“Educate and Celebrate,” the LGBT-youth charity founded by a music teacher named Elly Barnes, ceased operating in January. The organization was in its 14th year of existence.
Although no cause of death has been announced, the charity reportedly experienced a drastic loss of funding after an infamous TV stunt by one of its foremost public advocates.
“Oh how we didn’t laugh,” producer Malcolm Clark writes of the moment in November 2022 when ‘trans influencer’ Jordan Gray stripped naked on the British television show Friday Night Live and banged a keyboard with his penis.
“The problem was that Gray wasn’t just any old flasher. He was also a patron of Educate and Celebrate,” Clark explains. “Patrons of a charity are generally expected to conduct themselves in public with the highest standards — not get their knob out for laughs on national TV.”
Under public pressure, the organization “removed Jordan Gray as a patron” the week after the stunt. “As far as the charity are aware, Jordan Gray has never gone into schools and the charity have never requested Jordan carry out work for or on behalf of Educate & Celebrate, either in a voluntary or paid capacity,” the trustees announced.
This turned out to be a flagrant lie. Gray had long ago told interviewers about his work for the charity in schools. Video of Gray speaking in schools also emerged. Educate & Celebrate had posted about his school visits right on their Facebook page. We ran those photos here at The Distance. It was one of the best-performing articles in our history.
On the YouTube channel of the now-defunct Gay Star News website, we found video of Jordan Gray saying that he used to be a straight man, but now he is a lesbian. “I never had to grapple with my sexuality,” he says, “just my gender, because of course those two things are not connected.”
Except that they totally are, because Jordan Gray is still having sex, not gender, and using his sex organs, not his gender organs, to have sex instead of gender.
Remember, this person was supposed to be communicating with children. Here, he discusses his penis for six minutes, supposedly as guidance for youth, including young lesbians.
He tells men like himself they should “never put your own happiness second to someone else’s comfort,” because making lesbians uncomfortable feels good. To him. Not to lesbians, of course, but who cares how they feel?
Gray wants homosexual women to be “revolutionary” and “double the love” that they create in the world by having straight sex with a man. It’s how he proposes to “change the face of all this” and make the world a better place.
Bullying and the stigma of gender nonconformity shaped him into the man we see, here. And yet Jordan Gray, who likes to talk about his penis and play the piano with it on television, wants us to believe he is a woman just because he says so, and he will bully anyone who says “no.”
Like the great majority of adult men who “transition” nowadays, estrogen is the limit of his ambition to transition. In this video, he emphasizes twice that “it doesn’t require any medical or surgical intervention” for him to “be a woman.”
His word alone is enough, as “I am not any less of a woman for having a penis.” Gray will never have his penis removed, he insists, because it takes a “toll on your body,” and because his girlfriend likes it. His ‘lesbian’ girlfriend.
How did a charity that was organized to stop homophobic bullying in schools end up with a patent lesbophobe as a spokesperson? According to Malcolm Clark, from 2016 Educate and Celebrate began publishing guidance to schools about “queering the education system.”
“In a video in 2019, Barnes announced that she wanted to ‘smash heteronormativity’ and ‘encourage intersectional ways of thinking’ among primary-age children,” he notes.
When we investigated Educate & Celebrate in 2022, we found earnest efforts to normalize pansexuality and discussion of adult sexual behaviors in the British schoolroom. As we noted, the organization was giving schools very bad advice that invites abuses, and consequent damages.
Elly Barnes and Jordan Gray were insulated from consequences for too long. Once the public finally had reason to pay attention, their “nonsense ideology” became donor poison.
“The trouble is, just as one of these groups shuts down, another is bound to spring up,” Clark writes. “Tragically, the ease with which Educate and Celebrate was able to enter our schools has encouraged a swarm of others to try their luck at ‘queering’ the classroom.”
What we might need, then, is a charitable organization that exists solely to remind people about the examples of Educate and Celebrate, as well as Stonewall and Mermaids and GLSEN and all the other trans-captured organizations. Cautionary examples are always worth revisiting.