Sunday, June 29, 2025

Andrew Sullivan: How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way

I agree with the vast majority of this.
   Sullivan is great, IMO. I'm sorry that he seems to have retreated somewhat from public debate. My hypothesis has long been that it was the vicious treatment he got from commenters at NY magazine. Man, those were some stupid and mean-ass comments. As he notes in this piece--and as we all know--any deviation from the radical leftism of the progressives is treated as blatant bigotry. So Sullivan is basically Himmler to the woketards. Or Madison...
   The trajectory of the movement in question has been a lot like the trajectory of feminism: what was once a fairly down-to-earth, fairly commonsensical, liberal, egalitarian movement turned into a radical, irrationalist, extremist leftism...in part, it seems, because it achieved its major goals. Such movements don't just pack up and go home when they win. Rather, they tend to radicalize and seek out new and less-plausible battles to fight. This also happened with liberal anti-racism...which has turned into loony, extremist (e.g. Kendian) "antiracism" and CRT. One view is that activists are too emotionally committed and financially dependent on the movement to just admit they succeeded and now have little left to do.
   You know, I don't really see anything in the piece that's new. All his major points have been made before. Logically speaking, the debate is basically over. "Trans" radicalism has offered no sound arguments in defense of the view. It's offered a barrage of disparate, ridiculous, often mutually contradictory arguments for a prima facie absurd position...a position that is patently false. "Trans" ideology lost the debate from the get-go, and has enjoyed whatever rhetorical and political success it has had merely by insisting that it is right and that its enemies are bigots. Now almost all we're doing is repeating the same devastating, decisive arguments over and over...and the other side simply refuses to admit that it was wrong. It's not like this is a close call. It's not as if they offered prima facie plausible arguments that just haven't quite worked. And it's not as if there is a complicated array of technical arguments that only experts really understand. Basically they just said that night is day, the "science" is settled, and only bigots disagree. As Sullivan notes, even many progressives know it's all bullshit. But most of them are afraid to admit it in public because they fear "cancellation"--the vicious campaigns of character assassination the left uses to stifle dissent and keep people in line.
   The debate over "trans" ideology/pseudoscience, is, logically speaking, over. It barely ever got off the ground, because it just won't fly. There are, of course, some people who profoundly wish they were the opposite sex, many others who simply prefer the esthetic associated with the opposite sex...and a few, perhaps, here and there who really do believe themselves to actually be, in some sense, the opposite sex. But the starting point for any rational debate about this has to be: actually changing your sex is--at our level of medical technology, at least--impossible. And "gender" theory is such a train wreck that it doesn't change anything--it merely confuses the issue.
   As I keep saying, one big problem with the progressive left is that it never stops radicalizing. Consequently, slippery slope arguments against it tend to be sound. It never stops moving leftward, never stops radicalizing. And, among other things, that means that later radicalization tends to cast doubts on earlier successes.
   The left falsely insists that tolerance of homo- and bisexuality is inextricably linked with "trans" pseudoscience, gambling that, having come to see that heterosexuality is non-obligatory, we'll all accept transgenderism. But, of course, one man's Modus Ponens is another man's Modus Tollens. So, instead, fed up with ridiculous "trans" pseudoscience, people may turn against non-heterosexuals.
   The solution, obviously, is to reject the link between the two (completely different) issues.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home