Bruce
Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, Surrender,
and The Victims' Revolution. His novel The Alhambra
was published in 2017.
Here
are two representative recent items on the topic of “LGBT
identity.”
First,
The Federalist on June 2 ran an article about the
“New Gay Left” in which Christopher Bedford lamented
that the old gay pride movement, which pleaded, reasonably
enough, “for inclusion, acceptance, and self-esteem,”
has been replaced by an aggressive, off-putting push centered
on “trans kids,” “pregnant men,” and
other far-out notions that offend “a lot of people who
have no problem with ‘gay rights,’ as they thought
they understood them.”
Second,
at the Legal Insurrection website, a June 4 post reports on
a study by University of London professor Eric Kaufman showing
“homosexual behavior . . . has grown much less rapidly”
in recent years than “LGBT identification . . . Whereas
in 2008 attitudes and behavior were similar, by 2021 LGBT
identification was running at twice the rate of LGBT sexual
behaviour.” Kaufman concludes that the “LGBT surge
is socio-political, heavily siloed among very liberal young
people.”
But
at the heart of both of these pieces is a semantic problem
and it’s very widespread. Bedford accepts the idea that
the movement now focused on “trans kids” and “pregnant
men” has something to do with gays or gay rights. It
doesn’t. Kaufman, for his part, thinks that “LGBT
identification” has some connection to “homosexual
behavior.” Again, no.
I’m
not blaming these writers for making this mistake. They’ve
been lulled into it by the LGBT movement itself—which
has sought (very successfully) to mainstream transgender ideology
by piggybacking onto the gay rights movement.
In
fact, no connection exists between the two. “LGB”
of course, stands for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals—that
is, people who experience same-sex attraction, a relatively
common phenomenon throughout recorded history. “T”
stands for transgender people, who (if they are indeed trans
people, and not callow teens jumping on a trend) suffer from
a vanishingly rare affliction called gender dysphoria that
afflicts 1 in 30,000 to 110,000 individuals.
In
addition to the fact that gays far more plentiful than (genuine)
transgender people, they’re also about entirely different
things. Their histories are entirely different, too. Beginning
in the 20th century, people with gender dysphoria could undergo
treatments to make them resemble members of the opposite sex.
Extremely few in number, and demanding only tolerance, they
weren’t seen as presenting a major challenge to societal
norms and met little resistance.
That
was never the case with gays. Until recently, being gay was
a crime nearly everywhere. (It’s still a capital offense
in many nations.) In the United States in living memory, gay
bars were raided by police. Government employees discovered
to be gay were fired unceremoniously. Until the 1980s, gays
in most U.S. states could go to prison. In Idaho, the punishment
was a life sentence. Not until 2003 were the last of these
laws struck down by the Supreme Court. There were never such
laws about transsexuals.
The
cause of gay rights sought to eliminate those laws. It succeeded.
But then came “trans rights.” Which means—what?
It means the “right” to compel everyone around
you to affirm that, deep down in the core of your being, you’re
not—and never have been—a member of your biological
sex. To be entitled to this affirmation, you don’t even
have to undergo surgery; you need only declare that you’re
trans, and—presto!—your entire life record has
to be rewritten to indicate that you are and always were a
she, not a he (or vice-versa). Otherwise, you’re being
denied your “rights.”
It’s
all part of an ideology known as transgenderism. Its contention
that a man can really be a woman—or the other way around—has
no scientific basis. And the “rights”—the
demands—that flow from this ideology have no parallel
in human history. Yet almost without debate, it’s become
an orthodoxy.
How
did this happen?
Thirty
years ago, the gay rights movement was simply that: the gay
rights movement. It never used the letters LGBT, or such more
elaborate versions as LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, and LGBTTTQQIAA. In the
1990s, I wrote extensively about gay rights, which I discussed
with hundreds of gay men and lesbians around the United States.
Never did the subject of trans people or “trans rights”
or the LGBT acronym come up.
And
then? Everything changed. The gay rights cause gained ground.
Leaders at gay rights organizations looked into the future
and saw their jobs disappearing. So they transformed the movement,
putting trans issues front and center and rebranding themselves
as LGBT activists. And the utterly fraudulent assertion that
“trans rights”—that is, transgender ideology—had
some link to gay rights enabled them to pressure others into
affirming that ideology.
In
short, they used gays, and our relatively modest quest for
equality, to lend an air of legitimacy to the extraordinarily
immodest attempt to mainstream transgender ideology—and
thereby drastically transform our conception of human identity.
They even rewrote the gay rights movement’s history,
replacing old references to “gay” (or “gay
and lesbian”) people with the neologism “LGBT.”
Most
gay people parroted the new term with a shrug. What they didn’t
realize at first was that it represented an existential threat
to their own identity. After all, if biology has no role in
determinating whether one is a man or a woman, then homosexuality—which
is all about attraction to one’s own biological sex—is
meaningless. It’s becoming more and more clear the reason
many parents of effeminate boys and masculine girls are eager
to “transition” them is that they’d prefer
having a trans child to a gay one. In other words, unhappy
parents who a generation ago would’ve enrolled their
gay kids in “conversion therapy” with a quack
psychotherapist are now having their genitalia butchered.
Then
there is the increasingly obvious problem that transgender
ideology poses for women. As cases like that of Lia Thomas
underscore, the doctrine that a man can instantly become a
woman threatens to drive biological women out of women’s
sports entirely, as well as to open the doors of women-only
spaces—from spas and restrooms to prisons and rape shelters—to
men who may or may not really think they’re women.
It’s
madness, and I fear it won’t stop until we reach a critical
mass of people who—having undergone surgery only to
realize they’re not really trans, after all—“detransition”
and then sue the pants off the teachers, school counselors,
psychotherapists, surgeons, and others who led them astray.
I also fear that when the whole misbegotten edifice finally
does come crashing down, it’ll take gay men and lesbians
down with it—even though the overwhelming majority of
us had nothing whatsoever to do with the damn thing.
by
Bruce Bawer:
Paul
Auster: Man in the Dark
Karl
Ove Knaaugaard's The Morning Star
Gender
Narcissism
History of World's Most Liberal City
Global Warning: An Unsettled Science
