The threat to gay rights comes from trans extremism, not Reform or Trump
At home, Reform is gaining support; abroad, President Trump – who danced to Y.M.C.A. at his election rallies – 'would be happier with us invisible and gone… if not biologically altered to become as straight as him.' This, apparently, is the hostile climate that demanded he write Tip Toe – a drama, by his own admission, 'literally no one asked for.'
Davies seems unaware that in the UK, gay and bisexual people already have every right worth having – we can marry, serve in the army, adopt, and bore each other senseless about mortgages, just like anyone else. Any threat to those hard-won freedoms now comes not from the state, but from the overreach of activists like Davies himself, and the forced yoking of the LGB to the T – causes that pull in opposite directions.
If the Right is gaining ground, it's because the public has grown sick of being bullied into denying biological reality. It's not Reform UK that alienated ordinary parents; it's Stonewall-trained teachers telling six-year-olds they might be born in the wrong body. It's not Nigel Farage who united radical feminists and renegade vicars; it's activists trying to strip away our language, our spaces and our sexual boundaries.
Indeed, Reform's promise to 'ban transgender ideology' in schools could shield the next generation from the fiction of being 'born in the wrong body' – a lie that disproportionately ensnares children who will grow up to be same-sex attracted. In this, the party has done more to safeguard gay rights than Davies.
The trans lobby has spent the last decade dismantling the definition of homosexuality. Stonewall's former boss, Nancy Kelley, even smeared lesbians who refuse male 'lesbian' partners as 'sexual racists.' The Right has stepped into the void left by progressives, and who can blame them?
Yet Davies yearns for the 'anger of the past' and warns of a coming fight. 'They're out to get us,' he says of the US right. 'The whole world is keeping all of us awake… I hope [the younger generation] are prepared to fight… because a fight is coming.' On that, at least, he's half right – a fight is coming.
But it's not against imaginary armies of 1950s-style homophobes. It's against an ideology that makes homosexuality unspeakable by erasing the reality of sex. And if the scenes continue to be written by men like Davies, there is a risk that the hard-fought rights of LGB people could be swept away by the justified tide of fury about the excesses of trans activism.
If Davies truly wants to defend gay rights, he should stand for the right of same-sex attracted people to exist on our own terms. Otherwise, the bleak finale he fears will be one he co-wrote – and this time there'll be no option to rewind and reset when the credits roll.
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