Caron Lindsay

Lib Dem, Green and Labour LGBT organisations condemn transphobic protest at Pride

By | Sat 7th July 2018 - 9:39 pm

This morning I said I was excited about Pride in London today. Unfortunately, it has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons after a small number of transphobic protesters were allowed to march at the front and hand out transphobic literature to the people lining the streets. From the Huffington Post:

Organisers of the most “diverse” Pride event in London have hit back at accusations it allowed a group of anti-transgender activists to lead the parade through the capital on Saturday.

The small group, which reportedly only consisted of about 10 people, are believed to have carried signs with slogans such as “trans activists erase lesbians” and distributed leaflets stating “a male can never be lesbian”.

And here’s some more reports from Twitter:

The idea that someone’s rights must be the expense of someone else’s comes straight from the divisive rhetoric of the likes of Nigel Farage. And like Nigel Farage, a relatively small group of trans-exclusionary radical feminists are getting a disproportionate amount of air time, much of it complaining that they are being cut out of the “debate.” There’s a lot of their rhetoric which puts me in mind of the horrid homophobia I came across in the 80s.

A recent Stonewall report into trans people’s lives found that 40% had suffered hate crime in the last year and a third had suffered discrimination in their daily lives. These figures should worry liberals and we should be doing our best to stand up against it.

There is no conflict between women’s rights and transgender rights for the very obvious reason that women can be any combination of cis, trans, lesbian, heterosexual, of all races and religions (or none of the latter). Most women just work together for the good of everyone but there are a few who want to spread hate and there should be no place for that in any organisation which advocates equality.

LGBT+ Liberal Democrats condemned the protest and Pride in London’s reaction to it:

And there was a bit of cross-party consensus:

As a reminder, Party President Sal Brinton has written for us about how transgender rights are core to Lib Dem values. For the avoidance of doubt, trans women are welcome in women only spaces in the Lib Dems.

Our definition for those who are eligible for AWS is based on the self definition of candidates when they ask to go on to the approved candidates list (which can be updated if their circumstances change by sending a formal request to the candidates office to change their equality and diversity form). We respect the view of the individual as to their gender – it is core to our values – and we’ll continue to do so.

Pride in London needs to sort itself out after today. The very minimum they should do should be a very fulsome apology and an assurance that this will never be allowed to happen again.

Pride should be an inclusive, fun, fabulous, joyous celebration and should not be marred by anti-trans bigotry.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

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6 Comments

  • Jennie 7th Jul '18 - 9:56pm

    ♡♡♡♡♡

  • OnceALibDem 8th Jul '18 - 12:42pm

    Pride in London seem to have a lot of questions to answer. At the very least why they didn’t have any sort of contingency plan in place for any attempt to disrupt the parade give that this involved he massive number of 10 people.
    https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/07/07/pride-in-london-says-parade-set-off-as-planned-amidst-condemnation-of-anti-trans-lead/

  • Lorenzo Cherin 8th Jul '18 - 8:11pm

    I have and do have disagreements with Caron and even Jennie when it comes to style or substance we all disagree when necessary. But the article from Caron and comments from Jennie are terrific.

    I was on the left once or actually on the right of a left party, Labour. The behaviour of these TERFS as called, is like the farther left of socialist organisations, to get them to agree anything other than their disagreement with nearly everyone, is not worth the effort of engaging. To alienate the T in LGBT, by those so called identiying with L, is typical of the extremes of a politics that I rejected years ago in my obvious preference for this party.

  • clive englisjh 9th Jul '18 - 11:46am

    It is certainly an odd definition of feminism that TERFS have. I thought the point of Feminism was to argue we are not all defined by our external genitalia that we can have diverse hopes, and dreams. Clearly not in the land of the TERFS perhaps they should be re-branded as the last defenders of Patriarchy.
    Certainly they should not be spreading hatred at Pride events.

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