I'm a Queer Woman and the Far Right Need to Stop Weaponizing my Safety as an Excuse for their Racism

“With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.”

The above is an excerpt from Hitler’s political manifesto, Mein Kampf.

I remember these lines were reproduced in my GCSE history textbook. At the same time I was studying To Kill a Mockingbird in English. For those unfamiliar, Harper Lee’s novel centres around the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man who is falsely accused of raping a white woman during the Jim Crow era in Southern United States. Whilst studying the book, we learned about how the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups portrayed white women as innocent, vulnerable beings in need of protection from black men who were cast as animalistic aggressors. In many instances, false sexual assault accusations against Black men were used as justifications for lynchings. It struck me that Hitler was essentially using the same tactic.

Why do I mention all of this? Well, because white ‘Christian’ men suddenly claiming to care passionately about the safety of women when it’s a convenient excuse for their racism is nothing new. In 2026, this plays out as a narrative which tells us Muslim men practice an ‘inferior’ culture which does not respect women. We see it in the way that the cases of predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs in the North of England are endlessly magnified and used to cast aspersions on men who share the predators’ religion, nationality or skin colour. This despite the fact that 85% of suspects in group-based sexual offence cases in the UK are white and British.

In To Kill a Mockingbird Bob Ewell, the father of the young woman who falsely accuses Tom Robinson, is sexually abusing his daughter. Lee clearly saw that there was a link between the sort of man who wishes to violently oppress people with more melanin than them and the sort of man who perpetrates violence against his own family. It should come as no surprise to us, then, to learn that 1 in 5 of those arrested during the 2024 racist riots in the UK have since been reported for domestic violence. Or that most of those arrested at the recent protests for Henry Nowak had previously been reported for intimate partner abuse.

These people have far more in common with the caricature of a Muslim they have created in their heads than they would care to admit.

Of course, this hypocrisy doesn’t just extend to women’s safety. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told that I shouldn’t advocate for Palestinian people because, as a queer woman, they would supposedly ‘throw me off a building’ if I ever visited Gaza or the West Bank. This hugely oversimplified and largely unevidenced observation often comes from people who are homophobic or transphobic themselves.

Which brings me to Nigel Farage. His Reform party have sought to restrict Pride events in the areas where they control councils (something Farage has said he has ‘no objection’ to). They’re seemingly obsessed with tearing down the pride flag wherever it might appear. They call trans-inclusive education an ‘ideology’ which they say they would seek to ban in schools. Farage has also said he believes the 2013 legalisation of same sex marriage was ‘wrong’. He’s recorded videos supporting a pastor in Essex who calls homosexuality an ‘abomination’. (Do not even get me started on how he and his party are targeting women – see Deborah Francis-White’s Road to Gilead project if you want details on that).

But of course, despite doing so much to re-introduce regressive rhetoric which harms our community, after one person was killed and 29 injured during an attack at Berlin Pride this weekend, Farage tweeted how ‘horrendous’ it was. Why? The attacker has been categorised as ‘Islamist’ by German police.

Farage added ‘the strange left wing alliance between Islamists and the LGBT community in this country cannot last’.

This is a very deliberate mischaracterisation of what’s happening on the left. Absolutely no one, apart from Islamist terrorists, supports Islamist terrorists. Who we do show allyship to on the left are Muslims. Muslims and Islamist terrorists are two very different groups (the former being vastly larger in number than the latter) whom Farage has sought to deliberately conflate. LGBTQ and other marginalised people recognise the way Muslims are being targeted by the far right, an experience that mirrors our own, hence the solidarity.

Farage cloaks what he says in seemingly-respectable language. He knows how to stay on the right side of outright incitement. But he knows exactly what he is doing – dog-whistling whatever rancid group of hate-mongers it’s most advantageous for him to in the moment in order to bring him closer to power. Him and his ilk will weaponize the very real issue of misogynistic and anti LGBTQ violence if it suits them, but only the extremely credulous would ever believe they genuinely care.