouldn’t, that they will be on the “wrong side of history” this is the biggest damage of all, damage that is finally seeing the light of day, damage that I ask you to have the courage to be a part of fixing.
Now that Stonewall is falling it should make it easier for people to speak out, I can promise that those that do will be meet with praise and support from people like myself who want to see the back of Stonewall and its toxic ideology.
So why am I writing to you with all of this? Its because I want someone in power to know and acknowledge the fact that hate in all its nasty forms is back in this county and I'm the target of it again, again due to a fact I can't change. Something that’s meant to be as protected as my race. You are my MP and like my MP years ago I ask you to take this issue seriously and have the courage to speak out.
Courage calls to courage.
“They are both based on things I can't change“ and why should you want to?
Excellent article. Well said.
While I do sympathize with the writer of this letter I also find the notion of "homosexual needs" a concept that has clearly led to the assertion of "transgender needs," which now threaten to cancel the former. There are surely basic human needs, children's needs, the needs of the elderly, those of women--all groups that have and in many cases continue to be abused, exploited, repressed, forsaken, as a category or class. The majority of men, as members of the working class, may surely also be said to fit under this category. No one can help be any of the latter things, and it may well be the case that no one can help being homosexual, especially without subjecting themselves to sorts of analysis that might well prove to be too onerous and unreliable. However, sexuality is subject to change in a way that is categorically distinct from the earlier mentioned examples. Indeed, the other categories are also subject and indeed the very proof of change (no one remains a child if they live long enough, no one is born aged), but sexuality is the only one where the subconscious plays a primordial part. And so when certain forms of sexuality are defined as a protected class, what in reality is being defined as such is a particular type of psychological state and very likely a particular type of subconscious state that may very well remain poorly understood by science itself. So the ground, unlike in the case of the other examples cited, is primarily the psychological and thereby necessarily the subconscious. It coincides that this precisely the area where state and corporate power most sophisticatedly operates and protection afforded by the state in recent decades over sexual minoritarian categories simultaneously represents the focusing of the state in ever more sophisticated ways in the subconscious states of its population. Moreover in the case of transgender persons the state, especially in Anglophone countries, is quite evidently not only affording protections to sexual categories it had previously outlawed, as was the case with homosexuals, it in fact appears to be promoting transgender identity, which is to say a gamut of subconscious psychological states that in many cases appear to inevitably clash with heterosexuality and even homosexuality (which is much more materialist--and hence naturally Marxist--in its concept formation, than transgender identity, which seems tailor made for a brave new world of virtual reality capitalism). Is the state simply unaware of what it is doing in the present case, or is the state promoting certain subconscious states for reasons that it assesses stand to benefit the current neoliberal oligarchic order? One must recall that even more than homosexuality, transgender identity is predicated on disconnection from the natural material order of things and from historical memory, it is therefore the subconscious state best in synch with a future Western economic order where augmented reality and virtual reality will in combination have monopolized our senses and hence our minds.