Kemi Badenoch is a true gay-rights champion

Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has long been accused of obsessing over the culture war and the trans issue, in particular. But these are not trivial matters. It has taken great courage and strength to stand up to the entitled LGBT lobby. And in taking on those denying the biological reality of sex, Badenoch has earned the gratitude of thousands of lesbians and gay men, including me.

It really has taken guts on her part. Search for Badenoch on PinkNews, the favourite news service of spiky-haired nonbinary they / thems and drag queens, and you’ll find well over 250 articles, each one more negative than the last.

She has also been relentlessly pilloried and defamed by all manner of LGBT activists. She was told to shut up by idiot actor David Tennant. One of parliament’s most pretentious poltroons, Labour MP Chris Bryant, claimed that Badenoch made him feel unsafe as a gay man. Her ‘crime’, in his eyes, was to have spoken up against the medicalisation of vulnerable, often gay teens with puberty-blocking drugs.

Yet here’s the thing, Badenoch hasn’t backed down. Instead, she has shown intellectual confidence and stood up for herself – and for gay people.

This confidence was clear in her refusal to unquestioningly accept the narratives peddled by the LGBT lobby and embraced by parts of the Tory Party and the civil service. I witnessed this critical thinking for myself when, out of the blue, I received an email from Badenoch in 2021. I’d never spoken to her before. At the time, she was the equalities minister. She said she wanted to thank me for posting a thread on Twitter, which dissected research funded by her own department.

To say this research was garbage is to be unnecessarily polite. Academics at Coventry University had been paid a considerable sum of taxpayers’ money to study the prevalence and impact of so-called conversion therapy. In its press release, the Coventry team warned about the terrible damage conversion therapy is supposedly doing to LGBT Britons. You’d hardly have guessed, as I pointed out in my thread, that the team had managed to interview only 30 people, a third of whom reported that the attempts to ‘convert’ them had been a relatively positive experience. Whoops.

The civil servants in Badenoch’s department had intended to use this research as a pretext to ban so-called trans conversion therapy. Guess how many trans people the researchers had interviewed? A grand total of six, of whom only three said they had actually experienced ‘conversion therapy’. How on Earth could national policy be shaped by such pathetically inadequate research? The Coventry study, now viewed with the contempt it deserves, is rarely cited any more.

Any governing party that wants to get things done on behalf of voters cannot afford to be pushed about by lobbies that have more loose screws than a B&Q. And no lobby is more unhinged than the LGBT lobby, which actively undermines women’s sex-based rights and children’s mental health by insisting they can be born in the wrong body. Its tentacles stretch deep into our institutions, from schools and hospitals to the civil service. Indeed, the civil service appears to operate a revolving door for activists from LGBT groups, who are lobbyists one moment and staffers the next. This should matter to the Conservatives, not least because this capture of our institutions happened on their watch.

It began when David Cameron announced in 2011 that he was supporting gay marriage. There was nothing wrong with gay marriage in itself, of course. But he was obviously desperate to signal the rebranding of the Conservatives as modern, metropolitan and progressive. To do so, he actively sought the public approval of groups like Stonewall. This unwittingly handed the LGBT lobby something close to a veto over future Tory policy. From that point on, the Conservatives could be denounced if they failed to read from the Stonewall script. This arrangement became more perilous when these groups began prioritising trans rights over gay rights.

This led directly to the scandal of an ostensibly Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, championing the LGBT lobby’s signature policy of gender self-ID. A policy that would allow rapists to bed down in women’s prison cells and predatory men to perform their own interpretation of the Dance of the Seven Veils in girls’ changing rooms.

The Conservatives can at least take comfort from the fact they eventually came to their senses and rejected gender self-ID. They also recognised, despite the howls of the LGBT lobby, that there was a mounting medical scandal at the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service, and commissioned Dr Hilary Cass to investigate it. In both cases, Badenoch was critical to shaping the debate.

Badenoch’s early opposition to the dangerous influence of the LBGT lobby, and to the medicalisation of vulnerable children with puberty blockers, revealed a courage and independence of mind. If she were to become Conservative leader, she would be a bold alternative to the usual unthinking career politicians, who are all too easily swayed by lobbyists and the latest fads. As a gay man, I hope they choose her.

Malcolm Clark is a TV producer. Visit his substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.