Ten years ago Thursday, the movement for gay and lesbian equality scored a victory that only a decade before had seemed unimaginable. We won equal rights to civil marriage in every state in the country. In 2020 came another stunning win. In a majority opinion written by one of President Trump’s nominees, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court found that gay men, lesbians and transgender men and women are covered under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and protected from employer discrimination.

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.

In 2023, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights group in the country, declared a “state of emergency” for gay men, lesbians and transgender people — the first time in the organization’s existence. It had not declared a state of emergency when gay men were jailed for having sex in private, when the AIDS epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of gay men or when we faced a possible constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in 2004. In fact, we found out, this “emergency” was almost entirely in response to new state bills proposing restrictions on medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria; bathroom and locker room bans; and transgender issues in school curricula and sports.

Nonetheless, the money has poured into gay, lesbian and transgender groups in the past decade. Charitable funding for such groups totaled $387 million in 2012, according to the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Equitable Giving Lab. By 2021, it was $823 million. L.G.B.T.Q.+ organizations also saw their assets grow 76 percent from 2019 to 2021 — around double the size of their increase in donations. A group like GLAAD — founded in 1985 to combat anti-gay media bias in the depths of the AIDS epidemic — saw its funding increase sixfold between 2014 and 2023. The Human Rights Campaign has also seen revenues soar in the past decade.

But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with “white supremacy,” they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with “gender identity” in the law and culture, and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological “queerness” meant to subvert and “queer” language, culture and society in myriad different ways.