“If gay men and lesbians want to return to liberal politics, to protect gay children, and to win back the sane center, we are going to have to disown and distance ourselves from this nihilist extremism.”

—Legendary Blogger Andrew Sullivan, in a tortured substack critique of the current pro-trans fad and its consequences on children, gays and society.

Sullivan is tortured by a lot of things, being trapped in cognitive dissonance hell as a religious and essentially conservative pundit has been driven into the arms of Democrats by his hatred of Donald Trump and Republican opposition to gay marriage. Nonetheless, he is a smart analytical thinker who writes like an angel, and his essay “The Queers Versus The Homosexuals,” arguing that “the erasure of gay men and lesbians” is going to be the inevitable result of the current trans activism madness, is very much worth reading even in its truncated form, since the whole thing is only accessible to Andrew’s subscribers. (If I had the discretionary funds to pay for any substack essayist, Sullivan would probably be as good as anyone.)

A selection of some of his other points to ponder:

• “[T]he move to curtail the rights of trans adults are repulsive and dumb. But when you examine the other issues at stake — public schools teaching the concepts of queer and gender theory to kindergartners on up, sex changes for children before puberty, the housing of biological males with women in prisons and rape shelters, and biological males competing with women in sports — you realize we are far beyond what the gay rights movement once stood for. It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists.”

• “To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender. To be homosexual, in contrast, is merely to be attracted to the same sex, and gays and lesbians run the gamut of tastes, politics, backgrounds and religions. Some are conservative, some radical, some indifferent. Some gays are queers. But most aren’t. And queers now run what was once the gay rights movement.”

• “[T]hey quietly changed the meaning of the word “gay” so that it no longer referred to same-sex attraction, but to same-gender attraction; and changed the word “men” to include people with vaginas and uteruses, and the word “women” to include people with dicks and balls. Checkmate for the gays! We are all now just bigots with “genital preferences,” just like the Christianist right used to claim. Just to add to the confusion, hundreds of new “genders” were adopted — because some teens on Tumblr once invented them and queer theorists loved them.

• “Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell. Kindergartners were told to pick a pronoun, and thereby a sex, as soon as they arrived. Endless kiddie books reiterated the queer theory mantra about gender: “You can be a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else entirely!” And if the sex the child chose did not match their physical body, they were told they could just change it — and change it back if needed — no questions asked. Fun! If a boy said he was a girl, or vice-versa, it was in fact unethical to ask any further questions. From now on, he was a girl. Parents? A problem to be overcome…”

• “To get past [the] “do no harm” objection, the queers insist that children will commit suicide if they are not transed. There is no solid evidence that this is the case, and some evidence it is the opposite. But notice too how this is not an argument; it’s emotional blackmail. You can only justify irreversible medicalization if the only alternative is the death of a child. Groups like the Trevor Project even hype suicide stats to bolster their case — an extraordinarily reckless thing to do. To tell a parent, based on no solid evidence, that their choice is “a live girl or a dead boy” is obscene. It has no place in any medical setting.”

Sullivan concludes in part,

… I can’t in good conscience stay silent when I spent a lifetime attempting to defend the simple existence of the normie gay from the bigots on the far right and the fanatics on the far left. This emphatically doesn’t mean eroding trans people’s civil rights. We should oppose vigorously any such thing. We should counter hostility and prejudice toward trans people. We should treat gay kids and kids with gender dysphoria with tenderness, care, and love. We would legislate only where it is absolutely the last and only option.

But we have to be insistent that the gay experience is distinct and different and not intrinsically connected to either queer ideology or the trans experience. We have to demand that children’s bodies — gay, straight, trans, gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming — be left alone. And we must do all we can to make sure that the trans-queer revolution does not result in what it seems to be moving toward: the eradication of homosexuality from public life.