[gykno]

The root cause of all this is the LGBTQ+ in aggregate. Everything after the first three letters is irrelevant to sexual orientation.

If it had just been left as the LGB, that's something people can get on board with much more easily, from an individual liberties perspective and the principle of equal treatment under the law.

However, the TQ+, with its fundamental reframing of what it means to be a man or a woman, in terms of gender identity rather than sex, is something quite different. It's compelling people to believe something very controversial: that some men are actually women, and some women are actually man, and some people are somehow neither.

No surprise that this is getting pushback. But it's unfortunate, and really quite galling, that the LGB are also being dragged into this mess, particularly given all the gains made in recent years on equality.

[danShumway]

I have some very bad news for you if you think that a lot of transphobic, aphobic, and queerphobic people in aggregate aren't going to eventually come for LGB people too. If you think the LGB movement is going to pacify bigots by throwing transgender people under the bus... it's just a bad plan, they're not going to be pacified. A lot of the politicians banning affirmative care for transgender people would love to roll back gay protections.

But whatever, this is mostly just identity gatekeeping anyway. Transgender people were always active in early LGB rights movements from the beginning, and the idea that gay identity is normal but transgenderism is "controversial" is just laughably ignorant of how controversial gay identity used to be (and how controversial it still is in many circles).

People have some really serious short-term memory loss if they think that the LGB rights movement didn't go through the exact same pushback that the transgender rights movement is facing today, and that pushback included a ton of people who were all too eager to talk about how "respectable" gays deserved rights, but the fringe gays who did stuff like hold hands in public or talk about their partners openly were holding back the rest of the movement.

[gykno]

They may have been active in the movement since the early days, but it's also been a point of contention then, particularly amongst lesbians.

In particular, the modern gender critical movement is a direct continuation of an ideological split amongst lesbian feminists back in the 1970s, one group of whom considered transsexual males to be honorary women and welcome in their spaces as lesbians, and the other who regarded them as straight men who were infiltrating and imposing themselves, and effectively erasing lesbians as a group.

In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population. Over 80% in much of western Europe, Canada and Australia. And over 70% in the US and Argentina.

What we're seeing with this pushback against trans activism in these more accepting places isn't because people have suddenly become more homophobic, but for very specific reasons caused by this activism - effectively the same issue that the feminists of the 1970s were arguing furiously about, but in the public sphere.

Now you are right that some homophobic politicians have jumped onto this issue too, and used it as a lever to push against LGB rights. But they're doing so opportunistically. The more fundamental issue, opposed by many across the political spectrum who have otherwise discordant beliefs, is this elevation of gender identity above sex. For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.

[danShumway]

> In some parts of the world, LGB acceptance is very high amongst the general population.

Because of activism in the face of people who called gay orientation unnatural or dangerous -- activism that trans-exclusionists now want to see stopped just because they're worried about backlash and because they feel that they personally, individually no longer need that activism in order to be accepted in mainstream society.

If you went back in time you would see the same conversation we're having now play out about both bisexual and asexual people who both have faced the same kind of "are they really gay" gatekeeping that's happening here. If you went back further, you would see another split among feminists about whether lesbians could be considered feminist or whether they were distracting from feminist goals. If you went back even further, you'd see the same splits in feminist circles about intersectionality and whether talking about racism made feminism unattractive to white people. At every step, these exclusions were justified by talking about how the "less proper" activists were holding the broader gay/feminist/whatever movement back from mainstream acceptance.

It's the same story over and over again with each pushback characterizing the people they want to exclude as if they're uniquely controversial or dangerous to the movement. But they're not; it's just gatekeeping. Excusing bigotry that labels transgender people as pedophiles as if that bigotry is just reactionary pushback is really historically ignorant, given that literally the exact same "gays are pedophiles and groomers" rhetoric was used against LGB groups (and was especially used against bisexual people). There are parallels here that are impossible to ignore.

> For example, in the UK, on a grassroots level it's been mostly left-wing feminist women pushing back against this, not homophobic conservatives.

If trans-exclusionists want to talk strategy, then arguing that identity is the same as sexual deviancy, and aligning themselves with homophobic reactionaries is extremely short-sighted, foolish, and dangerous to the overall gay rights movement.

From the beginning, transgender people have done just as much to fight for LGB rights as anyone else in the movement and they deserve acceptance and support. Transgender people helped these so-called feminists put up the ladder, you don't get to pull the ladder up behind you now.