The predictable decline of Pride Month

How did this happen? Where did the LGBT movement go astray? Well, in this case, I actually do hate to say, “I told you so.” But I did, in fact, warn that exactly this would happen. In a 2018 Washington Examiner column titled, “I’m gay, but I’ll pass on Pride Month,” I argued that the gay rights movement had become hopelessly politicized, extreme, and oversexualized and that if it continued, the general public’s patience would wear thin.

Well, LGBT activists didn’t just continue this pattern of counterproductive activism — they rapidly accelerated it and took it into new territory I hadn’t even imagined.

First, the politicization of the movement. With rising support for gay rights among Republicans, you’d think that LGBT activists would strive to keep their movement as nonpartisan as possible. Instead, major LGBT activist organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign actively campaigned against pro-LGBT Republicans such as Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and smeared Republican lawmakers as “anti-LGBTQ” if they disagreed with liberals on unrelated issues such as immigration, abortion, or impeaching Donald Trump during his first term as president.

Then-HRC President Chad Griffin unironically wrote at the time: “Our community is as diverse as the fabric of this nation. We are women. We are Muslim. We are Jewish. We are black, white, Latinx, Asian, and Native American. We are immigrants and we are people with disabilities. And so, when Congress fails to protect Dreamers, that impacts LGBTQ people. When Congress votes to allow states to refuse to provide Title X family planning grant funds to Planned Parenthood … that impacts LGBTQ people. When Congress tries to repeal core provisions of the Affordable Care Act … that impacts LGBTQ people.”

Later, in 2019, then-HRC President Alphonso David publicly claimed that Trump, who supports gay marriage and has appointed high-ranking gay officials to the federal government, was “the worst president on LGBTQ issues ever.”

Was the idea seriously that activists would smear, malign, undercut, and work against pro-gay Republicans and closely tie supporting gay rights to the entire Democratic agenda, and then Republican support for gay rights would go up?

Nearly a decade ago, I noticed that support for gay and transgender rights was being conflated with a whole host of unrelated issues, such as gun control and abortion. This intensifying trend has come back to bite the LGBT community because, as the country and the culture have shifted away from the Democrats in recent years, they’ve shifted away from support for gay and transgender rights. That’s what happens when you explicitly tie a movement to one political party in a polarized and divided country.

But the infiltration of radical gender ideology into the LGBT movement and its activism has done the most damage by far. While I do believe that sexual orientation and gender identity are fundamentally distinct, transgender adults, people who experience severe gender dysphoria and wish to present and live as if they are the opposite sex, have been a part of the LGBT coalition for decades. Yet, about a decade ago, activists began pushing the boundaries far beyond allowing these few people protections under antidiscrimination laws and access to gender transition treatments.

They started arguing that biological sex itself was not real or meaningful. The so-called “Equality Act,” which activists rallied around and most Democrats embraced, actually sought to redefine “sex” under federal law to mean “gender identity” — in other words, whatever you feel like inside. That erasing the biological distinction between males and females might not fly with most people, particularly women, apparently never crossed their mind.

They insisted that there were infinite genders. That biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports and even enter women’s prisons. That young children “know who they are” and can definitively declare themselves to be a different gender and even consent to life-altering medical treatments that routinely result in sterilization and permanent sexual dysfunction. It got to the point where LGBT activists, academics, and “allies” could not even define what a woman is, as conservative podcaster Matt Walsh exposed in a damning documentary.

If you’d asked me to devise a better plot to sabotage a movement, I’d have struggled. But activists didn’t just conflate gay rights and LGBT acceptance with radical new ideas about gender — they also took a militant approach toward dissenters.

LGBT commentators, celebrities, and activists engaged in a vicious bullying and harassment campaign targeting even liberals, from J.K. Rowling to reporters at the New York Times, who dared ask questions or slightly scrutinize the most extreme parts of the agenda. They smeared those who disagreed with biological males in women’s sports as bigots and accused opponents of sex changes for minors of having blood on their hands and literally causing children to die by suicide. Evidence never actually supported this particular bit of demagogic emotional blackmail.

At some point, the dam broke. You can only throw around accusations of bigotry so many times before they lose their power. You can only strain people’s credulity about basic facts of life, such as human biology, so far before they write you off as unreasonable. And you can only ask so much of your fellow citizens before even open-minded, compassionate people start to tell you to hit the road.

The decline in Pride Month celebrations is really just a symptom of this broader collapse in support for this community and its activism. Yet that collapse wasn’t inevitable. It didn’t have to happen. And it can be reversed.

But that would require an activist community that was willing to admit its mistakes. That was willing to compromise. That was willing to police its own, make meaningful concessions, and draw unpopular boundaries. So, it would require something that currently does not exist and shows no meaningful signs of emerging.

TARGET STORES LOOK A LITTLE DIFFERENT THIS PRIDE MONTH

Of course, some might dismiss this all as “victim blaming.” That’s because it is. In this case, the LGBT community is in large part responsible for its own demise. To “blame the victim” in this case is simply to acknowledge reality.

Others might insist that right-wing pundits or hateful extremists have contributed to the decline in support for the LGBT community by spreading misleading, exaggerated narratives. That’s true to some extent. But while certain rhetoric, such as casually calling people “groomers,” was taken too far, LGBT activists didn’t have to give their critics so much ammunition to use against them. Or, as the transgender Republican YouTuber Blaire White recently said, “It’s not propaganda if it’s really happening.”

Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.