“We are not asking to speak anymore,” Annaïg Birdy says. “We are refusing to be interrupted.” The 27-year-old Dubliner knows a thing or two about the culture of conformity in Ireland’s LGBT spaces. When she came out as a lesbian 10 years ago, she was encouraged to attend youth meetings run by a support service called BeLonG To. It was an experience that Birdy now compares to “gay conversion therapy”, though in reverse: the group puts “massive pressure” on gender non-conforming children, i.e. most lesbian and gay youth, to identify as non-binary or transgender. At the first meeting she attended, they talked about how girls could hide chest binders from their parents. When she later slipped up on someone’s pronouns, she was ostracised from her cohort. This group received almost €800,000 in state funding in 2021.
BeLonG To is far from alone. Across Ireland, trans activist groups such as Trans Equality Network Ireland (TENI) and Rosa International have taken over a movement that used to serve lesbians and gay men. Since the Gender Recognition Act of 2015, a new orthodoxy has emerged. At Trinity College, Dublin, where the student union president is an infamous trans activist, students have driven campaigns to deplatform speakers, boycott events, and label gender-critical views as hate speech. Meanwhile, when it comes to women’s rights such as reproductive health and protection from male violence, Ireland continues to lag behind most of Europe.
Thankfully, an energetic new movement is forming. In Dublin, a group of mostly working-class twenty-somethings, including Annaïg Birdy, are taking a stand. Founded by three lesbians, two bisexual women and four gay men, Not All Gays (NAG) believe that today’s LGBT movement no longer speaks for them and that the government uses the movement to push through laws without scrutiny, like hate speech legislation, that would see people like them be criminally investigated. Their championing of sex-based rights, freedom of speech and ethical boundaries around surrogacy puts them at odds with the current activist dogma.
I meet them on the eve of the holy month of Pride. Not that this is a typical Pride crowd — most NAG members have been excluded from LGBT charities, events at universities, and Pride. They’re hosting LGB Interrupted, Ireland’s first lesbian, gay and bisexual-led conference. Birdy tells me that NAG decided not to publicly advertise the event’s venue, fearing the usual angry protests if word got out that the Terfs were daring to gather. Sure enough, as I arrived, the organisers were frantically looking for a new sound system. Theirs had apparently been stolen overnight. “It has to be sabotage,” one organiser told me. “Maybe they” — NAG’s enemies — “realise how bad it looks picketing in public, but either way there’s plenty of people who didn’t want this event to go ahead.”
Seán Atkinson, the vice-president and co-founder of NAG, used to identify as non-binary and used they/them pronouns. But he began to question gender ideology after he saw lesbians “facing the cotton ceiling backlash”: that is, they were expected to date transwomen. Atkinson realised that “gay men were not under anywhere near the same pressure to date trans men”. Other members experienced similar awakenings. Monica, a researcher and project leader, was a liberal feminist in her teenage years before she saw the need for LGB to separate from the T. Kylie, a gay man, attended BeLonG To in the 2000s, but turned against gender ideology because of what women, especially lesbians, were dealing with.
While critical of the progressive movement, many NAG members still identify as on the Left. “I’m a femme lesbian — Left-of-centre, atheist, pro-choice, anti-racist Terf,” Birdy tells me. But one of her best friends is a gender non-conforming gay man who is Catholic and economically conservative and “just as committed to protecting women and children” as Birdy herself. “We are proof,” she says, “that being same-sex attracted doesn’t come with a political party membership.”
What unites these members is not an ideology but reality. “Sex-based rights are not arbitrary or archaic issues, they are absolutely vital, particularly for women and girls,” says Birdy. “And the freedom to dissent from the gender narrative is now more important to defend than ever before.”
I find it fascinating that NAG are rejecting not just gender ideology but a number of other shibboleths. It’s very rare for young queer people to reject the libertarian “sex work is work” take on prostitution, or to critique commercial surrogacy. But NAG is a unique voice in a chorus of queer activists.
One of the issues the group is disturbed by is how lesbian and group youth are being sexually exploited in the name of liberation. There’s much talk at the conference of drug-fuelled sex parties, resulting in what have become known as “chemsex” deaths. A recent report shows that use among gay men in Ireland is on the increase, and I heard from several at the conference that weekend-long chemsex-fuelled parties are as common as clubbing.
“You will hear repeatedly, and this is the sad thing, almost all these gay men are going to parties where they’re using highly dissociative drugs, looking for brotherhood, connection, friendship, community,” said panelist Robbie Travers, a young gay Irish activist, “and young women are beginning to die in chemsex parties, which is a total shift.”
In recent years, sexually transmitted infections such as hepatitis, gonorrhoea and HIV are on the rise among gay men. And yet, as Travers pointed out, to even mention safe sex or drug misuse is usually met with accusations of homophobia. “It’s gay culture!” is often the cry in response. All of this is being done in our name.
A similarly contentious issue is surrogacy. Between 33-40% of those who use a surrogate are same-sex couples, with supporters describing gay male couples as “infertile”. Surrogacy in Ireland is unregulated, which means it is neither explicitly legal nor illegal. At LGB Interrupted, it was the subject of fierce criticism. One of the speakers was Olivia Maurel, who was born via surrogacy and is now the spokesperson for the Declaration of Casablanca, a global appeal to abolish surrogacy in all its forms. She calls surrogacy “a violation of human dignity, of women’s rights, and especially of children’s rights”.
“I was conceived through a contract that stated clearly that the woman who carried me, birthed me and bonded with me for nine months would not be my mother,” Maurel told the conference. “Adoption requires accountability,” she said. “Surrogacy requires only money.” Adoption and fostering rates are at an all-time low among lesbian and gay people, despite the fact that many of us campaigned for years in order to have the legal right to adopt and foster.
Since the Gay Liberation Front, founded in 1970, there have been significant improvements for gay people: the right to civil partnerships and marriage, to foster and adopt children in same-sex couples, and protection from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. Even the church and other religious institutions have accepted that we exist. But since trans activism became the dominant force, things have gone backwards. Surrogacy is now replacing adoption and fostering for gay men, lesbians are seen as bigots unless we swear our allegiance to the trans flag, and despite the terrible legacy of the AIDS crisis, gay men are being cajoled back into risk-taking hedonism and disregard for safe sex. These issues are “not Left-wing or Right-wing concerns,” says Birdy. “They are human-rights issues that transcend party lines.”
Lesbian and gay sexual activity was only decriminalised in 1993. Already many of the positive changes of the past three decades have been rolled back thanks to the dominance of transgender ideology. But this new generation, exemplified by Not All Gays, brings new hope.
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Author: Julie Bindel
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