Transgenderism was never supposed to morph into a political ideology. That it did speaks more to left-wing political advocacy and its callous use of the distress of people suffering from gender dysphoria than to the need to treat these individuals with compassion and respect.
The left piggybacks the trans agenda onto other identity agendas to strengthen its numbers and enhance its influence. The gimlet-eyed radicals who are using transgender people as strawmen in their power games don't care very much about the mental anguish felt by people suffering from gender dysphoria.
Many lesbians, gays, and bisexuals are starting to push back on the transgender agenda as it becomes clear that erasing biological sex distinctions erases their identity.
"The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided," says University of Cambridge student Maeve Halligan in a speech to the Cambridge Union, reprinted by The Free Press. "But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also children."
Halligan, a lesbian who founded the only single-sex women’s organization at Cambridge, advocating women’s sex-based rights, has suffered mightily for her advocacy for biological women. "I have been shouted at in the street, dubbed a fascist, spat at, insulted for my appearance, and contacted online with rape and death threats," she says. "A woman trying to assert her sex-based rights gets abused for doing so."
Halligan isn't alone. There is a growing movement within the LGBTQ community to push back against the toxic belief that biological sex doesn't matter, that one's sexual identity comes from within.
In Britain, the Equality Act defines sexual orientation as attraction to the same sex, the opposite sex, or both. The UK Supreme Court ruled last April that sex means biological sex. That is the law. It also happens to be the science. Same-sex attraction is about the reality that our bodies come in two types—male and female. Modern LGBTQ+ activism has spent the better part of a decade now trying to erase that fact—because if sex is real and immutable, much of what they’ve been doing falls apart.
Indeed, basing sexual identity on only biological sex would destroy the basis for transgender ideology as a political movement. The left finds this intolerable and will fight to maintain the fiction that biological sex is a mirage to the end.
Even as evidence piles up that many tenets of transgender ideology are harmful to children, the radical trans movement is trying to subsume the concerns of lesbians and gays with calls for "solidarity," as if lesbians and gays should help the trans lobby erase their sexual identities.
The focus and funding within LGBTQ+ organizations has shifted rapidly, and with very little democratic mandate from the communities they claim to represent. This shift is often away from gay and lesbian concerns and toward the nebulous TQ+. LGB lobby groups exist precisely because gay people have specific needs that differ from those of wider society. When you move the focus, you abandon those needs. There are over 60 countries, most in the Global South, where homosexuality is still illegal. The LGBTQ+ lobby here is more concerned with pronouns.
"Gay and lesbian people across the world have drawn the obvious conclusion: The movement no longer represents them," said Halligan. "When a community starts building escape hatches, ask what they’re escaping from."
Consider the case of the LGB Alliance, a registered charity founded by two lesbian activists whose only concern is advocating for people who are attracted to the same sex. The LGBTQ+ organization took the Alliance to court, claiming that LGB people organizing on the basis of sex is "transphobic."
"The movement eats itself," Halligan observes.
The LGBTQ+ groups go to ridiculous lengths to transform gays and lesbians from people attracted to the same sex to people attracted to any sex as long as the individual has a "T" designation.
So what have the institutions been doing while their supposed beneficiaries were forming breakaway groups in protest? Take Stonewall: It was set up to advocate for LGBs, and added the “T” in 2015. Since then, it has done nothing but make outrageous demands based on its trans agenda. It has run workshops for lesbians to unlearn their objection to male genitalia. In activist spaces, this is called breaking through the cotton ceiling. The organization that once marched for gay liberation now runs seminars on overcoming lesbians’ resistance to men. Many words come to mind. “Progressive” is not one of them.
By the way, let’s be clear: Over 80 percent of males who identify as transgender lesbians retain their male anatomy. The majority are, by any prior definition, heterosexual men. The movement that was supposed to protect lesbians is instead providing ideological cover for them to be coerced into accepting male-bodied partners rebranded as a matter of inclusivity.
Stonewall also says in its school guidance that “trans women are women; trans men are men” to children as an established fact — "lying to them and compelling them to repeat it or face accusations of transphobic bullying," Halligan says.
"What happens to gay and lesbian people when sex stops meaning anything? What happens to the children who may then grow up to be same-sex attracted?" asks Halligan. "They’re being failed by the people who claimed to protect them."
This is a war that's being fought among activists. Meanwhile, children are being indoctrinated into an ideology that teaches them biology has nothing to do with sex. The pushback by activists like Halligan is welcome but not nearly enough.
Until schools stop trying to brainwash children by filling their heads with nonsense about biological sex not mattering, the confusion the kids feel will only grow.
This is exactly what the radical transgender movement wants.
