Ten years ago Thursday, the movement for gay and lesbian equality scored a victory that only a decade before had seemed unimaginable. We won equal rights to civil marriage in every state in the country. In 2020 came another stunning win. In a majority opinion written by one of President Trump’s nominees, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court found that gay men, lesbians and transgender men and women are covered under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and protected from employer discrimination.
In 2024, the Republican Party removed opposition to marriage equality from its platform, and the current Republican Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is a married gay man with two children. Gay marriage is backed by around 70 percent of Americans, and discrimination against gay men, lesbians and transgender people is opposed by 80 percent. As civil rights victories go, it doesn’t get more decisive or comprehensive than this.
But a funny thing happened in the wake of these triumphs. Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized.
In 2023, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights group in the country, declared a “state of emergency” for gay men, lesbians and transgender people — the first time in the organization’s existence. It had not declared a state of emergency when gay men were jailed for having sex in private, when the AIDS epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of gay men or when we faced a possible constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in 2004. In fact, we found out, this “emergency” was almost entirely in response to new state bills proposing restrictions on medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria; bathroom and locker room bans; and transgender issues in school curricula and sports.
Nonetheless, the money has poured into gay, lesbian and transgender groups in the past decade. Charitable funding for such groups totaled $387 million in 2012, according to the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Equitable Giving Lab. By 2021, it was $823 million. L.G.B.T.Q.+ organizations also saw their assets grow 76 percent from 2019 to 2021 — around double the size of their increase in donations. A group like GLAAD — founded in 1985 to combat anti-gay media bias in the depths of the AIDS epidemic — saw its funding increase sixfold between 2014 and 2023. The Human Rights Campaign has also seen revenues soar in the past decade.
But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with “white supremacy,” they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with “gender identity” in the law and culture, and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological “queerness” meant to subvert and “queer” language, culture and society in myriad different ways.
The words gay and lesbian all but disappeared. L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ (to include intersex, asexual people and two-spirit Indigenous people). The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities, and, by some counts, more than 70 new “genders.” The point was that this is all one revolutionary, intersectional community of gender-diverse people, and intertwined with other left causes, from Black Lives Matter to Queers for Palestine.
They needed a new banner for that. So the rainbow flag, invented back in 1978 at the request of Harvey Milk, was replaced over the last few years by a new “Progress” flag, representing intersectional oppression. Black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow — for Black and brown people (and the people lost during the AIDS crisis) — and pink, light blue and white for trans people. That flag now demarcates a place not simply friendly to all types of people, as the old rainbow flag did, but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.
“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. It’s a word that can easily trigger gay men over 40 who remember it as the last slur they once heard before being bashed in the head. But one of the striking aspects of the younger queer generation is their disdain for those who came before them.
As I watched all this radical change, I wondered, was I just another old fart, shaking my fist at the sky, like every older generation known to man? Why not just accept that the next gay and lesbian generation has new ideas, has moved on, and old-timers like me should just move aside?
And some of the changes are indeed welcome. The greater acceptance of trans people is a huge step forward for all of us. But then, as I told my friends (gay, trans and everyone else), I’d always believed this and always supported trans civil rights. I was glad when, five years ago, the Supreme Court gave transgender people civil rights protection in employment. I’ve also long lived in a gay world that is skewed left, and, along with my fellow gay non-lefties, I’ve long made my peace with it, or tried to.
But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I was supposed to believe the difference didn’t exist?
I’m more than happy to accept that there are some people — not all that many — who don’t fit in that binary, and want to be protected from discrimination and allowed full access to medical interventions in order to live lives that are true to who they are. And I’m with them all the way. After all, I, too, am a part of a minority — most people live their lives governed by heterosexual desires. Thanks to the gay and lesbian movement, I’m not being asked to.
But abolishing the sex binary for the entire society? That’s a whole other thing entirely. And madness, I believe. What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people? Or changed what it means to be a man or a woman, for that matter? Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a societywide revolution — an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash, against not just trans people, but gay men and lesbians as well.
The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect — live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one’s straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged. You can bring up your children however you like. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
But in the wake of victory, L.G.B.T.Q.+ groups reneged on that pledge. They demanded the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies, and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth — it was now merely assigned, penciled in. We got new terms like “chest-feeding” for “breastfeeding” and “birthing parent” for “mother.”
A key leader of this movement, Chase Strangio, informed us that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” We all were suddenly expected to announce our pronouns as if everyone didn’t already know. Then neopronouns — xe/xem! — were added. The movement came up with a mantra: “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. TRANS MEN ARE MEN.” It was not an argument, nor a proposition to be explored or debated. It was a theological command. In all caps.
Was there any debate among gays and lesbians about this profound change, a vote taken, or even a poll of gay men and lesbians? None that I can find or recall.
And, as in other “social justice” spaces, dissent was equated with bigotry. Dissenters from gender ideology are routinely unfriended, shunned and shamed. Almost all of the gay men, trans people and lesbians who have confided in me that they don’t agree with this, or think that J.K. Rowling or Martina Navratilova have some good points, have said so sotto voce lest anyone overhear. That’s the extremely intolerant and illiberal atmosphere that now exists in the gay, lesbian and transgender space. This little community used to champion all manner of expression or argument or speech, eccentrics and visionaries. Now it’s fearful, self-censored and extremely uptight. Debate has been all but snuffed out; total uniformity of thought is demanded.
But this illiberalism made a fateful, strategic mistake. In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids. You can bring up your children however you like, we promised. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors. Partly because the adult issues had been resolved or close to it, and partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young, it meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria, but of every other kid as well.
Kids all over the country were impacted. Your children were taught in elementary school that being a boy or a girl was something they could choose and change at will. Your daughter found herself running against a trans girl (i.e. a biological male) in athletics. Children in elementary school got to pick pronouns, and some children socially transitioned at school without their parents’ knowledge or permission. I suppose there are other ways you can resurrect the ghost of Anita Bryant, and all the homophobic paranoia that followed her, but this will probably do the trick.
And then most radical of all: gender-affirming care for minors, which can lead to irreversible sex changes for children. The “care” included off-label “blockers” to arrest puberty, almost always followed with cross-sex hormones. To begin with, gays and lesbians, including me, empathized with kids with gender dysphoria, and trusted the medical profession with the rest. If this helped kids or even saved their lives, as was often emphasized, what business was it of mine? If transitioning this young in life would helped some pass better as adults, good for them.
Still, questions lingered, drawn from my own life. As a child, uninterested in playing team sports but very interested in the boys who played team sports, I was once asked by a girl when I was just 10 years old, “Are you sure you’re not really a girl?” Of course not, I replied. But I wonder how I might have responded if someone in authority — a parent or a teacher or a doctor — had suggested that my difference and occasional anxiety was because I was, in fact, a girl. That my body was irrelevant, and that I could choose to be the opposite sex before puberty and all my confusions would disappear. I just don’t know what I would have said or done, to be honest.
And how do today’s parents, teachers and doctors know for sure that a 10-year-old child isn’t, well, like me, and really is trans? How can they know for sure that the gender dysphoria isn’t instead a manifestation of being gay or lesbian and wanting to change it? How do they know for sure there isn’t another complicating personal or psychological factor? I was told not to worry. A child had to demonstrate a “persistent, consistent and insistent” trans identity for years even to be considered for medical intervention.
But this, I found out, was no longer true. The whole point of the new regime of gender-affirming care was that it rejected broad mental health assessments of children that could ensure that mistakes really didn’t happen. The old “persistent, consistent and insistent” model was deemed transphobic and loosened to become an affirmation policy. As soon as a kid said he or she was the opposite sex, further counseling and mental health exploration was deemed problematic, because it amounted to transphobic conversion therapy, we were told. When I said that seemed crazy, and that surely we needed more safeguards, I was sternly told, “Children know who they are.”
But do they? When they are between 9 and 13? I sure didn’t. Does any parent really believe this? Solid long-term data on how many children who transition but decide later it was a mistake is hard to find, in large part because the procedures are relatively new and the studies often have very poor follow-up. But without a doubt, there are some. They are walking around today, testifying in courts and legislatures, opining all over the web, telling similar stories of rushed judgments, minimal safeguards, inadequate gate-keeping and agonizing regret that as children they made irreversible decisions they could not meaningfully consent to.
I have met many. They break your heart. And so many of the gender-dysphoric kids are gay and lesbian. Of course they are, and there are many more children who will grow up to be gay and lesbian than who will grow up to be trans. When adolescents referred to a British gender clinic j0v” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>were asked about their sexuality in 2012, some 90 percent of females and 80 percent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual.
In the Netherlands, the famous Dutch protocol for gender-affirming care was pioneered in the 1990s with far stricter safeguards in place than exist in the United States today. There, of a cohort of 70 adolescents referred to an Amsterdam clinic from 2000 to 2008, 62 were same-sex attracted. And it’s easy to see that one way to “cure” yourself of attraction to the same sex is to become the opposite one. At Britain’s now-shuttered Tavistock clinic, according to the investigative journalist Hannah Barnes, staff members had a dark joke that at the rate they were going, there would be “no gay people left.” This is why sex-change surgeries are permitted and even subsidized in Iran: It’s a way to rid the country of gay people.
And a fix for gender dysphoria for gay and lesbian kids can be puberty itself, as it was for me and many of my gay male friends. Once my own hormones kicked in, my anxieties evaporated. I loved being a boy, I realized. Puberty blockers literally block gay and lesbian kids from the chance at that possible resolution of their gender dysphoria. There is a real conflict here, and it’s obscured by the L.G.B.T.Q.+ identity.
We were also told, repeatedly, that transitioning children was drastic, but the alternative could be that they would commit suicide. “We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a vocal advocate of these treatments, told ABC News in 2011. But even the American Civil Liberties Union’s Mr. Strangio admitted, when arguing before the Supreme Court last year, that suicide “thankfully and admittedly is rare.” In one study from Britain, of some 15,000 adolescents referred for gender care over a decade, there were four likely or confirmed suicides two who had been seen and two had not. One suicide is awful — and suicidality is real among kids with gender dysphoria. But that doesn’t mean that suicide is what will happen if you don’t transition a child.
One specific concern for boys who transition to girls in early puberty. “If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty’s blocked, it’s very difficult to achieve that afterwards,” a pioneering trans surgeon, Dr. Marci Bowers, has said. Research on this is minimal, and so caution is necessary in jumping to conclusions. But I ask myself: If there is a risk that some people will be denied sexual pleasure for their entire life because they transitioned very early, is it worth it? And how can a child understand what giving up orgasms for life might mean when he hasn’t experienced a single one? The obvious answer is that he can’t, and it’s profoundly unethical to put him in that situation. And who exactly is looking out for these kids? Certainly not the L.G.B.T.Q. organizations.
How did a movement that began with sexual liberation end up doing that?
By drift, activist extremism, a social media bubble and suppression of free debate. Soon enough, the right began associating what used to be the lesbian and gay movement with this gender extremism, and the L.G.B.T.Q.+ movement responded not by moderating tone or substance, but by closing ranks, seemingly determined to prove its point.
Dissent became anathema. When this newspaper reported on controversies in gender medicine, GLAAD parked a billboard truck outside the New York Times Building on several occasions, demanding the coverage change. In relatively new, disputed medical territory, partisans have insisted that “the science is settled.” When a book came out criticizing childhood transition, Mr. Strangio declared: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Public speeches by dissenters have faced abuse, intimidation, and far too often, threats of violence.
It’s a horrible reversal of history: For so long, First Amendment rights were the primary constitutional right gays and lesbians could fully and regularly exercise, and we treasured them. If censorship was in the air, gay men and lesbians were the first to oppose it. We knew who was shut up first when it came to shutting people up, and we knew we would always be a small minority. The idea that we would tell other people what words they can use, shut down speakers, criticize journalists and threaten others into silence was once absurd. Yet these are now the signature tools of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ movement. They do not seek to engage or persuade opponents; they seek to demonize, bully or cancel them.
Or take the campaign for marriage equality. We were almost pathologically civil, willing to debate anyone anywhere, and the harder the nut to crack, the better. For two decades, I went to fundamentalist churches in Idaho, Mormon groups, Catholic universities, conservative media, right-wing talk shows and C-SPAN, and published an anthology that included views from both sides. We knew that if we wanted to win, and not just posture, we needed to reach conservatives and moderates and explore where we might agree. And it worked! It took time, and we were laughed at at first, but you could see the polling slowly, inexorably shift toward us, from one-quarter to two-thirds in our favor from the 1990s to the 2010s, as our arguments and openness slowly, person by person, won over the country.
Now, look at the recent results of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ movement. In the last five years, activists have actually managed to move public opinion away from their causes in many respects. In 2021, for example, 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the very same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans — 56 percent — favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination. Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology.
And it’s not because most people don’t know any trans people personally. When people who know a trans person personally were polled, only 40 percent in 2021 supported their competing in teams that matched their gender identity; by 2023, that dropped to 30 percent. On the medical question, 46 percent of Americans supported banning medical care related to gender transitions for minors in 2022. Today, as people have learned more, 56 percent do. Trans extremism was taken up with gusto by Republicans as an issue and it most likely helped move swing voters to Mr. Trump last year. In one post-election survey, cultural issues, including transgender issues, were slightly more salient for swing voters than even immigration and inflation.
I hoped this might prompt a rethink as the election results sank in. Last week’s Skrmetti decision at the Supreme Court was another reality check, as the court upheld Tennessee’s ban on certain medical treatments for transgender youth, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, rejecting claims that the ban violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and shielding similar laws in other states. When the ruling came down, the mood among L.G.B.T.Q.+ groups was defiant. So the ranks are being closed again.
If Mr. Trump is against childhood sex reassignment, then we must be for it. If Mr. Trump says there are two sexes, we must insist that there is a spectrum. It will be very hard to break this dynamic in such a tribal atmosphere, especially when there is genuine transphobia among some on the right. But it would be incredibly healthy if we were to allow an actual debate in the community about the direction we are headed in, and treat dissenters less like bigots and traitors. Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, echoed this sentiment on Ezra Klein’s podcast last week. But she was condemned on social media as a traitor to trans people.
This intransigence matters because, left on its current trajectory, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ gender movement carries significant risks for gay, lesbian and trans equality. Gallup found that satisfaction with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people peaked at 62 percent in 2022 but dropped to 51 percent by January of this year. The center and right — whom some of us spent a lifetime engaging — are being lost. Gallup showed Republican support for gay marriage dropping from 55 to 46 percent between 2022 and 2025.
History strongly suggests that periods of toleration of gay men and lesbians can swiftly end if the public senses an overreach. That may be where we now are. No society has ever been as free for gay men, lesbians and transgender people as the modern West today. There is no such thing as the Human Rights Campaign’s “state of emergency,” and it was absurd to say so. But for some activists, there has to be. As Francis Fukuyama put it in “The End of History and the Last Man,” “Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause.”
Returning to a civil rights model and abandoning the quixotic attempt to end the sex binary do not mean, as some might have it, throwing trans people under the bus. Trans people are already on the bus; they are protected from employment discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Their existing rights should be defended and expanded to public accommodations — especially the adult right to have access to gender medicine through Medicaid, which is now being threatened. Americans should back us on that. But fighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces, and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.
This does not mean the L.G.B.T.Q.+ project should be shut down entirely. We need to defend our wins; we need to protect the interests of gays, lesbians and trans people. We need to greatly expand help and care for children with gender dysphoria, prevent bullying and increase mental health resources. Protecting them from often irreversible sex changes should not mean abandoning them. It should mean renewed concern, support and, above all, solid, evidence-based research on how best we can help.
But in America, on, this anniversary of the Obergefell decision, we also need to remember a critical thing: We won. We won because we defended free speech, reached out to right and left and center, left others and children alone — and trusted liberal democracy. That trust was rewarded with one of the swiftest successes in civil rights history. Let’s not throw it away.
Andrew Sullivan, an early advocate for gay marriage, writes the Weekly Dish Substack and hosts its podcast.
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