How ‘The Light’ promotes transphobia and homophobia

[Note – as of 22nd June 2024 we had produced an updated leaflet with more examples from “The Light” paper since publication of the article below on 30th May 2022)

By Hannah Boss, member of Community Solidarity Stroud District.

The Light has published articles by many homophobic and transphobic people. It also gives credence, through praise and through web links, to groups and people that promote hate and mistrust of anyone that falls outside of their blinkered ideology. The origins of some of the myths that The Light supports are based in the rhetoric of the Religious Right from the USA about Black people, later extended to gay men, then further to other non-heterosexual and trans people. Here, I examine more fully the issues outlined in our leaflet The Light: Promoting transphobia and homophobia.

Community Solidarity respects all folk of all genders and sexualities. We accept trans and non-binary people are authentic and we note the continued media coverage of LGBT+ issues that is often overtly discriminatory or, at best, poorly researched. Community Solidarity understands that this coverage enables further marginalisation, harm to these groups and even hate from people regardless of political affiliations. In this article we look at The Light specifically, because this is a paper that some people locally have decided they should hand out on our High St.

Vernon Coleman writes for every issue of The Light. This not only makes The Light an exceptional platform for him, but shows its tacit approval of Coleman’s toxic views. In 1989, the year that over 300,000 people had AIDS and an additional 5-10 million HIV (1), Coleman declared AIDS the “hoax of the century” in his Sun newspaper column as it would not be of significant risk to heterosexuals (2). He continues to downplay the threat of AIDS and HIV. Coleman, even now, states that not everyone that has AIDS also has HIV (3). This is categorically untrue (4). Whilst there are, undoubtedly, issues with the way in which pharmaceutical companies function to make money from suffering, by trying to separate two entities there is a danger that those who are HIV positive may be less likely to take antiretroviral drugs, and we know that these drugs prevent AIDS and, by extension, prevent spread. An illustrative case is that of three year old Eliza Jane Scovill who died of HIV-related illness after her mother passed on the virus in her breast milk (5). The mother did not did not take antiretroviral drugs for her HIV having started to follow the works of Peter Duesberg, a prominent HIV/AIDS-denier who, like Coleman, spreads unevidenced conspiratorial theories about HIV and AIDS. I have friends who witnessed a lot of AIDS-related deaths in the 1980s and I have friends with stable HIV thanks to antiretroviral medication. They are all upset by The Light’s insistence on platforming Coleman who has always maintained that AIDS is not a problem for heterosexual people primarily, and maintains that, as a syndrome, does not need treating.

David Icke is an internationally-known spreader of conspiracy opinions and his media outlet, Ickonic, is advertised and promoted in the Light. His antisemitic credentials are well documented (6). But, as with many of the folk that silo people into groups to assign whatever ‘faults’ they conveniently wish to assign them, homophobia and transphobia are never far behind. A search for Icke and Transgender takes you to a page of trans stories, hand-selected by Icke, to show his version of events (7). He links to stories that appear innocuous enough in some cases by the fact he simply pastes in bare facts, but then urges you to look further at the story by linking you to, typically, Russia Today or Mail on Sunday. One of the links takes you to a story from the US that states “government wants to force doctors to chemically castrate kids” (8). Trans youth taking hormones are not going be sterilised, this is an old transphobic trope (9), but it is very sad and unsurprising that these people think that a teen’s future fertility is of higher importance than their suicide prevention (10).

The homophobia is a little more open in issue 10. According to this article taken directly from the Epoch Times (a Chinese/American pro-Trump publication), a pastor, Artur Pawlowski, was arrested in relation to street preaching. As with the case of Graham Hart who was jailed for inciting racial hatred (which we covered previously), The Light’s article neglects to mention the key facts of the case in order to generate sympathy for someone who is clearly spreading hate. Pawlowski had already been warned on several occasions against street preaching in respect of his homophobic and anti-Muslim rants, and his anti-Pride protests. He publicly condemned the 2SLGBTQ+ community for flooding in his hometown of Alberta, and he has supported a number of far-right causes (11, ‘2S’ refers to the ‘two-spirit‘ term used by some North American indigenous communities to describe ‘third-gender’ or ‘gender-variant’)).

Issues 8 and 19 have articles by Joan Ginsburg. She presents some rather muddled arguments to support her view that children should not be allowed to explore gender concepts; she writes that the parents who allow their children to explore gender are abusers and that parents’ rights are “diminishing”. She supports, and has spoken at a rally for, the Public Child Protection Wales group that campaigns against compulsory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) on the school curriculum. A harmless enough sounding group (who would not want to protect children?), but they appear quite fixated on gender and LGBT+ relationships. The RSE curriculum is not without fault, but what it does not do is shut parents out. In fact, involving parents appears to be central to it (12). It seems that what Ginsburg really objects to is the child coming home with more open and inclusive ideas than their carers hold, and the carers’ perceived loss of influence in these matters. This is not about protecting children, it is about enabling unsupportive parenting, a restriction on information for children, and policing children’s freedoms.

Ginsburg’s views do not come from a place of evidence; she says that children in Scotland are being allowed to choose their gender. No, they are being allowed to choose their pronouns. No one gets to ‘choose’ their gender. Experimenting with pronouns is a harmless way for children to explore their identities. She even ends an article by promoting Paul Diamond, a barrister who is often found supporting those who object to equalities.

Online, Ginsberg comments: “Puberty blockers usually lead to surgical transitioning with the result that young people are being maimed and sterilised before they have even had their first kiss… this experimental medication” (13). Firstly, puberty blockers do not ‘sterilise’. This is a standard transphobic trope (14). Secondly, Ginsberg uses the myth that a person has to have had surgery to be trans. Thirdly, Ginsberg’s statement deliberately creates an illusion of young people and surgery coming together. Whilst it is not, strictly speaking, illegal for an under-18 to access gender-affirming surgery in the UK (otherwise, parents and medics would not be able to mutilate children born with ‘ambiguous’/intersex genitalia), it is not possible to do so for the purposes of affirming gender in the case of coming out as trans (15). Fourthly, puberty-blockers and the use of gender-affirming hormones are not ‘experimental’. They have been prescribed to children for over 40 years for precocious puberty. That they are ‘experimental’ is another fictional cliché, commonly used by transphobes. Her comments are in response to a video that argues that the opening up of the gender and sex debate is part of some undercover “androgynous, dystopian future”. This style of anti-equalities discourse is not new. It is a conservative one that props up the ruling status quo, it enables the continued domination of individual identities, of suppressing anything that questions tradition. It questions anything that flows against the fascistic, stereotyping of the masculine male and the fertile female. This is a discourse that focuses on wombs and domesticity. It is anti-feminist. The platforming of people that confuse opinion with evidence is not uncommon in conspiracy circles and The Light is no exception.

Laura Dodsworth wrote State of Fear, promoted in issue 12. She criticises the government’s ‘weaponisation of fear’ during the pandemic. However, it is not only the government that use the public’s fear to arm themselves. Dodsworth is no stranger to weaponising fear to promote her own biases. In a Medium article (16), she focused on a term known as ‘detransition’. This is where a trans person halts their transition process. This can be for a number of reasons and does not necessarily mean, as the term suggests, a person is changing their mind about being trans. Dodsworth comes up with some alarming numbers to highlight her point. She notes that there were double the number of trans surgeries in 2014 compared to a decade earlier. There are similar, if not greater, rises in many other surgeries of course, as medicine advances. Better access to trans and other surgeries should be celebrated. She says she spoke to people who “unquestioningly” accepted their transness as if they were all treated post-haste on finding out this revelation. She wants to create a moral panic, a ‘weaponisation of fear’. Yet, in the UK, waiting lists just for an initial psychological assessment are several years long (17, 18). Once seen, the person is meant to show they have lived in their gender for at least a year before being assessed for hormone therapy. Many people therefore, as with all surgeries currently, have to resort to private care. Dodsworth rightly mentions that she cannot know the statistics for private clinics. If her concern for people is that they are being treated too quickly, then her issue should be with the private sector. She could also aim her campaigning toward improving the NHS offering to ensure the statistics she wants are available, not for guessing in order to confirm her biases.

The recent proliferation in people talking about ‘detransition’ is misleading. What a lot of authors cite as detransition, is often people getting to a point where they are happy and need no further treatment, or people having to retreat to their former documented gender (get back in the closet) due to social or work pressures, or lack of acceptance by family. I doubt anyone who truly has trans folk’s best intentions at heart wants to halt all conversation on transition-halting but it certainly seems to be a talking point for transphobes.

The Light enjoys its ‘think of the children!’ stances on LGBT+ issues and is happy to allow Anne Marie Waters, leader of the Islamophobic party For Britain and director of Sharia-watch, to promote Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, in an article (issue 19) taken directly from the far-right For Britain website. This is the same Robinson that states that being “pro-LGBTQ+ whatever is going to end up being pro-paedophilia” in one video (19).

No conspiracy newspaper would be complete without complaining about being ‘cancelled’. And according to Issue 20 on the Letters page, this is happening to The Light. Although no-one in the local Community Solidarity group in Stroud has called for the paper to be cancelled (we’ve asked that people reconsider the support they give to it by distributing it, and decline to read or write for it), the paper itself appears to be calling for anyone that upsets its point of view to be cancelled. Perhaps one of the most famous characters crying that he is being cancelled is Alex Jones. Yet, Alex Jones himself wants a lot of groups ‘cancelled’. This is a bit rich even for The Light. Jones is highlighted in issue 11 as a man we are expected to feel sorry for because he was censored by the media. Amongst the other right wing conspiratorial beliefs that Jones spouts, he said “when a person identifies as transgender, it is like calling oneself a giant, colorful giraffe” (20). He also compared being transgender to mental illness, and stated that government is creating gay people through “a chemical warfare operation” (21).

Another person The Light is fond of is David Kurten of The Heritage Party. In issue 5 an article all about him writes of “installing the transgender agenda in schools by teaching children far too early about these niche issues. I am fighting this battle and the actual taking away of freedoms…”. The Light promotes people who feel they are having their freedoms taken from them whilst simultaneously wanting other people’s freedoms taken. The Light apparently does not believe that attacking people’s freedom to be who they are; be it gay, trans, bisexual, non-binary etc is contradictory.

As well as directly giving column space to bigots, The Light also promotes other outlets which have a lot of nasty content. In issue 10, the Light has an article from theBL.com by Jose Hermosa. Hermosa is a homophobe and The BL has a long list of anti-LGBT+ articles (22) that imply ‘agendas’ of ‘indoctrination’ and even inserts articles on far-right governments and “anti-paedophilia laws” (23) that aim to prevent school-aged children learning about sexuality and gender identity. As for Hermosa himself, his own social media profile has transphobic and anti-Semitic (24) cartoons and supports the Hungarian anti-LGBT laws. One article he wrote for The BL suggests that any support for the LGBT community in children’s television programming is “destroying the morality of humanity”(25).

Several themes run through The Light that tie up its bigotry toward LGBT+ groups. One of these is the belief that governments are using vaccines, gender and microchips to bring about a future in which the human species will no longer remain in its current form. Issue 16, for example, encourages the reader to research Jennifer Bilek and her work on gender. Bilek is convinced that people are transgender as part of a transhumanist plot to enslave humanity (27).

Another theme is one of biological essentialism. Essentialism is a belief that any object has certain characteristics that are necessary to its identity e.g. a square must have 4 sides. However, applied to people, as is done with ‘biological essentialism’, denies the individual their individuality and it is easier to support and not stand against people with hateful narratives when your starting point is an ‘essentialist’ one. There are plenty of science articles and articles based in science that show how essentialism is not an accurate way to describe any human. Essentialism is damaging to feminism and to everyone striving for equality. Men and women cannot be broken down into two separate entities, but this must be the case if the structures that enable sexism in work, home life, sports etc. are to be supported. Why mention this now? The Light’s homophobia and transphobia is backgrounded by repeated references to women in respect of fertility and birthing and wombs etc. We are not a womb (some of us do not even have one), we are not child-bearers (some of us may never want them and some may never be able to). We are more than a receptacle for penis-in-vagina sex and for child-bearing. Some of us are intersex and may not even have the external genitalia that traditional biology books teach. No one person’s hormones or chromosomes are identical. The dominance of the fertility narrative tells us a lot about how The Light’s homophobic, lesbophobic, biphobic and transphobic views are reached and their quest for preserving the conservative dominance of our understanding of gender and sexuality.

If the real concern of The Light is to protect children, if they feel children are too young to learn about gender and relationships, The Light should also campaign against children being taught to prepare themselves for straight, cisgendered lives in which they will either be child-bearer or sperm-donor. It would be biased not to do so. The writings of The Light are as ridiculous, selfish and misogynistic as the article in issue 8 (page 4) where a father says that he sees no point in his son having an HPV vaccine as his son has no cervix. The father clearly does not understand the concept of passing on infection. Nor that these types of HP virus can cause warts and, less commonly, become cancerous in everybody who contracts it, regardless of sex or gender.*

To conclude: The Light promotes myths around LGBT+ people. The origins of this rhetoric are rooted in ‘Religious Right’ claims from the USA in the 1970s and 1980s that centred on how gay men were supposedly “child molesters” and “paedophiles” who were out to “recruit children.” Around the 2000s when false claims were losing their effectiveness against gay and lesbian people, the Religious Right shifted their efforts toward targeting people of other (non-heterosexual) sexualities, and then trans people instead.

Community Solidarity Stroud District stands against all forms of hate. We also understand that falsehoods used to ‘other’ people based on gender and sexuality hurt everyone by redirecting conversations away from the everyday misogyny and bigotry essential in propping up systems that oppress us all.

We have been handing out a summary version of this piece in a leaflet.

*Edit made as of 26th June 2023: This final sentence regarding HPV replaces the original sentence which closed the paragraph “Or he does not care as his son’s body will not be affected by the virus, only those his son passes it on to.” We always welcome feedback to correct mistakes.

References:

AIDS worldwide, R Yared, Population Today, Feb 1989; 17(2):4

2. ‘AIDs, The Hoax of the Century’.

www.TheSceptic.org.uk article: Vernon Coleman: How the Pandemic has Brought Some Unpleasant People New Fame , published 19.01.2022

3. “article taken from the Question and Answer section of Dr Vernon Coleman’s Health Letter” on HIV/AIDS

4. ‘HIV vs. AIDS: What is the difference?‘ Medical News Today

5. “HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore is dead“, Respectful Insolence blog

6. “Why de-platforming David Icke needs to happen now” — Get The Trolls Out website

7. “Transgender Agenga” tag on David Icke’s website

8. From David Icke’s website: “Mrs Doubtfire transgender Mayor to give monthly payments of taxpayers money to other transgender and ‘non-binary’ residents while government wants to force doctors to chemically castrate kids”

9. “A flawed agenda for trans youth” Editorial in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, May 14, 2021

10. “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults” (pdf), Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, Volume 23, Number 4, November, 2010.

11. ‘”Get Out”: A Timeline of Hate Preacher Artur Pawlowski’s Activities Across North America‘, from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network website

12. The New RSE Curriculum | Teaching Resources for Schools

13. Is MINNIE MOUSE In A SECRET SOCIETY? / Hugo Talks #lockdown – Hugo Talks

14. see 9.

15. ‘The truth about trans‘ from the stonewall.org.uk website

16. ‘The Detransitioners’ by Laura Dodsworth (Medium article)

17. ‘Transgender people face NHS waiting list ‘hell’, BBC News, 9 January 2020

18. NHS Gender Identity Clinics, from the Trans Health UK website.

19. Homophobic comments by racist Tommy Robinson, 1 minute video by YouTuber ‘Debunkage’

20. “Alex Jones Says Being Transgender Is Like Calling Oneself a ‘Giraffe With Purple Spots'”, yahoo.com article