Lgbt

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Glenn Youngkin’s transgender policy is just common sense

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has delivered a major win for the school board parents who helped propel him to victory in 2021. Starting in October, the state's public schools will be required to adhere to a new policy regarding transgender students. The updated guidance, first reported by the Daily Wire, is rooted in truth, parental rights, and plain ol' common sense. Transgender students are now only allowed to change their names on official documents with permission from their parents. Students must also demonstrate a "persistent and sincere belief" that they identify as a different gender. "Overnight travel accommodations, locker rooms and other intimate spaces used for school-related activities and events shall be based on sex,” the policy also says.

youngkin

Monday

Bruce Bawer

How Amsterdam ceased to be gay heaven

Last month, in preparation for an article about the growing gay backlash against trans ideology, I spoke with Bev Jackson, the co-founder of LGB Alliance, a gay and lesbian activist group that opposes the hijacking of the gay rights movement by transfolk. Bev told me about her background — fifty years in British gay activism, a resident of Amsterdam for four decades — and asked me about mine. I mentioned my 2006 book While Europe Slept, a cri de coeur about the Islamization of Europe. I heard in her voice a degree of disquiet about its topic. Nonetheless, she asked me to participate in the LGB Alliance’s forthcoming annual convention. I accepted, but when I hung up I told my partner: “I’ve been invited to a convention in London.

Thursday

David J. Garrow

The rise of gay Washington

Anyone under fifty may be unaware of how largely invisible gay Americans were until at least the 1980s. James Kirchick’s incredibly rich and impressively thorough Secret City does not mention Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the criminalization of gay sexuality, but only post-Bowers did the push for gay equality, and eventually same-sex marriage, rapidly become what he rightly calls “the most successful social movement in American history.” In 1992, a Gallup poll indicated that 43 percent of Americans said they knew a gay person — double the figure from just seven years earlier — and across all of America it was that growing knowledge of the presence of gay people that allowed such a dramatic political transformation to take place.

gay
Friends
Amber Duke

Friends creator falls victim to white guilt

Friends creator Marta Kauffman is very, very sorry. No, not for forcing us to endure the exhausting decades-long debate over whether Friends or Seinfeld is a better sitcom (the show about nothing wins without question, obviously). Instead, Kauffman apologized to the woke mob for not being nearly three decades ahead of her time. The fun-sucking left has for years complained that Friends is *problematic*. The show, they whine, lacked diversity and mocked and trivialized issues such as fat-shaming and transphobia. Kauffman says she finally took these concerns to heart after the death of George Floyd because the incident forced her to reckon with the way she "bought into systemic racism." Gag.

Friday

Phoebe Maltz Bovy

The fall of feminism led to the fall of Roe

It would be too much to say that wokeness lost Roe for progressives. There is of course a contingent in American politics and the population at large that views abortion as murder or murder-adjacent, and this is the camp that has, for the time being, gotten its way. But if you’re looking to sort out how the ostensibly pro-choice side got complacent enough to let the right to choose get overturned, look no further than the sorry state of contemporary feminism. If even so-called feminists think the typical American woman has it too easy, what hope is there for the fight for women’s rights?

feminism

Sunday

Cockburn

NYT finally tackles gender therapy

Cockburn started his Sunday by spitting Darjeeling all over the pages of the New York Times magazine. The cause of alarm? A lengthy, nuanced, meaty analysis of gender therapy had found its way into the paper of record. In Pride month, no less! Feature writer Emily Bazelon spent eight months reporting out the story, speaking to “more than sixty clinicians, researchers, activists and historians, as well as more than two dozen young people and about the same number of parents.” Her over-10,000-word article is framed around the forthcoming release of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s new Standards of Care guidelines, which are likely to prove controversial among both the pro- and anti-trans lobbies. It’s well worth a read.

nyt gender therapy

Wednesday

Cockburn

Nancy Pelosi: drag is ‘what America is all about’

Cockburn could not be more unnerved. He just happened to catch a clip of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on RuPaul's All Stars Drag Race. Not to be confused with actual drag racing, with cars that blur by quickly, the 100-second-clip, like Pelosi herself, dragged on slowly and painfully. But for once — or twice, this is her second time on the show — Nancy wasn't the most artificially made-up person in the room. What Pelosi told the "queens" was also um, something: My honor to be here, to say to all of you how we proud we are of you. Thank you for the joy and beauty you bring to the world. Your freedom of expression of yourselves in drag is what America is all about. I say that all the time to my friends in drag.

Wednesday

Matt Purple

It’s only a culture war when the right does it

Having recently botched South African history, the New York Times is now turning its sights to Australia. Our friends Down Under are holding an election this week in which the Australian Labor Party is expected to beat the Liberal-National coalition for the first time since 2013. (For Americans in need of a guide, the capital-L Liberals in Canada stand for the left, in Australia for the right, and in the UK for nothing whatsoever.) It's the issue of trans rights in the Australian campaign that has the Times's unisex knickers in a twist. They're worried in particular about one candidate, Katherine Deves, a Liberal running for a seat in parliament. Deves has said that trans youths who undergo gender-transition surgeries are being "mutilated.

times

Friday

Taylor Millard

Will DeSantis’s revenge on Disney work?

The Walt Disney Company is going to need some special magic following two losses in the Florida state legislature. Florida's House and Senate passed laws this week ending Disney’s self-governing special district and closing an exemption in the current social media law for companies that own theme parks. Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the legislation. It’s a quick governmental haymaker to Disney’s big-eared visage and a surprising one. The Friends of Ron DeSantis political action committee has accepted almost $107,000 from Disney Worldwide Services, according to records. Disney regularly hands out money to both Republicans and Democrats.

ron desantis disney

Thursday

Amber Duke

Americans support ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, poll shows

A new poll found that Americans overwhelmingly support the language of the Parental Rights in Education bill signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis this week. Celebrities at the Oscars on Sunday night shrieked about the alleged attack on LGBT rights and Disney executives were caught on tape promising to create more queer content for children in response to the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill. A poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies indicates that these woke institutions are wholly out of step with the concerns of normal Americans. When registered voters were shown the actual language of the bill, which prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate sexual education in pre-K through third grade, they supported it by more than a two-to-one margin.

boycott parental

Tuesday

Chadwick Moore

Attacks on the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law are about control

The alphabet people screamed in bloodcurdling unison Monday as Florida governor Ron DeSantis coolly signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed, in lockstep, by activists and the mainstream media the "Don’t Say Gay" bill, the words "gay," "homosexual" or anything similar don’t appear anywhere in the six-page law. Quite clearly, the law states that "a school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." A few things to note here: "primary grade levels" are defined in Florida as age three to grade three.

desantis

Friday

Michael Warren Davis

The trans debate shows we’re all supremacists

Why did Lia Thomas bother changing his name? According to the gender-studies mavens, it wasn’t strictly necessary. A trans woman doesn’t need a vaginoplasty or breast implants. He doesn’t even need to wear dresses. He doesn’t have to date men, or watch Downton Abbey or merge into traffic without checking his blind spots. Those are all socially constructed ideas of femininity. Trans women don’t have to conform to these sexist, patriarchal norms. Womanhood is a state of mind. The question, of course, is: what kind of state? The LGBT lobby refuses to answer that question. The official line is that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman. If Hugh Jackman came out today and said, “Oi, mate, I’m a sheila,” a sheila he’d be. Fair dinkum.

Friday

Cockburn

President Stacey Abrams gives Star Trek its far-left final frontier

Star Trek: Discovery took one giant leap for the leftist ideology that defines it in its fourth season finale this week. Enter President Stacey Abrams, leader of the thirty-second century’s United Earth. Perhaps deliberately, the sci-fi show’s writers left viewers ignorant as to whether President Abrams was democratically elected to her fictional role. Star Trek’s democratic ideals, after all, seem poorly matched to a politician who lost an election and then claimed that it had been “stolen from the voters of Georgia.” No worries, however: Abrams’s future is bright. Concluding her cameo, Abrams asks Discovery’s star Sonequa Martin-Green, “there's a lot of work to do, are you ready for that?

stacey abrams star trek

Friday

Chadwick Moore

Sam Brinton and the dorkification of kink

Remember when gay people were cool? Libertines and romantics, reviled, spat-upon, defiant and irreverent? Gay life could be sexy and thrilling, tragic and shameful. If the homosexual offered nothing else, he carried an arsenal of bawdy tales that left any housewife glued and dithering at a cocktail party. Judge his life as you may, but never call it ordinary. The mystique is gone. That dusky boundary between the dark and dirty and the workaday has evaporated. Assimilation has meant the faces of gay are either vapid, Instagram-famous semen receptacles, complete goobers or repulsive shrills. And they’ve dragged the rest of us, by association, into their orbit of cringe. The Forces of Biden particularly love the latter two.

sam brinton

Monday

Peter Van Buren

Drinking your way through the Chinese Olympics

The thing I am looking forward to the least right now is the Olympics, and I have a colonoscopy scheduled. The only answer is a drinking game. Enough with "politics by sportscasters for those who only care about politics." I threw away my Mao (and Che) T-shirts sophomore year. We all know Beijing is not a democratic regime. So for some sort of balance, can we all agree that for every hundred references to the Uighurs, Tibet and Hong Kong, we make one to where and how Covid all began? Or will the mainstream media continue their coverage détente? Bottoms up for every reference to bats, pangolins and Chinese wet markets. Speaking of Covid, a drink every time announcers insist China's Covid crackdown is autocratic draconianism while ignoring that much of the same was done in America.

Thursday

Chadwick Moore

No love for the gays at the Beijing Winter Olympics

The nights are about to get a lot colder for men’s figure skaters at the Winter Games. Gay hookup app Grindr was removed from app stores in China this month just ahead of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. Olympians are famously hot to trot. As far back as 1988, the International Olympic Committee banned outdoor sex after condoms were found littering the rooftops of the Olympic Village in Seoul. Complimentary condoms remained a staple at the Games, reaching a record at Rio in 2016 where 450,000 "little shirts," as they’re called in local slang, were supplied to the Olympic Village — that’s forty-two per athlete.

grindr

Friday

Peter Van Buren

Glee gives us a lesson in wokeness

YouTube just sent me down a spiral rewatching old Glee clips. I was never a Glee fan per se, but it was one of a handful of shows I watched when my kids were in Peak Mode, old enough to be interesting as people but not yet old enough to realize I was not interesting. My kids are adults now; did TV help form them? It did. And what we all learned, and especially how we learned it, is a lesson on the failure of 2021 wokeness to achieve change and instead just piss people off. In 2021, Glee strikes me as influential. When it first aired, it was thought of as, at least in a suburban way, edgy. I’m sure eyes all across Brooklyn are rolling but they miss the point. Glee being suburban was the point.

glee

Tuesday

Chadwick Moore

Man of Sssssssteel

So — Superman has come out. He’s gay. I know, stop the presses, another figure of the comic book universe is being stripped of his straight, white, maleness and tossed into the volcano of intersectionality. It’s about as edgy and groundbreaking as a consumer-product survey. I was less surprised to learn Superman was getting pinkwashed than I was to find out Superman isn’t Superman anymore. There’s a new Superman, apparently, and it’s Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s son, Jonathan Kent. According to DC Comics sometime this month he’s going to kiss a dude and, poof, be gay, or bisexual, or whatever. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a pillow-biter! What it isn’t is believable. I mean, have you met any of us gay men?

superman

Tuesday

Mary Harrington

The trans war on the body

'Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Some people choose their family And they love each other so proudly And they all go marching in The Big Parade!' In June, the Journal of Medical Ethics spelled out what it means in practice to teach children that family bonds are optional. If the world is to ‘take LGBT testimony seriously,’ argued Maura Priest, a bioethicist at the Arizona State University, then ‘parents should lose veto power over most transition-related pediatric care’. In many states, this is already well-established. In 2015, Oregon passed a law giving minors the right to receive transgender medical interventions at taxpayers’ expense, and without their parents’ consent.

trans jessica yaniv progressive misogyny

Tuesday

Rod Dreher

Viktor Orbán is winning his culture war

Budapest Even supporters of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán acknowledge privately that the Pegasus scandal is a hard blow to the embattled leader. Last month’s news that government spies had employed Israeli software to commandeer the smartphones of journalists, activists and government opponents confirmed the worst authoritarian stereotypes of Orbán, who will be running for his fourth consecutive term in 2022. These allegations, if true — and many Orbán backers with whom I spoke assume that they are — will likely displace what was Orbán’s greatest liability heading into next year’s vote: that he and his Fidesz party oversee a vast web of public corruption.

viktor orbán