© Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
It means that for the entire month of June, you'll get to hear about the plight of transgender people, just like you do the other 11 months of the year. It also means your social media feeds have become one long rainbow, littered with tacky memes about how we must "protect trans kids" and "respect polyamorous asexuals" or whatever. Or, if you lean right (which today means anywhere to the left of Mao Zedong), you'll see a billion posts about how Bud Light betrayed the Founding Fathers by hiring Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson.
Every year now, we celebrate the holiday marked by the flying of a flag, only it's a different flag each time, and nobody seems to know who is responsible for deciding how the flag changes or when we can stop and decide it's enough.
At first, the changes to the movement seemed merely aesthetic. They began with the Pride flag, which, in a nod to intersectionality, added black and brown stripes to represent black and brown people (Because rainbows have always been "whites only"?) and renamed it the "Progress" flag.
Then, the trans triangle, in all its baby pink and blue glory, showed up as if we'd all been forced to attend some eternal gender-reveal party: "Congratulations! You're having a boy who will grow up to dominate women's athletics!" Trans people already have their own flag, but apparently, that's beside the point; they need to take over the gay Pride flag, and gay people have to like it.
This design update heralded a new era for LGBT rights.
Somewhere, someone is penning an entire thesis on the symbolism of this hideous new design: the way the triangle encroaches upon the rainbow, just as radical trans activism consumes the gay and lesbian rights movement and dismantles the progress we've fought for decades to make; the way radical trans activists advocate the medicalizing of gender-nonconforming children, who, if left alone, would likely grow up to be gay and lesbian. ("Trans the gay away" is the new "pray the gay away," only more lucrative for drug companies.)
The interests of the new "LGBTQIA+" regime — and the "Pride month" that this soft authoritarian regime demands we all celebrate, or else — couldn't be in greater conflict with the interests of the gay and lesbian activists who came before it. Historically, gays and lesbians campaigned for protection from discrimination in the workplace and housing, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, and eventually, along with civil marriage and military service, peaceful and respectful coexistence with heterosexuals in a liberal society. Gays and lesbians wanted to stop being pathologized, experimented on, locked up, and drugged.
Today, LGBT rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and what's left of the American Civil Liberties Union, lobby for gender-nonconforming children (who would likely grow up to be gay or lesbian) to be given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which, in the past, were used by law enforcement to castrate convicted gay men chemically.
In effect, organizations that were founded by gays and lesbians are now lobbying for proto-gay adolescents to be transformed into straight adolescents, adolescents who often grow up to be sterile and sexually dysfunctional. It is a process that the transgender clinical psychologist Dr. Erica Anderson has suggested is a new iteration of gay conversion therapy.*
The inversion of Pride extends past the world of acronym-named gay organizations and to mainstream culture. I can't help but feel sad when I see the actor Elliot Page, formerly Ellen Page, on the cover of People magazine to mark the occasion. It's sad that this is the message being displayed for a holiday or a history month that began as gay pride. In 2014, Ellen Page gave an impassioned speech to the Human Rights Campaign about how she was gay. Her voice was trembling. She was nervous, but she was unburdened. Ten years later, she has received a double mastectomy and commenced on cross-sex hormones. She has begun the transition from lesbian to "straight" man. Another one bites the dust.
Shame, really, is why gays and lesbians needed Pride. Because the opposite of shame is pride. We needed to celebrate who we were because we could no longer bear to mourn who we were, regret who we were, or damn ourselves. It was one big exercise in "fake it 'til you make it." And we made it. Police harassment ended. Homosexuality was depathologized and decriminalized. Gay people could be soldiers. They could be spouses.
But now, this movement has curdled into something mean and bullyish, something that cannot be magnanimous and offer forgiveness and treat children with care. In the process, it is decimating so much we gays fought for: It's OK for men to be feminine and women to be butch; we can respect straight society; and that we're a minority, but we're a valid minority. I am not proud to be associated with a sect that wants to tear everything down and destroy things and break down boundaries and harm people. I am ashamed of the new Pride.
Comment: Same as it is with the social justice movement, the LGBT community has been taken over by psychologically disturbed individuals who co-opted the group for their own perverted agendas. For more on the infestation of the LGBTMNOP+ community by Cluster B personality disordered people, see also: