Acting up

On Friday, a group of trans kids disrupted the conference of everybody’s favourite pretendy-gay organisation, the LGB Alliance, by releasing thousands of crickets into the white-haired audience shortly after JK Rowling delivered a short speech from her luxury yacht.

The LGB Alliance is, of course, the Tufton Street-based, dubiously funded anti-trans organisation who admitted in court that the overwhelming majority of its supporters and members are straight, who misled the Charity Commission that a venomous troll was no longer connected with the organisation when in fact he is their Director of Research, and whose Irish division has been classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. As infamous anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen noted on Twitter, at the event “most attendees and volunteers seem to be straight women.”

The organisation and its supporters were quick to condemn the protest, with some claiming it was a “biohazard” and others doing the usual nonsense about violent transes silencing legitimate concerns. But if the LGB Alliance really were a gay rights organisation it’d be familiar with the tactics, which were used by organisations such as ACT UP! and the Lesbian Avengers against previous generations of bigots. The use of crickets to disrupt a meeting was a clear echo of the same tactic the Lesbian Avengers used in the early 1970s in a protest against conversion therapy.

When it comes to queer activist groups such as The Lesbian Avengers, the LGB Alliance wouldn’t even need to Google to find out about them: they could just ask one of their earliest and most prominent members, JK Rowling’s charity partner Baroness Nicholson, who was at the event. Nicholson, who as an MP voted against equal age of consent, voted for Section 28 and denounced lesbian families as “neither normal nor natural” knows the Lesbian Avengers well: she was the subject of one of their protests, which they held on her front lawn in 1995.