Andrew Sullivan argues in the New York Times how many LGBTQ organizations moved away from a liberal politics of equal rights toward an ideological project that seeks to redefine sex, gender, and social norms. According to Sullivan, this shift has undermined public support for LGBTQ causes by focusing on controversial issues such as gender medicine for minors, transgender participation in women’s sports, and the replacement of biological sex with gender identity in law and public discourse. In these debates, he argues that intolerance toward internal dissent has weakened democratic debate within the movement.
By Andrew Sullivan
June 26, 2025
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 and 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 curriculums 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 — which is then meant to subvert and queer language, culture and society in myriad ways.
The words “gay” and “lesbian” all but disappeared. L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ (to include intersex, asexual people and two-spirit Indigenous people). The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities and, by some counts, more than 70 new genders. The point was that this is all one revolutionary, intersectional community of gender-diverse people and intertwined with other left causes, from Black Lives Matter to Queers for Palestine.
They needed a new banner for that. So the rainbow flag, invented back in 1978 at the request of Harvey Milk, was replaced over the last few years by a new progress flag, representing intersectional oppression. Black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow — for Black and brown people (and the people lost during the AIDS crisis) — and pink, light blue and white for trans people. That flag now demarcates not simply a place friendly to all types of people, as the old rainbow flag did, but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.
“Queer” was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement from the gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights movement of the past. It’s a word that can easily trigger gay men over 40 who remember it as the last slur they once heard before being bashed in the head. But one of the striking aspects of members of the younger queer generation is their disdain for those who came before them.
As I watched all this radical change, I wondered if I was just another old fart, shaking my fist at the sky, like every older generation known to man. Why not just accept that the next gay and lesbian generation has new ideas and has moved on and old-timers like me should just move aside?
And some of the changes are indeed welcome. The greater acceptance of trans people is a huge step forward for all of us. But then, as I told my friends (gay, trans and everyone else), I’d always believed this and always supported trans civil rights. I was glad when, five years ago, the Supreme Court gave transgender people civil rights protection in employment. I’ve also long lived in a gay world that is skewed left, and along with my fellow gay non-lefties, I’ve made my peace with it, or tried to.
But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I’m supposed to believe the difference doesn’t exist?
I’m more than happy to accept that there are some people — not all that many — who don’t fit in that binary and want to be protected from discrimination and allowed full access to medical interventions in order to live lives that are true to who they are. And I’m with them all the way. After all, I, too, am a part of a minority; most people live their lives governed by heterosexual desires. Thanks to the gay and lesbian movement, I’m not being asked to.
But abolishing the sex binary for the entire society? That’s a whole other thing entirely. And madness, I believe. What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people? Or changed what it means to be a man or a
woman, for that matter? Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a societywide revolution — an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash, against not just trans people but gay men and lesbians as well.
The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect — live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one’s straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged. You can bring up your children however you like. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
But in the wake of victory, L.G.B.T.Q. groups reneged on that pledge. They demanded that the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth — it was now merely assigned, penciled in. We got new terms like “chest-feeding” for “breastfeeding” and “birthing parent” for “mother.”
A key leader of this movement, Chase Strangio, informed us that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” We all were suddenly expected to announce our pronouns as if everyone didn’t already know. Then neopronouns — xe/xem! — were added. The movement came up with a mantra: “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. TRANS MEN ARE MEN.” It was not an argument or a proposition to be explored or debated. It was a theological command. In all caps.
Was there any debate among gays and lesbians about this profound change, a vote taken or even a poll of gay men and lesbians? None that I can find or recall.
And as in other social justice spaces, dissent was equated with bigotry. Dissenters from gender ideology are routinely unfriended, shunned and shamed. Almost all of the gay men, trans people and lesbians who have confided in me that they don’t agree with this or think that J.K. Rowling and Martina Navratilova have some good points have said so sotto voce, lest anyone overhear. That’s the extremely intolerant and illiberal atmosphere that now exists in the gay, lesbian and transgender space. This little community used to champion all manner of expression or argument or speech, eccentrics and visionaries. Now it’s fearful, self-censored and extremely uptight. Debate has been all but snuffed out; total uniformity of thought is demanded.
But this illiberalism made a fateful, strategic mistake. In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids. You can bring up your children however you like, we promised. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors. Partly because the adult issues had been resolved or close to it and partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young, it meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria but of every
other kid as well.
Kids all over the country were affected. Your children were taught in elementary school that being a boy or a girl was something they could choose and change at will. Your daughter found herself running against a trans girl (i.e., a biological male) in athletics. Children in elementary school got to pick pronouns, and some children socially transitioned at school without their parents’ knowledge or permission. I suppose there are other ways you can resurrect the ghost of Anita Bryant and all the homophobic paranoia that followed her, but this will probably do
the trick.
And then most radical of all: gender-affirming care for minors, which can lead to irreversible sex changes for children. The “care” included off-label blockers to arrest puberty, almost always followed with cross-sex hormones. To begin with, gays and lesbians, including me, empathized with kids with gender dysphoria and trusted the medical profession with the rest. If this helped kids or even saved their lives, as was often emphasized, what business was it of mine? If transitioning this young in life helped some pass better as adults, good for them.
Still, questions lingered, drawn from my own life. As a child, uninterested in playing team sports but very interested in the boys who played team sports, I was once asked by a girl when I was just 10 years old, “Are you sure you’re not really a girl?” Of course not, I replied. But I wonder how I might have responded if someone in authority — a parent or a teacher or a doctor — had suggested that my difference and occasional anxiety was because I was, in fact, a girl. That my body was irrelevant and that I could choose to be the opposite sex before puberty and all my confusion would disappear. I just don’t know what I would have said or done, to be honest.
And how do today’s parents, teachers and doctors know for sure that a 10-year-old child isn’t, well, like me and really is trans? How can they know for sure that the gender dysphoria isn’t instead a manifestation of being gay or lesbian and wanting to change it? How do they know for sure there isn’t another complicating personal or psychological factor? I was told not to worry. A child had to demonstrate a persistent, consistent and insistent trans identity for years even to be considered for medical intervention.
But this, I found out, was no longer true. The whole point of the new regime of gender-affirming care was that it rejected broad mental health assessments of children that could ensure that mistakes really didn’t happen. The old persistent, consistent and insistent model was deemed transphobic and loosened to become an affirmation policy. As soon as a kid said he or she was the opposite sex, further counseling and mental health exploration was deemed problematic because it amounted to transphobic conversion therapy, we were told. When I said that seemed crazy and surely we needed more safeguards, I was sternly told, “Children know who they are.”
But do they? When they are between 9 and 13? I sure didn’t. Does any parent really believe this? Solid long-term data on how many children who transition but decide later it was a mistake is hard to find, in large part because the procedures are relatively new and the studies often have very poor follow-up. But without a doubt, there are some. They are walking around today, testifying in courts and legislatures, opining all over the web, telling similar stories of rushed judgments, minimal safeguards, inadequate gatekeeping and agonizing regret that, as children, they made irreversible decisions they could not meaningfully consent to.
I have met many. They break your heart. And so many of the gender-dysphoric kids are gay and lesbian. Of course they are, and there are many more children who will grow up to be gay and lesbian than who will grow up to be trans. When adolescents referred to a British gender clinic were asked about their sexuality in 2012, some 90 percent of females and 80 percent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual.
Catrin Lundström 