A few months back I wrote on the incoherence of LGBT where I argued the following:
Either (1) ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are tied to physical form, in which case the concept of sexual orientation (LGB) is intelligible but the ideology of transgenderism (T) is indefensible, or (2) ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not tied to physical form, in which case the concept of sexual orientation (LGB) is no longer intelligible. […]
So it seems to me that those who embrace the term LGBT face a formidable challenge: provide definitions of L, G, B, and T that both (1) satisfy the demands of transgender ideology and (2) comport with the conventional meanings of L, G, and B.
Daniel Moody drew my attention this week to an article in Quillette by a gay author, Brad Polumbo, suggesting that it’s time for ‘LGB’ and ‘T’ to go their separate ways:
The growing rift between increasingly radicalized transgender-rights activists and the lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) communities has finally come out into the open. This week, Europe’s biggest LGBT-rights organization, the London-based Stonewall charity, was publicly accused of subordinating LGB rights to the group’s increasingly single-minded goal of replacing sex with gender as a marker of identity. As Helen Joyce recently wrote in Standpoint, “Stonewall went all in for gender self-ID. Its online glossary now describes biological sex as ‘assigned at birth’ (presumably by a midwife with a Hogwarts-style Sorting Hat). ‘Gay’ and ‘lesbian’ now mean same-gender, not same-sex, attraction. ‘Transphobia’ is the ‘fear or dislike of someone based on the fact that they are trans, including the denial/refusal to accept their gender identity.’ At a stroke, anyone who declares themselves exclusively attracted to people of the same sex has become a bigot.”
As a gay man who lives in the United States, I have no direct stake in Britain’s intra-LGBT politics. (“LGB/T” might now be a more apt term.) But I am surprised that it has taken this long for such a formal breach to occur. The same pressures have been building everywhere, and it was only a matter of time before someone acted on them.
His argument is very similar to mine (bold added):
Gays, lesbians and bisexuals all have something obvious in common: same-sex attraction. This is an alternative sexual orientation that, to some extent at least, shapes our experiences and alters our life outcomes. We typically identify with our biological sex—and in fact, sometimes have spent many years feeling trapped by it. To be gay is to understand that sex is set at birth. My sexual attraction, likewise, is based on hard-wired factors beyond my control.
Transgenderism is a separate concept. While homosexuality leads to obvious differences in real-life behavior, transgenderism offers a categorial [sic] redefinition of what it means to be a man or a woman. As Joyce describes it, a “gender identity” is a quasi-spiritual concept—almost like a soul—that is “something between an internal essence, knowable only to its possessor, and stereotypically masculine or feminine appearance and behavior.”
(See also Daniel Moody’s much earlier observations about the fundamental incompatibility of LGB and T.)
The British author Douglas Murray — also a gay man — makes essentially the same argument as Polumbo in his new book The Madness of Crowds (surely one of the most important books published this year). Murray contends that “the LGBT community” is mostly a fictional construct, and necessarily so. (In fact, Murray suggests it’s an exaggeration even to speak of an LGB community.) Perhaps we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of the so-called LGBT movement. Certainly we’re going to see this LGB-vs-T argument articulated more frequently as ‘traditionalist’ LGBs try to cut themselves loose from the cultural suicide-bombers of the transgender movement.
To my mind, the interesting question isn’t why LGB and T are initiating divorce proceedings. That’s easily answered. The real puzzle is why they ever got hitched in the first place.
No less perplexing is that fact that some quarters of evangelicalism are caving into LGBT ideology just as it’s beginning to break apart. (The same can be said of those evangelicals who are currently pleading with us to make our peace with Darwinism.) William Ralph Inge surely had it right: “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”