Right-wing pundit Darren Grimes has claimed that the coronavirus pandemic proves that it’s “narcissism” to care about “trendy pansexuality”.
Grimes, a former fashion student who appears regularly on the BBC and ran the controversial BeLeave campaign during the EU referendum, decided to put out the odd take on the day that Boris Johnson declared a national lockdown.
Darren Grimes thinks the big take-away from coronavirus is that pansexuality is too ‘trendy’.
He tweeted: “If there’s owt good that can come from this, I hope it enables us to realise:
“• That leaving the EU really isn’t the end of the world • An obsession with trendy pansexuality, gender and pronouns is just narcissism • That, at the end of the day, all we have is each other.”
It is unclear why exactly a global pandemic would at all invalidate the identities of pansexual or gender non-conforming people – particularly given Grimes frequently notes his own identity as a gay man when confronted with criticism.
Indeed, in his pinned tweet, he states: “Young, working-class and gay? He can’t genuinely hold eurosceptic views (…) The sneering in some quarters of the Left is repugnant. Sadly, for them, I ain’t going anywhere.”
It’s not the first time Grimes has taken cheap pops at other LGBT+ people – insisting this week that he’s “absolutely delighted” that reforms to gender recognition laws have reportedly been shelved – describing the proposals as “madness” after apparently changing his mind on the issue overnight.
Meanwhile, when Lib Dem MP Layla Moran came out as pansexual in January, he claimed not to understand the term, tweeting: “I’m none the wiser.”
He has also claimed: “There’s a direct link between a person with their preferred pronoun in their Twitter bio and the likelihood of them being an attention-seeking bore.”
COVID-19 is a magnet for absolutely everyone’s terrible takes.
There have been many, many bizarre takes on coronavirus – with Grimes not the only person to have decided the middle of a global pandemic is the time to score tedious political points.
In a church sermon earlier this month, Tennessee preacher Perry Stone suggested that the spread of COVID-19 was a response to the legalisation of the “abomination” of equal marriage and abortion.
He said: “So why is there a reckoning? I’m gonna explain it in these simple terms. There’s a reckoning because the courts of the land passed a law (…) for marriage, that we have known it, to be changed into something we’ve never known.”
In response, people pointed out that the three worst-impacted countries – China, Italy, and Iran – all continue to ban same-sex marriage.