Congratulations, Queers! You've Made Gay-Hating Fashionable Again
You pushed too hard and this is the result
It’s hard not to notice on social media nowadays that anything remotely gay is met with a deluge of derisive and, yes, even outright hateful comments. From stories about Pride events to everyday gay people sharing their marriages and families, you’re bound to run into comment after comment expressing everything from mild criticism to outright death wishes. This attitude has always existed, absolutely, but it didn’t used to be present at quite this level and vehemence. Consider how, in 2022, Dave Rubin’s announcement that he and his husband were expecting two surrogate babies was met with congratulations from many leading conservative figures. There was also plenty of criticism, to be sure, but the response to the same announcement today would be an absolute firestorm.
I’m not writing this to debate the ethics of surrogacy. It is obviously not hateful to critique the way Rubin chose to build his family. But it is a stark example that shows how much things have changed. Many people are not only more comfortable critiquing gay men (and women) having families, but they are also more comfortable calling for an end to gay marriage and gay rights in general, saying gay people shouldn’t be around kids at all, and, in rare but growing instances, outright calling for our imprisonment or execution. And I am not surprised by any of this.
I’ve long been frustrated with virtue-signaling politicians who won’t shut up about all things gay, trans, and queer and who seem to want to make “Pride” a state religion. I’ve long held that the actions of these and other radical trans and queer activists destroying the rights of women and pushing queer theory on children were going to cause a backlash against anyone associated with “LGBT,” and that is exactly what is happening.
It was inevitable and glaringly obvious to me that destroying women’s rights, but most especially the push to medicalize and radicalize children, was always going to eventually lead to a tipping point. Many, many people who once took a “live and let live” approach to those of us who are gay and/or gender non-conforming have changed their minds and now are on guard for anything that seems “queer.” Fewer and fewer care to separate those of us who don’t hold radical progressive views and are ready to throw the entire acronym out. I’m sad about this, obviously, but I almost can’t blame them.
Virtually all LGBT organizations offer full support of trans “rights” (or rather, the trans desire to do anything they want, all the time) and have implicitly taken up queer theory as their guiding ideology. So while I think it is important to have some separation between the LGB and the TQ+, far too many gays also fall under the category of Q. I certainly don’t think most everyday gay people are as radical as the activists who represent us, they do still overwhelmingly support radical progressive politics and they would still spit “terf” at women who talk about the importance of women’s sex-based rights. They probably also have some vague notion of there being such a thing as a “trans child” and consider Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to be a hateful bigot for wanting to give children the opportunity to develop naturally.
Honestly, it’s a wonder we still enjoy the support that we do. But that support is eroding; it’s only a question of how far it will go.
I guess one benefit I get to reap from the fact that Canada went so radically progressive is that I can’t imagine any rollback to gay rights happening here. But it’s precisely because Canada went so woke that there is even the sliver of a possibility of that happening. And let’s not forget that Canada is often used as an example and a cautionary tale of what happens when the gays go too far: you end up with child sex changes and people getting dragged in front of tribunals for the crime of misgendering.
It’s a shame, really, because when Canada legalized same-sex marriage, it truly felt like an issue that could simply be put to rest. But those insisting on pushing queer ideology were never going to be able to let it rest. Something like marriage was just too normative. And so you had large advocacy organizations like Egale pivot to teaching kids in school that they could identify as any sex they wanted, including both, neither, or a mix of the two. This kind of thing started happening all over the West.
When I think about how attitudes are changing, my anger is mostly directed at activists like these—at the people who pushed these nonsensical and dehumanizing ideas into the mainstream, convincing progressives that the only way to be a “good” person was to fall in agreement while antagonizing everyone else. This is not to excuse people who have let themselves be pushed into actual hate, but when I consider how many there are and how vocal they are, all I can think is that it didn’t have to be this way. The queer activists didn’t have to create and embolden so many enemies for us, but it is something they actively did to continue feeding an insatiable persecution complex.
There was always going to be some level of hate against us, but at one point it was at least getting unpopular. Now it has become edgy and cool because everyone is so tired of being policed by the rainbow mafia. In fact, by waging cancellation campaigns, getting people fired from their jobs, and filing human rights complaints over not having their identities properly validated, queer activists have essentially allowed those who hate us to claim their own persecuted victimhood status.
I suppose many will say that this resurgence of gay hate on the internet is not reflective of real life. And it's absolutely true that people are more radical online. But I would never be so confident as to assume it can't have a significant effect on real life. Woke started online too, and for many years, people said that the crazy things being said by them online could never be implemented out in the world. Well then, how did we end up with the most deranged manifestations of these ideas possible? How did we end up with men in women's prisons and women's sports? How did we end up with kids on puberty blockers and cross sex hormones? We got here because online ideas like “trans women are women” and “sex is a spectrum” did not just remain online.
And there is no guarantee that these new ideas about gays will remain online either. It is, after all, real people doing the talking. The only potential silver lining is that, because the conversation has become so vitriolic and sometimes genuinely hateful, we could eventually swing back to more progressive views as those in the middle are turned off by how far it has gone. Personally, I wish we could just land somewhere moderate, where those of us on the fringes are free to live our lives but where that doesn’t lead to a demonization of the normal. Maybe, for some reason, that just isn’t possible and we're doomed to ossilate forever, but it is what I will keep fighting for.