by Hunter Ash, Queer Majority
The untruths of trans activism caused a backlash, but the LGBT movement has been on shaky factual ground for decades. |
Few things engender as much bitterness as discovering you have been lied to by a cause you believed in.
In a recent article in the New York Times, the writer and same-sex marriage pioneer Andrew Sullivan describes where he believes the LGBT movement lost the plot. He primarily focuses on trans activism and specifically the denial of sex differences, and while I agree that this is responsible for much of the recent erosion in public support for LGBT causes, the problems are deeper and older. Long before trans issues grabbed the movement’s spotlight, much of LGB activism was grounded in false or misleading claims. Some of these falsehoods may have been useful in the short term, but they made the movement fragile. Avoiding cyclical backlash and creating durable support for LGBT rights and liberties requires going back to the basics: we must ground our arguments in true claims and simple moral principles.
When I was a high school sophomore in 2009, I participated in a protest against anti-gay bullying. I wore duct tape over my mouth for one school day, with pre-printed notes explaining my reasons to teachers and curious students. This was meant to symbolize the silence imposed through fear on LGBT people, and was done in the name of Matthew Shepard, who I believed had been killed in a homophobic hate crime. I repeated the protest the following year as a junior in 2010. I also stood up to teachers on more than one occasion who insisted that homosexuality was a choice.
Growing up as an atheist in one of the most religious states in the US, I was accustomed to taking unpopular stances and unbothered by social disapproval. I saw advocacy for LGBT rights as a natural extension of my commitment to rationality, since the only arguments I ever saw opposing them were religious. I had a gay uncle who was always kind to me, and the idea that he should be discriminated against or barred from marriage struck me as a monstrous intrusion of unreason into the private life of a good man.