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.
Over time, I adopted, largely uncritically, many of the other key talking points of the LGBT rights movement. I believed that most AIDS deaths were primarily the fault of President Reagan for not responding to the epidemic. I believed that exclusive homosexuality was ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. And I believed that gay people essentially wanted to live identical lives to straight people but with a same-sex partner.
As I gained awareness of trans issues, I likewise accepted various narratives on the basis that they were the scientific consensus. I thought trans people had brains more similar to their identified sex than their birth sex, that being trans is always innate, and that transition reliably improves mental health.
I do not believe that the truth depends on one’s personal experiences and perspective, but I cannot avoid mentioning that I transitioned (male-to-female) in 2019 and have since detransitioned. While I was trans, I was deeply embedded in my local LGBT community and participated in just about every kind of sex and relationship configuration that exists. I am not someone who simply lacks an open mind, has an overactive disgust response, or doesn’t truly understand the community. This is something I lived.
My experiences in LGBT communities put the first cracks in my confidence in the left-activist view of these issues. Among the trans and gender-nonconforming people I knew, I saw no signs of improved mental health as they embraced their “true selves”, nor did I see any improvement in my own mental health as I took ever more steps in my transition. Furthermore, it did not seem to me that the trans women I knew were psychologically female in any recognizable sense. Most still dominated conversations, had poor theories of mind, moved and stood and sat in masculine ways, and were highly sexually aggressive. As someone who suffered sexual abuse from a man as a child, the latter was especially concerning to me.
In hindsight, I believe my transition was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to escape men due to this childhood experience. Now here we all were — welcomed into women’s spaces and conversations. My own escape hatch let the thing I was running from in behind me. Of course, none of this is scientific or generalizable, and I don’t believe that childhood molestation is a common cause of transgender identity. But it shaped how I reacted to my experiences in the community and motivated me to seek out evidence. And when I did, I found that almost everything I thought I knew was at best unsupported and at worst a lie.
Let’s go down the line:
Matthew Shepard, for example, was not murdered by homophobes in a hate crime. He was involved in drug-dealing and prostitution, and one of his killers was a gay former lover, most likely out to steal a $10,000 shipment of methamphetamine that was in Shepard’s possession. This fact pattern is persuasively laid out and argued in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard (2013) by gay journalist Stephen Jimenez.
It’s also not true that the government didn’t care about the spread of HIV. The virus spread so rapidly in the gay male (and to a lesser extent bi male) population because of the high transmission rate from unprotected anal sex, the fact that these men would often alternate between topping and bottoming, and the extreme promiscuity in the community. It was known by the 1980s that the disease was likely sexually transmitted, and various local governments and researchers beseeched gay bathhouses (popular locations for hookups and orgies) in cities such as San Francisco to close or at least do more to ensure safe sex. When these pleas fell on deaf ears and the San Francisco city government moved to close the bathhouses, protesters carried signs that said “today the baths, tomorrow the ovens”, comparing efforts to keep gay men alive to the Holocaust.
The attempts to stop the epidemic in San Francisco are documented in an illuminating collection of interviews with public health officials and experts involved in the effort. Today, HIV prevention and treatment medication is one of the only categories of medical care provided for free by the federal government to anyone who needs it and can’t afford it, alongside kidney dialysis. I take exception to the tone of the standard narrative that the government did not move as fast as some activists would have liked to protect the community from its own high-risk behavior. I believe in the freedom of adults to engage in almost any consensual activity, however risky, but it is unseemly to then act like a victim when the risks are realized.
I likewise discovered that while homosexual behavior is observed in many species, exclusive homosexuality is observed only in humans and domesticated sheep (it’s actually bisexuality that’s widespread in nature). The conflation of these two phenomena (bisexuality versus exclusive homosexuality) is clearly driven by a desire to bolster a certain narrative — one that is not necessary. I very much doubt there are many people whose support of LGBT rights hinges on the existence of exclusive homosexuality in hundreds of nonhuman species. On the contrary, building a case for LGBT rights and acceptance using falsehoods risks alienating allies who discover the truth — because people don’t like being lied to.
In terms of chosen lifestyles, gay people are not identically comparable to straight folks. 10 years after Obergefell, marriage rates for gay men and lesbians lag far behind those of straight people, and these relationships are disproportionately likely to be non-monogamous. Over the past 15 years, surveys have found that between 30% and 50% of gay men were in open relationships. There is no particular reason this is bad, but the idea that gay people are just straight people with swapped sex preferences is false and doesn’t account for the sex differences between male and female sexuality. Predicating the movement on the idea that most gay folks want a monogamous marriage and a white picket fence may have been effective, but it was always misleading.
This brings us to trans issues. Perhaps the first lie to mention is the “brain sex” model of transgender identity. The idea that trans people usually have observably opposite-sex brains was driven by sloppy neuroscience. To be sure, we do observe some cross-sex shift in the brains of transgender individuals: the average volume of certain brain regions among the trans women population is shifted in the direction of the female average relative to the male average. But we also observe this in non-trans-identifying gay men. Newer studies that control for sexuality show no net cross-sex shift, and neither do uncontrolled studies whose samples include very few transgender people who are also strictly homosexual. Another factor that has clouded the discourse is that in the past, most trans-identified people were exclusively homosexual, but now less than one-fifth are, so very few have cross-sex-shifted brains even in the limited sense established by earlier studies, and most people with cross-sex-shifted brains do not identify as trans.
The claim that being trans is an innate part of a person is similarly weak. Gender dysphoria — the sense of incongruence between and distress over one’s sex and gender identity — is a real phenomenon, though it remains an area with more questions than definitive answers. The strongest typology of trans women transitioners is sex researcher Ray Blanchard’s two-type model. He classifies trans women into two categories: homosexual transsexuals (HSTS) and autogynephiles (AGP). HSTSs are exclusively homosexual, showing both physical and behavioral signs of feminization before transition, and tend to transition earlier (though this may be less true today). They typically transition not due to a sense of being trapped in the wrong body, but often to escape homophobia, attract more masculine men, and better fit into society. AGPs are generally heterosexual or bisexual men who are, in a sense, sexually attracted to the idea of being a woman, which can produce gender dysphoria.
But neither psychological type necessarily leads to a trans identity. Most feminine gay men do not choose to transition, especially in more accepting Western countries. AGP transitioners are also a minority of all men who experience autogynephilia. Many choose to express it merely as a sexual preference rather than adopting a new identity or altering their bodies. Furthermore, the existence of detransitioners — those who, like me, transition, then later transition back — also complicates this narrative that one’s inner sense of self is immutable and unchanging.
As for transitions, the supposed mental health benefits are often cited as the primary argument by advocates in support of both adult and youth transitions. But the evidence supporting these benefits is of low quality. Many of the studies that purport to show the benefits of transition suffer from a host of serious methodological problems, such as small sample sizes, high dropout rates, lack of proper controls, and self-reported outcomes. Evidence reviews find small and highly inconsistent effects of gender-affirming care on objective mental health outcomes, including psychiatric medication use, mental-health-related hospital visits, and suicides. The general trend of more robust studies shows smaller, insignificant, or even negative effects. Perhaps the very best one could say for gender-affirming care is that we have no idea whether it improves patient outcomes. No other medical procedure, especially one with such severe side effects, would be approved with such a shoddy evidence base. Indeed, highly progressive Western European countries, some of which pioneered trans procedures, have since been pumping the brakes on fast-tracked care with insufficient assessment.
Many of the most common arguments and narratives used by LGBT activists are lies, distortions, or at best unsupported. And yet LGBT rights remain a vital and worthwhile cause. How then should we advocate for equal rights and dignity? There’s a very simple argument that would have appealed to my younger self and that still convinces me today: personal liberty.
Adults should have the right to engage in consensual behavior with other adults and to bear the costs of that behavior. They should have the right to pay for the body modifications of their choosing. This is the only argument that was ever necessary. It does not require any false or misleading factual claims. It does not require the politicization of science. It stands strong whether homosexuality is pervasive across species and whether sexual orientation or gender identity are innate and unchanging traits.
Choosing this stance could mean giving up some things that activists want. Perhaps it means people cannot force coworkers to use their preferred pronouns, the end of youth medical transitions, and the restoration of many single-sex spaces. It is a stable compromise: leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone. Asking for anything more than this risks throwing us out of equilibrium and creating cycles of oscillating backlash. As soon as you start imposing on other people, they will push back.
Blaming the anti-LGBT backlash on trans activists alone misses the point. We don’t need “LGB without the T”; we just need an LGBT and ally consensus on a truth-centered, morally liberal argument. If the message of the LGBT movement was simply one of personal liberty rather than a demand — grounded in falsehoods — for acceptance, subsidy, and ideological conformity, we would be in a very different cultural and political moment right now. In particular, LGBT rights would very likely have near-total support from the ascendant political faction of our time: the tech right. Freedom is cool. Transhumanism is cool. Hectoring morality campaigns are not. If we embrace self-determination and individualism, we will maintain the right of LGBT people to thrive in society without persecution. If we demand special privileges for ourselves and power over other people’s interests or children, we will bleed public support until all the gains of the past 50 years are washed away."
Well, when the LGB activists acknowledge the lies, I'm not sure how the ABC folx can attack them.
If Dan reads this, I'm sure he'll try to smear the author and the author of the NYT piece.
