What is the point of Pride? Douglas Murray & Julie Bindel – The View from 22 | Spectator TV

foreign [Music] ERS editorial manager in this episode we'll be discussing the topic of Pride what is its purpose why do some feel disillusioned by It While others are embraced by it I'm joined by The Spectators associate editor and columnist Douglas Murray and feminist campaigner and writer Julie bendon Julie I'd like to turn to you first you've written for spectator online multiple times about Pride you've attended Pride's marches and pride-like events um would you recall some of your earliest memories of Pride well I do remember the first Pride March I went on which is about 1980 so I would have been 18 um I traveled from Leeds to London and it was a very political occasion so it wasn't the kind of heterosexuals coming out to go up or have their own party and at that time we really really did need some very specific events for the lesbian and gay community as it kind of almost was then it was almost a kind of cohesive community because what what bonded us together was the necessity to fight for our legal rights which of course we didn't have but also for lesbians who weren't targeted by any legislation as such to fight in the family courts for example when we lost custody of our children often to Violent male ex-partners for the simple reason that we were lesbian so there was a lot there was lots happening very direct discrimination and of course we've just seen the end of the um honeymoon period in the Gay Liberation Front because the lesbians had walked out getting sick of the sexism of the men so here we are you know different century same [ __ ] anyway so it was it was good fun but I do remember thinking that we didn't quite fit together as lesbians with some of the gay men and their demands and there was a little bit of a kind of being gelled together like a broken teapot lid was that a specific Turning Point perhaps where you began noticing that that perhaps this togetherness where the community isn't quite working well actually and I don't mean this in any disrespectful or rude way to my gay brothers but we never ever asked to become lesbian and gay we had very different needs very different lifestyle choices different restrictions we were targeted by sexism as well as anti-lesbian Prejudice we were coerced into marriage of course we had male violence to contend and some of that sexism of course came from gay men we were fighting um the normalization of pornography whereas this was abundant within some gay male culture the kind of commercialized gay male culture and so we didn't ask to become lesbian and gay and that was particularly I think solidified during the campaign against section 28. later on in the 1980s where there were many gay men who were quite hysterical about it talking about there was one article I remember reading that was headlined the road to Auschwitz and it you know it was a horrific piece of legislation but please you know this was completely Beyond The Pale bearing in mind what gay men had had to concede had had to deal with prior to that in terms of being kicked out of their homes losing their jobs and of course we're talking at that stage about a peak in the um in the AIDS uh epidemic and lesbians of course had huge problems to contend with and we decided that actually we wanted to have our own March which was lesbian strength that had been organized from 1983. so we would go on Pride marches and we'd have a laugh with our gay male friends and we'd have a bit of a party because obviously gay men liked to party and then you know we'd also have our own March where we it was quite a bit more political and I do remember groups of gay men standing on the corner where our March was passing by clapping and cheering and just being really supportive and that was lovely that was really nice Douglas um can I bring you in on this topic what are your views on the grouping of lesbians gays bisexual now trans to form the LGBT well I basically say the same view as Julia which is lesbians and gay men didn't have very much in common from the outset had totally different demands totally different interests and much more uh my view and I've said this quite often in recent years is that the whole of what Dave Chappelle calls the alphabet people uh Carr has become a clown car because none of it fits together the first two letters don't fit together very well the lesbians of the gays don't have very much in common everyone's suspicious of bisexuals uh um a lot a lot of people just don't believe they exist particularly uh or at least think that it's you know buy now gay later as they used to say um then then the trans people come along they have nothing in common with any of the other people in the grouping uh because that's about the mysterious gender unicorn nonsense where you can suddenly be whatever sex you want to be depending on how you feel that morning when you get out of bed which has nothing to do with being gay or being lesbian which is certainly not a choice because who wants the choice of certainly for most of uh history making their life a bit harder so the tea people come along and help turn it into a total clown car and then you get the disaster of the the thing extending and extending until you get the asexuals uh thrown in as I always like to say there's no bigger difference in nature than that between asexuals and gay men um you get you you get in this two-spirit people or what's that it's something to do with Native Americans okay what if Native Americans uh got to do with lesbians in Brighton and London nothing at all in other words this has just become a great big messy soup of a people's mainly in recent years of people saying I want a bit of that I've objected actually to it most of my life to the whole pride thing uh mainly on taste grounds it has to be said I I don't mind I very much enjoy having a party most I don't begrudge anyone having a party I do begrudge people mistaking their sexuality for some massively important signifier which demands that other people then not just respect them but pay them some special dues and actually in actual fact you could see this so that I've stumbled across Pride a couple of times in my time I've never gone but I've stumbled across it a few times and one of the things that's on a simple matter of Aesthetics and taste that I deeply dislike is seeing a bunch of of disco gays on top of a bus waving to the public as if they're celebrities sorry love you're not a celebrity you're just gay that's all and you shouldn't treat the general public as your audience waiting for them to celebrate the Magnificent wonderful you so I think there's just this nice the narcissism at the heart of this uh and uh I've I've got no time for it and just one other quick Point uh I I actually very much Julie and I I'm sure disagree on lots of things she's uh of the political left and uh I'm not um and um I'm sure we disagree on lots of things but one thing we absolutely I think find ourselves in agreement with on is that there's a new misogyny wrapped up in this movement now and if anyone wants to see that they can see the fact and I I can't stress this enough I try to stress it wherever I go these days but I say things about trans issues which uh Julie says which JK Rowling and others say and I get absolutely no blowback I mean partly I don't care anyway but the point is is that I get no blame I don't get mad purple head Maniacs gluing themselves to the floor when I speak in public uh Julie bindle gets the threats gets JK Rowling gets some Kathleen stock gets some if anyone wants an absolute proof of this there's a a disgusting uh um website that is the result the residue of a defunct gay paper called pink news run by a pseudo-journalist called Ben something or other they have run thousands thousands and thousands of articles in recent years attacking JK Rowling basically as the devil incarnate she holds precisely the same views on trans that I do she holds precisely the same views on trans as her fellow Scottish writer Irvin Welsh does how many times has pink news attacked Irvin Welsh zero they believe and this is a very important point if I can say so the weird alphabet people clown car people believe that they should be allowed to control lesbians and gays and women in particular they believe that if we don't have precisely the locks that views they have we are traitors and the people that they believe they should have the right to control the most are women they are so disgusting these people I I of course agree the misogyny is Rife and I also haven't been on a pride March for a very very long time I got sick of the roller skating nuns and I got sick I mean no you know obviously each to their own I didn't want to see men's hairy asses hanging out of their leather chaps I just didn't and still don't and also I'm delighted to say that thank you for mentioning pink news because I did in fact sue them the definition um and we settled after 18 months of litigation where I'd love to think I handed them their ass in those chaps but to talk about the the hellish kind of clown car which is a great phrase Douglas I love that the lgbtqi two Spirit Plus now is resembling uh more of a an unbreakable Wi-Fi code than it is anything that is that speaks to a same-sex attracted people which is of course what we should be talking about we we have something in common even though you know one side of men and one side of women the gender wurus that have come in are just absolutely Bonkers and you're right that they target women they target lesbians in particular they really hate us they target women because because if you think about the clever ruse of trans activism what it's done is it's its position knee as they would say a CIS woman as the oppressor of a trans woman so therefore the oppressor class the privileged class whether you believe in patriarchy or not whether you think women are oppressed we all know that there's a disadvantage that women face in life compared to like men and we are now the oppressor of men who identify as women now Rachel dollizell wasn't allowed to do that um the white woman who masqueraded uh as having African Heritage she was not allowed in fact she was the biggest villain that had ever walked the Earth so why is that and my answer is this it's just a new men's Rights Movement but this time is populated in the main and I'm not letting the right wing off the hook for misogyny not at all but it's populated in the main by men who claim to be leftists Owen Jones for example who say that they're Progressive but I think in my mind my opinion really hate women that are too big for our boots yeah so long as they're shouting the loudest and we're in tow they don't mind but my god do they hate us feminists and they give us a good kicking via the trans ideology and the the um the slur of transphobia and I mean yeah we've all heard um and actually been asleep for for four days the latest docsfun Scandal another charity completely captured by Stonewall completely captured by trans ideology dominated by privileged kids without a brain in their heads that have left University where they haven't been taught to think critically they've been taught that thinking critically is dangerous and that they'll be finished if they do so they then go into senior positions at charity Cyclops Farm we've seen the Bedrock of misogyny there we saw that with the Haiti Scandal where there were um wealthy highly paid Consultants working for Oxfam raping children I will not call them sex workers I will not say that these men were clients there were raping children and leaving them a few quid for doing so and Oxfam I heard today from another whistleblower that there was a huge argument going on amongst the lgbtqi2 Spirit Plus lot in Delhi in India in their office about how these men in Haiti hadn't done anything wrong they had simply contributed to the local economy like going to eat at one of the local restaurants it's staggering and this this colleague who is a lesbian who's been called a CIS bigot who fights for the rights of women and that means against sexual exploitation as well she's critical of the sex industry she was called now wait for it [ __ ] phobic horror phobic for saying that men shouldn't have the right to have sex to rape vulnerable children and she was then further told that to speak out against the sex trade was transphobic in essence because many and I quote many trans women of color are sex workers so where do we go with this well I mean we literally think that they rule the roost yeah that's uh there's always a new Circle that you can look down to isn't there and that that's a great example of one Julie um I I mean groups like Oxfam have has been demonstrated this week they've all just been suffused by this this is just washed across uh the charitable sector as every other sector and and it it's partly because of course it's not just the ill education of the people that the audit is describing it's also the fact that so much of this discussion has been shut down for so long and it's part of a wider societal issue which is the again something I've talked about a lot in recent years which is the transformation of our societies from societies that uh that admire and validate heroism into societies that admire and seek to have victimhood and so the 2ia GQ plus LG uh bus people are basically a group of people who want victimhood well screw that I'm not a victim Julie's done not a victim we're not victims we don't live our lives as victims ah but there's a certain type of of heterosexual male in particular who wants a bit of the victimhood's pie they have the disaster and it is a disaster in our era to be born a white CIS heterosexual male they've got this terrifying disadvantage from the first of their life which is that they can't claim victimhood but now you can there was a a sort of low-grade lecturer at University of Oxford a few years ago who said that he was uh congratulated by a student who said it's so wonderful to see myself represented by a tutor as a queer student the tutoring question apparently I think put nail polish on or something and is married to a woman sorry you're not queer you're boringly straight you're just straight and that's fine you know know some of my best friends are straight I don't think there's anything wrong with it I think we should all Live and Let Live but this guy has realized in our era to be straight that's not enough so he's like thinks oh I'll paint my nails and then I'll call myself queer sorry and also for some of us queer isn't a nice word we didn't like you hearing that word we didn't like hearing that word from straight people when it was heard that gay people in the street and we don't like it being used by straight people who want a bit of the sodding victimhood pie and that's what we're seeing yeah I agree this is terrible I'm agreeing with Douglas all the way through this it sounds terrible it's absolutely normal you're bound to say something really offensive soon but you know I saw on the wonderful Hadley Friedman give an interview on times radio where she was talking about the absurdity of the the holy month of Pride and about how you know Oxfam with its new lgbtqi video in which it called middle-aged women turfs and just full of hate was trying to out woke itself and obviously spent quite a lot of money did Oxfam on this video and you know taking food out of the mouth of the children it's supposed to be helping but she she pointed this out and she's very funny sadly and she made really astute points instantly little talcum X Owen Jones is there saying that they now have straight people talking about Pride they have straight people denigrating our month of Pride well first of all how does he know that Hadley doesn't occasionally dye her hair blue which would make her queer and secondly what what is the cue right are they are they it's just straight men that like strangling women till they pass out are they straight men that are so queer they don't wash their car on a Sunday who are the aromantics and asexuals in what way does that make them queer I know lots of single people who can't be asked can't be [ __ ] to have a relationship maybe not even sex what on Earth does what makes them queer most of the queer identify people on that rainbow list are heterosexuals yeah with whatever Daft hair do oh and let's add one other to the list which is a totally fictitious group that call themselves non-binary means look at me look at me uh I want attention I'm coming out of non-binary and they always say oh I've got a big announcement I've really been I I mean like guys like I've been I've been like waiting for ages and I'm trying to build up the courage but I'm non-binary okay well that's about the biggest boring announcement anyone can make there is no satisfactory definition of non-binary that I've come across apart from look at me and the idea that that I mean obviously um he her they them Sam Smith uh Blair um he uh constantly announces that he's non-binary and his as Andrew Doyle said as far as we can see uh uh Sam Smith's idea of being non-binary is that he's he's a big big fat ugly bloke uh who occasionally dresses like uh a hoe and uh dances like a hoe around a pole and that's his feminine side well that's a lovely thing for all the women in the world isn't it isn't that just Charming uh um whenever you pole dance that's your that's you representing all the women in the world great work I mean this is this is the thing is this is old style you know they all think they're breaking boundaries and they're not they are reinforcing some of the most intolerably basic boundaries we ever had to contend with you know you your daughter likes blue get her on hormone therapy you know your son likes reading a girl it's so aggressive and I remember when I first started researching the topic of transsexuality as we used to be allowed to call it this was back in 2003 because I'd seen some article in a newspaper about this Brave and stunning um man male teacher that had gone back to school as a woman and that the pupils the students were all calling him Miss Jones or whatever and I thought hang on a minute is this still going on this is seen as something really Progressive and it's seen as something akin to coming out as lesbian or gay and why why is this so anyway I got on the case ended up going to a store called Transformations which was on in Houston but there were several branches around the country and what Transformations was it was a place where cross-dressing men who get a sexual kick from cross-dressing go to be dressed by these poor female shop assistants they get made up it's all online now which is a terrible shame so I spent the day at Transformations talking to the customers talking to the women they found it utterly grotesque that these Sean Connery type dudes would come in and want to wear the most ridiculous outfits that they had a police Woman's outfit they had a bridal department they had nurses uniforms I mean sexual fetish or what and you know size 12 stilettos and there was a glass cabinet with all the accoutrement on in there such as a rubber vagina for men to put over their dongers so they could um go to the Loo sitting down now this is the thing that upset me the most there were some pills that they could buy over the counter that brought on apparently symptoms feelings every month of pre-menstrual tension that's period pains for those who don't know now we spent our time as young women trying to find a cure for that these men want to experience it and the sexual stereotyping and the misogyny just in that room um was staggering and I just thought these 1950s psychiatrists that see actual gender non-conformity in other words a woman like me a man like you we do not fit the stereotypes that were set out for men and women the the whole kind of Adam and Eve stuff but that's wrong as you say Douglas that has to be corrected with the surgeon's knife the whole the whole project of feminism is to get rid of these rules in these stereotypes which is what many gay men have been arguing as well we can be as we want we don't have to conform just last week I noticed something quite interesting um a couple examples actually you had the U.S Navy who decided to change their Twitter and I believe Facebook Banner to support Pride um but in a matter of hours actually they took it down they removed it and a similar thing happened with major major league baseball I believe um what do you think is going on here why are companies and organizations toying with these Pride Flags which there are many variations of now but what do you think is going on here well if I can say first I I wrote about this a bit in a book a couple of books about The Madness of crowds uh you can actually trace the rise in this nonsense uh uh in into the absolute flooding across the mainstream to the post-2008 financial disaster um the banks the major corporations people who should have been on the line for what they did to the economy and almost completely destroying the world economy ended up discovering that a much easier way and a cheaper way uh to improve their image after 2008 was to go very very big on all the identity politics stuff you know Coots bank for instance just a single one out the Queen's bank is now covered in Pride flags at the front of the of the office and say a safe environment for all of our come on Coots has had gays working there for years it's not been a problem but they go big on it they go big on it after the the victories have been won you know I'm afraid that you know the American Military was wasn't great on gay rights up until yesterday they weren't great on gay rights when I was growing up when you couldn't be in the American Military and be openly gay um so so they all jump onto the bandwagon after it's actually effectively finished and then they've them I've said that this is like watching a train nicely pulling into its destination station and then suddenly getting ahead of steam going shooting off the tracks and off the rails and that's effectively what's happened the transformation of a pride March into a pride day into a pride week into a pride month uh you know as if this is an ancient and well-known holiday that we all respect when a bunch of poor straight people end up having to sort of wave rainbow flags and do things that gays don't do um and and and it's all the cynical corporates and the great thing that has started to happen is that we the public are on to them you know some years ago I wrote in a spectator about my bank Barclays uh you know they had this big campaign saying you know love is what a love uh happens here that was their slogan with a big rainbow I said I don't want love to happen at my bank I just don't want you to charge me extra money when I lose my back statements oh and also be quite nice if you gave some rewards for Savers but anyway they can't do any of that stuff that banks used to do but apparently I can find love at Barclays in my local branch oh but there aren't any branches anymore so it makes it even harder anyway the point is they can't do the base job they were set up to do so they do all this crap the great thing is that we the public are on to them now and that's why we've seen things like major league baseball start to reverse course because they've seen a couple of cases we've had a big one with the Dilla Mulvaney one in the U.S uh where uh Bud Light gave this endorsement to this uh trans look at me person and uh the most one of the biggest attention seekers in uh in America these days and uh Bud uh Bud shares have gone down by a quarter because people have abandoned the brand they don't like it uh same thing with Target one of the big retailers in the US they've been going huge on pride month including um swimwear for children and women that includes the opportunity to tuck your male genitalia into the swimsuit again it's the women being disadvantaged it's not happening with men's swimsuits but Target is now also as it were the target of a campaign the other way what we're really seeing is the beginning of the back Clash against this nonsense we are and it's money obviously and it's the Stonewall protection racket yeah that means that once a company or in an organization a charity an NGO whoever buys into that protection racket then they have to do all of it and of course because the flag has become more and more ridiculous every single year where they have added I mean I was torn limb from limb for saying this by some of the trans activists the trans Taliban but they are including the likes of maps minor attracted persons in other words those that want to have sex with children then I've seen as queer and they're seen and we've we know this through Academia there are at least two or three quite senior academics who have looked at the Discrimination towards those that wish to form relationships they would say and I would say sexually assault children underage kids and so they're now involved and every time I see a new stripe I think what next what now what the hell are we looking at and it has lost all meaning it's lost every single bit of political emphasis that it had and what on Earth are we we're seeing when we look at Camden Council with pink and blue the trans flag as a zebra Crossing I mean you know Kathleen stock and I set up the lesbian project but she's a bit like a think tank to look at the way that lesbians are completely ignored uh pretty much when it comes to the funding when it comes to research because we're subsumed within this atrocity of the lgbtqi lot and we had our first um brilliant meeting packed out meeting and we were picketed of course by the blue Fringe mob dancing and singing and shouting and knocking people's phones out of their hands when they went up to them to ask what they were doing and we finally got away from them we'd had a great day and they're in front of us was the rainbow flag on the I couldn't believe it we had to cross the road on that rainbow flag and I just thought it it is the world's gone Bonkers times 1028. but of course the flat of the flag went went Bonkers when a few years ago has decided to add the black and the brown Stripes which was a massive category error because it was suggested that without the black and the brown Stripes black and brown people weren't represented in the flag well of course like who did they think the yellow stripes represented or the orange ones or or the red ones or the blue ones was it the Smurfs were represented or what like people from Scotland when they've been in the Sun a bit too long like what do they think this these Stripes were at the beginning they weren't about race so that was the beginning of it but the main thing I just like to say is is this all of the all of this is about a really appalling way to limit the way in which we see people and the way in which we see ourselves uh there are no such thing as members of the lgbtqia community there is no such thing as that community and when I say this I've already explained why I think there's no such thing as that Community but there are no such thing as these people there are people who happen to be gay like me there are people who happen to be straight so what that is the least interesting thing it's about as interesting as the color of your hair and what is happening is we are telling a new generation of people apart from the fact you everyone can join the great rainbow magical unicorn people apart from that we're saying this will Define your life and it shouldn't it shouldn't it is the beginning of your life not in any way the be all and end-all of it and we are making people victims we are making them limit what they can do in their lives what they should seek to Aspire to it doesn't matter what your sexuality is you should Simply Be concentrating on doing what you should be doing in your life and doing it well Douglas can I can I just ask um what would you say to those what is your view on those people who perhaps celebrate Pride or attend Pride events because it gives them a sense of belonging perhaps because despite having legal equality there are still some stigma in society and growing up can sometimes be tough and it it does provide an opportunity for people to meet one another who have shared similar experiences there's a massive number of ways you can meet other people who've had the same experiences and you can go to a gay bar you can go on any app you can meet a group of friends you can meet A Wider Circle of people you can move to an area where there's more people like you uh uh um all sorts of things I I mean the idea that anything meaningful is achieved uh from uh the great float parade and uh Rave at the end of the day and that somehow makes the community is absolute nonsense I would say there was a sense of community at a time in the past as Julia firstly when there were specific things that needed campaigning for and there was some unity in those days including between lesbians and gays when when rights were not there but we're in the post rights struggle a part of this now and and and so you know I don't care if people want to find their meaning in a in a great float parade and day-long disc I don't care they're welcome to do it what they should not have the right to do is to say this is the only way of being gay uh I had some uh little um uh weirdo uh uh uh guy say to me on a show the other day I was with Piers Morgan and this this weirdo non-entity comedian said something he said uh he described me as being straight he said are you another CIS white straight male and I said well you've actually got that one Ron and immediately uh he said I was the worst type of gay so it's quite interesting the way these people can immediately flip you from being straight to the worst type of game but my point is I don't think these people have the rights of excommunication I don't think they have the right of representation Stonewall is a racket it is a racket that should have been shut down years ago it Opera rates like the mob it goes the politicians and saying nice career you've got here shame if anything happened to it it does the same thing with corporations Stonewall is a disgrace pink news is a disgrace these things should be defunct they do not speak for me they do not speak for Julie in fact they attack people like us and my point is we do not have the situation as gays of take me to your leader that's the worst one the take me to your leader sorry these weird malfunctioning inadequates who pretend to speak for people they don't know have no right to speak for a community they don't even understand and that doesn't in the end exist that's what I mind exactly and when I'm described as lgbtq I say how dare you first of all how can I be all those things at once I don't have the time secondly how dare you um call me anything other than my own definition of myself which is first and foremost a human being as you say Douglas and a lesbian imagine if Kathleen stock and I decided to take a little trip down to the pride March or one of the pride events we would be torn from Lim we would be absolutely vilified we would probably be attacked we'd be surrounded we'd be heckled there would be hell to pay it would be a terrifying experience and we are two lesbians who have fought for lesbian Liberation who have set up the lesbian project and who believe in the rights of women and all human beings to exist without discrimination but we would be under attack as though we were um some kind of crazed evangelists coming over to try to and all up and it would be worse Julie all of this would be done to you by the people saying love is love that's right love will love wins love wins especially when you're beating up lesbians apparently Douglas and Julie thank you so much for joining us [Music] all right [Music]

Channel: The Spectator

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Length: 36min 29sec (2189 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023