I support trans people and want them to be able to live their lives. I do my best to respect pronouns, even though it can be easy to slip up at times if I knew them in their previous life (for lack of a better word). Virtually all the trans people I know just want to live their lives in peace.
However, most trans activists are deeply unserious people. They have no concept of strategy, can’t read the room, and are way too maximalist in their demands. I often get annoyed by them and I support their cause (for the most part), so I can’t imagine how those that disagree feel. To me, these tactics probably cost the movement a good 20-30 years due to the backlash, but we will see. There may come a better wedge issue that conservatives can use, which means they’ll likely drop this one.
I’m very skeptical of that paper claiming that higher AIDS incidence at the peak of the pandemic was causal for improved political conditions decades later. I haven’t read the details, but I searched and it does not contain the word “confound”, even though there’s a clear confound in that states with high AIDS incidence at the peak of the pandemic are likely the states with the highest gay population density, which would naturally have some of these effects.
And AIDS was definitely a major setback in gay political progress - in the 1970s, there were a growing number of out celebrities, including people like David Bowie, Elton John, and Mick Jagger, but in the 1980s, many of them went back in the closet. It’s hard to tell how much was backlash, the whole Reagan/Thatcher revolution against the 1970s, and the “disco sucks” movement, and how much came a couple years later with the pandemic starting.
My guess is that AIDS probably caused some rise of sympathy by observers, and some organization & momentum by gay movements/communities (e.g. ACT-UP and AIDS advocates who may have catalyzed other pro-gay elements, and some straight celebrities with HIV vocally supported the gay community or praised their work)-- but overall it likely caused more opposition than support.
This is somewhat speculative on my part, but I can think of at least four factors that cumulatively seem likely to make AIDS mostly bad for public acceptance of gay people. My armchair reasoning doesn’t necessarily overrule studies, but it may give (defeasible) reason to be suspicious of what was found or what it means.
First, AIDS was invoked by many religious conservatives as divine punishment and proof of its sinfulness, at a high point in Evangelicalism’s political influence. In 1987, seemingly 43% of Americans agreed that “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior” (though the number plummeted in the subsequent decades), per Pew Research.
A few caveats. One, “immoral sexual behavior” would be taken by some respondents as a larger or distinct category than “gay sex,” though greatly overlapping. Two, the “might be” bit does weaken it somewhat, though without defanging it. Three, as with a lot of religious (and political) beliefs, it’s hard to discern how much this belief made its own causal *contribution* to other anti-gay beliefs & attitudes & practices, vs. how much this belief *reflected* prior anti-gay beliefs and attitudes. (Also, I’m also assuming the survey indeed found that people believed this. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some people said “yes” on the survey as a way of expressing opposition to gay people or suchlike, cf. partisan cheerleading.)
Second, AIDS was invoked by many people (religious and secular) as proof that homosexuality was unhealthy and imprudent--AIDS was a constituent of bad health, and the disposition of anal sex to transmit HIV was taken as evidence of its intrinsic dangerousness, unnaturalness (in either a religious or biological sense), etc. Rightly or wrongly, an activity’s or status’s being seen as unhealthy sometimes contributes to negative affect and moral opposition (cf. drug users, fat people, etc.).
Third, insofar as many gay men acquired AIDS via (actual or perceived) promiscuous sex with many strangers, this was taken as proof that gay people were mentally ill/irrational and/or had an immoral and self-destructive culture, and that "the gay lifestyle" was a reckless one whose influence should be curtailed.
Fourth, even among some people who weren't particularly *opposed* or *hostile* to gay people or homosexuality, AIDS made gay people seem *scary* or *dangerous*. Particularly in light of ignorance and myths about the transmissibility of HIV (e.g. drastically overstating its potential to spread via casual nonsexual exposure–even through the air, or by touching the same objects with no fluid transfer), some people avoided gay men (or anyone who actually or supposedly had HIV/AIDS) out of fear. For instance, lots of parents removed their children from the school of Ryan White, a child with HIV (from a medical transfusion for hemophilia), even though I’m pretty sure that some of them didn't blame White himself. (Some did demonize White, though.)
For a long time, there was also official discrimination against gay men (or men who’d had sex with men) donating blood, specifically on the grounds of preventing HIV transmission. (I need to research more to be sure, but I concede that this policy might well have been justified for a while after the initial crisis of patients getting HIV from blood/fluid transfusions. I think it became unjustified after more was learned about how to prevent transmission of HIV in such transfusion. In any case, I suspect it contributed to normalizing anti-gay discrimination on specifically HIV-based grounds.)
In theory, most of these considerations apply specifically to gay men, not lesbians (who have far lower rates of HIV–I think even lower than straight women and straight men). But in effect I think it largely amounted to a more general anti-homosexuality position and momentum. As far as I know, most people didn’t stop to question why God wasn’t punishing lesbians with AIDS, or other obvious questions about the implications of the gay/lesbian asymmetries.
Additionally, I know of at least one specifically anti-bisexual-male notion rooted in HIV, centering on the idea that bisexual men are dangerous vectors passing HIV from the gay community to the straight community.
And of course, the AIDS-gay framing generally ignores HIV among straight people, and in some countries the large majority of people with HIV are not gay men (varying by country). Nevertheless, a huge fraction of HIV patients are gay men in the United States and some other countries, and I think HIV tends to be *believed* gay-associated even in countries where this correlation doesn’t hold true.
There are, of course, causal arrows in multiple directions. Already-present homophobia definitely contributed a lot to public apathy and hostility against HIV/AIDS patients as well, and homophobia surely contributed to *why* many people were ready to adopt wrongful attitudes and beliefs toward HIV and its patients. On the other hand, confounding variables can go in both directions. Among the people who sympathized with HIV patients and increased their support for gay rights as a result, some of that was also probably due to prior disposition to support gay people. On the whole, I think HIV/AIDS probably did much more to harm public support for gay people than to increase it.
As a distant, sympathetic observer to these battles, I distinctly remember when I sensed a change from "cool, another small group we can all stop marginalizing", to a distinct "what's wrong with these activists"?
At some point the demands of trans activists shifted from just letting people live their everyday lives according to their gender identity, to a massive reconceptualization of sex and gender for everyone. It wasn't enough to distinguish gender from sex, now sex was not allowed to have any social relevance whatsoever. Instead of recognising that words like "man" and "woman" are naturally ambiguous between the two meanings, they wanted them fully redefined.
On top of that, the messaging became shrill and unsympathetic. Articles explaining what it's like to have dysphoria were out, and the new line was that trans people didn't owe you any legibility at all (as if social things like gender weren't hugely relational), that they would likely kill themselves if you dared to question any of their demands, and on top of that you would get publicly canceled for daring to suggest that bio sex might be relevant to anything at all, even something so basic as sexual attraction.
To me it felt like a power grab, probably driven by social media's tendency to amplify the shrillest and most extreme voices. I felt bad for the actual trans people trying to live as themselves, which is complicated enough, while being made into a totem by one faction and a scapegoat by another.
I wonder if there isn’t also a metaphysical difference. Even if someone thinks that being gay is morally wrong, they can still fairly easily understand what, metaphysically speaking, it is to be gay. (It’s just like being straight, except that you’re attracted to/romantically love/etc., members of the same sex rather than members of the opposite sex.) It’s harder to understand, I think, what it is, metaphysically speaking, to be trans. Many people hear “I’m a man in a female body” as a contradiction. If such people are to be convinced, they need metaphysical convincing, not moral insight.
I'm not sure good parents/good neighbors is what convinced people to support gay relationships, either. Seeing them be good partners to each other though, just as heterosexuals are? That does help.
Similarly I think people are probably more likely to be supportive of trans people if the trans people they know personally assimilate well into their new gender and intuitively "read" as their new gender.
This is an interesting post. I was wondering about the following. You say: “ We know that anti-gay prejudices dissolved decades earlier. Approaches that worked then were abandoned now.”. What is the main evidence for such claim? Why should we think that there has been significant change in tactics between the pro-gay movement a couple of decades ago, and the pro-trans movement nowadays? What are the tactical mistakes that are present now that were not present to a similar degree in the pro-gay movement? This is not clear to me. I think your point about “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” can play a large role in this issue. Thanks for your post.
Thanks for the response. It's for sure an open question how much "wrong place, wrong time" mattered. I think it was a big factor, but it may be even bigger than I suggest.
"Why should we think that there has been significant change in tactics between the pro-gay movement a couple of decades ago, and the pro-trans movement nowadays?" This question is what the previous two sections are trying to answer. Heath says, and I elaborate, that the trans movement had bigger "asks." I then deny that this is (mainly) due to the nature of trans liberation and suggest it has to do with a more radical political movement "inflating" the asks, and I lay out roughly what the fundamental (and less onerous) asks should be instead. That's the core of what I'm saying.
So I think if you want to challenge this idea, you should argue the asks were never bigger, or that my explanation of why they were bigger is wrong.
I think partially this is a side effect of collective memoryholing of just how radical a lot of early gay activism was. There really were gay activists who wanted to abolish marriage as an institution, who allied with pedophiles in NAMBLA, and so on. Of course, this side of gay activism didn't win out, because it was a nonstarter, but it did provide fodder for conservatives for years.
I think trans issues will likely end up shaking out the same.
Yeah, Andrew Sullivan in particular was a huge deal in changing the goals and presentation of the gay rights movement. Now he's a strident opponent of (the more radical parts of) trans activism, make of that what you will.
I suspect one part of it is that, correctly or not, homosexuality is widely recognized as a natural kind by most people, whereas trans or anything related to gender is not, and is seen more as a culture-bound syndrome of sorts.
I wonder whether Americans thought of homosexuality as a natural kind or culture-bound 60 years ago. It's clear they think of it as a natural kind now ("born that way") but that could be part of the change in view in question.
My suspicion is that it was thought of that way to some extent if only because of the long cultural history of homosexuality. It’s a “known thing” even if it was considered strange or immoral.
There’s also the issue of how “invisible” these things really are. I think homosexuality (in men especially) is in fact visibly/objectively demonstrable in a way trans isn’t (purely subjectivist), and that people generally sense this to be the case.
Not “determine” as in “verify with certainty”, but i’m referring to things like measuring various automatic bodily responses to certain sexual stimuli.
Ah! But there was this fascinating study about human responses to other species having sex, and it seems like fluctuations in circulation in genitals is just unpredictable and illogical. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sexologists of old didn’t actually find a fast, cheap, and airtight method of securely determining someone’s patter of sexual attraction, but instead recorded something that looked enough like a pattern…
Lots of young men seek help when they’ve had a relative’s baby sit on their lap and the baby squirms and the young man’s penis is physically stimulated and there’s a response, and these patients, I’ve heard, are usually deathly afraid of having pedophilic attraction. No pattern of attraction to children before. My teachers told me it’s almost ‘dead cert’ it’s anxiety, not a psychosexual difference. So erections aren’t a reliable measure of sexual attraction. Also, male rape victims of another man may even ejaculate from the stimulation without any history of seeking sex with men, so I don’t think we can safely say male sexual function is as simple as tumescence == attraction == tumescence.
And what about all the men who have children with a woman and then come out of the closet, divorce, and finally get to be with their preferred sex? If they were bisexual, wouldn’t they get divorced to get out of the marriage, not in order to get to be with men?
Gay and trans rights proceeded together, and were won together. The right not to be arrested over it, to not be discriminated against in housing, employment, and marriage--trans did not lag behind gays for any of these things. We won them together.
It's not just that the remaining asks from trans are more onerous, it's also that they're just more, period.
It's also particularly weird to see you write as if on-the-fence normals see the difference at all. LGB is facing an uphill battle to distinguish itself from the T. Mostly, both left and right are happy to keep them lumped together.
So no, it's got nothing to do with trans rights lagging behind gay rights.
I support trans people and want them to be able to live their lives. I do my best to respect pronouns, even though it can be easy to slip up at times if I knew them in their previous life (for lack of a better word). Virtually all the trans people I know just want to live their lives in peace.
However, most trans activists are deeply unserious people. They have no concept of strategy, can’t read the room, and are way too maximalist in their demands. I often get annoyed by them and I support their cause (for the most part), so I can’t imagine how those that disagree feel. To me, these tactics probably cost the movement a good 20-30 years due to the backlash, but we will see. There may come a better wedge issue that conservatives can use, which means they’ll likely drop this one.
I’m very skeptical of that paper claiming that higher AIDS incidence at the peak of the pandemic was causal for improved political conditions decades later. I haven’t read the details, but I searched and it does not contain the word “confound”, even though there’s a clear confound in that states with high AIDS incidence at the peak of the pandemic are likely the states with the highest gay population density, which would naturally have some of these effects.
And AIDS was definitely a major setback in gay political progress - in the 1970s, there were a growing number of out celebrities, including people like David Bowie, Elton John, and Mick Jagger, but in the 1980s, many of them went back in the closet. It’s hard to tell how much was backlash, the whole Reagan/Thatcher revolution against the 1970s, and the “disco sucks” movement, and how much came a couple years later with the pandemic starting.
My guess is that AIDS probably caused some rise of sympathy by observers, and some organization & momentum by gay movements/communities (e.g. ACT-UP and AIDS advocates who may have catalyzed other pro-gay elements, and some straight celebrities with HIV vocally supported the gay community or praised their work)-- but overall it likely caused more opposition than support.
This is somewhat speculative on my part, but I can think of at least four factors that cumulatively seem likely to make AIDS mostly bad for public acceptance of gay people. My armchair reasoning doesn’t necessarily overrule studies, but it may give (defeasible) reason to be suspicious of what was found or what it means.
First, AIDS was invoked by many religious conservatives as divine punishment and proof of its sinfulness, at a high point in Evangelicalism’s political influence. In 1987, seemingly 43% of Americans agreed that “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior” (though the number plummeted in the subsequent decades), per Pew Research.
A few caveats. One, “immoral sexual behavior” would be taken by some respondents as a larger or distinct category than “gay sex,” though greatly overlapping. Two, the “might be” bit does weaken it somewhat, though without defanging it. Three, as with a lot of religious (and political) beliefs, it’s hard to discern how much this belief made its own causal *contribution* to other anti-gay beliefs & attitudes & practices, vs. how much this belief *reflected* prior anti-gay beliefs and attitudes. (Also, I’m also assuming the survey indeed found that people believed this. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some people said “yes” on the survey as a way of expressing opposition to gay people or suchlike, cf. partisan cheerleading.)
Second, AIDS was invoked by many people (religious and secular) as proof that homosexuality was unhealthy and imprudent--AIDS was a constituent of bad health, and the disposition of anal sex to transmit HIV was taken as evidence of its intrinsic dangerousness, unnaturalness (in either a religious or biological sense), etc. Rightly or wrongly, an activity’s or status’s being seen as unhealthy sometimes contributes to negative affect and moral opposition (cf. drug users, fat people, etc.).
Third, insofar as many gay men acquired AIDS via (actual or perceived) promiscuous sex with many strangers, this was taken as proof that gay people were mentally ill/irrational and/or had an immoral and self-destructive culture, and that "the gay lifestyle" was a reckless one whose influence should be curtailed.
Fourth, even among some people who weren't particularly *opposed* or *hostile* to gay people or homosexuality, AIDS made gay people seem *scary* or *dangerous*. Particularly in light of ignorance and myths about the transmissibility of HIV (e.g. drastically overstating its potential to spread via casual nonsexual exposure–even through the air, or by touching the same objects with no fluid transfer), some people avoided gay men (or anyone who actually or supposedly had HIV/AIDS) out of fear. For instance, lots of parents removed their children from the school of Ryan White, a child with HIV (from a medical transfusion for hemophilia), even though I’m pretty sure that some of them didn't blame White himself. (Some did demonize White, though.)
For a long time, there was also official discrimination against gay men (or men who’d had sex with men) donating blood, specifically on the grounds of preventing HIV transmission. (I need to research more to be sure, but I concede that this policy might well have been justified for a while after the initial crisis of patients getting HIV from blood/fluid transfusions. I think it became unjustified after more was learned about how to prevent transmission of HIV in such transfusion. In any case, I suspect it contributed to normalizing anti-gay discrimination on specifically HIV-based grounds.)
In theory, most of these considerations apply specifically to gay men, not lesbians (who have far lower rates of HIV–I think even lower than straight women and straight men). But in effect I think it largely amounted to a more general anti-homosexuality position and momentum. As far as I know, most people didn’t stop to question why God wasn’t punishing lesbians with AIDS, or other obvious questions about the implications of the gay/lesbian asymmetries.
Additionally, I know of at least one specifically anti-bisexual-male notion rooted in HIV, centering on the idea that bisexual men are dangerous vectors passing HIV from the gay community to the straight community.
And of course, the AIDS-gay framing generally ignores HIV among straight people, and in some countries the large majority of people with HIV are not gay men (varying by country). Nevertheless, a huge fraction of HIV patients are gay men in the United States and some other countries, and I think HIV tends to be *believed* gay-associated even in countries where this correlation doesn’t hold true.
There are, of course, causal arrows in multiple directions. Already-present homophobia definitely contributed a lot to public apathy and hostility against HIV/AIDS patients as well, and homophobia surely contributed to *why* many people were ready to adopt wrongful attitudes and beliefs toward HIV and its patients. On the other hand, confounding variables can go in both directions. Among the people who sympathized with HIV patients and increased their support for gay rights as a result, some of that was also probably due to prior disposition to support gay people. On the whole, I think HIV/AIDS probably did much more to harm public support for gay people than to increase it.
-Will Lugar
As a distant, sympathetic observer to these battles, I distinctly remember when I sensed a change from "cool, another small group we can all stop marginalizing", to a distinct "what's wrong with these activists"?
At some point the demands of trans activists shifted from just letting people live their everyday lives according to their gender identity, to a massive reconceptualization of sex and gender for everyone. It wasn't enough to distinguish gender from sex, now sex was not allowed to have any social relevance whatsoever. Instead of recognising that words like "man" and "woman" are naturally ambiguous between the two meanings, they wanted them fully redefined.
On top of that, the messaging became shrill and unsympathetic. Articles explaining what it's like to have dysphoria were out, and the new line was that trans people didn't owe you any legibility at all (as if social things like gender weren't hugely relational), that they would likely kill themselves if you dared to question any of their demands, and on top of that you would get publicly canceled for daring to suggest that bio sex might be relevant to anything at all, even something so basic as sexual attraction.
To me it felt like a power grab, probably driven by social media's tendency to amplify the shrillest and most extreme voices. I felt bad for the actual trans people trying to live as themselves, which is complicated enough, while being made into a totem by one faction and a scapegoat by another.
I wonder if there isn’t also a metaphysical difference. Even if someone thinks that being gay is morally wrong, they can still fairly easily understand what, metaphysically speaking, it is to be gay. (It’s just like being straight, except that you’re attracted to/romantically love/etc., members of the same sex rather than members of the opposite sex.) It’s harder to understand, I think, what it is, metaphysically speaking, to be trans. Many people hear “I’m a man in a female body” as a contradiction. If such people are to be convinced, they need metaphysical convincing, not moral insight.
I should add: and they’re not going to get that from seeing trans people be good parents, good neighbors, etc.
I'm not sure good parents/good neighbors is what convinced people to support gay relationships, either. Seeing them be good partners to each other though, just as heterosexuals are? That does help.
Similarly I think people are probably more likely to be supportive of trans people if the trans people they know personally assimilate well into their new gender and intuitively "read" as their new gender.
This is an interesting post. I was wondering about the following. You say: “ We know that anti-gay prejudices dissolved decades earlier. Approaches that worked then were abandoned now.”. What is the main evidence for such claim? Why should we think that there has been significant change in tactics between the pro-gay movement a couple of decades ago, and the pro-trans movement nowadays? What are the tactical mistakes that are present now that were not present to a similar degree in the pro-gay movement? This is not clear to me. I think your point about “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” can play a large role in this issue. Thanks for your post.
Thanks for the response. It's for sure an open question how much "wrong place, wrong time" mattered. I think it was a big factor, but it may be even bigger than I suggest.
"Why should we think that there has been significant change in tactics between the pro-gay movement a couple of decades ago, and the pro-trans movement nowadays?" This question is what the previous two sections are trying to answer. Heath says, and I elaborate, that the trans movement had bigger "asks." I then deny that this is (mainly) due to the nature of trans liberation and suggest it has to do with a more radical political movement "inflating" the asks, and I lay out roughly what the fundamental (and less onerous) asks should be instead. That's the core of what I'm saying.
So I think if you want to challenge this idea, you should argue the asks were never bigger, or that my explanation of why they were bigger is wrong.
I think partially this is a side effect of collective memoryholing of just how radical a lot of early gay activism was. There really were gay activists who wanted to abolish marriage as an institution, who allied with pedophiles in NAMBLA, and so on. Of course, this side of gay activism didn't win out, because it was a nonstarter, but it did provide fodder for conservatives for years.
I think trans issues will likely end up shaking out the same.
Yeah, Andrew Sullivan in particular was a huge deal in changing the goals and presentation of the gay rights movement. Now he's a strident opponent of (the more radical parts of) trans activism, make of that what you will.
I suspect one part of it is that, correctly or not, homosexuality is widely recognized as a natural kind by most people, whereas trans or anything related to gender is not, and is seen more as a culture-bound syndrome of sorts.
I wonder whether Americans thought of homosexuality as a natural kind or culture-bound 60 years ago. It's clear they think of it as a natural kind now ("born that way") but that could be part of the change in view in question.
My suspicion is that it was thought of that way to some extent if only because of the long cultural history of homosexuality. It’s a “known thing” even if it was considered strange or immoral.
There’s also the issue of how “invisible” these things really are. I think homosexuality (in men especially) is in fact visibly/objectively demonstrable in a way trans isn’t (purely subjectivist), and that people generally sense this to be the case.
Wait, how does one determine a man is gay from the outside? Or are we talking probabilities?
Not “determine” as in “verify with certainty”, but i’m referring to things like measuring various automatic bodily responses to certain sexual stimuli.
Ah! But there was this fascinating study about human responses to other species having sex, and it seems like fluctuations in circulation in genitals is just unpredictable and illogical. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sexologists of old didn’t actually find a fast, cheap, and airtight method of securely determining someone’s patter of sexual attraction, but instead recorded something that looked enough like a pattern…
Lots of young men seek help when they’ve had a relative’s baby sit on their lap and the baby squirms and the young man’s penis is physically stimulated and there’s a response, and these patients, I’ve heard, are usually deathly afraid of having pedophilic attraction. No pattern of attraction to children before. My teachers told me it’s almost ‘dead cert’ it’s anxiety, not a psychosexual difference. So erections aren’t a reliable measure of sexual attraction. Also, male rape victims of another man may even ejaculate from the stimulation without any history of seeking sex with men, so I don’t think we can safely say male sexual function is as simple as tumescence == attraction == tumescence.
And what about all the men who have children with a woman and then come out of the closet, divorce, and finally get to be with their preferred sex? If they were bisexual, wouldn’t they get divorced to get out of the marriage, not in order to get to be with men?
Gay and trans rights proceeded together, and were won together. The right not to be arrested over it, to not be discriminated against in housing, employment, and marriage--trans did not lag behind gays for any of these things. We won them together.
It's not just that the remaining asks from trans are more onerous, it's also that they're just more, period.
It's also particularly weird to see you write as if on-the-fence normals see the difference at all. LGB is facing an uphill battle to distinguish itself from the T. Mostly, both left and right are happy to keep them lumped together.
So no, it's got nothing to do with trans rights lagging behind gay rights.
https://garettstone.substack.com/p/the-undeniable-human-a-new-chapter?r=6415fu&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=audio-player