The Mischaracterization of LGB Alliance as a Supposed Hate Group

Mia Ashton describes how it happened that lesbians are being attacked and disparaged. Here is an excerpt of her article at Public:

"[F]rom its conception, LGB Alliance was under attack. While Harris describes that first meeting as “joyous,” during which those who had been silenced and called bigots, transphobes, and neo-Nazis basked in the joy of meeting like-minded individuals, the announcement of their group’s formation just days later “unleashed the most extraordinary storm.”

“From that moment onwards, there was an absolute onslaught against us to try and squash us before we started,” recalls Harris. The reason for this was that, at that point, LGB Alliance was the only organization in the world that said it was okay to be gay or lesbian and not believe in gender identity.

In the deluge of abuse that followed, LGB Alliance was repeatedly called a hate group. Harris thinks it was LGB in the name that really made trans activists angry. “That implied that we hated the T. Well, we don’t agree. We think you can have a dogs’ charity who don’t hate cats.”

But according to Harris and Jackson, redefining homosexuality from same-sex attraction to same-gender attraction and insisting that heterosexual men can be lesbians is not the only harmful effect of trans activism on the LGB community.

Because another curious development was that Stonewall, and self-proclaimed LGBTQ+ activists, also started to advocate for the medicalization of adolescents who identify as transgender, many of whom are gay or lesbian. “This is what is happening in schools at the moment,” Jackson explained, “lesbian has become a dirty word. There was a time when being gay or lesbian was becoming more accepted, even among teenagers, but now it is not.” Now lesbians come out first as lesbians, then they call themselves non-binary, and then, “six months later, they’re trying to find testosterone, and they’re trying to have their breasts cut off.”

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Transgender Activism and the Road not Taken

ELIZA MONDEGREEN argues that we could have avoided most of the pandemonium we are currently witnessing about transgenderism. His article is titled: "Trans Activism and the Road Not Taken: The current conflict over trans rights was entirely avoidable."

Here an excerpt from Mondegreen's article, along with Colin Wright's illustration:

A conversation about reasonable accommodations is a nuanced conversation. Instead, we got a radical trans movement that wants to erase sex in law and society, put men in women's prisons and boys in girls' sports, and run an unregulated medical experiment on gender-nonconforming children. This has given rise to an absurd and dystopian reality where men are granted access to women’s prisons, sports, and other protected spaces, and where gender-nonconforming children have become the target of unregulated medical experiments that involve puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and extreme surgeries.

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Conservatives Defending Traditional Liberal Values

How did it come to be that conservatives have become the most vocal defenders of traditional liberal values? At Public, Michael Shellenberger describes the challenge facing those of us who embrace traditional liberal values:

For most of the post-war period, liberalism in the United States was defined around freedom of speech, the needs of the working class, and the fight against racism and sexism. It was liberals who defended the right to burn the American flag, and of neo-Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. It was liberals who fought against corporate power and for the rights of working people. And it was liberals who fought to end racial segregation and to protect girls and women, including in sports.

All of that has changed. Today, it is conservatives who are fighting the racial re-segregation of classrooms and workforces by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) administrators in thrall to Critical Race Theory (CRT). It is conservatives who are defending the right to freedom of expression online from progressives demanding greater censorship by Big Tech and the government. And it is conservatives who are defending the rights of girls and women to female-only spaces and sports from natal males...

A similar dynamic occurred with the natural environment. After World War II, both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, supported industrialization, economic development in poor nations, and nuclear power. Starting in the 1960s, the radical Left turned against industrialization, and started romanticizing peasant life in poor nations, while opposing nuclear energy in rich nations. The result was that Republicans were left holding positions that were once mainstream liberal ones...

As a result, conservatives find themselves in the paradoxical position of defending traditional liberal values like free speech and racial equality from progressives.... A big part of the reason as to why it has been left to conservatives to defend liberalism is because the radical Left, or what is sometimes called the Woke Left, had already defeated traditional liberals, first in major societal institutions and then in Congress, many years and some cases decades ago. [Christopher] Rufo attributes much of the radical Left’s success to its ability to manipulate language and emotions.

Traditional liberals didn’t understand who they were dealing with. The liberal university presidents, the newspaper editors, and the heads of various professional associations were committed to civil dialogue and democracy; the radical Left insurgents were not. The radical Left didn’t hesitate to use illiberal means, including making false accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, against their opponents...

Readers of Public know that I believe that the radical Left’s power stems from being able to offer a complete Woke religion to fill the vacuum left by declining belief in traditional religions ... Into the spiritual void emerged a new religion: victim ideology, or Wokeism.

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