Spare me your bloody rainbow lanyards

Only the enemies of gay rights insist on wearing medals for a war they did not fight

Many are wearing rainbow lanyards this week to signal opposition to Esther McVey’s sensible request that public servants do not bring their politics to work. Many heterosexuals, in particular, will do so out of nothing but good intentions imagining that they are conveying solidarity and courage. From the perspective of the modern gay rights movement many of us see things differently.  We see well-intentioned people wearing these lanyards like a medal worn by those who did not fight in the wars for gay rights very many years after that would have mattered. We in the gay rights movement could have done with a few rainbow lanyards back in the dark days of AIDS. Today, these lanyards indicate to us fealty to gender identity ideology, and we note that 80-90% of young patients at the Tavistock told they had the wrong bodies were simply same-sex attracted. A rainbow may not change in nature, but in can change in politics. This rainbow now stands for blocked puberty, crossed hormones, and for the damning verdict of the Cass Review that a live experiment has been conducted on mainly gay youths.  

It's an irony that those most engaged in the culture war accuse their opponents of stoking them and seem oblivious of their own enthusiasm for such. It is now 2024 and the idea that a grown gay man or lesbian requires a GP, a politician, or a local councillor to signal “you are safe” via a rainbow lanyard is frankly ludicrous. What are we to think of colleagues who refrain from such virtue proclamations? Is it that society is infested with homophobes in a state of deep cover? We now have a vast architecture of laws and policies that protect same sex attracted people, so the modern reality is that no one is really bringing their homophobia to work, but some are loudly bringing their anti-homophobia to work. Many wearing these lanyards will see this as harmless, but I can say with some authority that being in the middle of a culture war is a dispiriting thing. It is a profoundly disabling notion to be pandered to, it is infantilising to be nannied in this fashion and, speaking candidly, it is always embarrassing to watch tourists try to act like the natives.  

Decent straight people wearing these lanyards are most probably unaware that the gay rights movement is presently in a state of deep schism and bitter civil war over gender ideology. Stonewall itself now says the word “homosexual” is old fashioned and that lesbians can have penises. The former CEO compared lesbians who dispute this to “sexual racists”. Online, the words “cis gay man” functions as a prefix and a subterfuge because they are invariably by homophobia that would give a 1980s US televangelist a run for his money. Stonewall and friends like Mermaids enthusiastically embrace the idea that some young people are born with the wrong bodies and require medical correction. These young people are mainly gay and disproportionately autistic, and evidence shows if allowed to grow up they will desist from cross sex ideation. So, we are now at a grim pass in gay rights where some of us on the other side are forced to say, “puberty is a human right and puberty is a gay right”. In all of this, those most likely to embrace this modern gender fad are invariably those most likely to be wearing rainbow lanyards. I don’t expect decent and well-meaning straight people to have kept up with the turmoil and tumult of gay politics, but I do ask that they consider carefully what political symbols mean before they adopt them.

With that in mind, it is worth remarking that we have an equal age of consent, we are post gay marriage and section 28 is no more which rather begs the question, what is the point of these lanyards now? As with so much identity-based grievance politics, the demand for homophobia seems to outstrip supply and this might be a comical instance of benign over correction had what was in effect Gay Conversion 2.0 not occurred at the Tavistock. The paradox of the moment is that it is the enemies of gay rights most likely to be wearing these things. Scottish MSP Maggie Chapman is a good example, rarely seen without a rainbow lanyard, she is on record as advocating for 8-year-old children to “change their gender”. All the evidence suggests such children would overwhelmingly grow up to be gay.

Gay Rights should be more than a petulant gesture to Esther McVey. It should be more than a casual thing around your neck, and it should be more than the special status minority of the moment to be treated like children. Thank you for your support, but this rainbow is now tainted and it’s time to take the lanyards off.