Why is there 'no LGB without the T'?

[Righthandcider]

Something’s been going around my head in circles.

I’ve seen the mantra ‘No LGB without the T’ repeated in several places.

But exactly why have so many LGB organisations aligned themselves with trans hook, line and sinker? I mean one might argue that well-meaning LGB groups have been sucked in by TRAs who are blatantly piggy backing, borrowing the legacy of the gay liberation movement to shut down any debate by making it seem backwards and ‘phobic’ to question them in any way. But LGB groups themselves obviously don’t see the relationship this way. Most of them don’t seem to think they’re being used.

So what is it that they think they have in common with trans activists? Isn’t there a bloody huge elephant in the room? LGB rights are about ensuring nobody is treated differently because of their sexuality. That's literally what unites lesbian, gay and bi people.

I thought the party line for trans rights is that being trans is separate from and independent of a person’s sexuality. It’s simply about whether they feel they are male, female, neither or both.

So where’s the overlap? Why are LGB groups giving their energy to fighting for the ‘T’, to the point of saying there’s ‘no LGB without it’, if it’s not about sexuality?

Is it because they actually feel deep down that it IS about sexuality?

That it’s partly about same sex attraction, in that a lot of gay people still feel the pressure of homophobia and would rather be transed out of it?

That it’s partly about autogynaephilia, in that many cross dressers can now hold their heads high as stunning and brave better versions of 'cis' women, while enjoying the fulfilment of their ultimate sexual fantasy?

If it’s not either of those things, then where exactly is the natural connection between LBG and T? The only explanation I’ve seen anywhere is that ‘they are another marginalised group’. But there are many other marginalised groups, so why join with this one in particular?

I’m interested to hear people’s views.

So in the 1990s was when the word ‘trans’ as an umbrella/forced teaming term was being concocted by Press for Change, it wasn’t widely adopted until much later.

And more specifically, this was a thing going on inside the trans movement itself, and not anything to do with the LGB movement (who were largely still only really including transsexuals on the basis that they were homosexual).

Yeah, just to add that the T was only added to LGB when Ruth Hunt took over at Stonewall, in 2010. I was at uni and out as a lesbian in the early 90s and T didn't exist, except as transsexual which was overwhelmingly about straight men with cross-dressing fetishes.

there's a heap of people who haven't questioned the move to genderist politics so staunchly support the T in LGBT.

This is exactly what I've observed with one of our teens. He hasn't questioned it. He has accepted it blindly and gives it no critical thought because that would be transphobic.

Not only has he blindly accepted that people can actually change sex, like communion bread turning into the body of Christ, but he has blindly accepted the 'fact' that anyone questioning any aspect of this subject hates trans people and wants to banish them from the face of the earth.

That's partly what makes me wonder how we'll ever get through this mire.

So many people (businesses, universities, corporations, government, the NHS etc etc) swallow without question not only what the TRAs are saying - but also what the TRAs claim GC people are saying.

They don't read or listen to anything first hand to find out what we're actually saying and what's behind it. They don't know what JKR has actually said - just what she's vaguely accused of having said
.

They only ever see any GC views second hand, after they've been bent out of all recognition by a trans rights reframing process.

I do think that section 28 in the 1990s was a bedrock for the modern movement though.

The whole banning of "promoting homosexuality" by allowing it to be discussed and allowing people to share their own sexuality and realise it was entirely normal was disgusting and rightly people now realise how wrong it was.

As a backlash, now we encourage people get to talk openly about any aspect of their identity and TRAs have exploited that by creating false equivalence between gender identity and sexuality - "I was born this way" and "conversion therapy"

Yes, back in 1994 a small group of transsexuals and transvestites in the US and then the UK started thinking about how they could create a rights movement and came up with the trans umbrella. This was in the context, remember, of the PIE being wound up a decade previously — but the members of PIE were still around. They may have drawn up the trans umbrella, but it was confined to a very small number of people until Stonewall adopted it.

In the 70s Women's Studies had become a thing in universities. By the late 80s Women's Studies was being taken over by Gender Studies and queer theory began to spread. Many more men began to see how it could be used to undermine feminism. Around the same time the Third Wave feminism (be kind to men) began to creep in and undermined second-wavers. Suddenly, in my late 30s after working all my life with women who were proudly feminist, I was training young female graduates who didn't want to be called feminists and who thought I was a dinosaur...

I think the whole Section 28 thing has been breathed a new lease of life in the retcon history. I hear a lot of young people talk about it in a voice that makes them think they sound really right-on and informed, but there is a lot of ignorance and confusion around it too. They seem to conflate it with homosexuality being illegal and if you go onto the Wikipedia page, look at this ridiculous background:

Background

Male homosexuality had been illegal within what is now the United Kingdom for centuries, with laws on sodomy having first been passed as the Buggery Act 1533 by Henry VIII in England. This was later compounded upon by the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28

Section 28 was about what was being taught in schools - nothing to do with homosexuality being outlawed by Henry VIII. The GLF scared the horses by vowing to do away with the nuclear family, and child safeguarding spidey senses went into overdrive with a little girl being photographed in bed with two naked men in the children’s book ‘Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin’, it put the Tories on the defensive.

After S28, there was so much good work to win hearts and minds - civil partnerships so that gay/lesbian couples could be next of kin and so on.. Gay Pride events that were fun and subversive, maybe it was the circles I moved in, but gay culture was very much at the hub of youth culture.

It was so fucking weird when Stonewall put out that poster saying ‘Some people are gay. Get over it!’… Yeah duh I, and everyone else knows that.

Who was that poster addressing? Who were all these imagined homophobic bogeymen?

None of my peers at school during s28 were openly gay but my children have many gay peers.

Gay people I know my age came out much older and were very concerned about how it would be recieved.

It is not "retconning" to recognise that the world for gay people in the UK today is very different to when s28 was in place

What's your motivation in denying this?

I had an ‘out’ gay friend at school in the equivalent of year 9 in the 80s.

Yes there was a lot of homophobic bullying if boys didn’t seem tough, but my friend was so out, so effeminate and unapologetic, that he was totally left alone.

Having said that, no one came out as lesbian until after they’d left secondary school.

the world for gay people in the UK today is very different to when s28 was in place

What difference does it make what you can ‘promote in schools’. That’s all it covered. Schools. What teachers were allowed to teach. How did that impact on anything?

In my school, at the time of S28, we had openly lesbian and gay teachers and there was even a support group for lesbian and gay parents and lesbian and gay teachers to get together. I don’t really know what form it took, just that my mate’s mum went to it.

There is a concerted effort to make out (to retcon) that it was like the times of getting Alan Turing chemically castrated or something.

Telling kids they can have a healthy and fulfilling relationship with someone of the same sex, and thereby “pushing them down the route” to doing so, leads them into a life where they won’t be able to naturally produce children with their partner, doesn’t it?

Few people now think that’s a good argument for not telling children they can have a healthy and fulfilling relationship with someone of the same sex.

Gay activists are aggressively attacked by Transactivists. There's no way the two are bedfellows, or could ever be.
genevievegluck.substack.com/p/trans-activist-who-shut-down-gender?utm_source=substack&publication_id=322259&post_id=96649593&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true

As a lesbian, I want no part in a movement which is so authoritarian, and is inextricably linked with unethical or outright paedophilic activity.

It is not "retconning" to recognise that the world for gay people in the UK today is very different to when s28 was in place

We just about got to a place where gay and lesbian folk were able to be better received by most people in the UK. Homophobia still exists but is less acceptable.

Now, though, we are in a culture where being gender non-conforming (and often gay) is being sold as trans. This would be harmless if not for the deeply regressive beliefs about sex stereotypes, the puberty blockers and the surgery that come as part of the package.

As a lesbian, I want no part in a movement which is so authoritarian, and is inextricably linked with unethical or outright paedophilic activity.

Me either.

Nor a movement that believes caring about other people's consent and believing that you should not involve and use non consenting others in your sexual experiences is at best pearl clutchy and old, and at worst repressive and hateful.

Or that my primary job as a homosexual female is to get my knickers off and learn to spread them and tolerate any male who claims a subjective view of their inner self and feels entitled on those grounds to sexual pleasure from me. (See: other people's consent is boring, old and irrelevant)

I want nothing to do with something this selfish, this utterly uncaring about others, which seeks to separate the world into those who take without conscience and those who serve and had better not dare complain or have feelings about it.

And which is openly homophobic.

Why is there 'no LGB without the T'? Because the LGB are incredibly useful to the T and have been broken down for parts to feed a political agenda that increasingly proves not only that it has no conscience and no care for the harm it does to anyone in its path, but also that it lacks any capacity for such.

Exactly. Why do you think that was. Section 28 wasn't responsible but it was implemented in reflection of a culture that was still hostile to gay people. People genuinely thought if you "promoted gayness" then you could turn people.

Also worth remembering Section 28 was the conservatives playing to their voters at that time - not us, at school, and not necessarily our parents but our grandparents. Who grew up when homosexuality was illegal.

The false equivalence is that TRAs are saying we want to make self ID harder as we are worried about turning children trans. Whereas it's demonstrably about safeguarding.

I also think for a lot of gay men especially , they remember a time when "gay = possible paedophile" and dismiss womens concerns around safeguarding as similar.

Further to the S28 issue. It was a ruling about schools and teaching, limiting what could be taught to children, nothing more.

I think it is no coincidence that currently, this is bizarrely retconned to be seen as the lowest point in LGB history, when right now our schools are being flooded with inappropriate materials, discussing adult sexuality with kids, by the same activists who are re-writing history.

We know that PIE and equivalents hung on the coat-tails of LGB.

I think it is part of the whole master plan- Preempt any criticism of what they are pushing in schools, by saying “this is just like Section 28, the darkest, lowest point in human history” (when safeguarding concerns about what is appropriate to teach kids about adult sexuality was last legislated for), so it makes safeguarding concerns seem to belong to the realm of Mary Whitehouse dinosaurs. So now you have all these well-meaning teachers normalising inappropriately sexual conversations with kids so they don’t seem like homophobic ‘Section 28 advocates’. Kids are having their boundaries eroded by teachers in such a way that primes them for abuse.

You're ignoring the fact that Section 28 overlapped with the AIDS epidemic which really did make gay men pariahs to a lot of the general public. I used to have an HIV+ contact with whom I sometimes worked. He told people he worked with that he was HIV+ out of courtesy. He was at first isolated into a separate office to work alone and banned from using the kitchen and loos at work, then sacked. Colleagues told him to hurry up and die. (He didn't, he's still alive).

None of the LGB teachers I knew were out at work and would avoid time in the staff room with all the chitchat and questions about boyfriends and husbands. One of my gay male acquaintances was a regular 'boyfriend' for several of us when it came to Christmas work dos because yes, I was undercover some of the time too.

So, no chemical castration, but some really worrying and scary times. Look up what happened to Michael Boothe. Read about Colin Ireland and Dennis Neilson, who preyed on gay men. The Admiral Duncan bombing. You seem anxious to minimise what for many LGB people was a really bad period. And that was without 13% interest rates...

Yes, AIDS was a dark time, but there was a concerted effort to change the narrative and I think it was very successful. Public health campaigns made it look like straight women were the ones who were most likely to contract HIV, to the point gay men, who were most at risk couldn’t get appointments to be tested, Princess Diana was photographed shaking hands with an AIDS victim. There was definitely a very successful campaign to change the pariah status. On the other hand I know Boy George, George Michael, Freddie Mercury, etc, weren’t out at the time, times have definitely changed as to whether it is career-damaging to be out, so there has been a lot of movement in that regard.

However, I know it is bollocks to make out that Section 28 made life tough for lesbians and gay men. It was what was being taught in schools, that was it. It made no difference to an adult’s life if they were not a teacher.

The climate beforehand was that pedophiles were saying they were gay as a way to get access to kids in children’s homes:

“In the comprehensive report which was finally published three years after the first London Evening Standard story appeared, Ian White, who is now the social services director of Hertfordshire, wrote: “We were told that managers believed they would not be supported if they triggered disciplinary investigations involving staff who may be from ethnic minorities or members of the gay community.” Many of the 22 against whom allegations were made were from these groups, in particular gays. Much of the abuse resulted from the fact that there was an overemphasis on recruiting people who called themselves gay but were in fact paedophiles. White concludes that positive discrimination allowed staff to exploit the children in their care for their own purposes.”
https://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2000/10/forgotten-children-the-background-to-the-childrens-homes-scandals/

So it wasn’t the Mary Whitehouses of the world who are to blame for there being a move to protect kids from gay men, it was the predatory pedophiles who were able to use the political gains of lesbians and gay men who are to blame.

The threat to women’s rights does not, repeat does not come from genuine Ts. It comes from men.

Well yes, this is the whole point. This is what womens rights groups have been saying all along. This is what they are saying NOW about the GRR.

But every time they do, TRAs jump in and claim it's about them. THEY are the ones saying transwomen are dangerous!

Women are saying, very simply, men are the risk so please allow us to keep our sex segregated spaces. That's it. Why are TRAs so against that?

Why do TRAs want to open all spaces to men, especially those spaces where women and children are vulnerable. What good reason is there is remove safeguarding for all?

If men are the risk, why do TRAs want to invite them into female spaces?

I know that this is slightly off topic, but see how this vague allusion to S28 being so awful - the retconning- is used constantly to push this agenda: “smears about being “danger to women”, “predatory” , “converting young people” exactly the same tropes they were levelled at gay & lesbian people a generation ago.”

I feel it is may be an appropriate moment to share this meme again. Kind of says it all.

Although Wikipedia is pretty useless, it did provide these facts about Section 28:

“It was in effect from 1988 to 2000 in Scotland and from 1988 to 2003 in England and Wales.”

So it was basically just the 1990s. I do recall watching the news with my dad when a woman got into the newsroom shouting “stop clause 28!” and I asked about it and I remember talking to teachers at school, before it became Section 28.

However, the idea that the 1990s was some terrible time for gays seems beyond ridiculous to me. I was there. It was a terrible time for women, for sure - the the mainstreaming and normalising of the sex industry and cruel sexist banter, retro sexism, lads and laddettes. But when it came to the LGB, blokes were becoming ‘metrosexuals’ ie- copying the styling of gay men, there were so many gay and lesbian pubs and clubs all over London, the medication for AIDS meant that people survived, yes, I remember the nail bomber attacks, but the first was in Brixton and the perpetrator was a lone extremist, it wasn’t part of a pattern of homophobic attacks or anything.

Basically, all this ‘dark days of Section 28’ falsification of history is targeted propaganda, in my opinion, and I mistrust anyone who repeats these lies.

Perfect!

lol what?