Ep 18: Fear & Loathing at TERFcon part 1: the rise of Gender UKIP

On thursday 21st of October 2021, the political organization called “the LGB alliance” held a conference of 400 plus people, from across the transphobic political movement. Much of the reporting and public commentary on the conference has focused on a few shocking or comic high points: the terrible disco, the dire reputations of certain attendees such as Andy Ngo, clips of transphobes behaving weirdly and the generally odd vibe. However the actual contents of the conference, and its nature as a political event have not been delved into in detail by most commentators: most people think the event was a bit of a joke.

We think this is a mistake. Thanks to a friend of the show who attended and recorded the event, we’ve obtained a recording of the entire thing, and the stuff in the recording point in some very concerning directions. 

 

The next few episodes of ours will be covering this conference; those who follow our twitter will know how many hours of material and pages of notes M has been labouring on; we refuse to inflict 7 hours of our nonsense on anyone in one block. 

 

Much of the conversation at the conference  touched on various tropes similar to those found in fascims, including bodily essentialism and conspiratorial rambles about invading, encroaching, plotting forces. We’ve covered the theory around these in previous episodes; this is not going to be sports commentary of the same old plays.

 

But in between regular deployments of wildly bigoted tropes, slanders, and slurs, a theme was clearly hammered home to attendees: the LGBA has a clear strategy of destroying its opponents (Stonewall, we know, though other targets were discussed) and engaging in a multi front campaign across all the major institutions of civil society to roll back the trans rights movement, as well as modern intersectional politics in general. 

 

The LGB alliance seeks to be a sort of anti-stonewall vanguard, working within the higher institutions of british civil society, campaigning to totally change NHS, BBC and wider government policy with relation to gender and LGBT issues in a deeply reactionary direction. This has thus far been what most people familiar with the trans rights movement would have assumed about the organisation, but the depth of the reality needs to be seen and directly analysed.

 

We will be using audio clips from the conference where possible, and reading out transcripts where the audio quality does not allow for a good listener experience.

Content warnings for this episode include regular sound clips of highly transphobic political speech, including discussions of my common transphobic tropes. 

 

As ever, our music is by Molly Noise