The LGB and the T

What these distinct and often conceptually opposed movements share in common beside an institutional Borg force teaming them

As an account of a temporal sequence, no one can deny that the LGBTQIA+ movement has followed exactly the trajectory depicted in the reactionary shitpost meme posted above. A few years after the attainment of gay marriage, the institutional juggernaut built to obtain “marriage equality” was indeed quickly repurposed to propagate the chemical castration and surgical modification of a population of mostly autistic, gay, mentally-ill, and gender nonconforming youth who have been promised by online transgender influencers and communities that all their problems can by solved by transforming themselves into members of the opposite sex.

This has taken the form of a full spectrum effort throughout the Anglosphere (concentrated in progressive areas but by no means confined to them) to induct children at the earliest ages into what I have termed a Queer Normative curriculum, whose rationale and purposes are succinctly summarized in an academic review of decades of research into Comprehensive Sex Education thusly:

“…the early grades may, in fact, be the best time to introduce topics related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, gender equality, and social justice related to the LGBTQ community before hetero- and cisnormative values and assumptions become more deeply ingrained and less mutable.”

Kindergarten sex education materials from Portland, Oregon public schools

The causal and conceptual linkages between the LGB and the T are less certain, however. There is a fervent debate within the synthetic “LGBTQIA+” collective summoned into being by the institutional imperatives of the nonprofit Borg that purports to represent a “community” encompassing those afflicted by congenital disorder of sex development, gays and lesbians, autogynephilic fetishists, and the “asexual” about the wisdom and morality of continual extension of the LGB alphabet to encompass new categories of the oppressed — or to subordinate the interests of some members of this group to those of others while loudly insisting that no conflict in interests can exist between these disparate groups. Organized LGB splinter groups, recognizing a threat to their own political and social gains in being classed with a group of adult fetishists seeking to induct confused children into a cult of medicalized self-harm, have come into existence, but remain outside of the mainstream of the institutional gender movement which has subsumed what was as recently as 2010 a movement that framed itself as pursuing “gay rights.”

Meanwhile, heterodox writers such as Andrew Sullivan and Katie Herzog have explicitly framed transgenderism as driven by a latent homophobia — a drive to enforce gender conformity by defining little boys who like unicorns and princesses (many of whom would grow up to be gay men in intact bodies) and little girls who like rough and tumble play (many of whom would grow up to be lesbians in intact bodies) as members of the opposite sex. Many of the clinicians who expressed misgivings about the rush to medicalize gender nonconforming children at Britain’s only pediatric gender clinic were gays and lesbians. Eighty to ninety percent of those referred to the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Service were same sex attracted. A mordant joke made by the staff was that as a result of their efforts “there would be no gay people left”.

And yet in spite of the LGBTQIA+’s movement expressed tendency, common to all movements associated with the Successor Ideology, to cannibalize prior subjects of progressive reform so that new categories of the oppressed can have their day in the sun, we have the undeniable temporal sequence spelled out in the reactionary meme above. In the following post, our undercover public school correspondent Moonlit Piglet, a veteran of Tumblr-era LGBTQ activism who came to be persuaded by gender critical feminists that transgenderism was a peril to the rights of women, sketches out some of the troubling continuities between the LGB and TQ+ movements that any realistic account of the two movements must take into account.

It is by no means a comprehensive account of a story I want to tell in much greater detail — for one thing I am seeking to commission a richer account, hopefully from an insider, about how and why, as Piglet puts it, “the very major organization that developed to fight for gay and lesbian equality in the last fifty years — GLAAD, the HRC, and the ACLU, to name a few — immediately shifted to transgender activism after Obergefell .” But its account of how the transgender movement succeeded by “wielding with brutal efficiency the institutions, tropes, and tactics that were first developed by gay and lesbian activists before them,” is a useful starting point with which all those who seek to understand how a movement for the rights of homosexuals came to be a cult pushing medicalized self-harm onto troubled children must reckon.

By Moonlit Piglet

A few months ago, lesbian activist Eva Kurilova released a piece entitled “No, the Gay Movement Did Not Spawn the Trans Movement” on The Distance. The article (as you can guess by the title) is a response to the common assertion that gays and lesbians are in some way responsible for the explosion of transgender activism in the post-Obergefell era. To criticize this idea, she walks through the history of transgender activism from the 1960’s onward and shows — convincingly, I think — that it has always existed apart from, and in tension with, the gay rights movement, rather than having emerged directly from it in the last decade or so.

Reading her piece, I found myself frustrated — not because there were any real issues with her well-researched history, but because I felt it fundamentally misunderstood what so many people mean when they say one emerged from the other. There are, of course, some out there who do see the L, G, B, and T as four consecutive stops on one big slippery slope we’ve been riding since the 60’s. And for those people, Kurilova’s article is a valuable rebuttal. But for the rest of us, the historical and ideological distinctions between the two movements are less important than the continuity of their tropes and tactics in the here and now.

This is what I imagine most people mean when they say the gay rights movement “spawned” the trans movement: Not that one leads inevitably to the other in any ideological sense, but rather that the transgender movement’s success has come from wielding with brutal efficiency the institutions, tropes, and tactics that were first developed by gay and lesbian activists before them.

The institutional continuity is undeniable, of course. Every major organization that developed to fight for gay and lesbian equality in the last fifty years — GLAAD, the HRC, and the ACLU, to name a few — immediately shifted to transgender activism after Obergefell. Rather than retread that subject, I’d like to lay out three specific areas where strategic and rhetorical continuity is most obvious: The weaponization of suicide and self-harm, the emphasis on personal desires over material concerns, and the urge to downplay or decenter biological sex.

Before I begin, a short disclaimer: None of what I say going forward should be taken to mean that transgender activism is somehow “the fault of” the gay rights movement, or of gays and lesbians more broadly. The transgender movement also repurposes tactics and rhetoric from the civil rights activists of the 1950’s and 60’s, which has no retroactive bearing on those methods for a genuinely oppressed group seeking equality in America.

At the same time, we can’t adopt a reactive defensive posture. The gay rights movement of the 2000’s and the transgender movement of the present day are obviously linked — if not in terms of ultimate ideals, then surely in terms of strategy and tactics, as well as concrete institutions — and a simplistic “LGB movement good, TQ+ movement bad” mindset insulates several legitimately harmful dynamics from necessary critique. Our ultimate goal should be to understand what went wrong in the post-Obergefell era, and the answer can’t simply be that a previously perfect political movement suddenly went crazy.

Weaponizing Suicide and Self-Harm

I first became interested in the fight for gay rights when I was a teenager, around the time that Tyler Clementi, a gay student at Rutgers University, took his own life after his roommate secretly filmed him with another man. His death was only one of the many suicides that were breathlessly reported on by progressive outlets at the time and consistently shared on the burgeoning social justice oriented wing of social media. Stories about these tragedies were everywhere, functioning as perhaps the most widespread cause célèbre of the early 2010’s. At times, the fixation bordered on obsessive, or at least a little tasteless – Madonna’s MDNA world tour, for example, followed a performance of “Like a Virgin” with an interlude where the faces of LGB teenagers who had taken their own lives were projected on stage.

To be clear: There’s nothing inherently wrong with commemorating the tragic deaths of young gays and lesbians, or examining the ways stigma and social ostracization can contribute to mental health issues. But during the “It Gets Better” era, it was common for activists to go beyond merely acknowledging these tragedies to politicizing them. In my liberal community, suicidality was often cast as an inevitable, perhaps even justifiable, response to conservative bigotry – I remember asking my mother what a ‘martyr’ was, because I had heard Clementi described that way by a teacher of mine.

Prominent gay rights activist Dan Savage pinned Clementi’s death specifically on religious leaders and “hate groups,” whom he openly referred to as “accomplices.” And when asked for her own comments, the executive director of GLSEN made a point to say, “… goodness knows people get enough signals about ‘how wrong it is to be gay’ without anyone in those communities actually having to say so” – mirroring the common claim from transgender activists today that any trans person’s suicide can be linked to any person’s disapproval at any time, even when no actual abuse can be identified. Popular talk show host Ellen DeGeneres was even more explicit recently when she blamed a rise in Utah’s suicide rate directly on “the shame [gay and lesbian youth] feel from the Mormon Church.” Meanwhile, Harvard was releasing shaky studies that drew direct connections between suicide attempts and restrictions on gay marriage even after Obergefell was decided.

It seems clear to me now that these ghoulish tactics helped desensitize progressives to the dangers of politicizing suicide, and ultimately laid the groundwork for the “living son or dead daughter” sloganeering that defines the modern transgender movement. It’s no wonder that gay and lesbian critics struggle to reign in these irresponsible tropes today in part because many of those same critics worked hard to defend and entrench similar narratives not even a decade ago. Once again, this doesn’t make gays and lesbians “responsible” for the new heights of emotional blackmail that transgender activists have reached — but it does show that, if we really want to push back on the cynical weaponization of suicide in political discourse, then the L, G, B, and T might need to go back to the drawing board.

Emphasizing Personal Desires

At the turn of the 21st century, LGB Americans faced a huge number of serious issues: Discrimination in housing, healthcare, and employment was not only legal, but widespread; homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health issues had been stuck for years at unacceptable rates, especially among youth; and outright violence and abuse was tragically common. To its credit, the gay rights movement of the 2000’s and 2010’s did admirable work to address these issues — yet, if you were to ask the average person what right or protection was most vocally demanded in those years, the obvious answer would be gay marriage by a mile.

There was nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course. The right to civil marriage is a legitimate one and the exclusion of gay couples from this important institution had meaningful negative impacts, both in terms of individual well-being and broader social attitudes towards homosexuality. However, it was comparatively rare to see gay rights activists emphasize these material consequences in their appeals for legalization. In fact, it was more common to see them argue that, even if civil unions could be entirely equal with marriages in terms of benefits and protections, the division would still be entirely unjust.

There was almost a sort of anti-materialism in the most common mainstream arguments, as if it was a little gauche to consider concrete questions about visitation and inheritance over the transcendent moral and spiritual beauty of the institution itself. What mattered most was having the word ‘marriage’ — after all, as it was constantly pointed out, no one grows up dreaming about their civil union.

Decent, thoughtful people can disagree about the importance of symbolism and shared meaning when it comes to social institutions. However, it’s hard to deny the straight line that can be drawn from I want the word ‘marriage’ to I want the word ‘female,’ or any of the other common demands made by transgender activists. This isn’t to say the two are equally reasonable or sympathetic — only that gay rights activists were tremendously reckless with the feel-good moral principles they casually relied on. Rather than laying out arguments for why the specific institution of marriage ought to be extended to the specific group of gays and lesbians on the basis of specific material concerns, the gay rights movement pushed a dangerously broad worldview that saw depriving someone of something they really, really want to be an injustice in and of itself. It’s no wonder, then, that I don’t want to use the gender-neutral shower, I want the one that validates my gender makes so much sense to so many liberals today.

Decentering Biological Sex

To be clear, this point is no rehash of the laughable conservative claim that gays and lesbians deny biology merely by existing — that sort of vulgar appeal to the “natural” is both entirely ideological and directly contradicted by the near-universal prevalence of homosexuality in both human and non-humans across the globe. It’s perfectly possible to have a conception of homosexuality that not only acknowledges the reality of biological sex but specifically grounds itself in that reality, if one so chooses. Many of the early gay liberation movements took exactly this approach, emphasizing their deviation from heterosexual scripts and the unique nature of their same-sex relationships.

Unfortunately, this is largely not the approach gay rights activists took as they pushed for gay marriage. Rather, the movement pushed to collapse both heterosexuality and homosexuality into one larger category of “love” that avoided any reference to what sexes might be involved. This mindset is best represented with the classic slogan “love is love,” or Andrew Sullivan’s claim that “This isn’t about gay marriage. It’s about marriage.” And with this mindset, it was only a matter of time before activists settled on another slogan, even more obviously ripe for later exploitation by transgender activists: “Hearts, not parts.”

When I wore a little button with that catchphrase in my high school years, I only intended it to mean that same-sex love was valid. But looking back, I see how cultivating knee-jerk discomfort with talk of “parts” as a way to assuage homophobia was a dangerous bargain. This notion that all our most cherished concepts could be understood in purely abstract terms — and that framing them in the context of bodies was unsophisticated or even degrading — very clearly finds its fullest expression in the transgender movement, where “reducing” someone to their body is considered the highest sin.

Of course, gays and lesbians didn’t embrace this mindset as part of some nefarious plan to purge biology from polite society entirely. They simply — and, I would argue, correctly — identified our culture’s entrenched discomfort with unambiguous same-sex desire and realized more general appeals to heterosexual-friendly concepts would be strategically effective. Nonetheless, fighting to frame the mention of bodies as undignified in comparison with purely abstract concepts floating out in the ether has had disastrous results. The Platonic genie is hard to put back in the bottle, and transgender activists have now made “hearts not parts” the default approach to everything in the realm of sex and gender.

***

I imagine this piece will be frustrating for those who want a more straightforward rebuttal of Eva’s analysis, one that lays the blame for transgender activism entirely at the feet of the gay rights movement. But that would be too easy an answer — just like it’s too easy an answer to say that a pristine and faultless gay rights movement suddenly went insane the day Obergefell was ruled on. It would be most accurate to say that, while the modern transgender movement openly repudiates many of the foundational aspects of earlier gay and lesbian activists, it also avails itself of the institutional, cultural, and rhetorical structures those activists created and deploys them to other ends. In other words, while the gay rights movement didn’t actually spawn the transgender movement, we might still consider putting their name on the birth certificate.