Updated leaflet on transphobia and homophobia launched at Stroud Pride 2024

We were at Stroud Pride today sharing a stall with friends from Stroud Against Racism.

We handed out updated copies of our leaflet on why we should Bin “The Light” paper because it promotes transphobia and homophobia – the text of which is copied below. Elsewhere on our website you can find a downloadable pdf version of the flyer and more details. We had lots of good conversations at a great event!

Leaflet text:

BIN ‘THE LIGHT’ – it promotes transphobia and homophobia

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 that is essential in propping up systems that oppress us all.

In recent years, rhetoric 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’ has been revived. Around the 2000s, when false claims were losing their effectiveness against gay and lesbian people, the religious right shifted their efforts toward instead targeting people of other non-heterosexual sexualities, and then trans people.

This is happening to some extent in various media channels, including mainstream newspapers – but the free paper “The Light” is a particularly nasty QUEER-BASHING HATE-TABLOID.

“The Light” has published articles by many people who are homophobic and transphobic. 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 Light” continues to equate gender non-conformance to paedophilia, views affirming parents as abusers, references surgical procedures for trans people using fictional statements.

As just one example (see overleaf for more): in edition 23 it stated “As the month of July descends into a rainbow-festooned festival of the Globohomo Cult that shall no doubt see us all having to watch the unedifying spectacle of police officers twerking beside their re-branded, multicolour clown cars in cities across the nation, the question must surely be asked just how much longer can society stomach being force-fed this most degenerate form of diversity”. The issue also contained a cartoon of a parent asking their child “How was school?” and the child responding by vomiting a rainbow, to ram their anti-LGBTQ hatred home.

Community Solidarity Stroud District stands against all forms of hate.
Learn more: communitysolidaritystrouddistrict.org

Side two

BIN ‘THE LIGHT’

• Joan Ginsburg (issues 8, 19, 25) equates parents allowing children to express their gender outside of the binary to paedophilia. Says “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 is, of course, statistically untrue, it is devoid of any fact. Ginsburg is a vocal supporter of the ‘Public Child Protection, Wales’ group which seeks to exert an authoritarian rule over children’s autonomy. It promotes an opt-out to unconditional love by accepting bigotry as a parenting style. Issue 33’s International News focuses on an Australian document supposed to show that it is illegal for parents to refuse gender-affirming care for their children. The documents actually says no such thing; it says that sending your child to a known conversion therapist out-of-district will be construed as… sending your child for conversion therapy.
• There are regular links and advertising in “The Light”: Off-Guardian, UKColumn and Unity News Network – all media outlets that promote disinformation about trans people (as well as about anyone else outside of their politically and economically-privileged world).
• Another favourite link of “The Light” is to the wonderfully titled TheRedPillRevolution.com. “The Light” enjoyed using this site via it’s writer Ben Hunt and his attempt to ‘man harder’ under the guise of a supposed fear of a ‘War on Masculinity’ in issue 31. Apparently, “gender is now being presented as a lifestyle choice”. It is sweet that this website pays homage to the red oestrogen pill used by trans women in the 90s referenced in the film the Matrix, written by two trans women as an allegory for transitioning.
• Ben Hunt (again) in issue 32 describes a trans woman who was listed in ‘Women of the Year’ by USA Today as “Exhibit C: Richard (“Rachel”) Levine”. He argues that a blurring of gender lines is such a falsehood that we could lose the meaning of ‘adult’. “Can a child now be reimagined as an adult, say when it comes to sexual consent?”. Conflating gender diversity with paedophilia is a throwback to the commonly used vitriolic homophobia of the 1970s (and still prevails now, although less often).
• Jose Hermosa, in issue 10, is linked under his article from theBL.com, where he also protests children’s TV “looking for the little ones to normalize these new sexual orientations that are destroying the morality of humanity”.
• “The Light” is somewhat obsessed with sex and all its connotations, bringing it into many, many articles over its, so far, 45 issues.
• Niall McCrae has a number of entries in “The Light”. He is an active member of the Bruges Group (and wrote a pamphlet for them that used the usual antisemitic tropes of The Great Replacement and Cultural Marxism). McCrae wrote Green in Tooth and Claw – a book that views same-sex attraction as subversive. He writes on several right-wing sites with scathing criticism of anything LGBTQ+.
• Alex Jones, before McCrae’s Light popularity, was cherished for his attacks aimed at ‘mainstream’ media and his views on government-corporate takeovers but neglect to mention that Jones asserted that the government is creating gay people through “a chemical warfare operation”, or Jones’ threat to come after drag performers with torches “like the villagers in the night”.
• Finally… In something of a ‘self-own’ in issue 35, “The Light” describes the use of the word Inclusivity as mainstream media speak for “Collectivism; no individuality allowed”. “The Light” appears to have missed that the point is to accept all individuals. Yet “The Light”, time and again, clearly has a problem with anyone who falls outside of their accepted norms.

Learn more: communitysolidaritystrouddistrict.org