Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, has described it, homosexuality is suspect now, because in acknowledging the reality of same-sex attraction’ it also ‘indirectly (acknowledges] the reality and importance of biological sex as a driver of attraction. And this contradicts the ‘quasi-spiritual’ crusade to ‘replace biological sex with gender identity’, she says.”
The homosexual is offensive because in only feeling attracted to people of the same sex, he or she implicitly rejects the rules of gender identity, the modern commandment that says people are whatever gender they say they are. So the lesbian that feels no attraction to a man who identifies as a woman – on the basis that he is male – is a living, breathing affront to gender ideology. She is inherently transphobic. Her refusal to accept that this man who identifies as a woman really is a woman is sacrilege, a thoughtcrime against one of the key religious mantras of the identitarian era: ‘Trans women are women.’ Her sexual preference for women – not trans women, not men, but women – is an intolerable defiance of that mantra. Her homosexuality is bigotry. Her innate being is an outrage against the new dogmas of identitarian thought.
Same-sex attraction really is being redefined as bigotry. New slurs have emerged to brand and insult homosexuals. As a columnist for the National Post says, efforts have been made to ‘brand homosexuality as a “genital fetish”‘? Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and lesbian, describes an experience where she was pointing out that lesbianism is the love of women for women, not for men, even when men identify as women, when someone said to her: ‘What is this genital fetish?”®
A BBC investigation spoke to young lesbians who said they had been branded ‘genital fetishists’ for refusing to sleep with ‘trans women’ who have penises. One was told that she owes it to her ‘trans sisters’ to ‘unlearn my “genital confusion”. In short, learn to love penises, learn to take dick. This rehabilitates the old homophobic prejudice that lesbians just need a good ‘seeing to’, that that will sort them out.
Dr Veronica Ivy, a former competitive cyclist turned author on trans issues, has openly said that “”genital preferences” are transphobic’. In other words, sex-based attraction is transphobic. Homosexuality is bigotry. Lesbianism is hate. Homosexuals who reject people of the opposite sex genuinely run the risk of being thought prejudiced. As a writer for the Observer says, ‘We are in the extraordinary position where lesbians are now being told by some activists that it is bigoted for them to say they are not attracted to trans women who are biologically male’.
Even the UK’s largest LGBTQ charity, Stonewall, now seems to believe that same-sex attraction can sometimes be a borderline hate crime. Yes, ‘sexuality is personal’, it says (very gracious, ‘but if, when dating, you are writing off entire groups like people of colour or trans people, it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attraction’.
Let’s leave aside the cynical inclusion of people of colour alongside trans people, the low aim of which is to liken homosexuals who dare to criticise gender ideology to racists. The more important point is that even Stonewall seems no longer to understand what homosexuality is. Of course lesbians and gay men ‘write off entire groups’ when they are dating. That’s because they are not attracted to people of the opposite sex. For a lesbian to refuse to date a ‘woman with a penis’ or a gay man to refuse to sleep with a ‘man with a vagina’ is not proof that they have been infected by ‘societal prejudices’ – it’s homosexuality.
Homosexuality risks being redefined out of existence. Stonewall was founded in 1989 to combat Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, which forbade schools from ‘promoting homosexuality’ – that is, same-sex attraction. Yet now Stonewall avoids all talk of ‘same-sex’. Instead it defines a homosexual as ‘someone who has a romantic and / or sexual orientation towards someone of the same gender (my emphasis).” But then Stonewall describes as ‘transphobic’ any ‘denial [or] refusal to accept someone else’s gender identity’. So if homosexuality is attraction on the basis of gender, but it’s bigotry to question a person’s professed gender, that must mean homosexuals are expected to feel attracted to anyone who claims to be the same sex as they are, even if they aren’t really. As Joyce says, the ‘logical consequence of these distorted definitions is to define same-sex attraction as bigotry’. In the past, it was ‘conservative homophobes’ who claimed that ‘homosexuality was a dangerous, counterfeit identity’, says Joyce: now that’s done by the ‘progressives running organisations that claim to champion the interests of lesbians and gay men’.
