Suzanne MOORE

Right now, gay people have several things to worry about, not least a marked rise in hate crime. Earlier this month, a 50-yearold man was killed in Tower Hamlets, east London, in what police described as a “suspected homophobic attack”. A day earlier, a gay couple were attacked with broken bottles in Birmingham. In July, a married gay couple were kicked and punched in the street in Edinburgh, and in Liverpool there have been several attacks on young gay men. These are just the crimes we know about. A lot more go unreported.

Although we like to think things have progressed, not all in the garden is rosy. These days, not only can you be physically attacked for being gay, you can be attacked for being the wrong kind of gay.

So pervasive is a kind of groupthink, often fuelled by social media, there is now a tyranny of policing “correct” and “incorrect” ways of being homosexual.

It is a truth self-evident that sexuality, whether that is a preference for the same sex, the opposite sex or a bit of both, does not mean that one identifies with everyone who has the same preference. We may all have different politics or beliefs. People are complicated.

Or at least they were. Complication has been replaced by compliance to simplistic dogma that must be swallowed whole, or one is cast out. Dante’s sixth circle of hell was Heresy, where one would spend eternity in flaming crypts. Now someone on social media calls you a bigot, and people who have replaced having a personality with an “interesting” gender insult you.

I am so used to this, I didn’t think I could be shocked. But then this weekend, I saw a video online of a young man being harassed at the Manchester Pride march. A crowd surrounded him, chanting “Trans lives matter”, before he was escorted away by police, for his own protection.

One of the people shouting at him was April Preston, a Liberal Democrat candidate for Withington; she later boasted on Twitter about having had “a terf removed” from the march. (“Terf ” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, but has become a shorthand for “transphobic bigot”.)

The man being hassled was Alexander Bramham, who says he is proud to be gay. But he is the wrong kind of gay, as he was marching in an “LGB Alliance” T-shirt; the absence of a “T” in the acronym is the mortal sin. The horrible scene was made more astonishing when trans activists routinely wear T-shirts and wave banners saying things such as “Terfs must die”.

Yet the video was circulated approvingly on social media by a well-known zealot and part-time hack. This Witchfinder General of Twitter, who has elected himself king of all gays, speaks in increasingly Trumpian proclamations about good and evil. But he is, we must conclude, a bear of very little brain.

For those who don’t know, there is more than one organisation that gay people can join. In 2015, its most famous lobby group, Stonewall – under its previous CEO, Ruth Hunt, who now sits in the Lords – took a £90,000 donation for it to become more trans-inclusive. It was formed to fight for the rights of same-sexattracted people.

But it has now widened its remit beyond representing lesbians, gays and bisexuals, alienating many of its natural supporters in the process, as Simon Callow pointed out last week, when he condemned its “strange turn to the tyrannical”.

Of late, it has campaigned for something completely different – to convince us that innate gender identity somehow trumps sex. So lesbians can have penises and gay men can have vaginas, and there can be no debate about this. Clearly, many gay people have empathy with trans people, a tiny percentage of the population, but feel theirs is a different struggle. Hence why last year the LGB Alliance was born.

They campaign on the grounds of sexual orientation, and rightly feel that lesbians have been neglected in many of these debates. For this, they have been called a “hate group”, and myths circulate about them being funded by the far-right. As they have been granted charity status, they will have to be transparent about their funding. So let’s see.

What is their view on trans people? According to their website, “we fully support trans people in their struggle for dignity, respect and life lived free from bigotry and fear”. Trans people are simply not their priority. For this, they must be condemned by the unthinkingly self-righteous.

Founded in 2017, Woman’s Place UK has similarly been deemed a hate group by this insane tribe because it seeks to protect single-sex spaces, from refuges to prisons. Wow, what extremist monsters! These women must clearly be burnt at the stake.

We certainly cannot be listened to. The groupthink that requires such conformity of thought is being pushed by those who genuinely imagine themselves to be progressive. They are utterly deluded. Some of them are even deluded enough to think themselves journalists.

The Left is in ever-deeper trouble if it cannot tolerate freedom of speech or even tiny differences within in its own ranks. Bullying is mob cowardice. Just watch that Manchester Pride video to see what I mean.

“Courage is fire,” said Disraeli, “bullying is smoke.” We need to clear the air.

The Left is in deep trouble if it cannot tolerate differences within its own ranks