Gary Powell: Why the LGBT Advisory Panel should be disbanded… for good. And my plan for moving forward.

The Government’s LGBT Advisory Panel has been disbanded, with three of its august members having already flounced off last month, disappointed at the Government not doing as it was told. 

The LGBT Advisory Panel was formed as a result of Theresa May’s LGBT Action Plan of July 2018. Do you remember her? She was the one who, if she hadn’t been removed as PM, was ready to wave through transgender self-identification. Although she probably meant well, Mrs May was clearly misinformed and badly advised with regard to LGB, transgender, women’s and children’s rights issues, and her appalling plans for self-ID risked putting male-bodied boys and men into girls’ and women’s protected spaces and competitive sports. We can already see the effects of this outrage in the USA.

Can someone become Prime Minister without realising that self-ID provides the legal passport for male-bodied predatory or violent non-transgender men to pretend they are transgender in order to access women’s and girls’ private spaces? Perhaps the LGBT+ lobby within political parties has done such a thorough job at brainwashing senior politicians into believing that girls and women are not actually at risk from self-ID. Or perhaps the senior politicians know full well what the risks are that they are creating, but they don’t care.

The BBC report of 13 April advising us of the disbanded LGBT Advisory Panel decided, with the BBC’s usual pro-LGBT+ lobby bias, to quote four individuals criticising the Government and Liz Truss for the decision, with not a single person interviewed or quoted who believes this panel’s dissolution to be a very good thing.

It would not have taken much effort for the BBC to find representatives from the lesbian and gay community who would have expressed their satisfaction that the Panel had come to its natural, contractual end, and that the individuals who sat on it, unrecognised by the vast majority of the LGB community, would no longer be rasping an LGBT+ lobby agenda into the Government’s ear…

Liz Truss, the Minister for Women and Equalities, deserved congratulations for rejecting Mrs May’s reckless plans for transgender self-ID, which would have had an appallingly misogynistic outcome. It should be noted, however, that Liz Truss’s announcement on self-ID was delayed by several months, suggesting some backstage Government wobbling was going on. One cannot always be sure that our current Prime Minister is wise enough not to take advice from the wrong people. Woke people.

Secondly, the BBC should by now be aware that a large section of the lesbian and gay community has not been intimidated into craven conformity and blind Orwellian acceptance of the new LGBT+ fundamentalism. It would not have taken much effort for the BBC to find representatives from the lesbian and gay community who would have expressed their satisfaction that the Panel had come to its natural, contractual end, and that the individuals who sat on it, unrecognised by the vast majority of the LGB community, would no longer be rasping an LGBT+ lobby agenda into the Government’s ear that fuses extreme gender identity issues with same-sex sexual orientation issues (with the latter always ceding to the former, of course).

Liz Truss, the Minister for Women and Equalities

Let us be very clear about this: any coerced political programme that forces lesbian and gay people to surrender our right to meet, organise, campaign and advise on the basis of our single shared minority characteristic alone – which is same-sex sexual orientation, and nothing else – is a programme that is intrinsically and unequivocally homophobic.

As lesbian and gay people, we have an unassailable right to organise on the basis of being gay or lesbian, just as we had done for decades until self-appointed activists and cash-register charities decided to bolt extreme gender ideology on to our name, our community and our campaign. It is a measure of contempt towards all our community that this should be imposed on us with the expectation that we should cooperate with it. The outcome of this abuse to our community is something we are clearly seeing today: there is an attempt to completely erase our identity as lesbian and gay people by redefining us as “same-gender attracted”, rather than as the “same-sex attracted” people we actually are and have always been throughout history: an abuse that is further marked by the insults we now receive, where we are described as “genital fetishists” and “transphobic”, simply because we insist on our right to choose only to date people we find sexually attractive, when we are only sexually attracted to people of the same biological sex as ourselves. This is non-negotiable.

If the Government really must go ahead with a replacement, then it needs four panels to replace the dissolved alphabetical gaggle.

So good riddance to the LGBT Advice Panel: an outfit that was attempting to inject into the heart of Government this hijacking of our community and movement by extreme gender ideology. Any panel that insists on fettering lesbian and gay people to gender ideology is by definition an intrinsically homophobic structure.

Alas, the Government is very nervous about upsetting the LGBT+ lobby, and Liz Truss has declared she has plans for a replacement that will be set out in due course.

If the Government really must go ahead with a replacement, then it needs four panels to replace the dissolved alphabetical gaggle. The failure by the Government Equalities Office to properly consult women’s groups when discussing and consulting on these plans for transgender self-ID, among other things, is a disgraceful dereliction of duty and an expression of contempt towards women and girls, given how seriously extreme gender ideology impacts on their rights. In addition to a women’s panel, there should be a separate lesbian and gay panel, a separate panel for transgender-identifying people, and a separate panel representing child safeguarding: children are another group whose rights get casually thrown under the bus by extreme gender ideologues.

Four panels to replace one panel, and an end to intrinsic homophobia, misogyny, and neglect of child safeguarding represented by the structure of the previous arrangement. The LGB needs to be clearly disentangled from the T, and other key stakeholders need to be at the table rather than hanging outside from window ledges by their fingertips, their fate to be determined by the whinging Alphabettis who can never get enough of what they want.

Theresa May’s LGBT Action Plan from July 2018

Theresa May’s LGBT Action Plan was at pains to demonstrate conformity with the sacred argot: the document referred to “people assigned female at birth”; whereas, as we all know, nobody is assigned the identity of male or female at birth. Instead, babies happen to be biologically male or female, with the relevant chromosomes running through every cell like a seaside name through a stick of rock. Sex is observed, and not assigned. There is no evidence at all of male and female souls that can be discovered intuitively: and if there were male and female souls, we could never know which one we had, because we could never experience the other one to compare it with. Which is why the concept of gender is based on sex stereotypes – which, in turn, is why gender non-conforming children (many of whom are gay or lesbian) are particularly vulnerable to online gender ideology grooming, school and media gender politics indoctrination, and peer contagion.

So here is Mrs May’s LGBT Action Plan singing dutifully to the discordant tune of a dangerous child-hostile ideology. “We will improve our understanding of the children and adolescents changing their gender,” the Action Plan goes on to say. Quite an ominous sentence, you might agree. It goes on: “We will improve our understanding of issues facing non-binary people.” The hostages are cooperating, and they will believe some more impossible things before breakfast, or else we will report them to the Alphabetical Infraction Department at the BBC.

Four panels to replace one panel, and an end to intrinsic homophobia, misogyny, and neglect of child safeguarding represented by the structure of the previous arrangement. The LGB needs to be clearly disentangled from the T, and other key stakeholders need to be at the table rather than hanging outside from window ledges by their fingertips, their fate to be determined by the whinging Alphabettis who can never get enough of what they want.

Of course, no misogynistic master plan can be complete without a commitment to facilitate the instrumentalisation and commodification of women’s bodies. The LGBT Action Plan does not disappoint in this regard: “We will enhance fertility services for LGBT people”, the document declares. “Department for Health and Social Care will revise surrogacy legislation so single people (including LGBT individuals) can access legal parenthood after a surrogacy arrangement.” All surrogacy pregnancies are high risk pregnancies, both for the baby and for the birth mother. This is an exploitative transaction that normally involves lower-income women, that is fraught with risk, and that is a serious human rights violation, for both mother and child. However, the LGBT+ lobby must, of course, get whatever it demands, regardless of who else is impacted by it: and presumably many women’s groups who were excluded by the ludicrously misnamed Government Equalities Office would clearly have been able to explain the ethical unacceptability of surrogacy if the GEO had bothered to listen to them.

Mrs May, the LGBT Advice Panel, the Government Equalities Office, the LGBT Action Plan, the misogynistic and homophobic LGBT+ lobby, the parliamentary and civil service lickspittles who can’t cave in enough to all the absurd alphabetical arrogance … All of these have turned their backs on lesbian and gay rights, on women’s rights, and on children’s safeguarding. Surely it is high time that the Government stopped spending taxpayers’ money on the destruction of our rights, and the permanent disbanding of anything resembling an LGBT Advice Panel would be as good a place as any to start.

Gary Powell is a gay man and has been active in gay politics since 1980. He is the Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group and the European Special Consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture.