There's a new Wall Street Journal article about the rift between the LGB and the TQ
Here's the link, with snippets of the article found below:
"As a “very, very effeminate boy” growing up in Baltimore, Ben Appel was teased mercilessly. At school, where he was regularly bullied, the other kids called him “Bengay.”
“It was awful,” Appel, now 42 and married to another man, recalled. “I realized I wasn’t going to survive, so I made it my full-time job to defeminize myself as a form of self-protection.” In his 20s, Appel lobbied for gay marriage, and in 2017 he interned at Glaad, an LGBTQ advocacy group, determined to fight on behalf of kids like him.
But when Appel later enrolled at Columbia University, eager to learn about the theories behind his activism, the rhetoric he encountered felt more like dogma than inquiry. “According to queer theory, if you’re a man who behaves in ‘unmasculine’ ways or wears eyeliner you must be a woman inside, which I thought was regressive,” Appel, who graduated in 2020, recalled. “Saying that those superficial attributes are what make women women, and that any variation on the rough he-man stereotype means you’re not a man, reinforces these rigid sex roles, and I thought we were supposed to be against those.”"
These disagreements stem from radically different ways of viewing identity. Gay people typically see their homosexuality as fundamentally grounded in biology and based on attraction to people of the same sex. Transgender people instead prioritize gender identity, defined by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither.” Meanwhile, queer theory argues that both sex and gender exist on a spectrum and are often fluid, allowing for labels like nonbinary and genderqueer.
There have always been fault lines within the rainbow coalition.
But in the past 10 years, ever since the right to gay marriage was secured in 2015, further divisions have emerged and expanded, along with growing rancor and vitriol. All of which belies the overriding image of inclusion touted by advocacy groups.
“For those of us who work in this field as advocacy-focused political activists, these are hard conversations we have to have as a movement,” said Cathy Renna, communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, which was founded in 1973 as the National Gay Task Force. “To me, this is often about fear of the other, and nobody understands that better than queer people.” As for gay people who don’t believe in gender identity, Renna says, “It’s fine not to believe in it, but why do you have to impose what you believe on everyone else?”
Renna's last line really stood out to me, because from what I've seen and experienced it's the other way around. Transgender people and TRAs are trying to impose Gender Theory (which is based on sexist stereotypes) upon everyone else. Over the past 11 years, they have tried to convince everyone from teachers to doctors to politicians that femininity and masculinity are innate, that biological sex is either fake, malleable, and/or a spectrum, and that people can change their sex via speech alone. Over the past 11 years we have seen a shift in how language is used, and a preference for vague, often sexist phrases instead of more accurate, easy to understand terms that reflect reality.
Because a small subset of the human population believes that humans can undergo magical sex changes via simply "identifying" as the opposite sex, everyone else has had to follow along with their whims. Posters and brochures from medical clinics advising women to get yearly cervical exams now espouse the importance of getting yearly exams if you are a "person with a cervix." Likewise, articles and informational materials regarding menstruation can no longer use words like "women" or "girls," but have to utilize dehumanizing phrases like "mensturators" and "uterus owners" because a few people believe that men can menstruate. Adults in any line of work are are punished or sued for addressing a trans person by the wrong name or pronouns, even if they weren't aware that the person was trans or had obscure pronouns.
TRAs have also tried to redefine sexuality, so that sexual orientations are based on gender instead of biological sex. This is ridiculous and unscientific as homosexuality has been observed in various animal species in the wild, and animals do not have gender roles. Additionally, for 99.9% of the human population, most people can easily determine whether someone is male or female- we are a sexually dimorphic species. As sexual attraction concerns who a person desires to sex (the act) with, it of course involves their partner's biological sex (this should go without saying).
Originally, the term "gender" just meant "sex roles"-it referred to how men and women were expected to behave and dress in a given society. Now it refers to some kind of innate, nebulous internal sense of self. How can people possibly feel sexual attraction to someone's inner feelings? It's nonsensical.
Gay men and lesbians, however, have existed and will continue to exist regardless of human language and social expectations. We don't need the world around us to change. All homosexuals ever asked for was to be accepted as normal, to be allowed to love and marry who we want, and be allowed to live happy, peaceful lives. That doesn't require a reshaping of basic language or medical knowledge. Being gay doesn't require people to undergo risky, experimental surgeries so that we can become our "true selves," or for spaces designed for women to be invaded by men.
