There is a new word in Newspeak’, said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949
Ididn’t go to London Pride this year. In truth, I haven’t been for years, since the early 2000s, not only because of the festival’s increasing commercialisation as a platform for corporate advertising in search of the so-called ‘pink pound’, but because of its more recent embrace of the Metropolitan Police Force and the London Mayor, who have used it to promote themselves as ‘LGBTQIA+ friendly’ while overseeing the increase in their power over us, whether that’s in new Stop and Search powers against protesters or the Ultra-Low Emission Zone about to enclose all London in its tax regime.
Now, though, I am not merely disappointed — if no longer surprised — by the failure of the increasingly apolitical gay community to resist or even question this appropriation and co-option of Pride, or concerned about how a festival of resistance and solidarity in which I was proud to participate back in the 1990s has become the enforced orthodoxy of the UK biosecurity state to which every politician, institution and public figure must pay homage and exhibit dogmatic obedience. Today, in 2023, I am directly opposed to Pride’s recent, politically dubious and morally indefensible embrace of the violence, abuse and misogyny of what has come to be known as ‘trans-rights’. In this article I’m going to discuss why.
I’ve been meaning to write this article for some time, maybe years, since the orthodoxies of trans first crept into our culture comparatively recently. It was only in January 2017 that National Geographic, then the most-read magazine in the world, put a 9-year old boy on its cover with the quote: ‘The best thing about being a girl is now I don’t have to pretend to be a boy’ (the boy later recanted).
I’ve discussed the authoritarianism of woke in my book, The Road to Fascism, and why it is now the official ideology of the West; and I’ve made reference to the link between the transhuman programmes of what I call the Global Biosecurity State — which has emerged from the coronavirus ‘crisis’ as the new paradigm of governance in the West — and the practices of trans identity, which include the use of puberty blockers on children and the promise of ‘transitioning’ from one sex to another through hormone therapy and surgical mutilation. But as these practices and the ideology driving them have become more institutionalised, particularly in our schools, I have known that I would have to write an article devoted solely to this topic.
