Lgbt

"The simple moral case for resisting transphobia as a form of cruelty should be enough for anyone who has been similarly victimized by society (as cisgender lesbians, gay men and bisexual people have all been in one way or another) to stand with us in solidarity. Yet it should also be a matter of self-interest. The world in which trans people’s rights are restricted relies on narratives of dehumanization and myths of sexual predation. Restricting trans people’s rights relies on policing other people’s gendered appearance in toilets and changing rooms by arbitrating on who looks male or female enough, and by punishing deviation from rigid norms with intimidation and violence. It involves kids following the examples of adults and harassing their peers in the playground for being different. It relies on parents either beating into submission the child asserting their identity, or psychologically breaking them with conversion therapy. These traumatic experiences affect all ‘queers’, whether trans or cis. Advocating for them in any form for any letter will inevitably normalize their use against everyone judged queer. Politically, it is a gift to fascists at a time of growing far-right sentiment in Europe and North America alike."

"Even if a tiny proportion of LGB people are willing to team up with right-wing homophobes to oppose trans civil rights, it only takes a handful of committed LGB people wilfully perpetuating these negative narratives for them to become normalized. Such narratives are then taken up by political conservatives and far-right voices, whose ultimate goal is the dismantling of all LGBTQ+ rights because of their profound disgust for us all."

"Together, an LGBTQ+ coalition with class consciousness and anti-racism at its core must recover its radicalism and reaffirm its opposition to capitalism and patriarchy. Infighting and division are in the interests of our right-wing oppressors. Gay people and trans people have had to battle similar arguments about being ‘unnatural’: homophobia still often rests on the prejudice that the worthiest form of sexuality is that which is capable of reproduction. Transphobia, too, emanates from a prejudice that a person’s stated identity is more trustworthy if it reflects their ‘natural’ role in human reproduction. Similarly, cisgender women’s reproductive freedom is the first thing to be curbed by conservative regimes. Misogyny, homophobia and transphobia share much of the same DNA. To the patriarchy, we all do gender wrong."

"[...] as gender clinics have come under activists' sway, the treatment they offer has taken an ideological turn. Instead of advising parents to watch and wait with sympathy and kindness, they now work on the assumption that childhood gender dysphoria destines someone to trans adulthood. They recommend immediate 'social transition' – a change of name, pronouns and presentation – followed successively by drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones and surgery, often while the patient is still in their teens. This treatment pathway is a fast track to sexual dysfunction and sterility in adulthood."

"This powerful new [transactivist] lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. And it serves their interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification – which includes many post operative transsexuals, who are under no illusion as to how much bodies matter. It also ignores other possible solutions to problems faced by trans people – research into the causes and treatment of gender dysphoria, for instance, or adding unisex facilities alongside single sex ones. Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. When the general public finally realises what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the activists, where it belongs."

"Call me old-fashioned, but if your activism permits men to hit women, and to deprive women of medals, and to humiliate women who’ve trained hard for sporting glory, then it’s not ‘progressive’ – it’s misogyny in woke drag."

"Some trans activists are just as creative as their rejection of reality. Two popular YouTube trans activists (Riley J. Dennis and Zinnia Jones) have proclaimed that it is "cisgender" for people to restrict their mating preferences to "cisnormative" individuals; or in other words, heterosexuality is bigoted. It would seem that my my marriage is transphobic because I never considered a transgendered individual as a prospective wife."

"One of the primary objectives of trans sports activists is to normalize their theory of gender fluidity as settled fact. They sometimes resort to ruthless tactics in order to chill discourse that pushes back against their dogmas. They have de-platformed speakers, such as outspoken feminist Meghan Murphy. They have mobbed opponents on social media and, often successfully, demanded that their accounts be blocked (it helps that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are sympathetic to gender ideology). They have organized campaigns to cripple or end the careers of pre-eminent sexologists, including Dr. Kenneth Zucker, former director of the Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. And they have ensure that trans activists constitute an influential presence on committees tasked with providing gender identity guidelines in education, jurisprudence, social services, and yes, sport. They label anyone in the media who opposes their claims as "transphobic." Observant readers will have noticed that, in the last few years, the mainstream media have lost heart for engagement on this front and have largely ceded the field to the gender theorists."

"Girls deserve equal opportunity to compete and achieve in sports. The Biden administration's reinterpretation of Title IX is a slap in the face to young women and girls, telling them their hard work, on-field achievements, and athletic futures do not matter. Title IX was designed to stop discrimination and ensure equal athletic opportunities for women. By allowing biological males to compete in girls' sports the Biden administration will be reversing 50 years of progress for women. H.R. 734, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 strengthens the law's existing protections for women, ensures a level playing field for female athletes, and protects the law from the Biden administration's radical regulatory scheme."

"Trans people are emblematic of wider, conceptual concerns about the autonomy of the individual in society. Their rejection of dominant, ancient and deep-seated ideas about the connection between biological characteristics and identity causes a dilemma for the nation state: whether to acknowledge and give credence to the individual’s assertion of their own identity in law and in culture; or to mandate that it, the state, is the final authority on identity, and to assert its power over the individual – by force if necessary. Attacking the very concept of trans people by imposing rigid and immutable definitions of sex and gender, as Orbán’s party has done, is the latest iteration of the way national governments embrace totalitarian ideology. After all, attacking trans people has been a part of fascist practice since the destruction of ’s Berlin back in 1933 by Nazi youth brigades."

"[Social Justice Campaigners] decided instead to push vigorously on trans: to pick up the hardest part of the whole question ('I am who I say I am and you can't prove otherwise') and run with it: 'Trans lives matter'; 'Some people are trans. Get over it'. Everywhere, with a wearying predictability, the people who always complain about every aspect of the patriarchal, hegemonic, cis-supremacist, homophobic, institutionally racist, sexist state, decided to run with the trans issue. They specifically claimed that yes, if a man said he was a woman and didn't do anything about it, then yes he was a woman and it was transphobic to suggest otherwise."

"It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, more subtle and hidden, perhaps, intent upon exploiting human rights themselves against man and against the family."

"Transgender activism purports that biological sex and "gender" are non-binary fluid constructs."

"[L]esbians and radical feminists who object to the idea that identification should grant biological men an all-access pass to women’s rights and safe spaces are openly derided as “TERFs” all over social media."

"To talk about the "rights" of someone who has chosen to rebel against responsible living is nonsense. It is simply not true that all human beings have the same rights."

"There is an effort in some countries to manipulate the Church by gaining the often well-intentioned support of her pastors with a view to changing civil-statutes and laws. This is done in order to conform to these pressure groups' concept that homosexuality is at least a completely harmless, if not an entirely good, thing. Even when the practice of homosexuality may seriously threaten the lives and well-being of a large number of people, its advocates remain undeterred and refuse to consider the magnitude of the risks involved.The Church can never be so callous. It is true that her clear position cannot be revised by pressure from civil legislation or the trend of the moment. But she is really concerned about the many who are not represented by the pro-homosexual movement and about those who may have been tempted to believe its deceitful propaganda. She is also aware that the view that homosexual activity is equivalent to, or as acceptable as, the sexual expression of conjugal love has a direct impact on society's understanding of the nature and rights of the family and puts them in jeopardy."

"Everyone has their own Stonewall legend."

"The girls of Stonewall siam: | I'll do the perm; | we don't wear underwear; | pubic hair shows! | The queens of the Siam village: | we always look at ourselves | let's do the perm, | because we are girls!"

"The last goal I set for myself was to find the Stonewall. The news of the battle against the police in C.E.1969 had affected us immensely. I wanted to ask a passerby to take a photo of me in front of the bar. I thought that one day, after I die, someone might find the photo and understand me a little better."

"Trans feminists seek to interrogate society’s ingrained assumptions about the social and cultural meanings we ascribe to biology. They also generally incorporate an analysis of intersex people, who do not fit this reductive model, and who have suffered historical and ongoing mistreatment at the hands of a medical establishment obsessed with imposing binary biological sex on to bodies that don’t ‘fit’. The experiences of trans and intersex people show us that not all humans fit perfectly into two clear-cut categories of biological sex; indeed, the belief there are two separate sex categories is itself an erasure of sex variations that occur either naturally or through medical modification."

"I think I've done quite a good job of integrating male and female attributes. I've since discovered that so many people who don't have intersex conditions do just the same after a midlife crisis. … What I don't understand is why people who are normally so willing to accept that each human being is unique, are suddenly so afraid of variation when faced with the fact that between the conventional extremes of what we understand as being male and female there are endless shades of variety."

"Sex segregation directly harms many intersex and transgender athletes and would-be athletes. But, these policies also harm many cisgender people who do not see a place for themselves in certain sports because they sense and are told by parents, peers, teachers, and coaches that they do not measure up to the normative masculinities and femininities that we attach to those sports. … [T]he material evidence of binary sex is not always visible, measurable, or stable over time."

"I got in touch with a support group [for intersex people] when I was eighteen. They agreed to send me some information. … A big, brown envelope arrived, and I … opened it in private and read through it. I was … partly relieved in that I now knew what my condition was exactly, and why I'd had the surgery, and that it was an intersex condition. [But I was] … shocked and … horrified that nobody had had the decency to tell me about it as I was growing up. … The doctors decided not to tell me or my parents that it was an intersex condition, because they [thought] that [I would] grow up psychologically unbalanced and unable to cope with the [knowledge]. … The clitorectomy … cut the nerve endings out of the clitoris, [and] some of the erectile tissue; but most of it was left tied back onto the skin to the pubic bone. … [I]f I get aroused, it tightens up and pulls away from that bone and causes … excruciating pain. That's something I'm left with for the rest of my life; there's nothing that can be done about that."

"It is interesting to compare Queer Theory with Vedanta and Buddhism both of which consider linguistic categories as relative to our world of cognition. Categories are seen as constructed by the ego’s cognitive system. The relative realm we live in is the laukika /empirical realm. The paramarthika or absolute reality transcends all categories. In this sense, what Queer Theory is claiming has long ago been thoroughly explained in Indian thought."

"Queer theory proposes to think identities in terms that place as a problem the production of normalcy and in terms that confound the intelligibility of the apparatuses that produce identity as repetition."

"We are in sympathy with the ideas of the Querists presented above. However, things don’t stop here. An important result of Queer Theory we note is that one cannot argue against them because they reject outright, any opponents using scientific and rational categories. Therefore, their discourse is more like the dogma of a Church, and it is blasphemy to challenge their thesis using evidence-based logic. We disagree and would like free speech. No discussion should be declared final and closed to further development."

"Interestingly, in support of Queer Theory, in the Vedic system, Ishwar (God) is represented often as half male and half female, and a blurring of boundaries between masculinity and femininity even in the understanding of divinity. Therefore, what the Querists are saying has already been respected in the Indian tradition."

"Why don't we do it? (やらないか, yaranai ka)"

"What? Again? But you came only a minute ago, is your dick on crack or something?"

"Whoa! Hot guy! (ウホッ! いい男…, Uho! Ii otoko...)"

"But you never know, it might be fun to do it covered in shit."

"Abe: Good, now let it all out."

"Michishita: [penetrating Abe] Okay, it’s in."

"However, parallel to this semantic broadening, there has been an inverse movement of lexical differentiation operating at the heart of the concept of homophobia. Because of the specificity of attitudes towards lesbianism, the term lesbophobia has been introduced into theoretic discourses, a term which brings to light particular mechanisms that the generic concept of homophobia tends to overshadow. With one stroke, this distinction justifies the term gayphobia, since much homophobic discourse, in reality, pertains only to male homosexuality. Similarly, the concept of biphobia has also been proposed in order to highlight the singular situation of bisexuals, often stigmatized by both heterosexual and homosexual communities. Moreover, we need to take into consideration the very different issues linked to transsexual, transvestite, and transgender persons, which brings to mind the notion of transphobia."

"There is very clearly a difference in mechanisms between gayphobia and lesbophobia, and this translates into different types of aggression. Where the collective imagination over-sexualizes gay men and exerts strong verbal and physical violence against boys and men who are not considered sufficiently masculine / heterosexual; for women, on the other hand, the assertion of their lesbian identity will be further disqualified, minimized, reduced to a fad, or even sexualized as a prelude to heterosexuality."

"Gayphobia is a form of homophobia that specifically affects men. Although it is primarily aimed at gay and bisexual men, it can also affect heterosexual men who are perceived as homosexual. Gay men may be targets of physical aggression or devalued by stereotypes linked to feminisation and hypersexualisation."

"Public toilet signaling by gay men, the glory hole and the graffiti, demonstrates the ubiquity and transgressive nature of public, casual sex for many homosexuals."

"Sex for gay men has often been equated with a feeling of freedom and independence. For many gay men, sex with another man is often seen as the sole expression of being gay. Historically, it has not been uncommon - and there are still men who behave this way today - for men who have sex with other men to have two lives. One is the life that looks fairly ordinary to the outside observer; that is, no one would be able to look at this person and suspect anything gay about him. The other life involves the man going out looking for gay sex. This type of person probably does not identify as gay, may not have any gay friends, and does not desire a lasting relationship with another man. He just wants sex with men."

"[There is an] antisocial impulse to queer revolt that may lead some gay men to have risky sex - the delirious pleasure some gay men may take in contravening both society’s norms and their own (“the rejection of normal life”)."

"That gay men are capable of sex without significant emotional cathexis has given rise to the idea that gay men are “promiscuous.” This observation - one of the key planks in the campaign to keep gay men [nothing more than] homosexuals - tells us little about being gay. The issue has come to the fore because the campaign is focused on sex, and because gay men are typically more forthcoming about their sexual lives than heterosexual men, many of whom envy the sexual freedom gay men experience. Gay men have the same capacity for purely libidinous, uncathected sex that a majority of human males have; but gay men are unfettered by the traditional, socially promoted sensibilities and sexual expectations of women… Heterosexual society has a significant investment in keeping gay sex apparently promiscuous and emotionally empty."

"Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of ."

""Degenerate disorderly conduct," the offense for which the men at Koenig's were convicted, was the charge usually brought against gay men or lesbians found gathering on the streets or in public accommodations, or gay men trying to pick up other men [in 1920s' New York City]. The use of the disorderly-conduct law against gay people was consistent with the intent of the law, which effectively criminalized a wide range of non-normative behavior in public spaces, as defined by the dominant culture."

"Many Latino gay men may be quite competent in dealing and functioning within the mainstream gay culture, but affectively and emotionally they feel quite disconnected and ill-at-ease within it for a number of different reasons, ranging from non-standard physical appearance to institutionalized class and race discrimination practices within the gay community."

"The last and most painful thing I’ve learned from my contacts with gay men is how the war between the sexes looks from the other side. As embarrassing as it is, I finally had to concede that women engage in a lot of behavior that is homophobic or sexist, and that it is women who enforce much of the sexual repression of the children they raise. This doesn’t mean that I think women are equally responsible for their own oppression. Men get most of the goodies from the system and have the highest investment in keeping it running. But I no longer feel that all women are innocent victims, and all men are misogynist monsters."

"Scholars writing about “not-women and not-men” have frequently drawn the conclusion that these “not-women and not-men” were this country’s first lesbians and gays. Williams (1992), Roscoe (1988), Allen (1981), and others have concluded that American Indian lesbian women and gay men are these “not-men and not-women” who have occurred among most if not all American Indian tribal groups."

"John Campbell similarly documented the important role of online spaces in gay men’s culture: focusing on gay Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, he chronicled the importance of online spaces for gay community formation as well as for identity management and construction."

"To speak, as we do today, of homosexual individuals would have been quite incomprehensible little more than a century ago. The notion that individuals might be arrayed along a spectrum of hetero-homosexual experience was outrageous when it was put forward in the 1940s. The revolutionary proclamation of gay pride in the 1970s was breathtaking in its audacity… Equally, it is important to situate the responses of gay and bisexual men to AIDS in the 1980s in a very specific historical moment. It is impossible to appreciate the range and complexity of gay men’s responses without some understanding of the community which produced and nurtured them. It is equally impossible to understand the political preoccupations of the gay community with regard to testing, treatment and access to healthcare without an appreciation of the historical relationship between the communities and the medical profession."

"Many gay men have been subjected to bouts of name-calling, possibly from a time before they even realized what homosexuality was. The over-lexicalisation of pejorative terms for “gay man” which exist (for example: faggot, pansy, puff, shirt-lifter, brown-hatter, fairy, batty-boy, queer, etc.) is further testament to their status as “target.” Faced with verbal abuse from an early age, it is likely that some gay men would have responded by developing both a thick skin and superior ability to remark upon the weak spots or oddities of others."

"Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"

"Despite the negative stereotypes, most older gay men adapt as well, if not better, to aging than do straight-identified men… Overall, older gay men adjust better than heterosexual men because older gay men have learned to operate independent of traditional societal structures. That is, older gay men have developed coping skills to deal with societal stigma. Because our society tends to stigmatize the elderly, older gay men may be better prepared to cope with that stigma based on their years of living with the stigma of homosexuality."