Andrew Sullivan has an excellent opinion piece in the NY Times today about how the gay rights movement became too radical for its own good. If you read this story last week offering a history of the trans movement then you already know what Sullivan is going to say. But he says it as someone on the inside of the gay rights movement who only gradually realized the train had gone off the track.
In 2024, the Republican Party removed opposition to marriage equality from its platform, and the current Republican Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is a married gay man with two children. Gay marriage is backed by around 70 percent of Americans, and discrimination against gay men, lesbians and transgender people is opposed by 80 percent. As civil rights victories go, it doesn’t get more decisive or comprehensive than this.
But a funny thing happened in the wake of these triumphs. Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized.
Initially, Sullivan saw this as just the next phase of the movement, the new battle that young, gay people would fight on top of the ones that had seemingly been settled. But gradually he realized the new trans movement wasn't just different it was in some ways at odds with the very idea of being same sex attracted which after all was based on the sex binary.
I was glad when, five years ago, the Supreme Court gave transgender people civil rights protection in employment. I’ve also long lived in a gay world that is skewed left, and, along with my fellow gay non-lefties, I’ve long made my peace with it, or tried to.
But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I was supposed to believe the difference didn’t exist?
But it was something else that really created the backlash. As Sullivan sees it, the fight for gay marriage had always been one that emphasized this was a change for consenting adults which wouldn't change how the nuclear family worked for straight people. They could still get married and raise their kids whether the gay couple down the street were married or just living together. The argument from the pro gay marriage side was this changes things for us but not for you. And obviously that worked. It worked not just in court but it worked in the greater population. As noted above, opposition to gay marriage became a minority position even in the Republican Party. But the trans rights movement completely undoes that tacit cultural agreement.
In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids. You can bring up your children however you like, we promised. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors. Partly because the adult issues had been resolved or close to it, and partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young, it meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria, but of every other kid as well.
Kids all over the country were impacted. Your children were taught in elementary school that being a boy or a girl was something they could choose and change at will. Your daughter found herself running against a trans girl (i.e. a biological male) in athletics. Children in elementary school got to pick pronouns, and some children socially transitioned at school without their parents’ knowledge or permission...
Soon enough, the right began associating what used to be the lesbian and gay movement with this gender extremism, and the L.G.B.T.Q.+ movement responded not by moderating tone or substance, but by closing ranks, seemingly determined to prove its point.
He's absolutely right about this. I said the same thing last week and several times before that. The backlash began when this started involving everyone's children. Gay marriage was carefully framed as a discussion for consenting adults, but the gender unicorn is indoctrination for kids who don't have the first clue what sex or gender is about.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida passed a law to limit the spread of these ideas to K-2nd grade students it was attacked relentlessly by the media and dubbed the "don't say gay" bill. This was the key message. Any attack on the most extreme trans messages given to the youngest children in public schools will be treated as a bigoted attack on gay people. The takeaway was that the two were inseparable. And that was a mistake.
Later polling found that most people in Florida (and elsewhere) supported the contents of the bill. If the gay rights movement was all or nothing as the "don't say gay" framing suggested, then lots of people were ready to rethink the whole bargain. Given the stark choice between having a culture in which little kids are told they could grow up to be boys or girls and gay marriage for adults or a world where we have neither, a lot of people will chose neither.
Gallup found that satisfaction with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people peaked at 62 percent in 2022 but dropped to 51 percent by January of this year. The center and right — whom some of us spent a lifetime engaging — are being lost. Gallup showed Republican support for gay marriage dropping from 55 to 46 percent between 2022 and 2025.
This is where we are. Even NY Times' commenters (not a very conservative group) get it. Here's the top comment with over 1,200 upvotes.
Being co-opted by gender extremists is the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the gay rights movement. And the Democratic party, incidentally.
It's like this right down the top comments:
This is undoubtedly the most well written, reasoned, clear, and thoughtful op-ed I have ever read in my many years of subscription to the NYT. Mr. Sullivan perfectly captures how a small segment of activists have completely jumped the shark on gender identity, creating a massive backlash from the electorate who've had enough of being told that gender and chromosomes are entirely independent from each other. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Another one from a gay man who wonders what would have happened if he was growing up today.
What an incredible piece that somehow manages to sum up everything I’ve thought and felt these past few years. I’m a 37 year old gay man. I can’t help but remember second grade- in the morning we sat at two large tables waiting for class. One boys, one girls. Occasionally I sat at the all girls table. I came out at 13. When I grew up and as I became more comfortable in my own skin and my own interests I became almost a caricature of masculinity- Harley, lifting, sports, etc. but what would’ve happened in second grade if that’d been today? I’ve also started hanging out with more gay people lately and the uniformity of thought, and the expectation that you must think the same (about everything- I was shocked by the easy anti-White banter) is stifling
More:
Thank you NYT for publishing this!
I have worked with teens for over 30 years and remember when it was cutting edge to ask confidentiality: ‘Are you attracted to men, women, or both?’ All was accepted.
What I see now are teens consciously/subconsciously pressured via social media, peers, and authority (school/medical establishment) to pick a complex path. It’s as if teens feel inadequate when they gesture ‘sorry’ while announcing they are simply heterosexual.
Yes, rights are important, but the unconscious pressure placed on our youth has gone too far.
I could keep going but you get the idea. This resonates with people right and left which is a bad sign for the far-left activists.
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