Cambridge Union debate - This House Believes modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community

Yes, the framing is a bit boggy. I just found it hilarious that a man could come on and give a whole speech about how the movement is failing at intersectionality, and at no stage mention the specific intersection of being gay and female!

If lesbians aren't free to gather without men, that's a pretty big failure of the movement. If sex is overtaken by gender in law, as it has been in many places, then same sex attraction loses meaning, and homosexuality itself can no longer be legislated for as a protected characteristic. His whole point is supposed to be that "there is no single issue struggle, because we do not live single issue lives", which should have been a natural lead-in to discuss all this.

I wish the American left would hurry up and peak already. The lack of real conversation on this is getting so old. I can't imagine how Americans feel

Missed this 😂😂😂😂

Do you hear the people cringe?
Whinging a song of angry men...

I dreamed a dream that LGBTQ+** life would be
I got up at 8 for my wed-ding..

🎶

**<sing this bit very quickly>

"I agree with Andrew Boff that the work goes on, the cause endures, and the dream never dies." And suddenly we're in an amateur production of Les Miserables. Do you hear the people cringe? I do.
😂😂😂
I hope you heard me laughing out loud over the sound of people cringeing -
very very funny, SnoopyPajamas 😄

@SnoopyPajamas

Loving your write ups. I got about 75% through at the weekend but had to park for work.

One comment:

We now move to a speaker who is on our side, but not from the gender critical perspective.

The framing of the debate whether current LGBTQIA++ activism is fit for purpose for the LGBTQIA++ community.

That precludes consideration of non LGBTQIA++ specific concerns like women's rights or the wider social impact of what Genderists demand other than in how these may indirectly affect the "community".

(Though challenging whether the "LGBTQIA++ community" is still a meaningful group is in scope for both proposers and abstainers.)

In which things start to get weird:

• We now move to a speaker who is on our side, but not from the gender critical perspective. He's an American civil rights attorney whose stance is mostly that LGBTQIAA+++ activism isn't doing enough for black people. Particularly, black gay men and black transwomen. Black lesbians and bisexuals aren't mentioned.

• Alphonso starts off reasonably strong. He does come armed with a few statistics early on, when his argument is that "the movement" is failing to make any real progress on the things that matter. AIDS, economic factors, global majority homophobia. I can get on board with this, and was looking forward to a speech that tackled the issue from a different, but just as valid perspective. The omissions of earlier had me wary, but I hadn't written him off yet.

• Except that as the speech went on, it started to feel like Posho's before it. All vibes and very little actual substance. Alphonso quickly falls into this strange, corporate academic language. I don't know how else to describe it. It's as if he thinks he's at a DEI seminar instead of a debate. I started to get the feeling this was a speech he had given before. It feels like something he was paid ten grand to give at some Ivy League college. A very well-articulated word salad.

• "Not only is modern activism failing its community, but it furthers our collective oppression and fractures our community into divisible factions"

• Then he quotes Audre Lorde on intersectionality. You might be thinking, "Ah! This is the moment he'll talk about the intersectional experience of being gay and a woman! Of homophobia and misogyny! Finally, we come to the single biggest conflict of rights within the movement!" If so, you'd be wrong. And if you were thinking this might be the moment black lesbians get a look in? Don't get excited. They don't.

• He then tells us how the era of rights-based advocacy is over, and it's now all about "questions of distribution, equity, and power within the movement". I kid you not. He says this with a straight face! At a time when women have been legislated out of existence as a sex category in many countries - with the knock-on effect that same sex attraction has been legislated away too. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in this country, and while Sall Grover is fighting for her rights in Australia. The man is a lawyer, and somehow hasn't noticed we're having to fight for basic rights all over again? Is he serious?

• Apparently so. "If a movement cannot reach people at the intersection of their realities across race, across class, across geography" - notice anything missing here? I don't know about you, but I'm feeling unreached by the movement at the intersection of my XX chromosome, specifically

• "We have to be honest about what happens when a movement claims intersectionality but does not operationalize it". What becomes clear as you listen to Alphonso is that he has one uber issue, which stands above all others: race. So when he talks about intersectionality within the movement, he's not talking about the boring kind the vagina people have.

• Interestingly, he puts a lot of blame on the gay community and gay advocacy, for the economic struggles of black gay Americans. But the black community, and black advocacy - which is the other half of every black gay person's reality - goes unmentioned. You might think the ideal solution would be those two communities working together to give targeted support to black gay Americans, but it doesn't seem to be. Make of that what you will.

• Overall, I get the impression he's trying to have lofty conversations about intersectionality, and lesbians (even or perhaps most especially the black ones) need to shut up about all that sports and changing room stuff that only divides the movement into factions, because their silly little bodies aren't relevant.

I know he's American, but it's like he was beamed in from another planet.

The comedy continues:

• We now move to a young man with an accent so aggressively plummy I felt personally attacked by it. He's not just posh - he's the sort of posh you know will one day end up in the highest echelons of government. The thought is deeply depressing, because as you'll discover, he's an utter nitwit.

• Posho would like you to know that he finds this entire premise "absurd, self-indulgent and narcissistic", and is abstaining from it. My attempts not to be prejudiced by his accent are challenged right off the bat by this blanket dismissal, but I soldier on. Open mind, open mind, Snoopy!. He might be about to say something interesting. You never know.

• " . . . and whilst many of you who know me may think I'm just describing myself, I assure you that I'm not." I think this was supposed to be humour? It died on its arse, whatever it was.

• "I agree with Andrew Boff that the work goes on, the cause endures, and the dream never dies." And suddenly we're in an amateur production of Les Miserables. Do you hear the people cringe? I do.

• Anyway. Posho thinks that any criticism of the movement from within is just self-obsessed navel-gazing, really, and not important. Posho's debate tactic is to gesture vaguely at history but avoid ever getting into specifics. He clearly thinks waffling about the schisms within liberalism in the 1980s makes him sound learned. It doesn't. I'd have more respect for his intelligence if he gave his perspective on any of the issues "the community" is actually facing in the present day. Why does he think the LGB Alliance was formed? Does he consider it "self-obsessed" of them to want same sex-only advocacy? Is it "splitting hairs" to say lesbians don't have penises? What does he mean by any of this? What does he actually believe? Who the fuck knows.

• "I don't really have a doctrine to state to you" Yes, you're all puff and no substance. We had noticed.

• "I merely want to encourage you to think of all the good work that's being done for gay people, transexual people, transgender people, lesbians . . ." You'll notice lesbians come dead last in this rundown, after not one but two types of trans people, and bisexuals aren't mentioned at all.

• You'll also notice it hasn't occurred to him to wonder if all this "good work" could be done by separate advocacy groups. No. The borg alone can accomplish it, in his mind! I'd just like to remind you that this is a Cambridge University student. His parents paid pots of money for his education, and this is the result. Someone who couldn't think his way out of a paper bag, but will probably end up in politics. Are you depressed yet? You should be.

• He finishes with "Gender and sex matter. Of course they do", which is a rather strange statement to make when he's given no indication of believing it until now.

• "I'm not here to sort of declare, ignore these things that matter and we'll all get along." Aren't you? Isn't that sort of exactly what you've done, though? I really rather sort of think it is, old boy.

• "But these debates, which are important" - I thought they were absurd, self-indulgent and narcissistic? Self-obsessed and splitting hairs? - "can't distract us from the very real charitable work, from the very real compassion" - It goes on like this for a while. More puff and air than a bowl of Rice Krispies.

• Then there's some arse-kissing of the gay men of yesteryear, who were "so outward-looking and so compassionate" in supporting trans. The quiet part, I presume, is "as opposed to all those meanie lesbians who raised concerns".

• This is one of the speeches I flashed back to when Serena was describing the homophobia faced by lesbians in the present day, and felt really quite angry about.

I haven't engaged directly the OP because my hearing is bad and I can't hear Maeve's speech on the video, but I trust your five-star reviews!
And as I've said before about this wonderful young woman, she lives up to the fearless mythological queen she was named after
However, I have a very direct comment on the motion, 'that this House believes modern LGBTQ+ activism fails its community': there is no LGBTQ+ 'community' - there are three parts to that acronym, the first part referring to one group of people: people who are sexually attracted to people of their own sex; the T part refers to people who believe they can change sex; the third part refers to people with a variety of opinions on the subject of sex

These are separate groups of people with different identities, different histories, different demands, different issues. Some parts of it are actually inimical to other parts - for instance the treatment of lesbians - so it is hard to see a group of people as disparate as the 'LGBTQ+ community' as constituting a community, i.e. 'people having a particular characteristic in common', which is the dictionary definition.

The Dentons Document suggested 'piggybacking' as a strategy for promoting the trans agenda, meaning adding trans rights to existing rights organisations, to capitalise on their successes.
They did this by adding the 'T' to LGB - it started appearing as if summoned by magic, as a fait accompli, and we haven't been able to get rid of it. Yet.

The Dentons Document - a 2019 report which set out to 'to create user-friendly resource for itself, its members and the broader advocacy community for use in campaigning efforts for better gender recognition laws across countries in the Council of Europe'. is available here:
iglyo_v3-1.pdf
and discussed here
Analysis of the Dentons Document: A How to Manual - Women Speak Tasmania

Re-reading it, I realise that I had forgotten that its focus of the report was on young people:
adopting accessible, rights-based gender recognition laws, especially for young people, offering critical lessons for future advocacy
[my underlining.

'LGBTQ' is an artificial construct. It is not a coherent community.

LGB✂T

I thought your posts were excellent. But I guess they were too unsafe for the brave'n'stunning?

Wow, just re read the thread and yet again I have had some entirely reasonable posts deleted. I am going to ask MN exactly why.

It's always illuminating to know what posts are reported for, which ideas TRAs do not want anyone thinking about.

Helen Webberly is repugnant, but watching her catch shrapnel from all sides was one of the funniest things about the whole debate. I half-expected it to end with a skywriter plane zooming in to write "I HATE HELEN" on the ceiling 😂

More inadvertently amusing moments from the debate:

• When Emma Monday called out the ugliness of the progress Pride flag and even the Gen Z crowd around her couldn't be offended. It truly is that hideous 😂

• Also Emma, proving that that the philosophers of 1996 were so prescient they could deliver searing burns thirty years in advance of the present day. "Winning majorities is not the same as adding up minorities", indeed

• Sadly, we don't spend long with Emma and soon find ourselves back in dudsville, with a stammering middle class non-binary speaker so ashamed of her own privilege she's in danger of cringing herself inside out. She's trans, but only non-binary trans, because she tried being a man and was obviously terrible at it. Instead of taking this as a sign to pack the whole thing in, she reverted back to being not like other girls non-binary.

• If you're thinking this woman sounds a bit weak-willed, well . . . I should also mention that she transitioned because she heard a trans character on the BBC radio soap The Archers. Yes, you heard that right. Some kids get influenced by their peers. For some it's the internet. But if you're really unlucky, your child might get sucked in by that episode of The Archers you had on in the background one day while you were doing the washing-up.

• Her poor mum. If only The Archers had done an episode about internalised misogyny instead.

• The faces of everyone around Archers Girl are very, very carefully blank while she's speaking, but they all crack when she talks about what a terrible man she made, and it's not hard to see why.

• She wants you to know that trans people aren't lying. And they're not mistaken, except for that time she was mistaken about being a man. And it's not just that they've heard a label and they want attention. It's not a fad, Mum, honest! It's not because I heard it on The Archers saw it on tv!

• Well, what is it, then? It's, er . . . checking my notes, hang on . . . "It's because there's something going on and I don't know why it happens but it happens." I'm laughing, but I feel sorry for this woman, to be honest. Some day she's going to venture into terf spaces and figure out that her great moment of gender awakening listening to The Archers was just internalised misogyny, social contagion, and likely autism. And she wasted years of her life on this shit.

• All this flip-flopping would suggest some inner voice is screaming at her though, so maybe there's hope. By the end of her speech she's even subconsciously modifying her own language. She started off very offended at the idea trans people might be "lying" about being trans, but one of the last things she says is "the vast majority of trans people are not lying". So . . . some are? The fact that she's stuck on "lying" and not "mistaken" is also interesting. I suspect she's met some AGPs and the cognitive dissonance is starting to get to her. Archers Girl, I hope you peak. If you're brave enough to admit puberty blockers aren't life-saving child medicine, you're half way up the mountain already. Take the ski lift the rest of the way. Get it over with.

Webberley concluded her contribution, and therefore the debate, by saying that anyone who voted for the motion would have blood dripping down their arms from their hands as she held her hand up to demonstrate voting in favour.

Her behaviour is repugnant.

Incidentally, the president then announced that "in this house we vote with our feet". More excellent research by Webberley in evidence.

I guess that's the point. Queer everything. Except nobody can explain why.

Great summary!

Too many good bits to point to, but this one did float to the top:

Even Boff wanted to make it clear he's not a fan of Helen Webberly 😂

This is also what I meant by him giving vibes that he did at least agree with the motion in part. He was very clearly hiding from the difficult stuff... and blatantly knows it's a bit fucked up to give children irreversible medical interventions.

He thought the opposing viewpoint was "online discourse is so annoying" and "Pride is too corporate"

I think this was carefully curated feigned ignorance. If he thought this was as controversial as it got, he wouldn't have been so keen to tell us just how much he disagreed with Helen Webberley. I can't remember his exact words but was it something like we disagree on nearly everything? And then he celebrated the joy of disagreement.

Agree. They've dragged 'gender' through the mud until no-one knows what means any more; it means whatever the current speaker says it does. And they are having a damn good go at 'woman', too.

I’m beginning to think the word gender should be banned. It’s become so vague and woolly it can mean anything.
In the past , gender was a polite synonym for people who were embarrassed to say the word sex .

Don't you just love it when the new posters present all the arguments that they appear to think haven't been heard before?
The oh so patronising " you do realise don't you?" Or the even worse "do you realise?"
Just bore off, we've been standing up for women while you lot were at playgroup

Inadvertently amusing moments from the debate:

• It seems that the debate moderator had to round up every submission by thanking the speaker for their "fine speech". There were times when I felt sorry for him. You sometimes could tell he thought the speech he'd just listened to was far from "fine" 😂

• When Buck Angel declared "I am considered an elder in this community" at 61 or whatever, and the next speaker, Andrew Boff, felt the urge to drop into the conversation that he was 68. You could tell Boff had expected to be the "elder" in the room, and it ended up looking like a bit of comical one upmanship.

• Andrew Boff treats being the first man to get gay married in Britain as some sort of personal achievement. But all he actually did was be front of the queue. It could just as easily have been someone else. Someone who might not be griping all these years later about the horror of having to get up at - gasp! - 8 a.m! I'm now picturing Boff as a man who has breakfast brought to him in bed in noon, because he was up until four smoking cigars at the billiard table.

• Did you know he's 68? He's 68

• But he's a cool 68. A 68 who has seen Pluribus and defo has an iPhone.

• Even Boff wanted to make it clear he's not a fan of Helen Webberly 😂

• "WELCOME TO HUMANITY! WELCOME TO DEMOCRACY!" I think that was supposed to prompt gales of laughter? It came across more like he needed a sit down

• "If I'm ever in the dock accused of something grim, I want me one of those activist lawyers!" . . . er, I see. Was this just one of those hypothetical situations you find yourself wondering about over beer with Peter Tatchell, or is there a particular "something grim" that's been playing on your mind, Andrew?

• It's somewhat ironic that the thrust of Andrew's argument was that annoying voices on the internet don't represent the whole of the movement, because his characterisation of the opposition sounded like someone who has never had a conversation about this offline. Or never ventured beyond his own middle class bubble. He thought the opposing viewpoint was "online discourse is so annoying" and "Pride is too corporate". Then you put his faffing up against Serena's blistering list of examples of what lesbians are going through, and Maeve's takedown of the true cost of Being Kind, and Andrew just looks completely out of touch with reality.

• "Every movement has its bores. Every movement has people who mistake volume for wisdom." Are they in the room with us, Andrew? Pontificating at length, perchance? Mistaking age for wisdom, perhaps? Are they thinking to themselves: "I'm 68 and I made history - I don't have to listen to the concerns of silly little women"? Perhaps?

• I've just Googled Andrew and it turns out that his marriage is technically number one on the paperwork, but the fifteen day waiting period was waived for a terminally ill man, who was actually the first to be gay married in 2005. I'm not sure I, personally, would want to make a career out of being "the first" if a dying man had a plausible claim to the title instead. I might just have let him have it. But then, we're all different and I'm sure Andrew feels he's done a lot more good dining out on it all these years, and he did after all get up at 8 a.m.

”Exactly how will women's private spaces preventing trans women entering fix that?”

Gosh? Howse that? I am sure this point was attempted as a gotcha last year. It still fails as any type of point because it is irrelevant.

It also doesn’t prevent domestic violence being widely discussed and any media coverage either. Those discussions should still be had and are still had. What a false accusation that the two cannot be simultaneously focused on at the same time.

of course, ensuring single sex provisions also provides necessary support to those victims of domestic violence. Including in refuges, support groups and even in single sex health care when needed, and other provisions. Even in prison where many female inmates are known to be vastly over represented by domestic violence and other violence victims.

Excluding male people from female single sex provisions is not aimed to prevent domestic violence. But I can assure you, as a child of a domestic violence and abuse household, I sure do need to have a provision that is female single sex only away from male people. I know quite a number of other female people who are victims of sexual violence and other violence who certainly don’t want to share any female single sex provision with a male person above the age of about 8 years old regardless of how that male person identifies.

I also know of a couple of women who certainly don’t want to be sharing a female single sex provision with their abusive ex husbands who are now claiming to be women.

So no, single sex provision is not aimed at preventing domestic violence.

And the majority of that violence comes from male people. Male people from across all groups and sub groups. They are the category of people excluded from single sex provisions after the age of about 8 years old, regardless of the sub group they belong in.

Ah yes, the lovely Baroness Hunt. Having been a former Stonewall supporter I remember being at the time quite perturbed by its move towards a more strident tone.

There was a definite change in the atmosphere and, for want of a better word, “normie” lesbians were increasingly side-lined. As an uncool lesbian it didn’t particularly surprise me. I think I only had a small window of about a decade where I was accepted as fashionable/unproblematic whatever terms the in-crowd used.

It was during the campaigning for repealing section 28 and civil partnership act then same-sex marriage phase in LGB rights.

Later, some seemed to want to be seen as progressive more than thou rather than actually to want to make homos actually safer.

It saddens me mostly. But at that time they needed us vanilla types to not scare the horses and make the case in private and political circles when things were truly hostile.

The current bunch would last five seconds in the time of AIDS with no cure, when we could be fired from our jobs and keep quiet on who we dated. Awful to see how they have upended the true safety net of the Equality Act as envisioned by Trevor Phillips.

You missed the bit about them going on to police other people's identities.

I imagine it is truly exhausting and takes over your whole life.

In my experience, if you try to drill down into it with people who believe this, what you arrive at is their belief that all human beings are bisexual deep down.

They don't care about the homophobia inherent in that belief.

Amusingly, they also get very uncomfortable when you ask them how an oppressor class of straight people can exist, if no-one is actually straight. They tend to be very attached to the idea of themselves as queer people oppressed by evil straights, and don't want to give that up.

They also tend to believe things like "you can't police other people's identity", and don't like to be reminded that the "everyone is fluid" hypothesis invalidates the chosen identities of others. It's cognitive dissonance all the way down, with these people.

Did @EmilyinEverton derail the entire thread with this "lesbianism includes penis, actually" nonsense?

That's a shame. I've just made it through the whole of the debate and came here to say how wonderful Maeve was, and how pleased I am her speech is going viral.

Serena also dropped some incredible home truths about how the movement fails lesbians. I can understand why she framed it as an abstention - her argument being that actual lesbians (not what we might call Emily "lesbians") have been all but kicked out of the movement long ago. But I think it would have been better to stick to the movement betraying failing lesbians as her point. Because while this debate was a good showcase of all the gay men who are ignorant of (or flat-out indifferent to) the struggles lesbians are facing, it is a sad reality that there are many actual, bonafide lesbians who are prominent activists but have proved themselves quite happy to sell out their sisters and quote the party line on trans. The Megan Rapinoes and Cynthia Nixon's of the world. I can't remember her name, but wasn't the leader of Stonewall, who pushed the trans stuff the hardest, a lesbian herself? These women should be held to account. They're failing their own community by any metric

I want to know how you can be attracted to someone's gender. If it is their own, personal inner identity how can we see it to know if we are attracted to it or not? If it can change, what happens if it changes halfway through a date? What happens to those of us who don't have a gender identity?
Attraction to male and/or female seems a much simpler way to categorise people.