13/10/2022
Olly Alexander is among those LGBTQIA celebrities who have called out the far right wing newspaper Daily Telegraph, which is often mocked as the “Torygraph” for its constant diet of reactionary news. The gay singer said that it was no coincidence that the paper was targetting the trans youth support charity Mermaids, just as it had previously gone after the wider LGBT+ advocacy group Stonewall. LGBTQIA newswire Pink News elaborates on the current attempt by British papers to create scandal where none exists, noting “The attacks on Mermaids come just weeks after a tribunal challenging the Charity Commission’s decision to register the right wing front group LGB Alliance as a charity heard evidence. The legal challenge was spearheaded by Mermaids and is supported by LGBT+ Consortium, Gendered Intelligence, LGBT Foundation, TransActual and the Good Law Project”. Cleo Madeleine, for Gendered Intelligence, warned that the right wing newspapers were aiming to hurt LGBTQIA charities more generally. “It’s a concerted attack that’s intended to bring a lot of negative publicity to the organisation but also to invite the harassment, particularly on social media, of the people who are working for the organisation. It’s an all out attack”. She went on ““It’s really reminiscent of the way that gay people and specifically gay men were talked about during a time of similar crisis in the 1980s when we had the introduction of Section 28, the mismanagement of the AIDS crisis, and some of the language that’s being used around trans people now is very reminiscent of the Thatcherite language around gay people then.”
