Fred Sargeant

Fred Sargeant, a 74-year-old disabled French-American gay rights activist, veteran of the 1969 Stonewall riots, and a co-founder and organizer of the first Gay Pride march, discusses having been attacked at a recent Pride event in Burlington, Vermont. Tracing his involvement within the gay rights movement from the 1960s to the present, Sargeant criticises the transgender movement’s wholesale capture of the lesbian and gay rights movement whereby today it is assumed that gay men and women “owe trans people the event that we created,” likening this hijacking to a bad marriage where he believes the only solution to this conflict is for lesbians and gay men to separate themselves from the QT. Sargeant notes how local gay and lesbian organisations and media have ignored the attack on him, noting the many death threats and acts of violence committed by the transgender community whenever anyone denounces the fetishism, homophobia, misogyny, and abuse rife within this community. Sargeant observes how violence is being used to force the public to accept a fiction, “We are being asked to exalt their personality in very weird ways,” citing JK Rowling who recently spoke out about the attack on him: “Violence is not a bug, but a feature of this authoritarian movement.”