Lesbians ushered away from Pride march... after bust-up with trans groups
LESBIAN protesters accused police of ‘failing to protect’ them after officers told them to leave a Pride parade for ‘causing confrontation’ with trans activists and supporters.
Members of anti-trans lesbian group Get The L Out UK had turned up on the route with messages on banners such as ‘transactivism erases lesbians’.
It led to a confrontation between the sides including a lesbian and a transgender woman shouting at each other in a road.
Organisers, Pride Cymru, said the activists had ‘interrupted’ the LGBTQ event on Saturday in Cardiff.
Video footage showed an officer confronting the group to say: ‘At the moment, your march, this group of people, is causing confrontation between different groups of people.’
Women are then heard replying ‘we’re lesbians, it’s Cardiff pride’. The police officer replies, saying ‘whatever you are... at the moment, is causing confrontation’.
One of the women is then told: ‘To make sure you’re safe, we are going to remove you from the road.’ A member of the Get The L Out UK group responded: ‘You should be able to protect lesbians in a pride march.’ Angela Wild, a co-founder of the group, last night said she and fellow campaigners were ‘appalled by the behaviour of the police’.
She said: ‘We feel it highlights the level of institutional capture by this ideology we are witnessing, that they would rather remove lesbians than engage with us.’
Miss Wild said she and other women wanted ‘to promote lesbian visibility within an increasingly misogynistic and anti-lesbian gay, bisexual and transgender movement’. She added the group’s members – who want the letter L removed from the LGBTQ+ acronym because they believe lesbians are no longer represented – have received a backlash including being subject to rape threats and death threats. The group is considering making a formal complaint about the South Wales force.
Former Wimbledon women’s champion and prominent lesbian Martina Navratilova was among the group’s supporters. She tweeted: ‘This shows just how ridiculous and sideways things are going in our LGBT community.’
Playwright Andrew Doyle said: ‘The pride movement no longer supports gay people.’ But a member of the public commenting in support of the trans activists wrote: ‘They were removed because they went there specifically to spread hate about trans people.’
Gian Molinu, of Pride Cymru, said: ‘Despite a small group of people interrupting the march, they were drowned out by shouts of solidarity... there is no place for hate at Pride. And as our parade said today loudly and clearly, “trans rights are human rights”.’
A South Wales Police spokesman said: ‘Officers were required to engage with a small protest group who had assembled themselves on the route to block the procession.
‘To ensure no further disruption to the event, officers asked the group to move to an alternative location nearby which they agreed to do.’
‘Went there to spread hate’