UK The Fall of Pride: How Gender Ideology Hijacked a Movement

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Pride Month 2025 is a far cry from its revolutionary roots. What once was a bold and necessary stand for the rights of lesbian and gay people has, critics argue, devolved into a spectacle defined more by hedonism than by meaningful advocacy. This year’s Pride, adorned with flashy displays and indulgent performances, seems eerily silent on one of the most significant legal rulings for gay and lesbian rights in recent history: the UK Supreme Court’s April decision that affirmed ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex.

 

The court’s conclusion safeguarded the right to single-sex spaces, protecting same-sex orientation from being reduced to a meaningless concept. Yet rather than celebrating this victory, Pride has turned its back on those who made it possible.

 

The lesbian activists who intervened in the case received no gratitude from the institutions now purporting to celebrate LGBTQ+ rights. Instead, they faced hostility. Pride UK has even barred political parties from participating in this year’s events, an act of protest against the support those parties offered to the court’s ruling. Rather than engaging with the legal affirmation of lesbian and gay rights, Pride seems intent on retreating into ideological dogma. Gender identity, not same-sex attraction, has become its banner—and in the process, relevance is slipping away.

 

Across the Western world, Pride organizations are experiencing a crisis. Corporate sponsorships, once abundant, are drying up. UK events in Plymouth, Lincoln, Southampton, and Hereford have struggled to stay afloat. In the United States, deficits run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The rainbow that once saturated marketing campaigns is fading fast. The corporate world, once eager to align itself with Pride, appears increasingly hesitant as the implications of gender ideology become more widely scrutinized. The LGB movement, critics argue, has been consumed by a parasitic ideology that never served its interests.

 

For years, Pride leaders failed to reckon with the consequences of gender medicine. They remained silent—or worse, complicit—as children, many of them same-sex attracted, were funneled into medical transition at institutions like the Tavistock gender clinic. It’s now known that 80 to 90 percent of these youths were struggling with their sexuality, not their gender. Nancy Kelley, the former CEO of Stonewall, once branded lesbians who weren’t attracted to transwomen as “sexual racists”—a statement that typifies how far the movement has strayed from its foundations.

 

Conversion therapy disguised as medical transition occurred under the watch of those now waving the Pride flag. Rather than challenge these practices, they cheered them on. But the tide is turning. In Denmark, a medical journal recently broke the silence on the overrepresentation of autistic youth in gender clinics. Australia is also now grappling with the unregulated chaos of gender treatments. Meanwhile, Stonewall has fallen into near silence, its rare public appearances shredded by critics on both sides of the debate.

 

This shifting landscape is impossible to ignore. The BBC now interviews gender-critical women. The UK health secretary is weighing a ban on cross-sex hormones for minors. Even the prime minister has ceased repeating the mantra that "some women have penises." Pride’s leadership, long accustomed to unconditional support, now appears unprepared for this reckoning.

 

We are far removed from the spirit of the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day march, organized by Linda Rhodes, Ellen Broidy, Craig Rodwell, and Fred Sargeant. That historic protest by two lesbians and two gay men sparked a global movement that fought for genuine equality and visibility. Today, the challenge is different—but equally urgent. If history is to be honored, it falls to the same community that once demanded freedom to now confront and dismantle the ideology threatening to erase it. That would be something truly worth celebrating.

 

  Adapted by ASEAN Now from The Telegraph  2025-06-13