It’s time to take the “T” out of “LGBT”.
Forms ask you’re straight, gay, lesbian, bi/pan … transgender. Wait, what??
Last I checked, I thought “transgender” was an identity thing, not a sexuality thing. Obtaining a sex change is not the same thing as feeling attracted to members of the same sex.
Years ago, when I still lived life as a woman, I was gay. Now as a man, I’m straight. If the LGBTQIA…XYZ community keeps trying to say that sexuality does equate to your “gender identity”, why are the two groups alway bunched up together?
Part of the reason many LGBs are finally tired of transgenders transtrenders is because these attention seekers have hijacked groups whose primary founding and goals are about legalizing and maintaining marriage equality, and made these groups focus solely on trans “rights” instead, to the detriment of their more numerous LBG siblings:
Gay rights activists simply want society to accept their different ways of living and loving—since gay men and lesbians pursue romantic interests and build families in ways that are at odds with conventional heterosexual expectations. Followers of radical gender theory, on the other hand, demand that we all reject our basic understanding of biological sex in favor of a recently conceptualized abstract notion of human identity.
—Brad Polumbo, “It’s Time for ‘LGB’ and ‘T’ to Go Their Separate Ways”, Quilette.
Here is the history of HRT and SRS: to help turn the more “feminine” man in a gay relationship, or the butch is a lesbian relationship, into a member of the “opposite sex” so that the couple can assimilate. Yes, there were transsexuals back then (we have always existed in some form or fashion), but our sexual orientation was still labeled based on how we were born; while we were conflated with our butch sisters and flamer brothers, it was an answer for both of us to re-integrate into society. Same-sex couples just want to be seen as “normal” couples, not just people who want something lustful and carnal—just like transsexuals undergo a sex change so they integrate into society as regular men and women…unlike transgenders, who seem to insist on wanting to stick out like snowflakes.
Pride marches started as “gay liberation” marches, so people who were in same-sex relationships couldn’t be fired, couldn’t be kicked out of their apartments, couldn’t be dismissed from the armed forces, couldn’t be arrested for “sodomy” or “crimes against nature”. They were not meant to be corporate-funded parades to show off our nude bodies, our sex-crazed drag personas, and act off all sexually in front of children.
I say this on the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Transgenders need to stop co-opting gay and lesbian history for their own agendas.
Transsexualism was always a medical issue; gay sexuality was always an interpersonal, relationship one. But now transgenders and “enbies” want to make it all about them, at the expense of alienating allies:
In a relatively short period of time, the gay-rights movement fused with more radical campus-based gender and identity-politics movements, to become the compound movement now known as “[LGBT]”—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, [ … ] and more. Even many people within the movement now have trouble keeping up with all the new subcategories contained within that plus sign. One version [link added] of the rainbow flag unveiled last year has 11 different colors on it. The creator, Daniel Quasar, identifies as a “queer non-binary demiguy” whose pronouns are “xe/xem/xyr.” None of these bizarre neologisms have any resonance to those of us who joined the gay-rights movement simply to affirm and protect the basic rights of people to be who they are and love who they choose without stigma or legal sanction. We’ve been forced to watch the simple moral logic of non-discrimination be transformed into a self-parodic alphabet soup of invented identities.
—Quoting from the same article as above.
Gay activists are trying to illustrate that other than having two dads or two moms, having a same-sex relationship is not much different from today’s idea of straight relationships, where both male and female partners are equals in the relationship. Transsexuals are trying to illustrate that, despite a sex change, we are just trying to live our lives as regular men and women. Trans cult radicals are trying to destroy the notion of biological sex and gender, make everything unisex, disregard everything to accommodate their petite numbers and radical ideology. Anyone who doesn’t make themselves sexually available to them are automatically “transphobic”.
Transsexualism is about the fight for access to medicine to help heal gender dysphoria, and allow us to live as members of the opposite sex. Gay rights is about allowing people to have relationships without consequence. Yes, some transsexuals are gay, lesbian, or bisexual—but their miniscule number doesn’t mean we should continue to conflate the two; as the majority of us identify as straight, i.e. while I was born female, as a man I’m still attracted to women.
Transgrenders and other “queer radicals” are undoing in a matter of years what it took decades for our predecessors to gain. Polumbo mentions in that same article that it’s not the LGBT in its entirety that our allies are losing interest; it’s because of “queer and trans radicals”—who are taking control of everything, shutting down all conversations that doesn’t curtail to their narrative, and calling everyone “bigot” at the slightest hint of reservation—that allies don’t want to bother with trans people anymore, while still wanting their LGB friends and family to be able to marry and exist without consequence. It’s why transsexual activists like Buck Angel are reclaiming the word “transsexual” and are vocal about making distinctions between transsexual and “transgender”. Why there’s groups like the LGB Alliance breaking away from Stonewall UK.
It’s these radicals who are preventing a crucial law like ENDA from being passed. Remember: ENDA would have passed, but because these radicals didn’t like that it didn’t provide protections for “gender identity”, that they prevented it from passing. We could have passed that law to at least help our more numerous LGB siblings, but because a few wouldn’t get protected, no one got protections. A classic case of, “If I can’t have it, no one can.”
I agree without our LGB siblings that it’s time to separate the T from the LGB. I am tired of the right trying to deny me my right to live as a man; I also tire of the left trying to group me in with a community I have little-to-nothing common with, and saying that I should become an activist for some queer ideology I don’t believe in. I think it is best to close out with this:
The truth is that many lesbians and gay men are quite attached to the concept of sex as a natural, biological, material thing. And gay men are defined by our attraction to our own biological sex. We are men and attracted to other men. If the concept of a man is deconstructed, so that someone without a penis is a man, then homosexuality itself is deconstructed. Transgender people pose no threat to us, and the vast majority of gay men and lesbians wholeheartedly support protections for transgender people. But transgenderist ideology — including postmodern conceptions of sex and gender — is indeed a threat to homosexuality, because it is a threat to biological sex as a concept.
—Andrew Sullivan, via Quillette.
The difference between being trans and being LGB, I was told, is who you sleep as at night, vs who you sleep with at night. It’s time LGBs reclaim groups like GLAAD, HRC, and GLSEN for themselves. It’s time that the transgenders and transtrenders non-binaries find and organize for themselves, without stealing from everyone else for once.
And it’s time for the LGB to reclaim the Pride flag for themselves, too. 🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈
