Professional Judy: Today’s Prides are “spitting in the faces of the brave men and women who marched for our rights at a time when Pride marches still had value, purpose and relevance.”

As open letters go the one promoted by the UK Pride Organisers Network to Pride groups around the country was as shameful as it was deceitful. Instead of celebrating LGB Alliance gaining charity status following a lengthy investigation that cleared them of being an anti-trans hate group, the Network sought instead to repeat the same lies and untruths that the Alliance were cleared of.

Baruch Spinoza said that pride is ‘pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself’, and Charles Caleb Colton said that ‘there is this paradox in pride – it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.’ UK Pride Organisers Network (UKPON) certainly do think very highly of themselves and in the process made themselves look utterly ridiculous with their attacks on the only UK charity focused on the needs of same-sex attracted men and women. Attacking the very people who founded the Pride marches and, in the process, spitting in the faces of the brave men and women who marched for our rights at a time when Pride marches still had value, purpose and relevance.

The issue with this is not just the attacks on a charity that caters for three quarters of the amorphous LGBT community. It’s not even that with this incredibly tone-deaf response the reality is becoming clearer that the legacy LGBT+ organisations are nothing more than a front. The issue is that the accusations of bigotry and hate are presented without evidence, and made so freely, and inevitably boil down to the fact that we will not swallow the anti-scientific codswallop of gender identity.

We know where our journey started; we remember the paths we have taken. We refuse to let those who led the way for us be forgotten, and we understand the courage and sacrifices we took as lesbian, gay and bisexual people to get our freedoms and our protection.

It seems obvious that they are keen to suppress the counter voice to their well-funded dogma. A counter voice that is reasserting the simple and basic fact that sexual orientation – bi, gay and straight – are based on which of the two human biological sexes someone is attracted to and which sex you are. With this stunningly simple fact, there is no need to attend three-day workshops hosted by blue haired evangelists with neo pronouns who inform you that we have been getting sex wrong for the last 700,000 years, and yet we are all still none the wiser.

We refuse to suffer the “lesbian with a penis”, or the “gay man with a bonus hole” or the accusations of having a “genital fetish” – and there is our crime. We have something they do not. We have a strong sense of who we are. We know where our journey started; we remember the paths we have taken. We refuse to let those who led the way for us be forgotten, and we understand the courage and sacrifices we took as lesbian, gay and bisexual people to get our freedoms and our protection.

We have pride.

Who do these Pride groups think they are speaking for? Did they canvas the opinions of those LGB people in their areas? What are they doing to progress the rights and freedoms of LGB people? Where are their voices regarding the Tavistock scandal? Do they even mean anything to LGB people these days?

UK Pride Organisers Network letter about LGB Alliance asking for local Pride signatories (published on Twitter). 

These groups have been dining out on our LGB Pride events of old and are drunk on the vanity that comes from their position as self-appointed leaders of our community. They have unilaterally decided to cast out the “Bad Gays” and banish them for the crime of being proudly homosexual, and along with them the “Bad Bis” for their crime of not believing there are more than two sexes. But theirs is a pride that dines on vanity, and in doing so it sups on contempt.

That is why LGB people are increasingly asking why we should have anything but contempt for these abject failures of community cohesion. These are people who have long ago ditched any pretence to live up to the values that the Pride marches of old represented, the marches where LGB people stood up for our rights and our freedoms. Where we demonstrated that we are not the perverts and genital fetishists that we were painted as in popular culture, where we showed that we are not a sinister conspiracy trying to overthrow the very nature of reality itself and coming after their children. We marched to say to straight people that we are just as “Good As You” and that all we want is the right to live our lives free from stigma and shame.

London’s ‘Gay Pride Week’ march in 1979

These days Pride marches appear to be more about having a massive piss up with some of the most cringeworthy and shame inducing people I have ever seen. They seem to be more attended by straight people bringing their children to view what has become a modern day freak show of people in full gimp gear, pup fetishists, furries, and ‘queers’ whose only oppression seems to be their neon green hair and pierced tongues, and that they’re going to have to wait until they are 25 before they can access the trust fund. Perhaps when they do their first purchase might be a bar of soap and a couple of bottles of Domestos?  

Go ahead and cancel me right now.

What a slap in the face of those that marched before us under a banner of equal rights for ordinary people who just happen to be same sex attracted to be looked down upon and told we are not welcome. It is blindingly obvious how little these groups have actually done over the last five years to progress the voices of LGB people as we watch on in horror at the deathly silence from them on the constant stream of homophobia and biphobia we face in the name of the cult of gender identity.

It has been said that pride comes before a fall, well look no further than the open letter from UKPON regarding LGB Alliance gaining charity status to see how far our ‘community’ has fallen.