Culture & Identity

Grievance Collection and Victim Portrayal

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He further writes:

Our attention is increasingly being diverted to so-called “intersectional” issues outside the shared realm of essential matters of LGBT equality or community-centric concerns – accompanied by the attendant presumption that sexual orientation conveys proscribed political perspectives. Moreover, this implies there is now a lot less on the “gay agenda” commanding group attention.

We witnessed this dichotomy last summer when “No Justice No Pride” radicals pilloried wholesale the LGBT community and local Pride celebrations in multiple cities for not protesting pipelines, prisons, police, and the lending policies of banks.

And he adds:

If we’re to expand our sights on issues of community concern, we are notably casting our gaze in the wrong direction.

Given that LGBT entrepreneurs and small-to-moderate-size enterprise owners and operators are widely estimated to represent fully 10 percent or more of our demographic cohort, much higher than that of the population as a whole, community leaders might better turn their attention toward issues of concern to those engaged in business.

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‘Men’s Studies’ Indoctrination, Not Scholarship

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It didn’t have to be this way, but once the academic left takes control this is what happens. Not that this is anything new (e.g., see my 1994 post Masculinity Under Siege, and from 1999 Mary, Mary (Daly), Quite Contrary).

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The Adoration of Chelsea Manning

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Writes James Kirchick:

More troubling than this fawning from avowed enemies of the American “security state” is Ms. Manning’s embrace by large swaths of the LGBT community. At the New York City Pride March in June, thousands cheered as Ms. Manning sat atop the American Civil Liberties Union float. While in prison, she had repeatedly been named honorary grand marshal of San Francisco’s gay pride celebration. She has also been the subject of constant, adulatory coverage in gay media.

Celebrating Chelsea Manning just a few years after gay and transgender people were permitted to serve openly in the military discredits the LGBT cause. Throughout most of the 20th century, homosexuality was associated with treason and used as a basis for purging gay people from government jobs, denying them security clearances and restricting their service in the armed forces. The decision by Ms. Manning’s defense team to argue that untreated gender dysphoria was a factor in her decision to leak classified information unwittingly aids those who say that LGBT people cannot be trusted in sensitive government jobs. And it dishonors the LGBT people who have served in the military throughout history without betraying their country.

More below:

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Luxuriating in Victimhood

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A lesbian college professor writes about today’s LGBT-PC student culture:

A non-binary student critiques a faculty colleague of mine in class for using the term “drag queens” to describe the self-identified drag queens who resisted at Stonewall. My colleague, who is 35, queer, and teaching Sociology of Sexuality, is informed that this is an incorrect and insulting term.

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LGBT Progressives Want Litmus Test on Friends

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Michael Musto writes, What To Do When Your Friend’s a Gay Republican. Answer: drop them.

Similarly, if a real-life friend—someone who knows my plight, my accomplishments, and my oppressions—decides to trumpet in my face the alleged glories of the Republican party, I simply have to show them the hand and the door. Friendship over.

And he adds this bit of brilliance:

There are other icky issues within our own backyard, as longtime performer Penny Arcade astutely points out. Arcade is a bisexual fag hag, who finds that bi people are routinely ignored in the community. (She likens it to being a part Jew who’s Jewish enough for the Nazis, but not enough for the Jews). What’s more, she’s a self-admitted fag hag who’s been diminished for that too, and has lobbied to put an “F” for “fag hag” into LGBTQ.”

Yes, because they’re aren’t quite enough letters in the acronym already.

Here’s a nice counterpoint:

Also:

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Twixt Left and Right

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Hatefulness gussied up as moral superiority can be found among conservatives and progressives. Ideologues, one and all.

Bad anti-LGBT conservatives:

Bad LGBT leftists:

As others have pointed out, these “useful idiots” (in Lenin’s famed words) wouldn’t last long on the streets of Gaza City or Ramallah. But no one would care in Tel Aviv.

Gee, maybe these aren’t just “isolated incidents”?

Some sanity:

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Getting Woke?

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Pertinent points made by Frances S. Lee, a queer designer, trans baker and cultural studies scholar. Lee writes:

As a QTPOC (queer trans person of color), I have experienced discrimination and rejection due to who I am. … And yet, I reject QTPOC supremacy, the idea that QTPOCs or any other marginalized groups deserve to dominate society. The experience of oppression does not grant supremacy, in the same way that being a powerful colonizer does not. Justice will never look like supremacy. I wish for a new societal order that does not revolve around relations of power and domination.

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LGB and T: ‘Detransitioning’ Isn’t the same as becoming ex-gay

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Katie Herzog wrote an article for The Stranger titled The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren’t, about “an emerging population of people who have transitioned to a different gender and then later transitioned back.” Then all hell broke lose.

It seems like much of the ferocity behind the attacks on Herzog’s article asserts that detransitioning is akin to becoming ex-gay. But this assumes transitioning as transgender is a close parallel to coming out as gay or lesbian. The studies Herzog cites and her interviews with detransitioners indicate that this isn’t the case.

I’ll leave aside the issue of “effeminate” gay or “masculine” lesbian pre- and post-adolescents who now increasingly are pressured to view themselves as transgender. Suffice to say that solid research has shown that many who experience gender dysphoria when young will grow up gay, lesbian or bisexual and feel comfortable as the gender they were assigned at birth.

Ironically, when an effeminate gay man (or boy) transitions as a woman (or girl), “she” typically takes on a heterosexual identity. By detransitioning, “he” reclaims a gay identity, thereby enraging trans activists, our LGBT+ “allies.”

On a related note, Taylor Fogarty writes that some trans activists are now disputing the definition of being gay itself:

Shannon Keating of Buzzfeed suggests we eliminate the word lesbian altogether, arguing: “Against the increasingly colorful backdrop of gender diversity, a binary label like ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ starts to feel somewhat stale and stodgy. When there are so many genders out there, is it closed-minded — or worse, harmful and exclusionary — if you identify with a label that implies you’re only attracted to one?” …

Riley J. Dennis…tells lesbians their “genital preferences are discriminatory,” since they only “prefer” vaginas, and “some women have penises.”

And finally:

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LGBTQ+++ movement characterized by racism and transphobia, it seems

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The AP reports:

The recent flare-up of racial tensions comes as no surprise to Isaiah Wilson, director of external affairs for the National Black Justice Coalition, one of the few national groups focused specially on black LGBT rights. He said the broader LGBT-rights movement “has been whitewashed” — dominated to a large extent by white gay men. …

He said major LGBT-rights groups need to be frank in discussing the issue of racism, as well as recruiting and supporting nonwhite leaders.

In my experience in LGBT activism in the ’80s through the early ’90s, any person of color who walked through the door was implored to take a leadership position. As for “dominated to a large extent by white gay men,” women have dominated movement leadership from the mid-80s onward.

Diversity is vital, except when it’s not.
Jewish symbols makes some people feel unsafe, whereas Islamic symbols…oh, nevermind.

The Windy City Times reports that “Supporters added that American flags were similarly not welcome as they too are considered signs of oppression. However, flags from other nations were present.”

A bad sign.


A good sign.


Finally, Fred Litwin writes:

[Activist Tim] McCaskell claims that the issues of interest to young gay people, his so-called ‘new activists’ are “police racism, HIV criminalization, corporate power, the environment, acceptance of gender fluidity, Palestine solidarity, park sex, poverty, immigration and refugees, [and] youth empowerment.” …

Once again, McCaskell and his cohorts leave out the most important issue facing the gay community today. Our gay brothers and sisters around the globe face being tossed off of buildings in ISIS territory, being hanged in Iran and being harassed in Russia. Gay remembrances of the Pulse tragedy in Orlando rarely mention the Islamist ideology that fueled the terrorist bomber. Point that out and you’ll be called a pinkwashing homonationalist.

More. James Kirchick brings it home:

Jews are not only being made to feel unwelcome in left-leaning spaces, but anti-Semitism—masked as anti-Zionism—is becoming a marker of virtue. These episodes of ostracism are almost always undertaken to appease Muslims, which makes no sense under any circumstances, least of all for the LGBT community, which is welcomed and celebrated in the world’s only Jewish country and subject to state-sponsored harassment, imprisonment, and murder in nearly every Muslim-majority one.

It’s also cruelly ironic that Jews, of all people, would be subject to this sort of discrimination, given the disproportionate role they have played in LGBT politics and culture.

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