Why I Won’t Be Joining PRIDE This Year

PRIDE is a nice weekend in New York City. The streets are swarming with all sorts—I mean ALL sorts—of people who, perhaps more than any other time of the year, feel welcome to express their quirky uniqueness.

Sadly, I’m not feeling it this year, and it’s not for lack of trying. Emancipation is always a fine thing, and I wish everyone well. But the LGBTQ+ “community” (which incidentally may be more of a yearning than a reality) is shooting itself in both kneecaps in a way I won’t be part of.

Historically, one of the worst things we had to combat was the nefarious idea that adult Ls and Gs and whatevers were a danger to children because of the historic association in the mind of straight society between same-sex behavior and pedophilia. That was never true, and for the most part people finally realized it. After the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision of 2015, that old canard seem to be put permanently to bed, and the culture war about whether to leave adults alone in their private behavior looked to be mostly over.

Now, it’s back with a vengeance. Reactionary forces are eager to eliminate all aspects of rainbow-hood from libraries, schools, and even some public spaces. And it’s all in the name of protecting minors.

The point of the lance is the LGBTQ+ insistence that underage kids must be eased into gender transition with minimum obstacles and with no further public debate. This is not about putting a ring through your lip or even permanently inking your skin. Parents might not like those actions, but teen rebellion has a long history among the human race and probably won’t go away.

No, this is about permanent medical intervention based on what a sometimes very young or even pre-pubescent individual has decided to do with and to, er, themself. And sorry, gang, I think that at the very least we need deep and sustained debate on the wisdom of this course—placing me outside the bounds of permitted opinion in the LGBTQ+ “community.”

Examples of the suppression of dissident views on the recent explosion of gender questioning are legion. In the most recent case, a tenured academic, Northwestern professor Michael Bailey, published a study of what he termed “rapid onset gender dysphoria” among a non-random sample of hundreds of concerned parents whose children had declared themselves non-binary or the like. The study is a modest contribution to understanding this phenomenon, but it was quickly shouted down in the modern style of vigilanteism, and the journal retracted it (though it is still available online with a big RETRACTED stamp across its quite interesting pages).

We can discuss the details of that or many other studies and commentaries, and I’d like to. But that’s not allowed any more because any deviance from the official line on transgender issues is cause for expulsion from polite LGBT+ society. (I don’t doubt someone will invite me to climb on an ice floe upon reading this.)

It’s pointless to argue in advance that I have some credentials in the area, but I will anyway. I led an AIDS prevention and advocacy group in downtown Santiago, Chile, for seven years whose headquarters stood at the exact intersection where trans prostitution was practiced for a city of 5 million. (They had a lot of clients, especially married men.) We interacted with those women for years, defended them, and learned much about their difficult lives.

None of that will matter if my unease with the idea of 12-year-old girls independently deciding to get their breasts surgically removed becomes widely known. I expect to be cast into the outer darkness and told to keep quiet. Maybe I’ll even be expelled from the “community.” That’s why I’m taking the initiative to say in advance that joining with others for emancipation has meant a lot to me over the years. Also, I will be okay without it.

Meanwhile, that community is pushing forward to provide the most hateful elements of an unenlightened society with a gold-embossed invitation to resuscitate the worst historical fears of sexual minorities—that we are a danger to children. Don’t be surprised if the advances and gains of recent decades suddenly go into reverse, including, I dare to predict, marriage rights.

America went into a war footing in Europe a year ago convinced that an easy victory would follow. That was delusional, but the war-cheerers aren’t alone. My LGBTQ+ friends are riding a similar wave of dangerous overconfidence that will cause all of us to pay a devastating price. I’ll be watching from the sidelines while they proceed and will not be waving the rainbow flag.