It’s past time for the gay community to wake up to the widespread, insidious politicking and ideological capture that has infiltrated the once-proud movement that sought to liberate same-sex attracted people and welcome them with open arms into broader society. I’m talking, of course, about Toronto Pride, the local manifestation of an annual commemoration of the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, which was first instituted in the Big Apple in 1970 and spread across the border in 1981.
I say this in the blessed lull after Toronto Pride month, when many gay men and lesbians sigh with relief, now that the carnival of libertines, the public parading of nudity and fetishes and absurd narcissistic sexual fantasies has finally drawn to close. This year, rather ironically, the parade itself was stopped in its tracks by a small handful of pro-Palestinian protesters calling for an end to “pinkwashing” — whatever that’s about. Let me guess: too many corporate sponsors of Pride invested in Israel? Bingo!
Only utterly deranged same-sex attracted individuals would knowingly support a theocratic regime that demands as a core tenet of its religious beliefs the summary execution of gay people. Is the existence of “Queers for Palestine” rather more suggestive of how pervasive and widespread drug use is across the gay community?
But hold on a moment. Queers for Palestine? Why not Gays for Palestine? These words are no longer synonyms, not in 2024, in the post-queer theory world championed by academics like Judith Butler. Queer is an adjective that everyone once agreed equated with same-sex attraction, but has now broadened to include absolutely anyone departing from the norms of sexuality and gender. So, the whole thing is misleading — much like everything else in this topsy-turvy world of chase-to-switch meanings and pernicious truth subversion.
The group wants you to believe it is gays and lesbians who paradoxically advocate for Hamas, when in fact it is an activist movement comprising a much larger demographic slice: straight people with a kink, or adults still undecided about their sexuality. A recent U.S. survey found that more than one-fifth of gen Z adults self-identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. But setting that quibble aside, what’s truly comic is that the Toronto Pride parade simply ground to a halt, the organizers citing public safety reasons.
Now, when you consider that gay men and women faced off against hostile crowds and police officers in New York in 1969 at considerable risk to their personal safety, and in Toronto as recently as 1981, when patrons of local bathhouses were rounded up by police, this feeble response by Toronto Pride mandarins is the kind of limp-wristed, half-hearted level of commitment that is an utter embarrassment to those who championed our liberation in earlier decades. For the straight readers out there, this is no better than a young person mocking our war heroes and interrupting a Remembrance Day observance.
Yet among that same sassy and non-confrontational coterie of Toronto Pride grandees is an ideologically captive subgroup of neo-Marxist nonsense speakers who are ready and willing to scream bloody murder and cast ad hominems left and right, indiscriminately labelling dissenters as “bigots” and “transphobes” until the rest of the world falls into line and appeases their demands. These are the self-styled transgender activists — many of them not in the slightest bit transgender themselves, simply allies of a cause that at its ideological heart calls for the medicalization of children and the shaming of same-sex attracted people like myself.
Many are white, middle-class people who are preoccupied with defending and amplifying their own status in the dinner-party game of one-upmanship. Being a “trans parent” these days is widely thought in this echelon of society to be progressive and morally upstanding. Beliefs like these constitute a very private, complex and somnambulant state of delusion, one of deep and reflexive denial that will never, ever admit to objective reality, namely that this very same credo justifies the mutilation of their own children. According to writer Helen Joyce, “It’s a fight to the death as far as they’re concerned.”
This is the new homophobia. Much like antisemitism, this deeply embedded prejudice for those in society who are attracted to members of their own sex mutates and responds to environmental pressures, taking on new forms, hiding in plain sight in novel and unexpected places. As with viruses, the change is swift and difficult to track unless assiduously monitored.
The reason why straight folks are so easily lured into the LGBTQ+ honey trap is that it promises an opportunity for low risk, high return on social investment. It says that you can broadcast your social virtue by supporting a collective of marginalized and oppressed people who are unified in their battle for recognition and acceptance into broader society. But this is a bald-faced lie, and it is time for opposite-sex attracted people, the so-called allies, to be brought up to speed.
Here is the truth of the matter. The work of journalist Hannah Barnes into the goings on at England’s Tavistock clinic led to the disclosure that the vast majority of children presenting with gender dysphoria were same-sex attracted. Compounding this, the four-year-long review commissioned by the outgoing U.K. government and conducted by world-renowned pediatrician Hilary Cass revealed there to be scant evidence in support of prescribing puberty blockers for prepubescent trans-identifying kids.
Thinking these recent revelations to be a priority for discussion among the thinking class, I approached my departmental chair at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Management & Innovation (IMI), querying why it was that a recent awards ceremony — an event that you can well imagine involved a good deal of fatuous gladhanding and self-congratulatory but largely meaningless backslapping — and which took place during Pride Month, featured an arch made up of celebratory balloons mimicking, not the Pride flag, but the newer, highly divisive Progress Pride flag.
In that meeting, I was clear about how such symbolism was aligning the department with an ideology that called for the shaming of same-sex attracted people and the medical correction of gay teens. The response, rather amusingly, was, “The Institute does not have an ideology.” That’s unfortunate, on any number of levels, most especially since IMI styles itself as championing innovation. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, an ideology is “a form of social or political philosophy, or a system of ideas, that aspires both to explain the world and to change it.” On IMI’s website, the department claims its mission is to, “Constantly transform thinking to solve the hardest problems facing … societies globally.” It is hard to say, then, whether the messaging is purely mendacious, or merely incompetent.
But I am not pursuing a “gotcha” moment. In a recent conversation with Jordan Peterson on the subject, he urged me to consider the “margin of the margins” conundrum. Namely, that the goal of a previously marginal group — in this case, gays and lesbians — was acceptance and normalization into society, and their much-deserved success has left behind a thinner sliver of the population, a sub-population, languishing at the periphery.
Today, these are the trans individuals; and if these people are dutifully enfolded into the centre, who, then, will be left to include? There are ever tinier minorities with even stranger interests.
Today, these are trans individuals; and if these people are dutifully enfolded into the centre, who, then, will be left to include? There are ever tinier minorities and even stranger interest groups, whose future “inclusion” — and the inevitable appending of yet more letters to the already ungainly acronym — may well prompt an unintended backlash.
We are in uncharted terrain. The curtain is about to rise on a new theatre in the culture war, one that would be perilous to ignore; and, although tearing off the bandages will hurt, the LGB will need to contemplate divorcing itself permanently and irrevocably from the TQIA2S+, as has already happened in Britain with LGB Alliance and the Gay Men’s Network. If we gays and lesbians and bisexual members of society do not heed this imperative, we risk the collective wrath of the majority of Canadians who, much like a sleeping dragon, will soon be stirred into a fiery and retributive rage.
National Post
Leigh Revers is an associate professor at the Institute for Management & Innovation at the University of Toronto.