by Michael Gove, Spectator Highlights email
Once our collective annual calendar was marked by Michaelmas and Martinmas, St Swithin’s Day and the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Now our year has different punctuation points – International Men’s Day, Earth Day, Red Nose Day and even World Toilet Day (19 November since you ask…). But the daddy of them all is Pride. First just an afternoon, then a fully-fledged day, it spread to a week and now takes up the whole month of June. We’ve got used to the rainbow flag fluttering aloft every public building, but this year the ‘wheels finally seem to be coming off the Pride clown car’, writes Gareth Roberts in his cover piece this week. Councils are refusing to fly the polychromatic progress banners, Whitehall has banned civil servants from buying parti-coloured lanyards and many Pride celebrations across the country have been either abandoned or cut back because of a lack of funding. It was inevitable, says Gareth, that as trans ideology collided with reality, Pride would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. In an accompanying piece, Lara Brown reveals what we can expect from the next stages of lawfare from trans rights campaigners. Having lost the fight to redefine ‘woman’ in the Supreme Court, campaigners are moving on to the definition of ‘biological’.