تدريب Shadowing: Sammy McDonald | This House Believes Modern LGBTQ+ Activism Fails Its Community | Cambridge Union - تعلم التحدث بالإنجليزية عبر الفيديو

Thank you, Alfonso, for that fine speech.

Now speaking second for the opposition this evening is Sammy McDonnell.

Sammy is an MPhil student of modern European history at St John's College.

He was the Cambridge University Labour Club's LGBTQ plus officer and was president of the Cambridge Union in Lent 2025.

Sammy, you have the ears of the house.

Thank you very much, Mr President.

It's great to see a political leader who is not currently on the verge of resigning.

Fantastic, although I see Jasper's looking a little shifty there over there.

You might want to watch it.

It's a pleasure to be back here.

It's probably my last time addressing this, and I'm going to have a moment of self -indulgence

and just thank all the staff of this building that have helped give me four wonderful years here, making a lot of friends, and there's a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes,

both through the Orata staff and the AV staff, and I thank you so much for the opportunities this place has given me, and it's a pleasure to address it one last time.

I want to start by two important caveats.

The first is I can only speak for myself.

I have the great fortune of growing up as a gay

man at the age of 21 rather than at the age of 71.

And I cannot speak for everyone in this community.

As we've seen already tonight, everyone has a diverse range of experiences and it's not for me to speak over people or speak for people.

The second is, at the same time, I understand for many people that it's painful even debating things like this, and I think I heard some of the pain in the opposition speaker's voice.

I understand the fundamental pain when your identity is called into question, where you are constantly subject to gaslighting by others.

I do believe that the best way to proceed is through civility, is through respect, and is through open conversation.

I do believe that.

I understand it is painful that I believe we must proceed in that calm, rational, but also truthful way to describe our experiences.

When looking at this motion, I wanted to have a look at what modern LGBT activism actually is.

And, as you shouldn't do, I turned to the British press.

And I found some truly terrifying things.

The trans threat to freedom.

Crikey.

Gender ideology relies on censorship to survive.

We're even talking about somebody being turfed out by the trans Taliban.

Now, as far as I'm aware, Joe Biden did not leave behind a bunch of US military equipment for the trans people to pick up.

No, thank you.

But it's this again, again and again.

We're even told that trans activists are a little hitless.

And in fact, what we see is this cavalcade of negative articles, portraying everyone in the LGBT movement as demonic,

as woke, as out of control.

In fact, in one year alone there are 115 negative articles in the Daily Mail.

Sorry, I'm gonna make some progress, Fanny.

And when you look at these headlines, they're very hard to explain.

Transgender people only account for something like 250 ,000 people in the UK, according to a census, gay people around maybe 5 % of the population.

But they have echoes for anyone with familiarity with gay history.

Turn to the 1980s in the sun and you see Britain threatened by the gay virus plague.

Are we being run by gay mafia?

Politicians in constant threat of being outed and their careers ruined for things

that they cannot change and things they were born with.

And we're seeing something very similar today.

And this is what I want to call your attention to.

I think that this motion has got it backward.

I do understand and I think many speakers have put it extremely eloquently that there are problems with the LGBT movement, its cohesiveness and its activism.

But I do think the primary responsibility for the reverse is the backlash to the progress

that had been achieved over the 2010s and the extremely coordinated nature of that.

And you will see echoes of the old past

that never really quite died in many of the things I'm going to go through.

When I'm going to go through some of these examples in British public life that transgender people have to face, I'm not doing so to smear everyone who has questions about anything

or to imply or toxify the debate nevertheless I think it's important to see some of the rhetoric

and some of the realities for what they actually really are

that people have to experience when they're often called out of control, woke, zealots, the Taliban for responding to.

Yeah, go ahead Freddie.

Look, you clearly look to the media, and you're yourself being a victim of the vicious British media.

Well, wouldn't you say that this is more a problem in general with our terrible, wretched, Daily Mail telegraph than anything else?

I wouldn't say that, and I'm going to get on to reasons why I think it's a kind of broader society -wide problem of

which activism is an absolutely crucial part in combating.

I want to talk about some people who transgender people have to face.

And one example, and I want you, when I go through these examples, to really think, are these people making criticisms,

rational criticisms, in response to activism?

Or is there something far deeper and darker that they're drawing on and that they're going through and being powered by?

For example, I want to talk about Graham Linehan.

Now, he's already called me a twerp, as Franny has alluded to.

So, you know, this is already, if you're watching Graham, hello.

But he's somebody who's gone from making Father Ted films to sort of potentially rather sad career on social media.

But here are the kind of things that Kemi Badenot, the leader of the opposition, who posed smiling next to him,

thinks is fine and is rational debate in response to the overreach of trans activists.

He suggested, in response to somebody who annoyed him, make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

Respectful, great debate there He called a 17 -year -old a domestic terrorist, a groomer and a pedophile

And he said in response to the founding of the Society of Women I know

that they would not accept this rhetoric But

that young men stand up for these women Don't let them fight psychotic men on their own Now,

when I go through this Have in your mind Is this really a rational debate,

a conversation Something provoked by trans activists Or do they have a slightly dangerous image in their mind?

And I want to get on to what

that image is by looking at some figures who are more potentially aligned with the right.

If we look at for example the account libs of TikTok, anyone overly online enough will be unfortunate to have come across their putrid content.

But what you see in the language there was again these

conspiracy theories recycled from what we had to face 40

or 50 years ago

that still lurk in the back of the collected mind about gay people being paedophiles and aggressive and potentially seducing children.

They call the people child molesters, pedos, groomers and butchers.

This is the kind of dehumanised, I'm going to make some progress, this kind of dehumanising language that is constantly going on.

They call LGBT people a cult, the person who founded this website, saying, I think they're evil.

Sometimes we try to break it down a lot, and you know we discuss why it is happening.

I think the simplest answer is they're just evil, they're just bad people, they're just evil people, and they want to groom children.

That is simply, I'm just going to make some progress, that's alright, that is simply straight out of the old homophobic playbook.

And sure enough, Ron DeSantis embraced it, and instead of being used to push back against the supposed excesses of trans activists, it was used to pass a draconian don't say gay law,

which shut down conversation.

We see the same with Posey Parker, who's aligned with the far right in Britain.

And the point I'm trying to raise by this is simple.

There is often an effort, an enormous psychological effort put onto transgender people to be the perfect model activist, whilst having the most dehumanizing,

cruel and reprehensible insults thrown at them, their identity and increasingly a campaign that does not want them anywhere near public life at all.

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In fact, their mere presence is enough to provoke outrage that they're a threat to women, that even just if they appear in public, they are apparently putting on woman face,

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which is another lovely thing that they've come up with.

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When you look at this, and this is what I want to get onto, you are drawn to the inescapable conclusion

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that some of the old prejudices about those who do not conform to the heteronormative model of a man

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and a woman with children being maligned as groomers, being maligned as threats to children, are potentially more alive than it was thought.

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And that gets me onto my second point which has been alluded to by the other speakers.

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The scale of success for LGBT activists was rapid by all historical standards

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and has left potential ruptures in society in its wake.

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Just 40 years ago, only about 10 % of the population agreed with gay marriage, and large portions viewed us as sinful, as disgusting, as perverted.

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Many things that are now hurled at trans people today.

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And within a generation, that had become socially taboo and unacceptable.

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Support for gay marriage, according to Nate Silver, rose by 2 .5 % every year, which is almost unthinkable in terms of social changes.

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But the more things change, the more they sometimes stay the same.

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These forces are still out there.

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There is powerful American evangelical money that still wants to profit off our division

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and off demonising those who do not fit the kind of model and society that they want.

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And I think it would be a shame for us to blame activists for this failure,

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when what we've seen is an extraordinarily powerful and coordinated effort to demonise...

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I'm going to make some progress, sorry, I've only got one minute.

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...to demonise transgender people.

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The Donald Trump campaign, everyone's favourite campaign,

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spent $220 million on advertising demonising transgender people.

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Now, I'm sure there are issues, as many speakers have.. no thank you, has eloquently alluded to with transgender activism.

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But ask yourself for a second, if somebody is spending 220 million dollars, the forces that are arraigned against transgender people just existing in public life,

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and the forces that are still arraigned against gay

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and bisexual people from being themselves in much of the world are still powerful and they are still strong.

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If you endorse this motion, you endorse a backward notion

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that those who are victims of this rise in hatred are those responsible

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and you endorse this perverse notion that somehow transgender people, gay and bisexual people must always be the models of political politeness

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and rectitude whereas those who are lined up to oppose them must and should never be held to any moral standards.

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I am nearly out of time, my apologies.

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I will say this by way of conclusion, I am extraordinarily lucky to have grown up in a time where I'm no longer maligned as a faggot,

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as a pervert, as somebody who should be excluded from mainstream society

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but any knowledge of history that this building has shown shows

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that when progress happens backlash mounts and that progress is very fragile

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and that progress will be reversed unless we stand up to those who peddle hatred

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and do not blame those who are the victims of that hatred for what has been perpetrated upon them.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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تدريب Shadowing: Sammy McDonald | This House Believes Modern LGBTQ+ Activism Fails Its Community | Cambridge Union - تعلم التحدث بالإنجليزية عبر الفيديو

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