I stopped marching for Pride in London when the after party was opened up to straights. That first year, they wandered around us staring, like we were titillating, foreign exhibits. There was a Stonewall agenda from that point to be more ‘inclusive’. Trans individuals would come along to local LGB meetings, to sound out our thoughts about their inclusion. It was clear they were cross dressers, not HSTS, from the abject dress sense, so they were politely told no. After all, what do we have in common? The straight male trans agenda has been clearer in the US however since that time, because organised cross dressing men were more open in targeting lesbians and lesbian culture. If LGB organisations had given a flying fuck about lesbians from the 90s onwards, they would have campaigned against this harassment, not welcomed it with open wallets. It’s time to really split from the straights. Lesbians are leading the offensive at LGB Alliance and Gays Against Groomers, because we cannot rely on men to take care of our interests. The past suggests we were always an afterthought or a target.
🤔 what’s a learning curve? Learning that women always have less value and organisations set up to defend us failed to do so? Women grow up knowing that we have less value and that men prioritise their own desire. What’s to learn? It’s men who have been exclusionary, for millennia. Women have learnt over the last 5-10 years that we can work together to take on powerful lobbying groups, the legal system and ferocious male activists who do not accept boundaries.
Well aren’t you a misogynist. Victims don’t fight back. I always fight back, especially at patronising be kinders who claim we should be inclusive, then make ad hominem attacks 🙃
Very powerful statement. As someone who lived through all of it and was on the front lines in my local community from the 70’s through the marriage equality movement, I am appalled by the hijacking that took place. And by the irony that I got fired from my job in a liberal workplace not before basic gay rights protections were in place but afterwards, because under the rubric of “trans rights”, my lesbian identity and politics defined me a “bigot”.
The trans ideology arsenal is well crafted. "Trans rights" includes the right to redefine reality. Compelled speech is mandatory. That man in the women's locker room is a woman, and don't you forget it.
In the victim/oppressor paradigm upon which all woke politics are constructed, you must say whatever the victims tell you to say, otherwise you're a bigot. And if the label isn't powerful enough, they just fire you. Bigot. Easy peasy.
Extremely accurate description of how our community has been decimated by the ideology. Nearly every lesbian I know is totally blind to it. I’d rather have a right wing conservative refer to me with an obnoxious slur, any day, than have someone from the community refer to me as “queer”. That’s how bad it is at this point.
"Allies who claim to support “trans rights” without claiming this identity are really hedging their bets. They don’t have to take harmful drugs or have any surgery to be acceptable to the tiny proportion of the global population who identify as transgendered. All they have to do is bully those of us who believe that sex is real and they have accomplished their mission. The ability to feel virtuous beyond measure is theirs for the taking. The fact that this is built on a foundation of quicksand must be a great example of motivated ignorance." https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/motivated-ignorance-the-secret-to
"There is no pride in using a flawed ideology to groom children into premature sexual awareness, encouraging confused people to have surgeries and drugs that will leave them sexually non-functioning, mutilated and trampling over the bodies of women and children to assert a man’s right to put his penis anywhere he wants to because it’s a “lady dick”.
I've been hoping for a declaration like this for a long time. Thank you!
"Where are the gays" is the question I ask myself many times each week as I follow the gender critical media. By "gays," I mean gay men who keep their distance from trans and queer scenes and people because they can't relate to them and won’t fake it. "Mainstream gays" might also fit. That other types of gays have gone all-in on queer and trans is not at all surprising. Gay Lib coincided with the flourishing of the 60s counter culture. Counter-cultural types had less to loose coming out than, say, office workers. Well, they're still here, only now they're drawn to the queer/drag end of the spectrum, having said goodbye to 90s woo.
Where the gays are is a question I can't answer literally even though I am a gay man. That is because while I am in my late 60s, I have yet to find my gay tribe. There are myriad gay subcultures, scenes and friend groups, but none have felt like home to me. Often I didn’t feel like I sounded and acted gay enough. For that reason I have no first-hand information concerning what gay men of my generation think about the state of the gay rights movement or the trans phenomenon that came out of nowhere over the past 15 years or so. I am equally uninformed personally about the views of younger cohorts down to and including the 18-to-25 demographic.
Are there mainstream gay voices in the media today? Who is writing the Tales of the City of the 2020s? Where are the gay writers who are tackling the pressing issues this essay explores? The once-ubiquitous Dan Savage doesn't fit the bill. He's yet another high-profile gay who thinks drag is the best thing since sliced bread. I can't bring myself to read The Advocate or Pink News because I fear both publications have been thoroughly absorbed by the LGBTQ2SIA+++ amoeba. Who wants to read about sex realists as the bad guys?
There's a reason gay men should be paying attention to the culture. They need to look out for gay youth. Gender identity ideology and its conjoined twin, queer theory, are the worst things to happen to America's gays since Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell. Consider the plight of this person who spoke at a conference where the researcher Eliza Mondegreen was in attendance:
A young man in the audience shared his experience identifying as transgender:
“As a gay boy who does not comply with stereotypes, when I was younger, there was nothing I could refer to, nothing I could identify with in cartoons, movies, TV series, or in everyday life. Everything was very codified based on sex. And I did not have a father figure, so I thought I was born in the wrong sex. I wanted to transition from a very young age because I thought that homosexuals did not exist, that feminine men did not exist. I thought that I was the problem and in order to please everybody and to be accepted I needed to transition… I think our generation sees that it is still difficult to be a homosexual today, so maybe they think it’s better to shift to the other sex and just pretend to be straight.” He concluded by asking whether transitioning is a way of “eradicating the homosexual.”
Let the enormity of this situation sink in. It delivers one shock after another:
"I wanted to transition from a very young age because I thought that homosexuals did not exist, that feminine men did not exist. I thought that I was the problem and in order to please everybody and to be accepted I needed to transition."
And:
"I think our generation sees that it is still difficult to be a homosexual today, so maybe they think it’s better to shift to the other sex and just pretend to be straight.”
Oh, the humanity!
It is a pity more isn't known about this young man's circumstances. His views toward his sexuality and identity are so tortured and self-defeating that it is tempting to think he grew up in isolation in a homophobic family and community that strove to make sure he remained ignorant about what it means to be gay.
But what if that's not the case? What if his school had LGBTQ flags and rainbows from one end to another? What if the problem was that all the socialization at the school, among his peers and online was focused on the TQ to the exclusion of the gay? Could it be that there were no adult gay role models available to him, in person or online?
It is to be hoped that this lad was an extreme case of gay failure to thrive. That does not mean that everyone else is off the hook. Recently, it seems as if the "trans kid" has become the poster child for the trans movement. Trans allies and trans activists set aside all differences to defend trans kids so they can grow up to the be happy trans adults they were meant to be. Except we know there's a good likelihood that many of those youngsters would grow up to be gay men or lesbians if they did not come under the influence of the Trans-Genderqueer Industrial Complex. They need protection.
Finally, we gay men have something worth marching for again.
So well done! So many of my straight, liberal friends have absolutely no idea what is under the hood here. They are so certain they are simply supporting the “marginalized.” While meanwhile, they might think to ask this old L about going to a Pride Parade in the early 80s and turning around to see a NAMBLA float. They have no freaking idea what they are supporting. Thank you for laying it all out so clearly.
Loved this: "Pride once meant protest—stone-throwing rage turned, over decades, into hard-won triumph. Now? It’s a quirky date night for heterosexual couples chasing an edgy vibe, a corporate photo-op where the struggle’s just a backdrop for selfies."
What a terrific article. Succinct and accurate. Gays and lesbians are absolutely not part of the "queerty" parade. No amount of transing and queering can get rid of us. But we need to reform, regroup, rebuild a same sex only attracted community.
How well this as described could be applied to the "systemic racism" narrative and the demand for reparations that erases the courage and determination of generations of the enslaved and turns them into victims whose legacy has to be "repaired". Are their descendants owed something? Yes, because 160 years ago a legal promise was made that all would be given "40 acres and a mule", and the interest on that unpaid bill has accumulated.
But, then, what better way to keep people trained to prefer silos to the scary world of reality divided into little social clubs than to choose an oppressed minority-du-jour, put a target on their backs, and use them to ensure the people clustered in other silos hate and fear them for no good reason?
Well there are some straights who view two dykes (or two guys) in tuxedos together at the matrimonial alter rather performative & probably on the order of drag queens? That queen issue has been with us since (at least) the Michigan Womyn’s Fest. They (the cross-dressers) want in? Validation for their fashion choices & looks? Call out the women who do this too (hyper femmes in media such as Taylor Swift?) Never got the ballroom look myself. Inaugural balls & gowns are not for me! Don’t begrudge anyone who can do it.
We still get a million people out for Pride here in Toronto every summer, it's our best street party, something for everyone🌈UDHR. It began as a protest, diversity & inclusion is an achievement.
Also, if we have J.K. Rowling & other feminists joining us to push back on non-binary trying to redefine queer & binary, that can only be a good thing, my straight friends of 40 years have been loving, accepting, powerful support for that time, incl. during AIDS era when perfect gay friends were dying needlessly.🌈UDHR
I million of us celebrating peacefully together @ the end of June annually since last century disagree. Of course, we're in 1 of the most diverse cities on 🌎 in 1 of the most peaceful nations🇨🇦, 2 official languages & all.
I stopped marching for Pride in London when the after party was opened up to straights. That first year, they wandered around us staring, like we were titillating, foreign exhibits. There was a Stonewall agenda from that point to be more ‘inclusive’. Trans individuals would come along to local LGB meetings, to sound out our thoughts about their inclusion. It was clear they were cross dressers, not HSTS, from the abject dress sense, so they were politely told no. After all, what do we have in common? The straight male trans agenda has been clearer in the US however since that time, because organised cross dressing men were more open in targeting lesbians and lesbian culture. If LGB organisations had given a flying fuck about lesbians from the 90s onwards, they would have campaigned against this harassment, not welcomed it with open wallets. It’s time to really split from the straights. Lesbians are leading the offensive at LGB Alliance and Gays Against Groomers, because we cannot rely on men to take care of our interests. The past suggests we were always an afterthought or a target.
It's a learning curve for everyone, what is the benefit of being exclusionary?🌈UDHR
🤔 what’s a learning curve? Learning that women always have less value and organisations set up to defend us failed to do so? Women grow up knowing that we have less value and that men prioritise their own desire. What’s to learn? It’s men who have been exclusionary, for millennia. Women have learnt over the last 5-10 years that we can work together to take on powerful lobbying groups, the legal system and ferocious male activists who do not accept boundaries.
Misandry has been around even longer, enjoy your victimhood>community & it's still 🌈UDHR.
Misandry? If misandry exists, it's because men have been pricks to women, and you're here touting that position.
Tw@t.
Well aren’t you a misogynist. Victims don’t fight back. I always fight back, especially at patronising be kinders who claim we should be inclusive, then make ad hominem attacks 🙃
Very powerful statement. As someone who lived through all of it and was on the front lines in my local community from the 70’s through the marriage equality movement, I am appalled by the hijacking that took place. And by the irony that I got fired from my job in a liberal workplace not before basic gay rights protections were in place but afterwards, because under the rubric of “trans rights”, my lesbian identity and politics defined me a “bigot”.
The trans ideology arsenal is well crafted. "Trans rights" includes the right to redefine reality. Compelled speech is mandatory. That man in the women's locker room is a woman, and don't you forget it.
In the victim/oppressor paradigm upon which all woke politics are constructed, you must say whatever the victims tell you to say, otherwise you're a bigot. And if the label isn't powerful enough, they just fire you. Bigot. Easy peasy.
Extremely accurate description of how our community has been decimated by the ideology. Nearly every lesbian I know is totally blind to it. I’d rather have a right wing conservative refer to me with an obnoxious slur, any day, than have someone from the community refer to me as “queer”. That’s how bad it is at this point.
"Allies who claim to support “trans rights” without claiming this identity are really hedging their bets. They don’t have to take harmful drugs or have any surgery to be acceptable to the tiny proportion of the global population who identify as transgendered. All they have to do is bully those of us who believe that sex is real and they have accomplished their mission. The ability to feel virtuous beyond measure is theirs for the taking. The fact that this is built on a foundation of quicksand must be a great example of motivated ignorance." https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/motivated-ignorance-the-secret-to
"There is no pride in using a flawed ideology to groom children into premature sexual awareness, encouraging confused people to have surgeries and drugs that will leave them sexually non-functioning, mutilated and trampling over the bodies of women and children to assert a man’s right to put his penis anywhere he wants to because it’s a “lady dick”.
Betraying gay youngsters in the name of gender ideology and chemically castrating the next generation of gay adults is nothing to be proud of." https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/im-not-transphobic-you-are-normaphobic
I've been hoping for a declaration like this for a long time. Thank you!
"Where are the gays" is the question I ask myself many times each week as I follow the gender critical media. By "gays," I mean gay men who keep their distance from trans and queer scenes and people because they can't relate to them and won’t fake it. "Mainstream gays" might also fit. That other types of gays have gone all-in on queer and trans is not at all surprising. Gay Lib coincided with the flourishing of the 60s counter culture. Counter-cultural types had less to loose coming out than, say, office workers. Well, they're still here, only now they're drawn to the queer/drag end of the spectrum, having said goodbye to 90s woo.
Where the gays are is a question I can't answer literally even though I am a gay man. That is because while I am in my late 60s, I have yet to find my gay tribe. There are myriad gay subcultures, scenes and friend groups, but none have felt like home to me. Often I didn’t feel like I sounded and acted gay enough. For that reason I have no first-hand information concerning what gay men of my generation think about the state of the gay rights movement or the trans phenomenon that came out of nowhere over the past 15 years or so. I am equally uninformed personally about the views of younger cohorts down to and including the 18-to-25 demographic.
Are there mainstream gay voices in the media today? Who is writing the Tales of the City of the 2020s? Where are the gay writers who are tackling the pressing issues this essay explores? The once-ubiquitous Dan Savage doesn't fit the bill. He's yet another high-profile gay who thinks drag is the best thing since sliced bread. I can't bring myself to read The Advocate or Pink News because I fear both publications have been thoroughly absorbed by the LGBTQ2SIA+++ amoeba. Who wants to read about sex realists as the bad guys?
There's a reason gay men should be paying attention to the culture. They need to look out for gay youth. Gender identity ideology and its conjoined twin, queer theory, are the worst things to happen to America's gays since Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell. Consider the plight of this person who spoke at a conference where the researcher Eliza Mondegreen was in attendance:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A young man in the audience shared his experience identifying as transgender:
“As a gay boy who does not comply with stereotypes, when I was younger, there was nothing I could refer to, nothing I could identify with in cartoons, movies, TV series, or in everyday life. Everything was very codified based on sex. And I did not have a father figure, so I thought I was born in the wrong sex. I wanted to transition from a very young age because I thought that homosexuals did not exist, that feminine men did not exist. I thought that I was the problem and in order to please everybody and to be accepted I needed to transition… I think our generation sees that it is still difficult to be a homosexual today, so maybe they think it’s better to shift to the other sex and just pretend to be straight.” He concluded by asking whether transitioning is a way of “eradicating the homosexual.”
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/can-the-child-still-grow-up
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let the enormity of this situation sink in. It delivers one shock after another:
"I wanted to transition from a very young age because I thought that homosexuals did not exist, that feminine men did not exist. I thought that I was the problem and in order to please everybody and to be accepted I needed to transition."
And:
"I think our generation sees that it is still difficult to be a homosexual today, so maybe they think it’s better to shift to the other sex and just pretend to be straight.”
Oh, the humanity!
It is a pity more isn't known about this young man's circumstances. His views toward his sexuality and identity are so tortured and self-defeating that it is tempting to think he grew up in isolation in a homophobic family and community that strove to make sure he remained ignorant about what it means to be gay.
But what if that's not the case? What if his school had LGBTQ flags and rainbows from one end to another? What if the problem was that all the socialization at the school, among his peers and online was focused on the TQ to the exclusion of the gay? Could it be that there were no adult gay role models available to him, in person or online?
It is to be hoped that this lad was an extreme case of gay failure to thrive. That does not mean that everyone else is off the hook. Recently, it seems as if the "trans kid" has become the poster child for the trans movement. Trans allies and trans activists set aside all differences to defend trans kids so they can grow up to the be happy trans adults they were meant to be. Except we know there's a good likelihood that many of those youngsters would grow up to be gay men or lesbians if they did not come under the influence of the Trans-Genderqueer Industrial Complex. They need protection.
Finally, we gay men have something worth marching for again.
So well done! So many of my straight, liberal friends have absolutely no idea what is under the hood here. They are so certain they are simply supporting the “marginalized.” While meanwhile, they might think to ask this old L about going to a Pride Parade in the early 80s and turning around to see a NAMBLA float. They have no freaking idea what they are supporting. Thank you for laying it all out so clearly.
Brilliant article! Thank you.
Great read… well said. Unfortunately, I think it is a long road back. But having fellow travelers helps a lot.
Loved this: "Pride once meant protest—stone-throwing rage turned, over decades, into hard-won triumph. Now? It’s a quirky date night for heterosexual couples chasing an edgy vibe, a corporate photo-op where the struggle’s just a backdrop for selfies."
What a terrific article. Succinct and accurate. Gays and lesbians are absolutely not part of the "queerty" parade. No amount of transing and queering can get rid of us. But we need to reform, regroup, rebuild a same sex only attracted community.
Ain’t that the truth.
How well this as described could be applied to the "systemic racism" narrative and the demand for reparations that erases the courage and determination of generations of the enslaved and turns them into victims whose legacy has to be "repaired". Are their descendants owed something? Yes, because 160 years ago a legal promise was made that all would be given "40 acres and a mule", and the interest on that unpaid bill has accumulated.
But, then, what better way to keep people trained to prefer silos to the scary world of reality divided into little social clubs than to choose an oppressed minority-du-jour, put a target on their backs, and use them to ensure the people clustered in other silos hate and fear them for no good reason?
Well there are some straights who view two dykes (or two guys) in tuxedos together at the matrimonial alter rather performative & probably on the order of drag queens? That queen issue has been with us since (at least) the Michigan Womyn’s Fest. They (the cross-dressers) want in? Validation for their fashion choices & looks? Call out the women who do this too (hyper femmes in media such as Taylor Swift?) Never got the ballroom look myself. Inaugural balls & gowns are not for me! Don’t begrudge anyone who can do it.
We still get a million people out for Pride here in Toronto every summer, it's our best street party, something for everyone🌈UDHR. It began as a protest, diversity & inclusion is an achievement.
Also, if we have J.K. Rowling & other feminists joining us to push back on non-binary trying to redefine queer & binary, that can only be a good thing, my straight friends of 40 years have been loving, accepting, powerful support for that time, incl. during AIDS era when perfect gay friends were dying needlessly.🌈UDHR
Diversity and inclusion have not been achieved. The terms cannot be defined let alone be arrived at.
I million of us celebrating peacefully together @ the end of June annually since last century disagree. Of course, we're in 1 of the most diverse cities on 🌎 in 1 of the most peaceful nations🇨🇦, 2 official languages & all.