It was an inauspicious start to Britain’s biggest LGBT celebration.
In a social media post featuring the rainbow flag and entitled “Canmen get ovarian cancer?”, the charity Ovarian Cancer Action said it was marking the start of Pride Month by reminding its followers that “anyone with ovaries,regardless of gender identity,can be atrisk for ovarian cancer”.
Presumably, the charity was attempting to demonstrate how inclusive it was of transgender people.
However, the move badly backfired, with critics accusing the organisation of insulting women and endangering their health by obscuring the fact that ovarian cancer is a female illness.
And this is not the first time that trans-related controversies have threatened to undermine the Pride movement.
Last year, Oxfam was forced to apologise after posting an animation for Pride Month featuring a character who many said resembled JK Rowling, depicted with red eyes and wearing a badge bearing the word “Terf” – an acronym of “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” used as a slur against feminists deemed transphobic.
Such disputes may on the surface appear minor, but there are worries among those who were there in the early days of the Pride marches that they are a sign of a more dangerous malaise. They warn that transgender activism has sown bitter divisions within the LGBT community and is now threatening to derail the movement they helped to build.
“The big division has been around the idea of believing that trans women are women,’ says Simon Fanshawe, one of the founding members of Stonewall, the UK charity that takes its name from the gay-rights riots sparked by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York, in 1969.
Anyone today who questions the idea that trans women are the same as biological females is immediately branded “trans exclusionary”, he says.
And it is lesbians, in particular, who have borne the brunt of this intransigence. “As a lesbian you have to accept them into this space as women or you are not an acceptable member of the community,” he says.
“So it started to be the case that lesbians were saying at Pride, ‘Hang on, we’re lesbians, this is something that was started by gay people so we are part of it.’
“But then you would have others saying ‘No you’re not’.”
Some lesbians have even been branded transphobic for not wanting sex and relationships with trans women who still have male genitals.
Malcolm Clark from LGB Alliance, a charity set up in 2019 to defend gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the face of Stonewall’s stance on transgender issues, says matters have deteriorated to the point where even original organisers of the first Pride marches are now being excluded for challenging trans ideology.
He cites the example of Fred Sargeant, one of the leaders of the seminal 1970 march in New York, who was attacked when he attended a Pride parade in the US state of Vermont in 2022.
The veteran gay rights campaigner was targeted for carrying a sign bearing phrases including “No Blackface, No Womanface”, suggesting that trans women are parodying females in the same way white people create an offensive racial parody when they wear make-up to look black.
“Fred went to a Pride march in his local state about two years ago and he was attacked, with coffee thrown over him.” Clark says. “That really tells the whole story of what’s happening now.”
Sargeant confirms Clark’s description of his recent experience at Pride, saying he has become increasingly disappointed at the “rewriting” of LGB history and the treatment of women.
A year before the 2022 event at which he was attacked, he attended the 2021 march in Burlington, Vermont, wearing a “Woman: Adult Human” T-shirt and holding a “Gay Not Queer” sign.
“The following September I went again with a new sign, ‘No Blackface No Womanface’. This time I was physically attacked and, when I wouldn’t end my First Amendment-protected demonstration, I was finally pushed to the ground by the group.”
Back in the UK, Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP, has spoken of how she no longer feels safe to attend Pride – despite making her first speech as an MP at the annual event.
Duffield, who has long highlighted the clash between the rights of women and those demanded by trans activists, has even decided not to participate in her local hustings for the general election because of the chilling threats she has received over her gender critical stance.
“The constant trolling, spite and misrepresentation from certain people – having built up over a number of years and being pursued with a new vigour during this election – is now affecting my sense of security and wellbeing,” she said last week.
Tanya de Grunwald, a human resources commentator, said companies, too, have been criticised for giving in to pressure from younger LGBT employees to support trans activism in the name of Pride.
“Employers have sold this message of ‘Bring your whole self to work’, so all this identity stuff came in,” de Grunwald says.
“So the thought of companies like [a multinational conglomerate] or a big law firm not doing anything for Pride has become unthinkable.
“But the problem now is how companies show they are supporting their LGBT colleagues while steering clear of what they know is the most controversial piece of this, which is the trans activism.”
Meanwhile, the clash between lesbian and trans rights has become so pronounced that one group of women has felt compelled to set up a grassroots campaign called “Get the L Out”, to protest at Pride events.
In recent years its members have attended parades in cities across the UK, carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Lesbians don’t like penises” and “Transgenderism erases lesbians”.
Liane Timmermann, a member of “Get the L Out”, says: “Pride was previously a political movement for lesbians and gays and then it was totally hijacked by this gender-identity movement.
“Trans activists have got higher up on the Pride board and it’s just become shocking.
“Lesbians who are same-sex attracted are not welcome at Pride now.”
Timmermann adds that, initially, Pride organisers were uncertain how to handle the group.
Members of the lesbian rights group were gently asked to leave one London Pride event, she says, but were ultimately allowed to stay because it would cause more disruption to forcibly eject them.
Pride in London, which did not respond to questions from The Telegraph, said at the time, in 2018: “They demanded to march behind the rainbow flag, which marks the official start of our parade. We did not allow that as we did not want to legitimise them or their message.”
However, as time has gone on attitudes have hardened. In 2022, police stepped in to remove the campaigners from Cardiff Pride after they were judged to be stoking a “confrontation” with transgender attendees.
And this schism within the LGBT community over trans ideology is set to widen. On June 29, the day of London’s annual Pride march, Jenny Watson, a 32-year-old lesbian activist, will hold an alternative rally in the capital, because she believes that the main event no longer represents women like her.
Similar to the members of “Get the L Out”, she feels that it has become dominated by the transgender movement and a growing number of men in “hypersexualised” outfits.
“Pride used to be simple and fun,” says Watson, who went to her first march at 18.
“But it’s just turned into this sexualised circus with men in bondage gear or wearing ball gags and lots of women just don’t feel comfortable to be there.
“I got so fed up with the behaviour of these men, I thought we deserve to have our own march.”
Fanshawe, who began attending Pride marches in the late 1970s, admits that watching the trans debate splinter the alliances which originally propelled the fight for LGBT rights has left him with “a great deal of sadness”.
Mourning the state of the Pride movement, he says: “It’s either a thing that welcomes everybody, which is inclusive and allows different views across this great sprawling mass that’s the gay and lesbian community.
“Or it’s got a single political view about a particular issue and if you don’t toe that line then you can’t come to the party. And that’s increasingly what’s happened now.”
