Drag queens pose in bond age gear for calendar in aid of Mermaids

Totally agree about the aggressive slogans and messages as well.

Don't forget
'Repeat after us: transwomen are women'.

I might not be as cool as the queer lot, or as edgy, or push as many boundaries, but I'd quite like to just be able to live my life thanks.

Exactly this. Being gay alone doesn't mean you are a 'boundary pusher' or edgy or flamboyant, it just means you are attracted to people of the same sex. That's it.

With a couple of exceptions (and I guess we are talking stereotypical haircuts and clothes here ) pretty much all of the lesbian women I know, you wouldn't know they were gay until you got to know them and their families. They are just regular women trying to live their lives, raising kids, getting on with their jobs, with the same relationship problems etc as anyone else has.

What the fuck any of that has to do with drag queens I don't know.

I wonder if the drag scene used to be rather self-regulating in the past since it was often a small number of performers who worked only in the cities. Everybody would know everybody else and if there were rumours of inappropriate behaviour, then the group would shun them immediately. Word would get out to the venues pretty quickly since there were relatively few venues who would host drag in the first place.

Now that LGBT has corporate backers at Pride and other events, drag is much bigger and mainstream due to social media, it becomes attractive to a certain sort of person who seeks to indulge their own fetish. Add the fact that people who identify as transgender are able to hide their pasts quite easily and people moving around a lot, it may be that the drag community has been infiltrated.

Mermaid are not clueless. They may have been infiltrated or have been formed from the very beginning to get at kids. Pie failed back in the day, but do not imagine they ever gave up. With the internet they now have the world and their perverts at their fingertips.

The gay community has been bullied, threatened, by them. They fought the original battles to be accepted, their success has now been grabbed and they are surplus to requirements.

BUT - in terms of schools and young children - there is no place for them, now or ever
Agreed, completely. It's just not necessary, as well as being inappropriate. There's no benefit, even if it was done particularly carefully. You could teach primary school kids how to play darts, and you could put in place a raft of safety measures to enable it, but there would be no net benefit because kids don't need to play darts, or know about drag queens, or learn how a cloakroom works at a nightclub. There's no benefit, the motives are questionable, the delivery is open to infiltration by those with malicious intent, it's just a bad idea from start to finish.

I think this confirms one of my many, many concerns about Mermaids - they are essentially clueless while believing that they are experts, and they don't understand that "LGBT" is not a monolith, and that being kinky is not synonymous with being LGBT.

We've just come from a season of events where small children go to see men dressed as cartoonish versions of women, and I'm fine with that. But can you imagine if you took your kid to the panto and Widow Twankey had his balls out and was being whipped by a fishnet-clad Baron Hardup, and you were lectured by Buttons, as he adjusted his strap-on, "hey, don't be bigots, folks! It's great for the kids to see such ~diversity"!

It's so fucking homophobic.

Disclaimer: I may have conflated my panto characters into One Enormous Panto.

'Acceptance with exception' slogan, and how much it reminded me of a religious slogan, actually.

I find that a very helpful observation. You nailed it.

And YES, acceptance without exception is shorthand for 'ignore your personal boundaries'.

I agree FlyingOink that 'Not All Drag Queens Are Like That". I've also been around them via adult circles for decades. BUT - in terms of schools and young children - there is no place for them, now or ever.

FloralBunting
Agreed, and it's quite aggressive too. "Accept us or else". Or else what? Even if you add us all into the alphabet soup we're a tiny, very fractured, minority.
"Some people are X. Get over it" is also massively aggressive, unnecessarily so. Most people had got over it to a certain degree. Plus the fact you could put almost anything in place of X and still snarl at people to get over it means there's no recognition of the fact there's a difference between being homosexual and being a furry, for example.

that view suggests gay drag queens are all sweet, lovely people
Sorry, just to go back to this - I don't think that at all. Some are quite horrible. Many are very misogynistic, the whole calling women "fish" thing. And we're talking about men who party pretty hard, in many cases. Not fluffy men. My point was that my personal experience of drag queens is that they can be a little self-obsessed (lots of attention, competition, etc) that they tend to be busy in their lives, and that because of being so busy drinking, miming, showing off and generally living in the night-time economy they exist in a gay bubble. So I can well imagine (and this is sheer conjecture) that one of them got told there was a calendar to do for charity and the others all wanted to be involved.
I'm probably painting them as idiots, and I don't mean to. But it is possible for a gay guy to exist in a gay bubble, to read penis news uncritically, to holiday in gay resorts, and to interact with the rest of the population very little unless he has a day job. So I think there is at least the chance these men had no idea of the controversy surrounding Mermaids, and wouldn't be inclined to stop and listen if you wanted to explain.
Not that they're all lovely at all. Some are, some aren't.

That was in response to Flying, threads move fast!

The way I see it as that the T movement has become synonymous with LGB but the relationship isn’t symbiotic and without the LGB of LGBT, the trans movement would not have gained the acceptance it has achieved in a few decades. The widespread acceptance of LGB ( rightly) means in the early days the T sector found it easier to affect change than they would otherwise because people were wary of being labelled homophobic. Bit long winded, hope it makes better sense.

The 'person' 2nd from left is tied to the beam; I have just finished reading the David Challenor threads. He who tied his 10 year old victim to a beam whilst dressed as ...

I was thinking about that 'Acceptance with exception' slogan, and how much it reminded me of a religious slogan, actually.

It's a great, right and proper thing, that requires no special beliefs, to fight for the rights of LGB people to be and love who they wish.

But the strap line 'Acceptance with exception' takes everything so much further than that. Acceptance is not a virtue. It's simply a description of someone capitulating to someone else. In some contexts, this is a good thing. In others it's abuse. To elevate it to a virtue that must be practiced at all times is a religious idea, which is very evident when you look at the broad remit Stonewall have set themselves now.

It is not good to accept without exception. It is a complete demolition of personal and other boundaries, and this should be entirely unacceptable in a culture that is just waking up to the importance of consent.

We fought for years to get porn calendars off walls in offices. So no.

I have drag friends, they do not approve of this.

The problem with much of what's gone on with the advance of the trans agenda is not that there's a master plan, but the gaps it opens up for opportunistic abusers.
Agreed. This calendar was a bad idea, and a lot of the tacked-on T stuff is a bad idea too. But it's got to the stage where gay people can't express their concerns either.
Social acceptance by proxy
So much. Literally riding on others' coat-tails. Then stealing the bloody coat.

The fear of being labelled homophobic maybe why the T tagged on to LGB and we end up with acceptance without exception, with a push for it to become mandatory for everyone.
I don't understand what you mean.

This is exactly why the T is tagged on.

1. Social acceptance by proxy,
2. Legal protection

Green, who clearly doesn't understand what is appropriate and what isn't (see the documentary for evidence) is trolling

I find this persuasive. Tweeted to provoke a reaction feeling protected by transgender-Teflon without it even occurring to Green that she also should have wondered whether it might be wholly inappropriate.

I'm not 100% convinced they form part of a paedo vanguard. If they do, I guess it's unwittingly.

The problem with much of what's gone on with the advance of the trans agenda is not that there's a master plan, but the gaps it opens up for opportunistic abusers. And as we continually see, even referring to this will get you a kicking for "saying" that "all trans people are sex offenders".

Bowlofbabelfish that jumped out at me in the article too

And this is the end result of these kind of happenings:

So normal, so acceptable, nothing to see here...

Flyingoink I can see where you’re coming from but that view suggests gay drag queens are all sweet, lovely people. I’m sure some are just as some individuals in any group of people are but that’s not the issue here. The fear of being labelled homophobic maybe why the T tagged on to LGB and we end up with acceptance without exception, with a push for it to become mandatory for everyone.

Wrong threads sorry ...

Or of course maybe they’re not stupid. Maybe the people designing the system have poor motives.

But that’ll never happen! Oh dear - here’s Gordon pike, convicted sex offender who helped draw up thebrules for transgender transfer.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-offender-gordon-pike-helped-set-prison-trans-rules-q8n3lnksv