Well worth 22 minutes of your time.
A few excerpts:
[J]ust try to imagine who you were 10 years ago … and imagine if at that time someone had suggested to you … that healthy teenage girls should be encouraged by health professionals to get double mastectomies, that younger feminine boys would be told they’re actually probably girls and they should be put on medication to halt puberty … or that women would be fired from their jobs and subject to threats of death and rape for saying that biological sex is real ….
Those who say that … these are fringe concerns, they’re effectively saying that free speech doesn’t matter, that women’s rights don’t matter, that gay rights don’t matter. They’re effectively saying it’s absolutely fine if some women are sexually assaulted because of the dismantling of women’s spaces, that it’s … absolutely fine to have gay kids medicalized, and that it’s fine for people to be arrested for the words they choose to say … and that all of this is just the price that we pay for progress. …
The reason why the culture warriors have been so successful is that we haven’t really taken a sufficient stand against them. That’s why I’m so pleased that the theme of the LGB Alliance conference this year is courage, because I think that is absolutely key. Most people are intimidated….
Added: An example of the opposing view:
Added: Andrew Sullivan weighs in:
>
Added:
Kim and Smith add:
One can witness the perverse consequences in the Rutgers professor Jasbir K. Puar’s concept of “homonationalism,” in which gays and lesbians co-opted by “normative” state policies are no longer even considered “queer.” Her analysis designates “masculine” and “white” gays as sinister agents, oppressors of her metaphorical “queers” — who themselves are defined however she wants them to be at any given time. … Such a binarization of gay men against metaphorical “queers” invites anyone who would identify as “queer” to disparage gay men and their hard-won access to social and political power, which made them less “marginalized.”