Poor Harry Kane, roundly mocked for almost-but-not-quite wearing his One Love rainbow armband in support of lesbian, gay and trans people during England’s first game in Qatar on Monday. Attacked on the one hand by various curmudgeons for “self-serving virtue signalling” and ”hollow pieties”, he was then criticised by those well-known bleeding heart-types Roy Keane and Ray Winstone for capitulating in the face of a threatened booking from Fifa.
Generally, the public mood on armbands and bent knees seems to be split. There are those who assume every organised public gesture in the name of human rights must be altruistically intentioned and beneficial. And then there are those who dismiss all such gestures as self-interested attempts to gain social capital. The relation between the two looks symbiotic: the more enthusiastically the first group don flags, lanyards, and armbands, the more obstinately the second group insists there is nothing but self-promotion at the end of this particular rainbow.
Prospects of a more nuanced take aren’t helped by Left-wing lip service to universal human rights, combined in practice with squeamishness about saying anything robust in their favour which might exacerbate racial or non-Christian religious sensitivities. One only has to compare the relatively muted and qualified response of Stonewall to the stabbing-to-death of three gay men in Reading in 2021 (perpetrator: a militant Libyan asylum seeker with a history of violence) to last week’s impassioned response to a US shooting in a gay nightclub (perpetrator: a white American with a history of threatening to blow up his mum’s house — although, in an inconvenient plot twist, he has since come out as non-binary).
Apart from leaving the stage clear for Right-wing commentators to claim the divisive spoils, the Left’s squeamishness about cultural insensitivity also entails that activist gestures are most plentiful in the contexts where they are least needed. The safest space for full-throated political activism is apparently one where you can rely on the audience’s proximity to your own values, not to mention their repressed politeness and fear of being judged as the bad people. Many tolerant people in the UK are by now very fed up with all the needless hectoring and guilt-tripping.
This hectoring reaches its apotheosis during the annual farce of Transgender Day of Remembrance in the UK. Nagged into it by Stonewall and other transactivist organisations, last week various institutions fell over themselves to mark the murders of precisely zero UK trans people during the previous year with various fulsome tributes. Perhaps imaginatively accompanied by visions of the Last Post bleakly ringing out over the Somme, the Welsh Parliament even dramatically tweeted out: “Today, we remember the trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen.”
Yet for UK political institutions to address a major factor in the majority of trans murders worldwide — working in the sex trade — not only would they have to address male violence and sex-buying, they would also have to take a public stand in some extremely macho and homophobic cultures overseas. Much easier, then, to put all such deaths down to amorphous “transphobia” and then return to the main task of leveraging irrational guilt out of soft-touch Lefties for the purposes of cash extraction and power consolidation.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe