Swindling the Gay Rights Movement

It's a shame, really. Unlike the left, this lady knows something isn't right. She is aware of the explosion in the number of individuals who identify as LGBTQIA or as "trans," the individuals who once were understood as transsexuals. And she wants to believe that it is a conspiracy among, and hatched by, forces she virulently disagrees with for other reasons. It is truly unfortunate, even tragic, that individuals such as she are completely unaware of the special interest(s) that is impelling so many young people today to identify as "trans.

What’s terrifying about this isn’t just the overt bigotry.

It’s the utter detachment from reality for such an influential group on the Right.

And it’s the tacit acceptance of it all in the name of pluralism among self-styled conservative intellectuals who should know better. https://t.co/qsr3nB1ZDJ

— Josh Cowen (@joshcowenMSU) May 22, 2023

It's not bigotry and it's not quite terrifying. However, itdoes represent an utter detachment from reality. It's not teachers' unions, it's not Biden, and only Lord knows what she is referring to by the ubiquitous "money." Nonetheless, she speaks for tens of millions of Americans. The gay and Republican Andrew Sullivan ("The Queers Versus the Homosexuals"), though he'd disagree with her, understands what has gone seriously awry and explains

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.

To be homosexual, in contrast, is merely to be attracted to the same sex, and gays and lesbians run the gamut of tastes, politics, backgrounds and religions. Some are conservative, some radical, some indifferent. Some gays are queers. But most aren’t. And queers now run what was once the gay rights movement. (For a longer, piercing reflection on the takeover, read historian Jamie Kirchick’s new essay in Liberties. For a discussion of the homophobia of the new queer activism, see Ben Appel’s excellent essay in Spiked.)

No one held a news conference and announced that from 2015 on, after Obergefell, the gay rights movement had changed its entire rationale. But they sure gave hints. The Human Rights Campaign, once a relatively moderate group, replaced “gay” and “lesbian” with the acronym “LGBTQ+” and expanded the word “queer” to describe anyone gay, lesbian, transgender, or even straight who defied heteronormativity. They changed the flag from a simple rainbow, to one that included some races (only black and brown — no Asians or whites) and transgender ideology. Their building in DC is festooned with a massive banner declaring their mission: “Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter.” Their new head is a woman who calls herself “queer,” not lesbian.

Then they quietly changed the meaning of the word “gay” so that it no longer referred to same-sex attraction, but to same-gender attraction; and changed the word “men” to include people with vaginas and uteruses, and the word “women” to include people with dicks and balls. Checkmate for the gays! We are all now just bigots with “genital preferences,” just like the Christianist right used to claim. Just to add to the confusion, hundreds of new “genders” were adopted — because some teens on Tumblr once invented them and queer theorists loved them.

Gay hook-up apps now include biological women seeking gay men and straight men looking for chicks with dicks. “NO MEN” some profiles now say — on what was once a gay man’s app. There are fewer and fewer exclusively gay male spaces left. Lesbian bars? Almost gone entirely. Lesbians themselves? On their way out. Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant. (Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: “I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.” We are going backward, not forward.)

Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell.

Kindergartners were told to pick a pronoun, and thereby a sex, as soon as they arrived. Endless kiddie books reiterated the queer theory mantra about gender: “You can be a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else entirely!” And if the sex the child chose did not match their physical body, they were told they could just change it — and change it back if needed — no questions asked. Fun! If a boy said he was a girl, or vice-versa, it was in fact unethical to ask any further questions. From now on, he was a girl. Parents? A problem to be overcome.

No one held a news conference and announced that from 2015 on, after Obergefell, the gay rights movement had changed its entire rationale. But they sure gave hints. Yes, the LGBTQIA+ movement has promoted the harebrained idea that sex- or gender, as it now must be called- is merely a social construct. Moreover, the genesis of this radical rejection of reality came not coincidentally with the same-sex marriage ruling.

If written in 2023, this could have been what Steelers Wheel was referring to with "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right," though I believe the reverse is probably more accurate. The cultural far left cannot seriously believe- can it?- that biology does not determine sex. By contrast, the right really does seem to believe that, as does the woman recognized by Josh Cowen as detached from reality, a human being's sex at birth cannot be changed by surgery.

Rank-and-file conservatives know that we are not all bigots simply because we choose not to join this very odd socio-political movement.  Unfortunately, they also seem to believe that it has something to do with Joe Biden or liberals or unions or whatever, and their leaders, who know better, are treating them like mushrooms.

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