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

[ItsCoolForCats]

I'm starting this thread mainly so I can post this link because Maeve Halligan is a force to be reckoned with:

https://x.com/i/status/2055119527914938412

They lost the debate, which was to be expected given the state of universities on this issue, but Thea Sewell said they got a respectable number of votes. Hopefully they have planted some seeds in people's minds.

Other speakers were Buck Angel and Helen Webberley (for the other side).

Full debate is here https://www.youtube.com/live/wE0JY9d7f-w?si=4ZIVmcxyevo0DQvB

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.

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.

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 😂

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.

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

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

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.

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"

Translation: "The LGB shouldn't break away from the T. We need to stop this nonsense and get back to being all about black trans women, or just black gay men like me in general"

• 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.

@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.)

"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 😄

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>

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

I don't know why he came over all Andrew Lloyd Webber then, but it did give me a chuckle

There is a castle on a cloud
Supreme Court says no men allowed
There in my castle on a cloud . . . 🎶

Oh yeah, 100%. Two of the (many many) ironies/inconsistencies of Genderist activism:

Intersectionality matters but no one can talk about being marginalised, disempowered or abused based on their sex, which is probably the oldest and most consistent source of injustice through time and culture.

Everyone should be openminded about the huge human variety in sexuality and never kink-shame until it comes to anyone whose sexuality is sex-based, in which case it's a terrible failing they must never mention and try to get past.

Grifter of the house, doling out the charm
Ready with some hormones and an open palm
Tells a two-faced tale, makes a little stir
Customers get their bodies damaged by her

🎶

Kink-shaming is so twentieth century. Genital Fetishists should be heading every Pride parade, out, loud and proud!

Lgbt has been like this since the very start...

@SnoopyPajamas I stand in awe of your surgical dissection of the less well thought through arguments. Chapeau.

Do lgb actually want to divorce from the t, or is this just your imagination like usual?

There are quite a few LGB groups that would like to devorce from the TQ+
The LGB Alliance being the most vocal.

It would be interesting to see how many times we see posters and media saying that support for the LGBTQ+ community has gone down when they actually mean that support for the TQ+ is reducing and the LGB is being dragged down with it.

Most lgb alliance members are heterosexuals. The organisations that promote trans ideology like stonewall etc began as lgb organisations and lgb people are the ones who bankroll the trans agenda. Next!

That most LGB alliance members were hetrosexual was debunked in the court case. Next.

As for the rest evidence please.

Do u have evidence that LGB alliance is supported by any significant faction of lgb people rather than just being a loud minority? Why is it that all the TRA orgs are just repackaged LGB orgs?

For the record I am not a tra but I think lgb get off too easily for their role in this!!! Russel T Davies, Graham Norton, Stephen Fry, Ben Bradshaw, all have one thing in common!!

...that they're all men?