Pride doesn’t represent me

[Vegansausageroll]

Just been watching Joe Lycett’s big pride party.
It was all sexualised smut. It’s ‘furries’ , kink, drag, sex and innuendos galore. This isn’t all what pride is about! It’s supposed to be about our sexuality and our rights and not being ashamed of who we are. But there is no representation for young people like I was! I want people to be themselves and express themselves but it all just seems so extreme now!

I’m a middle aged gay woman. I like books and countryside walks!

I am very worried about equal rights and the way they are, once again, under threat.
I have nothing in common with the people that now dominate ‘pride’. The last woman’s group I went to has long been shut down, as have the lesbian groups I used to attend back in the day. I’m worried gay youth are being sent a message that their sexuality must be linked to a certain type of ‘lifestyle’ when many of us just want to live a regular life the same as our straight friends - the only difference is the sex of our partners 🤷‍♀️.

To quote a better wordsmith than me: everything to the right of LGB in the alphabet soup is straight people. Unless those people to the right of LGB are same sex or both sex attracted.

I went to on Saturday too with my DD, her father, his boyfriend and some friends and their kids. We are not the ‘normal’ gay people keenly described in many posts here. While we have jobs and mortgages, we are not married, nor do we want to be. We also fully support anyone who might want to get married. Their choice. We adored the diversity we saw, the various letters of the LGBTQI unified in a climate of total fracturing. It was nice for our kids to know that there are lots of ‘others’ out there. And they loved the parade and we loved getting away for a day from another mundane Saturday of kids clubs, birthday parties and very heteronormative life.

Skipton Pride seemed to be just a sweet rainbow themed summer fete.
It was their first, bless em. Its a bit out in the sticks. The furries haven't spread that far.

I am just fed up of people talking about Pride as one event. They mean London Pride.
Of course, to many London is all that matters and only things that happen there count. In reality, there are lots of Prides happening in many Cities and Towns all around the UK. Each is different as it depends on who is organising it. Our local one is in the centre of town and the most "kinky" thing I see is men with no tops on or a few chains attached to clothing.
But no that does not count. All that counts is London and what happens there.

Well since that’s where about 9 million of the 70-odd million brits live, you have a good chance of the London event being your nearest ‘big’ event.

Thanks for confirming that only London matters and that is the only Pride you will focus on.

But it isn’t just about the actual marches, is it? It’s also about the whole rainbow month branding on everything, school assemblies about being kind or else, drag queens making innuendoes on adverts for Pride month as representative of gay people, corporate “diversity” events mandating pronouns and enforcing gender ideology on everyone.

The assumption that if you aren’t up for the corporate rainbowwashing form of “LGBTQIA++” gender ideology pronoun activism that you’re “homophobic”, even if you yourself are actually gay and the pronoun-mandating people aren’t.

@ShirleyPhallus
there was a thread from an asexual woman who said that for the past 50 years pride had stood for her

Do you remember what thread that was, I’d like to read from a fellow asexual?

What is the big deal about rainbow branding?
Drag queens have always made immuendos. As do pantomime dames. Have you ever taken your children to a pantomime? The point is that children do not understand it but the parents do.
Be kind is a good message for school assemblies and has been preached for decades. A Priest did this kind of assembly when I was at school.
I do not agree with mandating pronouns. If you want to shout about what your pronoun is go ahead. I do not care.

A lot of objections are homophobic. There is increasing homophobia on MN.

So @antelopevalley my daughter, as I posted upthread, was told in a school assembly that anyone who didn’t like Pride was “unkind” and that children at the school should like Pride. Is that okay with you for kids to be told they have to agree with a particular ideology that even many gay people aren’t signed up to? And you know full well that “be kind” is no longer some kind of neutral humanist idea - it’s now a slogan for enforcing gender ideology or else; and it’s also deeply sexist (Be Kind is all over girls’ and women’s clothes and toys but not boys.

Equally, in school the girls are regularly told to Be Kind and the boys for the most part aren’t. My DD’s school even has a special “Be Kind” remedial group for girls, where girls who are having friendship difficulties get sent to learn how to be kinder to each other! No such group for the boys, though - the boys who are having social difficulties get a lunchtime team sports club instead 🤷‍♀️

The whole mandating pronouns ideology is completely coextensive with the telling of girls and women to “be kind”. It’s no longer a neutral thing but part of the whole deal where any wrongthink is suppressed.

On the pantomime - I hate panto actually, but I’ve been to some with my daughter and no, the innuendo is considerably toned down from adult stage drag queen acts. There is a long history of cross dressing in the theatre which is not or only partly about drag, though equally it’s also often still about mocking women (for example the cross-dressed roles in classical and character ballet). There is a big degree of difference though between the milder panto form, and the “fishy”/“knockers”/“vagina” jokes in a drag act. I dislike them both, but there is a clear degree between what it suitable for children and what is definitely not.

Beautifully put. Thank you!

Ah yes - the ‘widow twanky is the same as Anna Bortion’ argument.

Kids are told they must be kind - lie, deny biology, and not complain if a boy is in the girls changing room (not even query a man in the ladies changing rooms or loos).

kids are being bullied for not using ‘right’ pronouns (article in The Times) and this includes children with learning difficulties. It’s the new ‘legitimate’ stick to beat and bully others with - be kind my backside.

Yes there is a huge increase of homophobia on MN, particularly aimed as lesbians who refuse to date males. Thankyou for pointing it out. I think it’s disgusting conversion therapy and hopefully will be banned when the new bill comes into place

@Billi77 are the lesbian and bisexual posters objecting to it — because of the homophobia of gender ideology —themselves homophobic then? How does that work?

It’s bizarre that these days straight gender ideologists get to call gay women homophobic because they aren’t on board with an ideology that targets and delegitimates lesbian women. But there you go.

Don’t you see why many gay women and men don’t like it? Being told what their identity is by the very same activists who go about saying “people are who they say they are”. (Only that seems to mean “we are who we say we are but you are also who we say you are.” It’s rank hypocrisy!)

I remember when I told my sister about male lesbians. Jesus I thought she was going to have a stroke.

She would have been prime fodder for these idiots as a child (‘boy’ clothes, haircut, toys, hobbies, etc etc etc.). thank god our parents just shrugged,” and bought her the action men and robots, blue trousers and jumpers with racing cars on them, and cropped her hair.

The sexism in your school sounds appalling.
It depends how the kind message about Pride was used. It is common to tell young children they should be kind in relation to discriminatory issues as the concepts themselves are hard ones for very young children to grasp. So if it mean they said do not use gay as an insult for example. be kind, that is fine. I do not see how a discussion of what Pride is would incorporate a be kind message.

I have already said I do not agree with people being forced to state what their pronoun is. It should be a choice. Just as Mrs, Miss and Ms should be a choice.

I am not keen on panto either. But if anyone is making fishy jokes it is the misogyny that would concern me, not the innuendos in front of children. The point of innuendos though is that they are supposed to make the parents laugh and go over the heads of the kids. Lots of kids' films make parent-aimed jokes that kids do not understand. It is simply to stop parents from getting bored shitless.

@PearlClutch I'm afraid that's how I feel-most people don't give a shit these days about people being gay and ladies like the OP- well good on them- what we don't need is a load of self obsessed drama queens dominating the agenda out there - I'm fed up of every thread turning to something about 'trans' - it's a very very small minority group- I have no problem at all with anyone who is, each to their own, I just have an issue about the amount it dominates agendas on forums and campaigning etc - if only disability, mental health, housing problems or other things that are far more prevalent were seen as quite so sexy or colourful!!!

Widow Twanky = Dixie Normous; Tanya Minge; Felicity Suxwell, Ida Slapter, Annie Rexic, Anna Bortion, Pussy Liquor and that rainbow monkey with a swinging phallus thing!

If that's what you think you had cruel parents!

Drag queens parody women.

Pantomime dames are a throwback to times when women could not be on stage

All misogyny but only one is deliberately offensive to, about women whilst pretending to adore them!

And a priest preaching be kind?!?! Maybe not the image you wanted to portray!

Be kind is a good message for school assemblies and has been preached for decades. A Priest did this kind of assembly when I was at school.

I actually slapped my forehead.

The “be kind” socialisation greases the wheels of rape culture.

Of course it does. Who benefits from little kids (girls) being socialised to ‘be kind’?

what’s your name?
…
oh go on, it’s not nice to ignore people
…
be kind
errrr Mary
ah Mary - I’m Jimmy. Can you give Jimmy a wee kiss…

Now this was more or less the way it went down when I was about 9 at the bus stop in my school uniform.

Jimmy followed me into the bus and sat behind me.

Jimmy kept asking for a wee kiss.

Jimmy went to grab my hair - only then did an old fella whack him with his walking stick.

I felt humiliated and was crying. Who the hell allows a creepy man to harass a nine year old - no one asked me if I was ok or safe???

but hey, I was ‘being kind’ by not ignoring creepy old Jimmy… he wasn’t exactly being kind was he?

"Widow Twanky = Dixie Normous; Tanya Minge; Felicity Suxwell, Ida Slapter, Annie Rexic, Anna Bortion, Pussy Liquor and that rainbow monkey with a swinging phallus thing!"

Yet somehow people take issue with Pussy Galore, the Bond girl 🙄

It’s not good enough to just say no to men. We’ll be called bitches, bigots, transphobes, TERFs if we are so unkind as to say “no, thank you”

Although, “be kind” only ever works one way. If males are so unkind as to enter female only spaces and make women feel uncomfortable, those women are still bitches, bigots, transphobes, TERFs.

As a middle aged lesbian I'm 100% with you. Although apparently I deserve to be shot for this.

You may feel perfectly happy with having male bodied people who “identify” as lesbians in a lesbian group but what about everyone else? How many of the 97/98% of women are happy with that. Could they say they were not? Or would that result in accusations of transphobia? Also I’m super curious what the organisation is if you don’t mind me asking?

I think one of the things that really bothers me about teenagers identifying as a trillion different genders, aside from the ideology itself and how this negatively impacts women and actual LGBs, is just how fucking boring and unimaginative it all is. When I was a teenager, if you wanted an identity you joined a band or went to raves or were a collector...just something that involved some creativity or thought. There is absolutely no creativity involved in putting yourself in a box and demanding that forms have a special little box for you to tick, or that corporation have name badges that display pronouns etc. This is a premade, tick box rebellion, for a screen raised generation. Why do they care so much about forms and badges, how fucking dull can you get! Write some embarrassing poetry, make some noise, put on some theatre, paint, just fucking do something that expresses your inner angst and aims at something higher than corporate practices. What a pathetic rebellion to think that a male wearing a dress and makeup alone is something revolutionary - Bowie, Cobain, Prince etc have all been there before them and y'know what, that was only one minor part of what they did because they were actual fucking artists who created things and aspired to something bigger, more important than census forms and weren't so naive as to think corporations actually give a shit about pronouns, no matter how they virtue signal. They look for reaction and want to shock, but they actually bore me shitless with it all, the endless know-it-all lectures, no diversity of opinion among them, none allowed. Get a fucking life you little cretins, Gen X are way cooler than you'll ever be so just fuck off with your pathetic little rebellion and buy an instrument.