No one has not heard of an “LGBTQ person” or the “LGBTQ community.”
If either were a company, their global brand awareness would transcend Amazon, Facebook, Coco-Cola, and Starbucks combined. This is hardly an overstatement.
Douglas Murray, a British public intellectual and openly homosexual man, explains as much in his very important book, The Madness of Crowds,
“There is no other issue (let alone one affecting relatively few people) that has so swiftly reached the stage whereby whole pages of newspapers are devoted to its latest developments and there is never-ending demand not just to change the language [to support it], but to make up the science around it.”
It has become a public duty for everyone to at least pretend to be concerned about the well-being of all things “LGBTQ,” has it not? Politicians, business leaders, educators and media darlings speak of it in reverential tones, eager to genuflect before it in highly public ways.
But if we are to live in truth, we must appreciate that both the “LGBTQ person” and “LGBTQ community” are mere creative fictions. When people use those words, they are referring to an artificial ideological and socio-political concept that does not exist in any actual reality.
This may seem like a silly assertion precisely because of the universal brand recognition and required allegiance to all things “LGBTQ” today. But an honest culture must face the fact: Both are fictions created to serve political and ideological purposes. Good people who desire to speak meaningfully must stop playing along with this fiction.
No Person is LGBTQ. No. One.
“As an LGBTQ person, I demand…”
We hear moral assertions like this regularly in public today and we are supposed to take the person’s self-proclaimed credentials seriously and utterly respectfully. The claim is fundamentally absolutist, meant to silence any debate or disagreement.
But the truth is that no person is “LGBT,” “LGBTQ,” “LGBTQIA+” or any of the other endlessly expanding alphabet soups that no one can keep up with. The reason is that if you take any of the individual letters themselves with any seriousness − which we are required to do under the current ideological regime − the collection of letters describing any actual person is a logical impossibility. Just think about it. If each letter means anything, they necessarily exclude the others.
Honest activists admit as much.
John Corvino, a philosophy professor and respected voice in the pro-homosexual community, wrote in the pages of The New York Times some years ago,
I’m amused whenever I hear someone say “as an L.G.B.T. person….” Nobody is an L.G.B.T. person. You can have two, maybe three letters maximum at any moment…” and that is pushing it.
Saying one is an “LGBT person” is an absurdity because each letter is mutually exclusive. To claim to be one is to necessarily state that you are clearly not any (or most of) the others. That is how language works.
Gary Lucia, a Walt Disney World employee writing over at Substack, explains that he is deeply offended when people apply the alphabet soup to him as a gay man. Why? He explains,
Let me speak for myself: I am not LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+, I am gay, just GAY. When you refer to me as “LGBTQIA+,” it is offensive to me. You are putting a label on that I never approved. You are lumping all those groups of people together, and we are not monolith.”
Lucia is admitting the artificial socio-political nature of the construct.
He also rejects the “T” and “Q” in the alphabet soup as illegitimate categories and wants nothing to do with them, precisely because they seek to erase the L and the G. If the reason why is curious to you, you don’t understand the recent evolution of sexual orientation and gender identity politics. The two do not and cannot co-exist peacefully.
Lucia is not alone in this rejection, by any stretch.
There are many same-sex attracted individuals who are extremely angry at the inclusion of gender ideology into their political and ideological efforts. If male and female exist solely in the mind of the individual (and not in the body) – as gender ideology demands – then being “same-sex attracted” becomes a senseless claim. What is it you are actually attracted to? Gender ideology IS the abolition of biological sex!
Jonathan Rauch, one of the most respected voices speaking for the homosexual movement, wrote a very important piece for The Atlantic in 2019 on the problematic illegitimacy of the LGBT alphabet soup. Rauch does not believe the string of letters effectively describes reality. He complains it is “cumbersome and artificial”:
Imagine if the religious-liberty movement instead styled itself the CJMHBSBA+ (Catholic-Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist-Sikh-Baha’i-Animist-plus) movement. The symbolism ceases to be about equality for all Americans and becomes instead about naming particularistic claimants.
So no, these letters do not describe anything or any person. They are nonsensical.
There Certainly Is No LGBTQ Community
Lucia, the gay Disney employee, adds, “[A]s a gay man, I am fed up with being lumped into the umbrella term ‘LGBTQIA+’. I am tired of organizations and ‘allies’ who have taken it upon themselves to speak for me.” That is because there is no actual “LGBTQ community.” These folks don’t really get along in any meaningful way because they are all actually very different things with conflicting interests and goals.
Even NBC News has noted this fact. They explained in 2019,
The letters LGBTQ often appear together, but the people the letters represent are not always as united. And now, decades-old animosity between transgender activists and “radical” lesbian feminists — who have conflicting views on gender [and sex] — has reached a boiling point on social media and in real life.
NBC continues,
A point of contention is “lesbian erasure” — an idea that lesbians are systemically “erased” and ignored within male-dominated LGBTQ activism and mainstream media, and a belief that transgender activism, which aims to protect the rights of a small and highly marginalized group, allegedly harms women, and lesbians in particular.
NBC is precisely right. And The New Yorker noted this significant rift between the letters and feminist ideals back in 2014.
The truth is, trans politics is the new misogyny. Consider the lesbians, being women who like other actual women. They have no interest in dating or celebrating men who pretend to be women. The lesbians now get called the most vicious names by their so-called ‘trans allies’ in the supposed “LGBTQ community” because they boldly reject the lie that “trans women” are women. And gender activists threaten lesbians and other feminists with complete impunity. This is what this “community” has devolved into.
As liberal feminist Kara Dansky explains in The Abolition of Sex, “’transgender” is simply a made-up concept that is used to justify all kinds of atrocities [against women]. It is in effect, a men’s rights movement intended to objectify women’s bodies and erase us as a class.” She adds, “It is left-wing misogyny on steroids.” Dansky is a very bold and truthful woman.
Gay intellectual Douglas Murray further illuminates how the this “community” does not hold together. This is precisely the gay Disney employee’s point. Murray properly asks in The Madness of Crowds, does “being gay mean that you are attracted to members of your own sex” or “that you are part of a grand political project.” Murray contends this is a very uncomfortable and inconvenient question in “the community” because they cannot afford to make a clear distinction between the two. That is how you know it is a political artifice.
And that’s why Murray says speaking of a so-called “LGBT community” is “a form of absurdity” and “one great big contradiction” because “even on its own terms, this composition is wildly unsustainable and contradictory.” Murray continues, “It may be too pedestrian to even mention, but gay men and lesbians do not always form the warmest relationships. …Neither have very much use for the other and almost none meet in any ‘communal’ spaces.” He adds, “there are hardly any places in the decades since gay liberation where gay men and woman organize or assemble to be near each other on anything like a regular basis.” Gender activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore admitted as much in the pages of The New York Times back in 2013, explaining “The gay establishment has always taken ‘L.G.B.T.’ to mean ‘gay, with lesbian in parentheses, throw out the bisexuals, and put trans on for a little bit of window dressing.’”
Murray explodes the political illusion, explaining the “LGBT community … barely exists even within each letter of its constituent parts. And each has little in common with the others” adding “and yet it [the LGBTQ+ community illusion] remains the means by which people are willing to identify vast swatches of the population, and build one of the defining justifications and bases for liberal society.”
This fact is precisely why good citizens who are interested in speaking truthfully about actual reality should cease using both terms. They are utter fictions created and employed for ideological purposes. We must all stop putting individual people with unique stories and struggles under artificial bumper sticker banners that are not actually descriptive of anyone or anything. Reasonable people must refuse to play along with the illusion.
Photo from Shutterstock.
