When we call the contemporary left “regressive”, it’s not just a throwaway insult. It’s because, despite their self-serving rhetoric about “progressivism”, much of the contemporary left’s manias are regressive in the worst possible way.
Making science subject to stone-age religious beliefs? Regressive. Reinstating blasphemy laws? Regressive. Reviving racial segregation? Regressive.
And forcing lesbian women back into the closet with not just threats of rape and violence, but the full weight of the state?
Regressive on stilts.
But, that’s just where we’re at, in 2023.
If you heard of a country that passed a law banning lesbians from creating formal associations based on their sex and their sexual orientation you would think that it was an authoritarian regime, stuck in the dark ages of gay rights. You would expect Stonewall and Amnesty International to be up in arms.
But it happened here in the UK.
Sex Matters
And not just in the UK. Here in Tasmania, lesbians have been told that they will be breaking the law if they host single-sex spaces.
Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Sarah Bolt banned LGB Alliance Tasmania from hosting lesbian events that exclude transwomen, on the grounds that such gatherings carry a “significant risk” of breaching existing equalities legislation.
After Ellen
What’s being foisted on women here in Tasmania is just a microcosm of a regressive trend across the Western world.
Last year, our survey of users of single-sex services got many responses from lesbians telling us about losing their associations. They told us about groups that were previously women-only coming under pressure to include men who identify as women. They said that women who dissent are excluded. They reported how events and meet-ups including book groups and cycling clubs, discos and drinking nights have disappeared, or gone underground. Venues cancel events; posters are defaced; women are harassed and bullied unless lesbian events are “inclusive” of males who identify as women. All this is mirrored online: even lesbian dating sites include men who claim they are women, and those who try to state a preference for biological women get thrown out.
For a mob who blatherskite endlessly about “inclusion”, “tolerance” and “welcoming”, the regressive left are notably exclusive and intolerant of anyone — women especially — who want to do something they disapprove of.
“Women who love women are being forced back into the closet because we are being told we cannot meet or socialise without including men who identify as women. Lesbians feel betrayed by politicians, who seem happy to stand by as lesbians are erased from public life unless we accept the mantra of the gender ideologues who believe that we should be same-gender attracted rather than same-sex attracted.”
What’s being forced on lesbian women by law is just the tip of a very, very ugly iceberg. Online and in person, biological men are pressuring lesbian women, often under threat of violence, to have sex with them.
The men in dresses have the full weight of “progressive” law on their side.
What is most shocking is that the government and the Equality and Human Rights Commission both say that this is how the law should be interpreted: that if a male person has a gender-recognition certificate he has a right to join an association set up by lesbians for lesbians.
Sex Matters
In the deeply regressive Islamic theocracy of Iran, they’ve all-but abolished homosexuality by forcing gay men and women to undergo sex-change surgery — or die.
What regressive Iran does by the scalpel and the noose, the regressive West is attempting to do by statute and bureaucracy.