Lesbian activist Linda Bellos went to the Supreme Court to back Trump administration during landmark LGBT cases
Linda Bellos speaks outside the US Supreme Court on October 8. (Facebook/PosieParker)
Veteran black British lesbian activist Linda Bellos was outside the US Supreme Court yesterday (October 8), backing the Trump administration’s efforts to make it legal to fire LGBT+ people.
Bellos, 68, was in the US in support of the “gender-critical feminism” movement there, which was mobilising against transgender rights outside the Supreme Court.
Bellos told a small crowd that “the rights of women to be women is being denied”.
“Now it is time to stand up and create a world in which race, gender and class are all banished, and we all see each other in [our] full human value,” she said.
The US Supreme Court was weighing in on three hugely important cases that will determine whether it’s legal to discriminate against LGBT+ people in the US.
Two of them, Zarda v. Altitude Express and Bostock v. Clayton County, will be argued together. Both relate to gay men who were fired from their jobs, allegedly because of their sexuality.
The third is the first-ever case regarding trans civil rights to be heard by the Supreme Court, and is the one that Bellos was there to protest.
Bellos was surrounded by activists waving placards that said “Sex not gender” – in reference to the fact that “sex” carries protection from discrimination under federal civil rights laws in the US.
Lawyers for the two gay men and one trans women argued that “sex” encompasses sexuality and gender identity, and so LGBT+ people have anti-discrimination employment protections under existing federal laws.
But their opponents – including the Trump administration, and a right-wing anti-abortion Christian law firm called Alliance Defending Freedom – argue that “sex” is defined as biological and does not include gender identity or sexuality.
I still can’t get my head around Bellos – a gender non conforming gay woman with short hair who wears a suit – *supporting* the Trump administration’s efforts to make it legal to discriminate against gay and/or gender non conforming women. https://t.co/5lV0pX0XZR
— E??eline M?y (@EmmelineMayRDPP) October 9, 2019
“A decision against Stephens would suggest that anyone who does not conform to rigid, retrograde gender norms – regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation – is putting their employment on the line.”
Our statement on today’s #SCOTUS hearings. https://t.co/FuPJHtCExt— Astraea Foundation (@AstraeaUpdates) October 8, 2019
“I fight for equality for all human being. race and gender are two examples, two large examples, of division and power over others,” Bellos, who founded UK Black History Month, said.
Linda Bellos, a @UKLabour member, in the USA along side alt right religious groups who are attempting to remove LGBT employment rights. Just let the sink in. https://t.co/vWrIvOq1p9
— hensteeth (@vickyjane64) October 9, 2019
She was then interrupted by a person with a megaphone, who stood in front of her and chanted, “Trans rights are human rights. We will not be erased.”
“Trans rights are human rights,” this person with a megaphone chanted at Linda Bellos. (Facebook/PosieParker)
Bellos shouted, “Racist!” at the person with the megaphone, who then began waving a rainbow Pride flag and chanting, “Go home, homophobe!” at Bellos.
Linda Bellos shouting “Racist!” at a protestor. (Facebook/PosieParker)
We were on the ground in Washington, D.C., yesterday as the Supreme Court heard three cases that could have major implications on the lives of LGBTQ people. #RiseUpOct8 https://t.co/85W7Vc3Pss
— GLAAD (@glaad) October 9, 2019
Video of Bellos’ speech was shared on Facebook by UK “gender-critical feminist” Posie Parker, also known as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull.
The fall of Linda Bellos, who basically founded UK Black History Month and who holds an OBE for services to equality, is one of the saddest spectacles of this whole mess. Transphobia rots the brain. https://t.co/YbdBxw5IG4
— shon faye. (@shonfaye) October 9, 2019
Bellos said, “I was a lesbian from an early point… but I did not know why. I thought being a lesbian was for white women only. I came out as a dyke before I came out as a feminist.”
I know it shouldn’t shock me, but I can’t stop thinking about how fucked up it is that UK TE RFs popped up at that anti-LGBTQ+ demo in the states.
— Rainbow Plague (@SadieCashbat) October 9, 2019
“Take your homophobia home!” the person with the megaphone person shouted again.
Bellos responded, “Take your racism away!”
Love to protect UK gay women from the trans menace by *checks card* persuading the US it’s fine to fire women for looking gay at work.
— Opinion Poltergeist Elainovision (@scattermoon) October 8, 2019
I know I often talk of transphobes being used by hate groups as thin edge of a wedge against all LGBT+ people but US far-right Christian organisations flying in one to argue outside SCOTUS for the right of companies to fire people based on their gender presentation is a new low. https://t.co/NgUxzqGSdD
— Opinion Poltergeist Elainovision (@scattermoon) October 8, 2019
The protestors were also read a message from another UK “gender-critical feminist”, Julia Long.
Long visited the US in January 2019 to meet members of the Women’s Liberation Front, or WOLF – a US “feminist” organisation that is allied with right-wing, anti-abortion organisations in the US and filed a brief in the Supreme Court anti-trans discrimination case in favour of it being legal to fire trans people.
“We live in dangerous times,” Long’s message said. “We have been sold a lie, a terrible lie. The lie that a man is a woman if he tells us he is. The lie that a young woman distressed with her own body is somehow ‘really a man’.”
“The lie is of such magnitude it is hard to believe that all our major institutions have been thoroughly complicit in promoting, and indeed enforcing, something so patently untrue and so devastating in its consequences.”
