Founded in 1977, Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) is America’s major organization for gay members of the GOP. There is much to admire about it. While virtually all other major gay-rights groups in America, such as Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and GLAAD, can seem to exist only to drive gay votes to the Democratic Party, LCR has done the hard work of encouraging GOP politicians to support gay rights. And while the other groups have often seemed less interested in promoting equal rights for gay people than in denouncing America, religion, the family, and capitalism, LCR has consistently sent the message that there is no conflict between being gay and being a patriot, a believer, a devoted parent, and an ambitious businessperson.
I do have one concern about LCR, however. Unfortunately, it has gone along with the well-nigh universal practice of saying “LGBT” or “LGBTQ” or “LGBTQ+” instead of “gay” or “gay men and lesbian.” This may seem like a minor semantic issue. It’s not, for reasons that I have tried to explain below. After being told that some members of LCR’s board would like to return to saying “gay men and lesbians,” while others insist on following what has now become standard usage, I wrote the following letter.
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To the board members of LCR:
As a proud winner (in 1994) of the Spirit of Lincoln Award from the Log Cabin Republicans, I have always followed the organization’s fortunes with interest and respect. While other, supposedly nonpartisan national gay organizations have, almost without exception, been lockstep supporters of the Democratic Party and of every lamentable new left-wing cause, the LCR has stood alone as a voice for sane, mature, and responsible-minded gay people who refuse to go with the flow.
For some time now, alas, the major gay-rights organizations have been far more devoted to promoting transgender ideology than to standing up for gay and lesbian Americans. Years ago, without debate, the words “gay men and lesbians” were replaced on the websites of national and local gay-rights groups and of gay studies departments across the country, by the acronym “LGBT.” Who asked for this? Certainly nobody asked me for my opinion. I’ve never met a gay man or lesbian who was asked whether they approved of this change. But now, because of a monumental change by what must surely have been a small group of people, I’m not considered a gay man – I’m considered LGBT.
The term is now routinely applied to historical events that had nothing to do with transgender people, thereby giving young people a drastically distorted picture of those events. Look up the Stonewall riots, for example, and you will see the participants described as “LGBT” people. Nonsense. Read any account of those riots from more than 20 years ago and you will find no mention of transgender individuals. Yes, activists have rewritten the story of those riots to put trans people at their forefront. Their standard move is to identify drag queens as “trans.” Yes, men in drag were involved. But neither they nor anyone else thought of them as being trans.
My book A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society came out in 1993, and during the two years that followed I traveled extensively around the U.S., giving talks, interviews, and readings, having extensive conversations with hundreds of gay men and lesbians, and answering countless questions. Nobody ever identified as trans. Nobody ever mentioned transgenderism. If someone had done so, everyone present would have reacted to it as if the subject of car repair or calculus had been raised. Because absolutely nobody thought of transgender individuals, who at the time were a tiny minority (and who were referred to as transsexuals), as having the remotest thing to do with gay people, the gay “community,” or the issue of gay rights.
I am proud of the role I played in the struggle for gay rights. I wasn’t fighting to force the general public to believe that a man can become a woman. I wasn’t fighting to force my fellow gays to use a whole new set of pronouns for transgender people. My own approach, in advocating for gay rights and for gay acceptance, was to appeal to straight people’s rationality and empathy. This approach, I think it’s fair to say, was pretty much that of most of the activists associated with LCR. After many years of respectful, sensible debate and discussion, we won. And our victory was a victory for reason and for basic humanity.
Then along came advocates for transgenderism who piggybacked onto the success of the gay-rights movement. Suddenly there was a universal pretense that transgenderism had won, too. No, it hadn’t. Although the term “LGBT” replaced “gay men and lesbians” everywhere, the tenets of transgender ideology had never been publicly discussed or debated — or for that matter, even explained honestly to anybody.
The trans cause was and is not about rights. Trans people have all the rights everybody else has. One of the ugliest lies is that the Nazis sent “LGBT people” to death camps along with Jews and gypsies. No. Gays were sent to death camps. Transsexuals were left untouched.
No, the trans cause is of an entirely different category than the gay-rights cause. It is about pressing upon the general public a radical new view of human identity. Replacing biology with the notion of an “inner sense of gender,” it insists that a biological man is a woman not only from the moment he declares himself to be one but is retroactively a woman going back to the moment of birth. Paradoxically, however, even as trans ideology insists on the immutability of this “inner sense of gender,” it insists on absolute fluidity, maintaining that a given individual can be a man on Monday, a woman on Tuesday, and “non-binary” on Wednesday and can belong to some other, perhaps newly invented gender category on Thursday. (READ MORE: Gender Dysphoria in Kids: It’s Time for Some Serious Research)
This was never a thing. The tiny number of people who genuinely experienced gender dysphoria stopped at men saying they felt as if they were women and women saying they felt as if they were men. The recent explosion of gender identities has occurred even as there has been an explosion in the number of people, especially very young people, claiming to be transgender.
Of course, most of these young people are not, in fact, transgender. Some say they are because in a time when they’re being told that humanity divides into oppressor groups and victim groups, they don’t want to be oppressors. Some identify as trans because their friends do. And some are embracing the trans label because they’d rather be a straight trans person than a gay “cis” person.
Gay activists used to stand fiercely against “conversion” therapy, which professed to “cure” people of homosexuality. But “gender-affirming treatments” — puberty blockers, testosterone, estrogen, and sex-change surgery — are, for countless young people, an even more horrific form of conversion therapy than was practiced by the fanatically antigay preachers of yesteryear. These treatments turn physically healthy people who are attracted to members of their own sex into superficial simulacra of the opposite sex whose attraction has not changed but can now call themselves heterosexual. (RELATED: Trans Individuals Seek Euthanasia After ‘Gender-Affirming Care’)
This new order of things is extraordinarily damaging to those young gay people who are thereby set on a lifetime course of “gender-affirming treatment” when all they really need is to be cured of their gay self-hatred. But it’s also damaging to gay people as a whole. For several years, our position was rock-solid. We had won the war for our rights and acceptance. Homosexuality had ceased being an issue. For someone my age, for whom every presidential election cycle was an opportunity to see myself and other gays demonized by politicians trawling for votes, the disappearance of gay-bashing from the national political stage felt like a miracle. But it wasn’t a miracle. We’d fought for it and won it.
Too many younger gay men and lesbians, I fear, take this acceptance for granted. I’ve never done so. I’ve always been aware that it could disappear very fast. To observe today’s transgender revolution is to witness a phenomenon that might easily have been designed to put an instant end to the acceptance of gay men and lesbians. In a time when biological males compete on women’s athletic teams and undress in their locker rooms, when male rapists are incarcerated alongside women because they claim to be trans women, and when puberty blockers are prescribed en masse to children with little or no serious psychological examination and without parental approval — and when such absurdities and atrocities are routinely defended as a matter of “LGBT rights” — then the gay rights and gay acceptance that some of us fought for decades ago are in dire peril.
Back in the day, when trans people were few and far between, I had no problem with calling a man a woman — as, for example, in the case of the writer Jan Morris. Saying that Morris was a woman was a polite fiction. It made no difference because the number of such individuals was so tiny. If you read Morris’s book about his “sex change,” you will see that he never believed, or demanded that anyone else affirm, that he had genuinely changed genders. He knew it was entirely cosmetic. Today, other M-to-F trans people like Debbie Haxton and Blaire White also admit that they’re not really women — and they deplore, as I do, the way in which radical activists have sought to upend objective reality on their behalf. To those activists, it has become increasingly clear, the idea of a well-nigh infinite possibility of “gender identities” at odds with biological reality is a kind of religious dogma.
Well, I don’t buy it. I’m not joining that church, and you shouldn’t either. This isn’t a question of disrespecting trans people or denying their humanity. It’s about recognizing that gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder, not a magical window onto some endless universe of subjective realities beyond objective facts. It’s about refusing to be associated with “therapists” who profess to take seriously, and who take action (sometimes to the point of irreversible surgery) upon, an immature child’s statement that or she was born in the wrong body.
Back when some of us were still fighting for equal rights and social acceptance, the toughest part was convincing straight people that gay people pose no challenge to their families. We did that. I’m still amazed by it. But our work on that front is already being undone by the trans movement, which directly targets children and teenagers in a way that should outrage all of us, gay or straight.
That targeting of children and teenagers has already begun to bring the trans project down. And if responsible-minded gay people don’t dissociate ourselves from this monstrosity, it will bring us down, too. With this in mind, I urge the board of LCR to stop using the term LGBT and to return to identifying itself as an organization for gay men and lesbians.
Respectfully,
Bruce Bawer
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P.S. A few days after I sent off this letter, LCR announced the names of the people who will be given awards at this year’s “Spirit of Lincoln Gala” in November. The “2023 Game Changer Award,” it turns out, will be presented to Caitlyn Jenner, who, since changing from Bruce to Caitlyn in 2015, has, for this accomplishment, won a Teen Choice Award, been listed on Time magazine’s “Time 100,” been named by Glamour magazine as a “Glamour Woman of the Year,” and been chosen as an “Entertainer of the Year” by Entertainment Weekly. I have nothing against Caitlyn Jenner, but I do not understand why an organization founded to advance the welfare of gay men and lesbians finds Jenner deserving of one of its annual prizes.
As the friend who apprised me of this news put it, “With Jenner as honored speaker, there’s no chance LCR will drop the T.” Alas.