ANALYSIS: Trans activists tell straight, gay people they can’t have ‘genital preferences’
The debate is the latest example of the fallout of queer theory–concepts taught in college courses that attempt to erase biological reality.
'Radical Gender Theory, and intersectionality as a whole, is a tool by cultural Marxists to keep people divided in struggle and on the defense as victims,' Log Cabin Republicans President Charles Moran told Campus Reform.
A recent Twitter trend has reignited a debate within the LGBTQ community. The debate involves the lesbian and gay members who are resisting the tendency of queer theory–an ideology advanced in higher education–to present conflicting, even regressive messages about the ability to find love in same-sex relationships.
“[I]n the last week,” one Twitter user writes, “I have seen a huge surge of ‘I am now anti-trans because someone told me I wasn’t allowed to have genital preferences.’”
Yeah that in the last week I have seen a huge surge of “I am now anti-trans because someone told me I wasn’t allowed to have genital preferences” feels like an op to me. Argued with a gay person who kept implying siding with anti-gay people was right because of that. Okay sure...
— Megan E. Zombi (@ZombiScribe) March 1, 2023
The subject of “genital preferences” is the latest debate in the LGBTQ community, with some tweeting that it is “transphobic” when a cisgender person does not want to date or is not attracted to a transgender man or woman.
[RELATED: STUDY: Transgender parents unwilling to label children’s gender identities]
Others, however, argue that activists looking to abolish genital preferences–the desire to date someone with specific genitalia– are “simply an echo of the ‘choosing the gay lifestyle’ rhetoric of the late 70s and 80s.”
The criticism of the latest trend in transgender activism as homophobic has been shared across the Anglosphere, including by journalists in Canada and England and in the pages of Campus Reform.
EJ Rosetta, a London-based writer featured in outlets including HuffPost, told Campus Reform, “I cannot choose my sexuality nor change it, opt in or out, and neither can anyone else.”
She described a problem in the transgender community: objectives are often pushed, not by people who are transgender, but by those she calls “Trans Rights Activists” (TRAs). Rosetta, who told Campus Reform that she is “a trans ally” and “[has] been for over a decade,” noted the harm done by TRAs.
“They do not ask, they demand and dictate, and we lesbians wish to be distanced from that,” she says. “We are going backwards!”
Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief Zachary Marschall made a similar argument when he described the fallout from “queer theory,” a set of concepts that, “in trying to always be about everything,” are “precisely about nothing.” These concepts–taught in college courses and advanced by on-campus gender and sexuality centers–attempt to erase biological reality.
In doing so, Marschall writes, activists promoting queer theory criticize anyone who follows traditional family values in getting married and having children precisely because those values are traditional.
“That is why radical queers go after gay individuals,” he argues, describing “those homosexuals who live their lives openly and honestly, but happily within the gender binary” and sometimes “as faithful, parenting, and church-going Americans.”
Marschall suggests that attempts to break down the gender binary–including activists’ attacks on cisgender men for who they are (or are not) attracted to–hearken back to the days of conversion therapy. Ditching genital preferences, his argument also implies, defies the decades-long fight to achieve same-sex marriage that was won, in part, because of the realization that who people love is not a choice.
Charles Moran, President of the Log Cabin Republicans, calls the ideas promoted by activists “Radical Gender Theory.”
The organization is “the nation’s original and largest organization representing LGBT conservatives and straight allies,” according to its website.
“Radical Gender Theory, and intersectionality as a whole, is a tool by cultural Marxists to keep people divided in struggle and on the defense as victims,” Moran told Campus Reform.
”We as gay conservatives wholly reject that. And it doesn’t mean we have to stop advocating for basic rights for trans individuals, but we’re never going to go down the lunacy road that blurs the lines between the immutable fact, and importance, of gender in society, that the left is so desperately trying to destroy.”
Rosetta said in her interview with Campus Reform that a split in the LGBTQ community might be necessary given that the issues of the transgender and nonbinary communities seem to diverge from those who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual.
“[T]he split is not a negative but a recognition that we are different so deserve different [organizations] to look after our individual needs,” she writes.
Rosetta uses terms within the gender binary to describe advocates for gay and lesbian rights, who “fought hard to be able to be out in polite society and will not have the very term used to describe … [l]esbians diluted.”
“[L]ife is too short and love is too important to be over-polite.”
Campus Reform contacted all relevant parties listed, though not all Twitter users could be reached for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
