Stonewall founder Simon Fanshawe ‘doesn’t get’ how a married mixed-sex couple can identify as queer
(YouTube/ LGB Alliance)
Simon Fanshawe, one of Stonewall’s original founders, said in a recent video that he couldn’t understand a “married male and female couple who call themselves queer”.
He made the remark on ‘The Gay Spot’, a recent series of online events run by anti-trans pressure group LGB Alliance.
The panel were discussing the reclamation of the word ‘queer’ as a term for LGBT+ people. He calls the term “the gay equivalent of the N-word, which you can’t reclaim”.
Simon Fanshawe calls the word queer ‘meaningless’
The panel discussion features Malcolm Clark, Lachlan Stuart and James Roberts alongside Simon Fanshawe. The discussion was called: “Are gay men getting lost in the gender identity debate?”
Roberts goes on to say that “transphobia is a word that’s lost all meaning”.
The event description said: “Is male same-sex attraction under attack as sex is erased in favour of gender? Are the gay boys of today at risk of being told they’re really girls trapped in ‘the wrong body’?”
James Roberts, former chair of trustees at the LGBT Consortium, responded to Fanshawe’s remarks saying: “[Queer] means to be other. It’s very ‘woke’. How many oppression points can I earn by being in lots of different groups or categories?”
Fanshawe signed an open letter in The Sunday Times last year claiming that Stonewall undermines “women’s sex-based rights”.
The letter said: “The government continues to treat Stonewall as if it represented the views of progressive thinking in general, and specifically LGB opinion. It does not.”
The managing editor of Boyz magazine, David Bridle, apologised for promoting this panel discussion on Twitter. He said: “We got it wrong. Please forgive us.”
All of the retweets of LGB Alliance from the Boyz Twitter account have since been deleted. However, many advertisers, stockists and LGBT+ leaders severed their ties with the magazine.
The panel discussed this during the event. James Roberts said he wants to find “our JK Rowling for gay men”.
Simon Fanshawe currently works as a partner at Diversity By Design which focuses on “eliminating the diversity deficits and realising the diversity dividend”.
