The queer threat to gay pride

The New York State legislature recently tackled the vital, pressing issue of whether the terms “mother” and “father” are cruel and oppressive. They concluded that these terms are indeed transphobic and need to be  replaced in law by “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent”. “Paternity” is also bigoted and axed. Among the Democrats, the vote was, natch, a few shy of unanimous. On all questions gay and trans, the Dems are now entirely controlled by trans and “queer” extremists.

Now take a look at the recent  Senate hearings  on sex changes for children. Again, the Dems were unanimous, and their position utterly unchanged: the “safety” and “effectiveness” of transing children is beyond any dispute; no one but Republican bigots oppose it; and any problems can be dealt with retroactively by malpractice suits. (The only slight concession to reality was an  end to the lie  that transing children was the only way to stop them killing themselves. But no apology for the lie, of course. Or for the human wreckage the lie caused.) The  Cass Review  never happened. Affirmation-only guidelines never existed.

Gays and lesbians and feminists and liberals who oppose transing children and defend the fact of the sex binary? Senators Sanders, Markey, and Baldwin don’t seem to know we even exist. Unsurprising. MS NOW, to take one example, has never had a single guest who’s been critical of child sex changes. The Cass Review, when it has even been mentioned, has been instantly dismissed. The gay and lesbian press, such as it is, reports on all this as a trans genocide in full swing.

That’s where we are in gay and lesbian world this Pride month. Queer as fuck. About a year ago, I wrote an  op-ed for the NYT warning that the queer takeover of what’s left of the gay and lesbian rights movement was hurting support for gay causes. I expected a huge backlash, but received a huge private thank you from gays and lesbians on the street in Provincetown and throughout the reader comments . I asked for a debate among gays and Democrats. But a year later, no debate has happened outside social media tweet-storms, no gay or lesbian institution or public official has said a word, and the policies — profoundly unpopular, rooted in critical gender and queer theory — are hegemonic.

Which is why it is only appropriate that Zohran Mamdani put out  a Pride statement referring solely to “queer and trans people”, excising LGBs from the movement we built. Mamdani described all gays and lesbians with a word, “queer”, chosen by  only 6%  of us in a recent survey. (Check  Google Trends  to see how rarely the word was even a search item until the 2020s.) They even  took Stonewall  from us. Rachel Maddow  called it “a riot by trans people”. Try to find a single trans person in the photos of that night in 1969. Now ask any gay under 40 who Frank Kameny was. No clue.

“For the first time since 2015, I genuinely fear for the future of marriage equality.”

The rigid refusal to compromise on this radicalisation — they also changed the Pride flag to insert mandatory references to TQ+, the discredited BLM themes, and “brown people” — is merely a part of re-writing the narrative back to the Seventies, before AIDS and gay integration. There is little attempt to engage the straight majority with reason anymore — or even gays and lesbians queasy at these new mandates — just an impulse to provoke, condemn, or cancel them.

I suspect the queers are so insulated they don’t even realise that this is what they have been effectively saying to Joe Public for a decade now. Remember when they told you that gay and lesbian people were just like everyone else, and just wanted to be left alone? Scrap that. We’re actually queers who believe marriage is a “ fundamentally violent institution ” and that the sex binary is a white supremacist fiction. Now we’ve gotten marriage, we will indoctrinate  your kids  in queer and gender theory, fire you if you don’t repeat our pronouns, force girls to shower next to boys in locker rooms, give irreversible sex changes to minors, and  insist  that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

And, after a few years of this kind of messaging, and no pushback from regular gays and lesbians … guess what? Support for marriage equality from the centre and centre-right is  nosediving . Gallup shows a decline from 71% to 65% support for gay marriage among all Americans in just three years. Among Independents, support has dropped by six points in four years, from 73% to 67%; and among Republicans by 18 points, from 55% in 2022 to just 37% today — setting us back 20 years. On the morality of same-sex relations, the drops are more acute: down 10 points among Indies and 21 points among Republicans. As someone who played a part in bringing those Republicans and moderates around to gay marriage, it’s distressing to see what the queer overreach has done — especially in red states.

We’re told that this is all about “h…