01/09/2018
“Oh, how the once mighty have fallen” was the title of one gay blogger’s post this week about Linda Bellos, once one of the champions of the feminist and gay movements, who has now been interviewed by Police under caution after several outbursts in which she told an audience how she wanted to “thump” transgender women. Bellos in the nineteen eighties was a Labour Party activist on the Marxist-Feminist wing of the party, and her achievements for cisgender gay men and lesbians are quite considerable. She led one of the so called “loony left” London borough councils who championed black and gay rights at a time when the majority of public opinion was viciously homophobic, whipped up to hysteria by calculating tabloid journalism from the biased right wing press. Although a prominent voice in black and Jewish feminism, Bellos also was not afraid to tackle the homophobia in communities close to her, and she helped organise a boycott of the African British paper The Voice after it ran extremely homophobic articles in nineteen ninety one. The Voice later apologised for its former stance. All this, however, has been eclipsed by more recent articles and statements made by Ms Bellos, which align themselves with a type of radical feminism which dismisses transgender people, and particularly transgender women. These reached fever pitch with the remarks that Bellos wanted to attack trans women. Although the police did not bring any charges after interviewing Bellos, the activist now faces a private prosecution brought by a trans campaigner.
