Another (!) brilliant article in the New York Times - How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way

Good follow up article to this one by Jesse Singal:

Logic Trips Up the Trans Movement

archive.is/2025.06.26-162858/thedispatch.com/article/transgender-court-skrmetti-argument/

Interesting, I agree w a lot of that. Can I ask what whoppers you've heard about black history?

Also, Sully likes to posit himself as the saviour of the gay rights movement but in some ways he's more of a liability. During the marriage campaign he promoted gay male open marriages as a good thing, somewhat discrediting his claim to respect marriage, and advertised for sex w other HIV positive men. The second was unfairly leaked, but I does seem to show a reckless & unhelpful attitude, esp for someone who claims to be a conservative Catholic....

I say that as a woman who aims to marry another woman. Sullivan promoted a dangerous type of gay male sexual liberation whereas a monogamous controlled approach would have been far better to encourage. He means well but even before the T issue he didn't always behave helpfully & the more out-there things he supported are partly at the root of the issues today w T & inappropriate Pride & DQSH.

I thought his main point - that the trans agenda has moved away from rights for trans people to changing society - was spot on but a bit hidden in a lot of extraneous info.

I did like the part where he detailed how well funded trans organisations are. One to remember when they accused gender criticals of being funded by the far right.

Indeed.

Very much agree with @GallantKumquat and it's really important to have Sullivan give this argument, because it's the NYT and because everyone knows he's the man who did more than anyone else to achieve gay marriage.

But it's very much a gay man's perspective. The arguments around women's spaces, sports etc are things that Sully can see in a second-hand way, but they'll never affect him, and I suspect won't affect many people he's close to. That's the dimension he's missing.

But he's got an extra dimension that women often don't have, which is a deep knowledge of how weirdos and extremists held the gay movement back. All the progress LGB people made was contingent on those people being marginalised, but as soon as all the key LGB demands had been won, back they came to undermine all that social acceptance. It's the difference between having an Andrew Sullivan as your public face and having a Chase Strangio as your public face.

There's a right wing YouTuber who coined the phrase "back to Fresh Prince" as a well-meaning but possibly naive impulse in US racial politics - let's get back to a Bill Clinton type culture where racial problems weren't solved exactly but they were diminishing and there was optimism that they were on the way to being solved. I think I see a similar impulse with Sully - let's get back to when we were equal and accepted, before the Q+ started to ruin it all. I think he believes the Q+ has to be thrown overboard, and he's genuinely conflicted about the T (because of people he knows in the T category who have a genuine affinity with the LGB)

I have found the NYT articles seem to have these massive holes in them. It is like they are almost there but not quite. Such as the podcast ‘the Protocol’. It Valorised the Dutch Protocol, completely missing the issues with the research but the writers did understand the issues currently.

I can only assume that the NYT has decided as a publication to hang their hat on the ‘true trans’ concept that we have seen grow in momentum over the past year. It will grow ever louder until finally people strip away this emotional blind spot.

I think they have chosen the strategy where they recognise that people are responding to the over reach of transgender lobbying and the impact it had on the Democratic Party’s results, but it wants to portray itself still as some sort of supporter of this supposedly marginalised group. Therefore it will be weak on its reporting on this topic.

Very few, if any, mentions of women's rights and protections in that piece.

The whole 'Queer' thing has become about adopting a very specific, minutely curated 'identity'; one tied up in the politics of radical social justice activism.

I'm not sure I entirely agree that this was entirely some kind of external issue.

Look at what Pride has become for example. It's more of a sex festival than anything else, for people who share certain politics. Men, who know they are men, in jock straps on floats. Other fetish stuff.

And some of the tactics the TRAs have used they have borrowed directly. Vilifying anyone who doesn't sign up to what the progressive agenda says, for example - there is total amnesia for most around the fact that quite a few people in the gay community weren't that keen on same sex marriage, now anyone who take a differernt view is immediately called a bigot.

Or the use of thought terminating cliches, often without really thinking through their larger questions. "Love Is Love being a prime example - really? No one thinks that is true. Or the insistence that it is a scientific fact that sexuality is inborn, and unhangable. That's not actually a scientific fact, it's a theory with middling evidence. Before it was popularised there were quite a few gay men who believed it to be a lifefyle issue. But these ideas are pushed now as if they are unquestionable and people who do question are shut down.

Similarly I have heard some real whoppers about Black history it was considered wrong to disagree with. From people who ought to know better

TRAs borrowed a lot from less honest elements of the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. And people were primed to simply accept that stuff, they had been taught that to question these kinds of things is the worst kind of transgression..

Sullivan is staking out a position in which he has zero problems with trans people personally, has trans friends who he wants the best for, and because of his personal irl observations of trans acquaintances and friends and his philosophy of live-and-let-live (people know what's best for themselves), he believes that there is an (at least in some instances) essential trans-ness for whom transition is the best possible treatment. I used to have roughly the same position, but I've since moved to the Helen Joyce camp - that trans-ness can't be separated from GI; transition should be allowed as a basic right of personal autonomy and expression (as far as I know she is officially neutral on whether it should ever be funded by the NHS) but as an ideology and identity it is wholly pernicious and invalid, and in her informed (but not professional) opinion transition is never an appropriate medical treatment, even though the underlying dysphoria and distress is real and should be treated as a valid condition. The difference between the two positions really comes down to the question of whether trans-ness can be thought of as a valid identity whose nature sits somewhere between that of homosexuality and psychological pathology (Sullivan) or whether it's invalid. I think Joyce's argument is stronger, but a coherent counter augment can be made, I just find it less logically compelling (though more emotionally compelling).

I agree that Sullivan's command of the issue does not seem to be fully fluent. Perhaps he could be faulted for that. No one can be expected to match Joyce's brilliance - her intelligence and painstaking research are unsurpassed, but it's also no longer necessary to go through primary sources and battle against misinformation (as it stood in the 2010s) to be informed and he was after all at one time the editor-in-chief for a major current affairs magazine; so he's familiar with what's necessary to become fully briefed on a topic.

In any case, Sullivan's position is defensible and it's useful in the debate because it's maximally deferential to trans people and allows him to make a strong argument that trans people are working against their own best interests, as formulated by themselves.

As i mentioned on another thread, Sullivan's main theses is that the authoritarian, censorious nature of the trans debate is the original sin, and to that extent, [LGB]TQI+ activist behavior is an exemplar of the woke left and its threat to democracy, especially since the right is convulsing with it's own authoritarian impulses. Secondly, he makes the veiled threat to trans activists that it will soon be time for gays and lesbians (homosexuals) to demarcate themself from gender ideology and push back against their former allies with new institutions and public condemnation of excesses. Even though many gays and lesbians (i.e. actual homosexuals) feel this way, this is the first time that that threat has been made in the US from a prominent platform, with the NYT as prominent as it gets.

I get where you are coming from, but I do feel like he pulled a few punches - as @MarieDeGournay says, was it really the addition of the Q+, or rather the addition of the T (+) that set former LGB rights advocates on this weird path? He clearly wants to talk about the harms to LGB people from trans ideology, but he also keeps talking about LGBT people. It feels like the other recent NYT piece - a bit fence-sitting-y. In terms of getting the usual readers of the NYT thinking, though, perhaps this is the way to go, though.

Excellent article. Thank you.

I saw this stuffed up with a yay Pride month message the other day- there is not even the faintest pretense any more of this having anything to do with gay people as well as trans.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/15340454976629318/

I’m inclined to agree. Missing that important first step.

While this article has lots of trenchant criticism of gender ideology, I expected it to be about how the 'Gay Rights Movement' had been infiltrated and hijacked - it did not 'radicalise' itself and lose its way, the movement was appropriated, used and abused by the trans juggernaut.

Sullivan doesn't problematise at all how the lesbian and gay movement became the LGBT movement. He complains that ' L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+,...' but he is silent on the bolting on of the T in the first place, which happened without the permission of lesbians and gays - we never had an EGM where we said 'Yes of course let this group that is not about sexual orientation at all tag along with us! They seem like nice people! What could possibly go wrong?'

'The greater acceptance of trans people is a huge step forward for all of us.' is not a statement that women, and in particular lesbians, would agree with.

So what he seems to disapprove of is the proliferation of identities under the 'queer' banner, rather than the appropriation of identities under the trans banner.

I am sorry to hear you were beaten up for being gay. There are some really unpleasant people around

Good article, thanks for sharing.

"“Queer” was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement than the gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights movement of the past."

Even the Simpsons were mocking social conservatives like this nearly 30 years ago 😂

When I got repeated kicked in the head and chest for being a "gay fucking fa**ot", weirdly enough I wasn't fussed about the colourful language, but about the fact my mouth was caving in, that I couldn't breath and if I was going to die. We reclaimed queer and other slurs as a resistance..as a 'fuck you' to those who hate us and those who wish to legislate us out of existence.

Also, this ridiculous man doesn't even know that we reclaimed queer long before we got marriage and before we even equalised the age of consent.

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