A standup comic named Paul Elia joked to an audience in Los Angeles last month about the newfangled Pride flag, which has in recent years replaced the better-known “rainbow flag” at many LGBT events in America.
“It has like six additional colors that represent the transgender and nonbinary community,” Elia enthused. “They had gay Pride outside my house, and I was watching everybody . . . waving it around . . . And then I saw some people with the old gay flag. Is that, like, the gay confederacy,” Elia asked. “What if there’s a gay civil war?”
The audience chuckled but Elia was onto something. A movement is underfoot on both sides of the Atlantic to decouple the alphabet soup that has come to be known as “LGBTQ+.”
As rising numbers of old-fashioned LGBs see it, the “T” — for transgender — and “Q” for queer, don’t necessarily have much in common with gays and lesbians.
For these ideological reformists, the LGBTQ mash-up and community-wide obsession with trans issues is sowing confusion and chaos within politics and popular culture — eroding much of the progress sexual minorities have fought to achieve.
Their nascent efforts have led to a swell in both online and IRL activism that’s pushing back against gender ideology and fueling a movement increasingly known as “LGB Without the T.”
“We feel shackled into this ‘umbrella term’ by organizations that are supposed to serve us but have actually turned against us,” explained Kate Barker, CEO of the London-based LGB Alliance, which was established in late 2019 to “advance the interests of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals.” “It has come to a point where many of us find ourselves forced into a relationship we never consented to and feel we cannot leave.”
The conflict, as activists like Barker see it, is not merely about nomenclature.
The rising prominence of transgender and queer issues has resulted in a backlash against “middle-of-road” gay and lesbian political wins such as marriage equality and parental rights.
As topics affecting those who are transgender — such as restroom access and medical interventions — drown out endless headlines, gays and lesbians are losing the long-time allies that have helped secure crucial civil liberties.
There is ample data to support claims that radical elements are damaging public opinion of all LGBTs.
Earlier this year, a Gallup poll revealed that support for same-sex relationships fell from 71% to 64% in just one year — the largest single-year shift recorded in more than two decades.
The decline came in tandem with an increase in Americans who oppose changing one’s gender — from 51% in 2021 to 55% this year.
The Gallup numbers follow a survey conducted last year by the Public Religion Research Institute which found that Americans are widely in favor of general nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTs — eight in 10 back policies securing jobs, public accommodation, and housing — but that support erodes when special privileges for trans people, framed as “rights” by the researchers, enter the picture.
Some 61% oppose boys playing in girls’ sports.
And even a quarter of Democrats surveyed responded negatively to questions specific to transgenderism.
Many in the community saw this shift coming. Back in January 2018 — barely a year into the Trump administration and three years after the Supreme Court legalized marriage equality — the conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece for New York magazine about the encroachment of “gender ideology” into the larger gay-rights movement and its potential for community-wide blowback.
Rather than advocating for increased civil equality, Sullivan wrote, the movement’s rising obsession with trans issues had morphed into an overall “critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality.”
The concurrent expansion of LGBT into a never-ending tongue-tussle, Sullivan added, was only furthering the type of “ideological polarization” that works against minorities, “rather than unwinds it.”
Sullivan no longer writes for New York magazine, but his critique of transgender issues — and their now outsized place within the larger LGBT ideas-sphere — has never felt more prescient.
The Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light fiasco from earlier this year, for instance, was precisely the type of mainstream outcry Sullivan so presciently foreshadowed.
For those who want to ditch the T, the response from their own community has been swift and vicious. Along with allegations of “transphobia,” many have reported death threats, doxing, online harassment, and physical violence.
“We’re immediately branded as ‘right wing,’ ” says Barker, “which is a total distortion of the truth.”
Last summer, for instance, gay rights pioneer Fred Sargeant — who helped organize the first Pride march following the Stonewall Riots in 1969 — was viciously assaulted by a group of TQ+ activists at a Pride celebration in Burlington, Vt., for carrying a sign critical of gender ideology.
They stole his placard, knocked him to the ground, and poured coffee on him.
Like many who want to reconsider LGBT, Sargeant’s stance is not rooted in “transphobia.”
“The concern I have is that the movement that I knew, the gay liberation movement, has metamorphosized into a gender identity movement that is quite misogynistic, homophobic — values that I can’t share,” Sergeant, 75, told reporters at the time. “I don’t recognize it any longer.”
Something similar happened to 34-year-old Texan Rob Van Leuven last year when he began posting his support for nixing the T on social media. Like many, Van Leuven’s stance is rooted as much in biology as ideology.
Being gay is about same-sex attraction, being trans is anchored in an alternative gender identity — and the two are not necessarily aligned.
Still, gay men who reject interest in potential trans partners are quickly accused of spreading hate. “All I said was gay men don’t like [female body parts], which should be common sense,” Van Leuven said.
The result: Transgender activists embarked on a widespread doxing campaign suggesting Van Leuven was knowingly spreading HIV and making sexual advances toward minors. Van Leuven says he’s looking into legal recourse. With so much of the LGB-only movement taking place online — “drop the T” videos on Tik-Tok, for instance, have been viewed over 7 million times alone– such experiences are becoming increasingly common.
Beyond the standard allegations of transphobia, transactivists like to claim that gays and lesbians “owe” their existence — and civil rights — to trans people.
Their assertions, while lacking in historical precision, are rife with the type of identity politics and intersectionality that has come to define every contemporary political cause.
“Queer People of Color Led the L.G.B.T.Q. Charge, but Were Denied the Rewards,” proclaimed a New York Times headline from a few years back.
Indeed, according to this narrative, a “trans woman of color” threw the first brick at Stonewall, igniting the June 1969 riot outside Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn that marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.
The trans person in question was Marsha P. Johnson, an African-American activist and self-identified drag queen.
By their own admission, Johnson — who died in 1992 — actually arrived at Stonewall a few hours after the riot first broke out.
Indeed, no one claimed otherwise until about a decade ago when the push to “elevate” LGBT voices of color began to take root.
Nonetheless, the Johnson tale has all but replaced recorded fact — so much so that in 2020 New York changed the name of the East River State Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to the Marsha P. Johnson State Park.
An indication of things to come can be found on a sign at the park’s entrance which informs visitors that it commemorates “TLGBQ+ acceptance” and the “TLGBQ+ community,” inserting the T to the front of the line.
Advocates of the T divorce date the rise of mass trans-prominence to the 1990s when queer theory — the academic concept that preaches biological sex and heterosexuality are merely social and cultural constructs — leached into the larger cultural arena.
Some say the trans takeover began in earnest in 1994, at the Third Annual International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy in Houston.
It was there that transgender trailblazer Martine Rothblatt — a billionaire entrepreneur who built a robot version of her wife — told attendees, “If we don’t join with the current gay, lesbian, and other queer rights issues being proposed, then we might have to wait another 20 years for our own liberation.”
In the US, snipping the T has proven an uphill and mostly informal battle.
But across the pond, the split has seen greater support.
The LGB Alliance, for instance, has received formal charity status, holds annual conferences, and is petitioning the British government to separate LGB from T in crucial census and data-gathering policies. Other British groups, like Get the L Out, have taken to marching in Pride parades carrying signs like “Lesbian Not Queer.”
One reason for their success in Britain, activists say, is the nation’s socialized health-care system which invites more scrutiny and accountability where gender issues are concerned.
Notably, the infamous Tavistock Center, an NHS-funded children’s gender clinic, closed last year after public outrage over medical interventions for transgender children.
High-profile cases like that of Allison Bailey have also aided public support for the LGB (sans T) cause in Britain.
Bailey, a London lawyer and black lesbian, won a lawsuit last year against her legal chambers after they announced she was under investigation for transphobia when she publicly questioned the ability to change sex.
The Bailey case, according to Barker, is emblematic of the “broach no dissent” ethos that permeates every element of the trans debate, which has only further alienated LGBs.
Still, the dizzying speed at which media and LGBT nonprofits have adopted trans ideology has left many LGBs bewildered, particularly when it took so long for gay rights to get off the ground.
Most crucially, the outsized focus on the trans community in many ways actually hurts trans people the most.
“This entire debate has left trans people under scrutiny they never wanted in the first place,” says Barker. “This conflict is setting everyone back — LGB or T,” she adds, “which is why the time has come for a divorce.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
