LGB and T Increasingly at Odds as Backlash to Annual Pride Month Builds

A backlash to Pride Month is intensifying this year — and while some blame the Trump administration, others say the T and Q in LGBTQ+ are pushing would-be supporters of gay rights away for the first time in decades.Corporations are pulling out of sponsoring Pride events and limiting Pride merchandise and advertising. Support for gay marriage among Republicans dropped 14 points in the last three years.Some gays and lesbians say it’s the LGBTQ rights movement’s dogmatic insistence on support for far-left orthodoxy and unpopular positions like allowing transgender criminals to be housed in women’s prisons that is repelling the American public.“You’re with us 100 percent on every issue or you’re a bigot,” a gay center-right YouTuber and journalist, Brad Polumbo, tells The New York Sun about the ideology of most LGBTQ rights organizations.“I’m seeing it all across corporate America and the internet: People are much less interested in Pride Month celebrations,” he adds. “I think it’s happening for the same reason we’re seeing significant backsliding and support for gay marriage, which is that the community tied itself to the Democratic agenda — including radical progressive ideas about gender, like medically transitioning minors and ignoring the role biology plays in sports.”Hijacking the LGBTQ Rights MovementA pediatric gender clinic whistleblower and executive director of the LGB Courage Coalition, Jamie Reed, agrees. “I’ve read so many articles that are just saying, ‘Oh no, this is conservatives backing out over Trump’ — and I think that’s missing this whole internal element of what’s really going on,” she tells the Sun of corporate hesitance this year to embrace Pride Month. “Corporations are using this as a get-out-of-jail-free card, as a way to back away without really talking about the conflicts that are present.”These conflicts, according to Ms. Reed, are about the T in LGBTQ. Ms. Reed, who is a married lesbian with children, says “trans has done a brilliant job branding-wise in tying us all together.” She echoes a growing sentiment among gays and lesbians online that the T and Q have hijacked the LGBTQ rights movement, are pushing for accommodations that the American public don’t support, and fueling a newfound contempt in the process.Nearly 80 percent of Americans — and 67 percent of Democrats — oppose transgender participation in women’s sports, according to a January New York Times/Ipsos poll. A majority of Americans oppose transgender surgeries and hormones for minors. Yet among most LGBTQ rights organizations — and many Democratic leaders — such opposition is considered bigoted.Governor Newsom on his podcast admitted transgender participation in women’s sports is “an issue of fairness,” but he refused to prevent a transgender track star from competing and winning gold medals in the California high school track and field championship last weekend. A Black New Hampshire legislator was compared to segregationists in the south earlier this year for opposing transgender surgeries for minors and wanting to protect women-only spaces.Steps Too FarJ.K. Rowling is attacked as a transphobe for funding a women-only rape crisis center and insisting on the biological reality of sex. Detransitioners — transgender patients who later regret their decision and decide to revert to their biological sex — are accosted as traitors. A transgender influencer — who looks like a man in a child’s dress — Lilly Contino boasts of taking photographs of every Disney World women’s bathroom to rate them for her Instagram followers. For many Americans, such antics have gone too far.As Pride Month ramps up, some gays and lesbians worry that they’re being lumped together with a radical ideology they don’t necessarily support. Mr. Polumbo and Ms. Reed say they wouldn’t be welcome at most Pride marches. They also worry that videos and photographs of nude men, furries, and bondage scenes will inevitably go viral at Pride events this year and fuel more anti-gay sentiment. Mr. Polumbo says he’s seeing increasing homophobia online.Many see a tipping point on the immediate horizon. The 2024 presidential election put transgender issues at center stage. “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” was the most talked about — and effective — ad of the 2024 campaign.“When we have pronouns and boys in girls’ sports and kids being read ‘Puppy Parade’ in kindergarten, where it’s being shoved down their throats, that’s what the backlash is against. And honestly, I completely agree with them,” Ms. Reed says. “Gay people were not asking for special needs or special accommodations. We wanted to have our job, have our kids, pay our mortgage, go to work, get married, and participate in society.”Return of the Culture WarsIn a 2023 essay on his Substack, Andrew Sullivan lamented the reigniting of gay rights as a culture war issue. “It was the most speedily successful civil rights story in memory. Its case for equality was simple and clear: including us in existing institutions needn’t change anything in heterosexual life,” he wrote. “And now? Back in culture war hell.”While Mr. Trump appointed gay men to his Cabinet and to prominent positions in the administration and removed the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman from the GOP platform, there is a loud segment of the right that sees overturning Obergefell v. Hodges — the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage 10 years ago this month — as the next culture war battle.Southern Baptists will vote this week on a resolution to work to overturn the ruling. The conservative Christian movement has long opposed gay marriage, but a resolution seeking the vote speaks to a growing sentiment among evangelicals that their win in overturning Roe v. Wade was just a start. While some prominent right-wing commentators have recently spoken out against gay marriage, the American public still overwhelmingly supports it.Mr. Polumbo says he hopes that the current anti-gay sentiment is just a course correction. He says respectability politics is underrated. While he doesn’t think the T or Q will separate from the LGB and doesn’t mind being associated with adults who transition, he thinks a divorce is needed from the most extreme positions on minors and women’s spaces. He says America is still the best place to live if you’re gay.“The pendulum swung really far in this unreasonable extreme on gender stuff, and the LGBTQ community overreached, and now there’s a bit of an overcorrection,” Mr. Polumbo says. “I think people should remember that there are normal gay, lesbian, and bisexual people across America who really go about their lives contributing to their communities, paying taxes, raising families. They’re nurses, they’re lawyers, they’re garbage men, they’re firefighters, and they’re police.”

LGB and T Increasingly at Odds as Backlash to Annual Pride Month Builds

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