Gay vs. Trans

Increasingly, gays are repudiating what trans activists are doing in their name.

by Bruse Bawer

At the website of America’s largest gay-activist organization you can read the following statement of purpose: “The Human Rights Campaign envisions a world where every member of the LGBTQ+ family has the freedom to live their truth without fear, and with equality under the law.”

Yes, “the LGBTQ+ family.”

Years ago, gay magazines and organizations routinely conveyed the message that, as a gay man, I was part of something called “the gay community.” Then, at some point when I wasn’t looking, apparently I was adopted into something called “the LGBTQ+ family.”

A Forced Marriage

Meaning that in the view of the formerly gay and now LGBTQ+ establishment—the leaders of groups like the HRC and GLAAD, editors of magazines like Advocate and Out, and assorted authors and activists and academics, all of them on the far Left—gay men like me aren’t just chained at the hip to lesbians and bisexuals; we’re also intimately lassoed to “queers” (which can mean anything), to individuals who identify themselves with some newfangled label like “nonbinary” or “genderqueer,” and, yes, to transgender people.

This, even though homosexuality and transgenderism are two utterly different phenomena.

Humankind has been familiar with homosexuality since the dawn of history. Transgenderism, in the rare cases in which it’s genuine and not imagined, is also founded in something real—namely, gender dysphoria, a psychiatric affliction that makes men think they’re women and makes women think they’re men.

Key word: think. 

Alas, what we’re dealing with in today’s woke world isn’t just gender dysphoria. We’re dealing with a transgender ideology, according to which a man who thinks he’s a woman isn’t suffering from a mental disorder: he actually is a woman, and always has been; and a woman who thinks she’s a man really is a man, and always has been. Such people were “born in the wrong body.” The sex they were “assigned at birth” on the basis of their genitalia was the wrong one.

But belonging to the other sex is just the chef’s specialty on a very long menu. Others options include claiming to be “nonbinary,” i.e., neither male nor female, or “genderfluid,” meaning male one day and female the next. In the new woke world that accepts such fantasies as reality, the concept of sexual orientation loses all meaning, because a gay or straight identity is firmly tethered to biological reality—and biological reality, in the view of trans ideology, is meaningless.

Indeed, the current trans line on same-sex attraction and opposite-sex attraction is that both are transphobic—that it’s bigotry for a straight man or a lesbian, for example, to refuse to sleep with a trans woman (i.e., a biological man).

(Note this illuminating detail: on the one hand, trans people demand that, in determining their “gender identity,” we rely not on biology but on their accounts of what they “feel”; on the other hand, they contend that persons to whom they’re attracted must yield to their demands for sex. Their feelings, then, are of infinite value, while ours don’t matter in the least.)

How It Happened

Transgender people used to be very few and very far between. No longer. According to the latest Pew Research report, about 2 percent of American adults ages 18 to 29 identify as trans, while an additional 3 percent purport to be nonbinary (which is sometimes counted as a subdivision of “transgender” and sometimes as separate); for all adults, the corresponding figures are 0.6 percent and 1 percent; among persons over 50, 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent.

In other words, identifying as trans or nonbinary, or claiming one of the many other cool new gender labels, has become a youth trend, like being emo a generation ago, or being goth a few years before that. But of course there’s a big difference between emo, say, and trans: it’s the difference between playing with a toy gun and playing with a real one.

Being emo, after all, didn’t mean convincing yourself that you had a problem that needed to be corrected with powerful medication and operating-room butchery. Being emo didn’t mean believing you had a right to use the opposite sex’s public bathrooms and locker rooms, to play on the opposite sex’s athletic teams, or to be housed in shelters and prisons intended for members of the opposite sex.

And nobody ever told gay men and lesbians that they now belonged to the LGBE family—standing, of course, for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and emos.

Come to think of it, the trans trend is less like the emo or goth craze than like the act of self-harm known as cutting, which seemed to reach a peak of popularity a few years ago. The only difference is that nowadays teenagers who want to mutilate their bodies can get a surgeon to do it.)

In the last year or so, I’ve covered the bogus gay-trans affiliation from several angles. In a piece called “Gender Narcissism,” I discussed the litany of ways in which sexual orientation and gender dysphoria could hardly be more different. In “Stop Saying ‘LGBT’” I pleaded with readers to remove that fraudulent term from their vocabularies. And in “The Great Consonant Shift,” I wrote about the way in which academics and activists, beginning in the early 1990s and without public debate or fanfare, replaced the word “gay” in the names of organizations, university departments, and fields of study with “LGBT”—thereby introducing transgender people into a category, and a movement, to which they’d never belonged.

In “The Great Consonant Shift” I noted the dates on which various gay groups around the United States added “T” to their names. But who kicked this off? I didn’t know the answer until the other day, when I watched, on YouTube, a session from LGB Alliance’s 2021 national conference at which a feminist writer named Jane Clare Jones explained that from 1993 to 1996, members of the International Conference for Transgender Law and Employment Policy (ICTLEP) “laid the legal and conceptual foundations of the trans rights movement” at a Hilton hotel in Houston.

At those meetings, they decided that to succeed at mainstreaming transgenderism and trans ideology, “they needed to attach themselves to the LGB” and “convinc[e] everybody that it’s the same thing.” To this end, ICTLEP member Phyllis Frye gave a speech at the 1993 Gay Rights March in Washington in which she demanded the inclusion of trans people into the movement. Frye’s speech, Jones noted, was instrumental in changing the term of choice from “transsexual” to “transgender”; it also introduced the disgusting lies that transgender people, not gays, were killed in the Holocaust and led the Stonewall riots.

That conference was held in October. I haven’t seen Jones’s fascinating account reported anywhere since then.

In any event, “gay” became “LGBT.” I suspect that after the new acronym was forced on them, most gay people didn’t give it much thought. Did any complain? If so, I can’t find any record of it. If some disapproved, they quietly tolerated it. After all, trans people were exceedingly few in number—far, far rarer than gays—and asked only to be left alone. Of course, trans women weren’t really women, but whom did it hurt—except maybe them—to humor their illusions?

Well, that was then. Today, armies of teenagers and twentysomethings claim to be trans. And their list of demands is formidable. They want the world to agree with them that a biological man can be a woman, or a biological woman a man, and that the moment an individual claims to belong to this magical club, he (or she) should be referred to by all and sundry as she (or he)—even retroactively. (Hence Phyllis Frye’s Wikipedia page states: “she earned the rank of Eagle Scout.”)

The Great Divorce?

Thanks largely to the media coverage of transgender role models like Lia (Will) Thomas, to books like Helen Joyce’s Trans, and Matt Walsh’s documentary “What Is a Woman?”, the public has become more aware of the trans movement’s ridiculous claims, outrageous demands, and dangerous practices. More and more people know that grade-school teachers are indoctrinating pupils into trans ideology (and that parents who object are labeled domestic terrorists); that teenagers are increasingly boarding the trans train (and, increasingly, being fast-tracked for “treatment”); that these teens’ teachers, psychologists, and physicians routinely lie to the kids’ parents and deny them the right to forestall hormone injections and the surgeon’s knife.

And as more light has been shed on all this madness, Americans have been losing their tolerance for the trans minority, whose members claim to be cruelly oppressed but act like authoritarian lunatics. This growing distaste is also bringing down public sympathy for gay people, simply because they’ve been yoked to transgenderism.

And yet, as it turns out, a great many of the Americans who are losing their patience with trans world are gay people who’ve decided it’s long since time to divorce “LGB” from “T.”

To this end, concerned British gay and lesbians have founded the LGB Alliance, on whose website you can read “that sex is binary, female and male, and that (for the vast majority of people) sex is determined at conception, observed at birth (or in utero), and recorded.” Heresy! LGB Alliance co-founder Bev Jackson, now 71, is a veteran gay-rights activist and woman of the Left, having become the spokesperson for Britain’s Gay Liberation Front way back in 1970. “I thought we’d achieved so much,” she told me on the phone the other day, recalling her decades in the trenches. But alas, thanks to the trans revolution, “homosexual has become a dirty word again.”

The threat posed by transgenderism to the rights and repute of gay men and lesbians is also the chief focus of a couple of brave, lively YouTubers whom I follow—an American lesbian named Ariella Scarcella and a gay Dutchman, based in Britain, who calls himself Mr. Menno. Four months ago, in a video called “The Tide Is Turning,” Mr. Menno cited a couple of recent developments in the U.K. that led him to feel that realism on this front is beginning to win out over ideology.

I hoped he was right. But I wasn’t sure. It depends a lot on where you look. This year, Britain’s only gender-identity clinic for children was closed down—a big win for sanity. But it’s also been reported lately that a San Francisco gender-identity clinic is treating children as young as 2 years old and that the U.S. Justice Department is ignoring the case of a Ph.D. student who’s selling hormones to teens. The other day, after the Twitter feed Libs of TikTok reported that Boston Children’s Hospital performs hysterectomies on minors, the hospital removed material proving the charge from its website and then denied it.

(I could cheer Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s just-announced plan to introduce a bill banning “gender-affirming care” for children, but I can’t imagine it won’t go down to defeat.)

On August 15, somebody named Peter Heck provided more evidence of a broad-based gay pushback against the trans tyranny, reporting at notthebee.com that the hashtag “#LGBdroptheT” had been trending on Twitter. He quoted a few tweets, including this one from Rich Westhorpe, a gay Welshman: “The T hitched a ride a few years back, invited itself for dinner, and is trying to make out that it always lived here. It didn’t. Pride marches, protests, and LGB rights happened WITHOUT the T. I remember—I was there. I also remember the T wasn’t.”

Some of the “#LGBdroptheT” tweets were bracingly blunt. For example: “the Ts are abusive, gay denying, homophobic misogynists.” And: “the trans movement [is] full of satanic, grooming, pro body mutilation dictators.” An American lesbian calling herself Merry Mayhem wrote: “They latched themselves onto our movement and became a parasite to the equality we fought SO hard for. They’re ungrateful, smug little bastards that need to go. Fight your own battles and leave us out of the whole drag queen story time shit . . .We didn’t sign on for this shit. We don’t want kids groomed . . . You took advantage of our good will. It’s gone too far.”

Three, they say, is a trend. On the same day that Heck’s article appeared at notthebee.com, Matt Margolis wrote at PJ Media that Gays Against Groomers, a new American group, now has “over 63,000 followers” on Twitter. From its website:

Gays Against Groomers is a coalition of gay people who oppose the recent trend of indoctrinating, sexualizing and medicalizing children under the guise of “LGBTQIA+.” . . . This includes drag queen story hours, drag shows involving children, the transitioning and medicalization of minors, and gender theory being taught in the classroom.

The [transgender] activists, backed by school boards, government, woke media, and corporations, have been speaking on our behalf for too long. When fighting for equality, our goal was to successfully integrate ourselves into society, but now these radicals aim to restructure it entirely in order to accommodate a fringe minority, as well as seek to indoctrinate children into their ideology.

We’re saying NO

Two days after Margolis’ article appeared, Twitter permanently banned Gays against Groomers.

A Revolution Against Reality

Gay rights was reformist. The trans movement is revolutionary. In fact it’s revolutionary in a way humankind has never experienced before. Because it’s not a revolution against any particular government or political system—it’s a revolution against reality itself. And if gay people don’t help bring it down, it’s going to take us down with it.

A lot of straight people have responded to the trans movement by saying that they knew gay marriage would only be a stepping stone to something even worse. Well, you were right, folks. But don’t blame gay people. This change was worse for gay people than for anyone—because we were dragged along for the ride. Nobody ever asked us if we wanted to be described as “LGBT people.”

Yes, you can blame the tiny handful of far-left gay activists who, when the gay-rights struggle was over, refused to close up shop and instead—eager to keep raking in the cash—cynically retooled their organizations so that instead of promoting gay equality they were pushing trans ideology. Hell, those activists never cared for the “assimilationist” goals of most gay people in the first place, and therefore took like ducks to water to the idea of using transgenderism to upend social norms.

But those activists aren’t the only guilty parties in this story. Trans mania would never have taken hold throughout the Western world if not for straight people—disproportionately white liberal women of a certain age—who let themselves be convinced by the mainstream media that the only proper response to transgender ideology was to embrace it unquestioningly.

It’s heterosexual women like these, not gays, who are escorting children to the chopping block—children who, if left alone, would almost certainly have grown into gay adults. They think they’re doing something virtuous by turning gay boys into trans girls and gay girls into trans boys. In fact they’re causing these kids permanent damage—and carrying out, in the name of progressivism, a gay genocide of the sort that even the Westboro Baptist Church never considered perpetrating.

First published in American Greatness.