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A Letter to My Gay Friends
June is widely recognized as “Pride Month,” and I’m sure we’ll see lots of reminders of that over the next few weeks. Most people aren’t aware that the Pride movement was inspired by, and is in part to commemorate, a specific series of events, the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969.
Like members of many other minority groups in American history, homosexual men and women faced discrimination, both legal and cultural, that was overcome only slowly and often at great personal cost. But it was overcome: today people who experience same-sex attraction have the same rights as heterosexuals and enjoy widespread public acceptance.
While the acronym “LGBT” (often with additional letters appended) is now ubiquitous, some in the gay community recognize, correctly I think, a problem with the inclusion of gender identity (trans, etc.) in what has traditionally been a gay rights movement. While the LGB movement sought equality and acceptance, the trans movement attempts to demand more than that and does so in ways that many people reasonably find objectionable.
Many of us don’t want to be told what to say, what pronouns to use, that our daughters must compete against biological males in sporting events, and share locker rooms with them in school. We also reject the seemingly nonsensical notion that we should pretend a boy is a girl simply because the boy declares that he is a girl. We resent the myriad circumlocutions increasingly required to avoid recognizing simple sexual reality: such nonsense as calling mothers “birthing people,” for example.
Beyond that, the trans movement is fundamentally hostile to the notion of basic human sexuality, and in particular of womanhood. It represents the final denial that men and women are different in important ways, in favor of a fictitious equivalence that, predictably, tends to serve men well at the expense of women.
I think there is a growing awareness among some in the gay community that there will be pushback against the increasingly extreme and unacceptable demands of the trans movement, and that, to the extent the gay movement is seen as inextricably bound to the trans movement, that pushback may undermine and threaten legitimate gains made by gay rights activists. It’s perfectly reasonable to encourage tolerance and understanding of people who are different; it isn’t reasonable to demand professions of belief and unacceptable accommodations (e.g., in athletics) based on a fanciful reimagining of human sexuality.
I think it would be prudent to begin to question whether being strongly allied with the so-called “trans” movement is in anyone’s best interests.
Published in Culture
Why is it healthy to have a sex drive which excludes natural sexual intercourse and includes only artificial forms of sexual imtercourse?
Rape is a natural sexual intercourse. At least two people are writing this post are related to Genghis Khan because of all the rape after all. Arguably polygyny is natural as well. Natural human sexuality is not necessarily good. Furthermore, I do believe that many animals masturbate as well and animals are quite natural.
I want to live in an unnaturally good and peaceful world.
If you choose to. Out of basic politeness maybe. But the government should stay out of it.
If a guy thinks he’s Napoleon, there’s nothing wrong with saying “How’s it going today, Emperor?” if you want to. But passing a law that everyone must salute him and the French must accept him as the leader of their country again is a little much.
And, if the guy is going to be a responsible and equal member of society, he should also be against everyone else being forced to accomodate his delusion.
I notice we don’t keep taking food away from anorexics, to be supportive of their fixation that they’ree too fat.
I think your point is valid on one level but it misses the bigger truth. It was never going to end with the normalization and legalization of gay rights. Gay rights was always just the first step in a larger revolution. Before same sex marriage was legalized, I always wondered what the next thing would be after that. Polygamy? Polyamory? Pedophilia? Something else average people have never heard of? The current trans rights movement dates to 2015 after the Obergefell decision. It sprang up almost overnight.
There must always be bigots so that the moral elite can have someone to look down on. Once there are not enough anti-trans bigots left, victory will be declared and another invented minority will promptly take center stage. What’s scary is that this process will never end absent some huge underlying cultural revolution. The radicals of today will be looked down upon as bigots by their grandchildren because it never occurred to them to denounce some currently unheard of bigotry.
This is all made possible by the guilt virus which arose from slavery, which makes it unusually easy to intimidate Americans to perpetually seek absolution from any and all newly invented injustices.
If homosexuality is a preference, why do we even need a theory on it? Do we look for similar theories for other preferences? Nope.
Right. What researcher is in the position of reading the mind of an animal having sex, and determining if the animal is raging gay, mistaken, confused, doesn’t care, or is just going through the motions?
Sure. But my point is that if we can handwave the foundational concept of survival of the species on and off when it’s convenient to make a point, it’s not much of theory.
@WBob #94 — really interesting analysis. Rings pretty true, unfortunately.
Um, well…
Darwinian evolution takes place over a much, much longer period of time than the ephemeral needs of farm labor.
To the great shame of our nation.
Pity, for a moment there I was hoping to see them next month.
Men can’t have sex with anybody unless they’re…how do I put this within the Code of Conduct…excited about it. And women don’t excite them. Their “personal preference” is no more changeable than yours.
OK, I don’t have time to read 100+ comments so I apologize for anything that I say here that may be repetitive. Let me relate an anecdote:
When the moon landing occurred in 1969 I was staying at the home of a local minister while I was doing some work associated with the church. I sat transfixed in front of the television late into the evening following the landing and the first images of a man on the moon. The minister’s wife came to the kitchen from her room and I spoke with her briefly about the moon landing. She yawned and said, “I just can’t get excited about these things.”
Well, LGB (and so on and so forth) rights do not excite me. Natural rights, do. So we should respect the natural rights of everyone and let it go. They need not justify who and what they are and whether the came to it by preference or involuntarily. If it is a natural right, then they are entitled to it, and no preferences or parades. If they do not seek preferences, parades, or (as in San Francisco) to act out their sexual activities on a public street, then we’re good.
I disagree… Men can have EeeWreckShuns for all sorts of reasons; touch, pornography, a personal fantasy, the excitement over the sex act itself, and sometimes for no reason at all at a socially awkward moment.
Let’s say you have a guy who is only attracted to space aliens with 14 tentacles. Is he doomed because it’s never gonna happen? Nah, he’ll work around it.
Don,
I don’t think that’s too hard. Simply put, Darwinism consists of three essential assertions and the consequences that follow from them:
It seems pretty likely that same-sex attraction has less survival value than normal opposite-sex attraction. On the other hand, if same-sex attraction is the product either of relatively minor genetic mutation or of relatively common environmental factors, then it wouldn’t be all that infrequent an occurrence, even absent that trait being passed on generation to generation (which, presumably, it wouldn’t be).
Put differently: there’s lots of room for traits with negative survival value in a large population. If they’re strongly hereditary, they’re likely to be suppressed pretty quickly by selective forces. Otherwise, they’re just part of the background noise, like any other odd mutation or accident of childhood that prevents reproductive success.
Other than the specific case of using “husband,” “wife,” and “married” in this context — and I don’t — I don’t know how I’d treat a same-sex couple differently from a normal couple.
Can you give me an example of what you mean — of a situation in which I might have to act in a way inconsistent with what I believe?
Let me try to explain.
I believe in same-sex attraction. That is, I am confident that homosexuality is really a thing: a man who is sexually attracted to other men is sexually attracted to other men, and there’s no fiction in that. I can acknowledge the truth of that attraction, and freely admit that I don’t feel that attraction while still being confident that he does.
If a man feels that he is really a woman, I can acknowledge that, yes, he probably does feel that way. But I don’t have to pretend to believe that he’s correct. I don’t have to pretend that I think he really is a woman, even if he is sure he is.
In both cases, I think there’s something a little bit abnormal in the psychology of the individual in question. That isn’t a value judgment, merely an opinion about biology: I think both homosexuality and gender dysphoria are abnormal, variations from normal human sexuality and its expression.
I am willing to acknowledge that both individuals feel the way they feel. The homosexual man asks nothing more; he doesn’t insist that I agree with him that the person to whom he’s attracted is sexually interesting to me. I don’t have to express my agreement with his feelings in order to accept him as he is, I merely have to accept that he feels that way.
Similarly, I am willing to acknowledge that the man who thinks he feels like a woman really does believe that. Unfortunately, the “trans” movement wants more than my acknowledgement that the feeling is real. They want me to express my belief that the feeling is correct, that it comports with reality in some way that I don’t think it does. That’s the portion of it that I reject. I think biological sex is immutable, and biologically determined before birth. It isn’t assigned, nor is it a matter of how one feels about one’s sex.
That’s the difference between my acceptance of the reality of homosexual attraction and my rejection of the assertion of gender fluidity, transmutability, etc.
Probably. We’ll probably all be forever called to celebrate Earth Day, too, and Kwanza, and other idiocy. That doesn’t mean we have to take any of it seriously.
I feel that way about the Proud Boys. As long as I never have to see them or hear about them, they’re OK with me. BTW, is there any gayer name for a group than “the Proud Boys”? They sound like they should be dancing on parade floats in spangled underwear.
*sigh*
You shouldn’t encourage him. I use the Castaigne Skip feature, so I don’t have to read his comments on this thread, but other people might not.
I disagree, but that’s a different discussion. The point of the original post really is simply that homosexuals have broad acceptance, and that that acceptance is likely to suffer as a consequence of the trans movement and its unreasonable, unacceptable, and bullying behavior.
Andrew Sullivan agrees with you.
Which was all just made up, so how is it relevant?
I think you go off the rails here, as it were. No man can know what it feels like to be a woman, and so no man can feel he really is a woman. All anyone can know is that they don’t feel “right” the way they are, which is at least the beginning of a definition of a mental illness.
Ya think?
I mean, that’s my point. Homosexuality has zero survivability to the next generation. It’s effectively a Darwin Award.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And I mean that, just as there’s nothing wrong with anybody who doesn’t engage in procreative sex for whatever reasons they choose.
Are there any examples of attraction or preference being genetic? I can’t imagine a mechanism for such a thing.
They want more than that, at least some of them: they insist that you bake a cake for their ersatz wedding, etc, under penalty of law.
That demand for acceptance, and even celebration in a way – such as providing a cake for their ersatz wedding – doesn’t seem any different from the demands of homosexuality, you’ve just become accustomed to the demands of homosexuals, or surrendered, or what-have-you.
Have you forgotten the previous unreasonable, unacceptable, and bullying behavior of homosexual groups before you seemingly more or less surrendered and wiped it from your memory?
The children/school/etc stuff certainly did not begin with trans. Homosexual advocacy groups – and their other enablers on the left – in the past demanded the same teaching of “alternate lifestyle” stuff – including sodomy – to children back when trans advocacy wasn’t even a gleam in some monster’s eye.
Right. The innate desire to mate has to be wired in for any species to survive.
Not so obviously. Some level of desire to mate, horniness if you will, is surely wired in. But anything beyond that appears to be more cultural, societal, or psychological.
(I live near San Francisco. If you googled “Folsom Street Fair” you would not say it was normal or healthy.)
But we change the “object and focus of our attraction” all the time.
Indeed. Survival of the species requires short term, long term, and all sorts of medium term survivals, all working together.
But at the same time, nobody has ever suggested that there is a gene for priests and nuns.
There’s a squeegee in the shower.
I gave you one. More on that here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/oct/13/highereducation.research
Parents teaching their gay children that being gay is wrong, and that gay sex is evil, damage their children fairly profoundly.
Is that just fine because parents have the right to teach their children whatever they want to?
And if that is just fine, why not FGM? What is the difference if it all comes down to parental choice?
The LGB movement hasn’t been perfect, but I think there’s a meaningful difference between it and the trans movement. The latter is founded on an essential fiction — unlike the homosexual movement— and broadly militant.
Homosexuality is real and it will be here forever. The trans movement is a noxious fad.