Twenty years ago today, the first legal civil marriages for gay and lesbian couples took place in America. For those of us who had been told for a decade and a half that this was an insane idea that would never happen, it was an obviously overwhelming moment. That day I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times focusing on how this decision would filter down in public consciousness and, crucially, reach lost, anxious, or bewildered gay and lesbian children. (That same week I was on another book tour for Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader.) In many ways, this was the galvanizing reason for my advocacy:
I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents’ or my brother’s or my sister’s. It’s hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it: the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel.
I wanted a way to tell gay kids they had a future. I wanted to help heal the wound that had existed in my own heart and soul until adulthood. I wanted them to feel completely at home with their sex and same-sex love. The mere existence of gay marriages would, I hoped, transform the culture in humane ways. Just seeing this possibility out there, gay kids would be less traumatized, less self-hating, and more confident in the world. They might grow up the way straight kids grow up — no more or less fucked up than their peers.
And I wasn’t wrong. This week the RAND corporation put out a study showing the real-world effects of gay marriage two decades later: all the predicted disasters failed to happen. New straight marriages went up slightly afterward; straight divorce and cohabitation rates stayed the same; gay couples in states with marriage equality demonstrated “more-stable relationships, higher earnings, and higher rates of homeownership.” Support for marriage equality was 42 percent in 2004, and the issue would help Bush win a second term in Ohio; now, as we see its actual impact, it is around 70 percent.
And how about the gay kids who had motivated so much of my passion?
Ay there’s the rub. It’s a hard question to answer — largely because the entire category of gay kids has been abolished by, yes, gay groups. Gay kids are now conflated with entirely different groups: children who believe they are the opposite sex, straight kids who call themselves “queer,” an entirely new category of human beings called “nonbinaries,” and a few hundred new “orientations” and “genders” — including eunuchs! All of these kids are now deemed “gender diverse,” essentially living the same “LGBTQIA+” life, defined as being queer and subverting any and all cultural and social norms. Homosexuality? It has effectively evaporated into “gender diversity.”
But what if there is an inherent, deep conflict between some of these letters? What if being trans and being gay are, in fact, utterly different experiences? And what if the interests of one group require at times the subordination of one to another?
The doctrine of intersectionality insists this cannot be the case because all the letters in the alphabet share being oppressed, which is the most important thing; and if there is a conflict between them, the solution is clear: the most oppressed group wins! In the LGBTQIA+ era, that means that Gs and Ls always defer to Ts. And while most of the time, this scarcely matters, in one specific instance, in this particular time, it does. I’m talking about gay children — and what gender ideology is now teaching them, and what “gender-affirming care” is doing to their bodies and souls.
The orthodoxy now pushed by the educational establishment, the medical industry, and the federal government is that being a boy or a girl is just a feeling state, and not a biological fact. Your genitals and your chromosomes tell you nothing about your sex. And as children grow up, the doctrine holds, they get to choose their gender, and the number of genders is infinite — and gender is conflated with sex. And then, if their body in puberty begins to look unlike the gender they have previously picked, they can and should change it.
You can see why this might make sense to teach trans kids with gender dysphoria. But teaching it to gay kids is a terrible misdirection, and is leading to horrifying results. The last thing a gay boy needs to be told is that he might actually be a girl inside — and that might be the source of all his troubles. It’s psychologically brutalizing and scarring.
One Christmas, at my grandparents’, when I was around eight and my brother four, my brother was playing with a toy truck, bashing it against the wall; I was reading a book. My grandmother looked at my brother and me, and said to my mum: “Well, at least you now have a real boy.” The off-hand remark pierced my self-esteem like a stiletto. It’s the deepest, oldest homophobic trope: that gay boys aren’t really boys. And it is now being deployed by gender theorists as gleefully as it once was by bigots.
Now imagine an authority figure comes along and reinforces this with a kid facing puberty. And the parent or teacher also tells the boy he can turn into a girl, if he wants, and thereby solve all his burgeoning anxieties. This well-meaning message to trans kids unwittingly translates into homophobia for the gay ones. Just when they need to be affirmed in their biological sex, they are told it doesn’t exist. The phrase that haunts me — ubiquitous in LGBTQIA+ children’s lit — is “You can be a boy or a girl or both or neither, or something else entirely.” And I ask myself: if I had been offered that solution would I have taken it?
And the answer is maybe yes. And I’m not the only one. Here’s Martina Navratilova, wondering if she would have been diagnosed as dysphoric as a kid:
For sure I would have been. Thank god I was born then and not 50 years later …
I began to fear we had reached a point of no return a couple of years ago, during a conversation I had with a supposedly ‘progressive’ friend. I told her that, if I had been a young boy now, I likely would have been prescribed puberty blockers and gone on to medically transition. ‘And you don’t think you would’ve been happy as a transwoman?’, she asked me. Her question left me speechless.
At the notorious Tavistock Center in the UK that provided “gender-affirming care” for children, a huge majority of the kids were same-sex attracted:
“It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” one male clinician said. “I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay,” he told The Times.
While conducting her definitive study of these experiments on children, Hilary Cass recalled one particularly haunting interview she had:
I spoke to a young adult who started to transition very early — male to female. She’s doing well, she had puberty blockers at the earliest stage, she had feminizing hormones at the earliest stage and she passes very well as a woman, but with hindsight she knows she was a boy with intense internalized homophobia and was gay. But at this point in her life she’s clearly not going to de-transition.
One clinician told Hannah Barnes that female patients seeking testosterone would often say things like “When I hear the word lesbian, I cringe. I want to die,” and “I’m gonna vomit if I hear the word lesbian another time.” If you have three minutes to spare, I urge you to listen to a beautiful young lesbian, Jet London, tell her story of puberty blockers. It broke my heart.
The overwhelming majority of detransitioners are gay men and lesbians who were persuaded they were trans in childhood. In the old days, sorting through these feelings just required growing up — no need to make a decision until you’re an adult — and every decision was reversible. In the age of “affirmation-only” and “gender-affirming care,” all this becomes ever more fraught as kids are required to make a decision against a pubertal clock. And this is not a hypothetical. We know it has happened; we know it is happening. For many gender-dysphoric children, there is no doubt that “gender-affirming care” is literally transing the gay away.
And where are the groups and activists who are supposed to look out for gay kids, defend them, protect them, and worry about their health and safety? They are the very ones pushing this new form of conversion therapy upon them! The price of intersectionality, “queerness,” gender ideology, and alphabet activism is the health and safety of gay children.
Take the reaction of the activist groups — HRC, GLAAD, Trevor Project, to name three of the biggest — to the Cass Review, which laid all of this out in irrefutable detail? They have said nothing. And the US-based groups that have responded to the Cass Review are digging their heels in. They are committed to this new form of conversion therapy as a religious conviction. They will tell you that no gay kid would ever be transed. But ask them how they distinguish between a gay kid and a trans kid with gender dysphoria, and they have no objective answer except to “believe the child.”
Ask them if the process could be slowed down to ensure a minimum of errors, and they tell you that is “transphobic,” and that the minute a kid says they think they’re the opposite sex, you are not allowed even to question it. That’s the “affirmation-only” model. This is unwise with trans kids. But with gay kids, it amounts to what can only be called abuse. It is the worst assault on gay children since the religious right’s conversion therapy era.
The only way out of this woke dead-end is to end the conflation of trans and gay identity, and to sever the “LGBTQ” coalition that is sacrificing gay kids. Gay men and lesbians have a specific identity, and a unique place in human life and culture. We have no essential connection to trans people; and trans people played a minimal role in advancing our rights. We can and do support trans rights, but in those areas where the two groups clearly conflict, we need to defend our own.
We need to regain and restore our pride as homosexual men and women. We are not trans. We are not straight. We know there are two sexes, because our very identity is made possible by the binary. Large numbers of us are not queer either. We are in red states and blue states, conservatives as well as liberals, Biden supporters and Trump supporters. The forced association with an utterly different life experience and an extreme ideology is hurting vulnerable gay children; and it is preventing us from helping them.
This is not an eschewal of trans rights; lesbians and gay men, myself included, will still defend those rights for adults, and best practices for children. It is not even best understood as a divorce from the TQ fanatics. It’s simply a recognition that 20 years after Integration Day, another landmark is now required: Gay and Lesbian Independence Day. It honors our successful past, and defends the beleaguered children who will be our future — if we only leave them alone.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a convo with Oren Cass about moving the GOP left on economics; reader dissents over the campus protests and Trump lawfare; four notable quotes for the week in news; 18 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of many accents; a delightful window from Tahiti; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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New On The Dishcast: Oren Cass
Oren is a writer and policy advisor. In 2012, he was the domestic policy director for Romney’s presidential campaign, and in 2018 he wrote The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. In 2020, he founded the think tank American Compass, where he serves as executive director. He’s also a contributing opinion writer for the Financial Times.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on how China cheats at free trade, and the possibility of Trumpism without Trump. That link also takes you to listener commentary on recent episodes with Adam Moss, Johann Hari, and Jonathan Freedland, plus lots of readers on lawfare, Israel, and the presidential race.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, Noah Smith on the economy, Bill Maher on everything, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, and the great Van Jones! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
“I think the protests are likely to strengthen support for Israel in the US. They sure have brought me back to sympathizing with the Jewish state’s predicament.”
This encapsulates something that I think is a bit of a trap you fall into periodically. Sometimes when you have a visceral reaction to a certain group of people (generally lefties), you allow your disdain for them to color your views of substantive issues. Here, you’re disgusted by the fact that some of the organizers of protests are actually Hamas supporters, or that they’ve behaved horribly in other ways. That’s a completely legitimate criticism … but it doesn’t make Israel any more or less right. It just makes the protesters wrong about their support for Hamas, or their personal behavior.
The protests “sure have brought me back to sympathizing with the Jewish state’s predicament.” Why? How do the actions of people on college campuses thousands of miles away have any bearing on whether Israel’s actions in Gaza are justified or unjustified, moral or immoral? There’s nothing logical about that. It’s an emotional/personalresponse on your part. It’s like saying, “If those horrible campus lefties are criticizing Israel, I feel compelled to like/support Israel more, because I have to be on the other side of these people I can’t stand.”
Why give protesters that much power over your own independent judgment? If you’re going to support Israel, do it because you think what they’re doing is justified by the facts on the ground in Gaza, not because you can’t stand the protesters criticizing Israel on a campus a continent away.
Read my response to that reader, along with another dissent, here. More dissents — on the Trump trials — are over on the pod page. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Trump-Biden debates, the Stormy trial, and tariffs. Below are a few examples, followed by a few new pods on Substack:
Mike Pesca points out, “Covid and overall mortality figures belie the narrative of white supremacy.”
YouTube is crushing Hollywood — and just about every other media platform.
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? (The beagle was added to obscure a key clue.) Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. One of the best entries is coming from our resident biologist:
I’ve been saving an animal for when we got back to Europe!
Super exciting, huh? This is Phengaris alcon, the Large Blue butterfly. Not particularly large or particularly blue, IMO, but I guess that matches its lifestyle. This butterfly gets along by making people mistake it for something more impressive than it is. It starts with the caterpillar:
All the images I can find show it surrounded by ants, which is usually bad news for a plump and juicy caterpillar. But not for this little scam artist! To start out with, it postures and smells like an ant larva. So the worker ant seen above is dutifully taking the caterpillar home to feed and cosset it.
When the caterpillar gets into the nest, though, it will reveal its true ambitions. It will start to release pheromones and make sounds just like the queen ant’s. While the workers bustle about trying to meet its every need, the caterpillar wanders through the colony and into the nursery, where it eats the ant larvae.
After noshing down — sometimes on enough larvae to wipe out the colony, if enough caterpillars have bluffed their way in — the caterpillar(s) will pupate, still making queenly noises from within the shell, and the worker ants will tend the butterfly pupae as their own until the adults break free and fly away.
Here’s a fine, if horrifying, video of the life cycle:
imagine you’re a guard for your castle, and you see this lady calling for help and saying she’s the queen, so you bring her in and everyone watches as she fucking eats the babies in there and just goes, “yep. Sure. New queen.” Because she got them, along with you, all high on psychedelics. And then she transforms into a giant fucking blue creature and crawls away, never to be seen again.
