The LGBT Community Is Failing Its Own:
Notes from Outside the Bubble
[February 7, 2026]
It is 2026, and there is a very real and escalating backlash against trans people. In the United States and elsewhere, trans rights are being rolled back, questioned, or openly attacked. Some of the same political forces are no longer stopping there and are once again talking about overturning gay marriage. Because of this, there is a constant refrain inside LGBT spaces about solidarity, unity, and the importance of sticking together right now.
I am writing this as a gay trans man, and I want to be very clear up front: I no longer associate with the LGBT “community” in any meaningful way. The only queer person in my life is my partner, who is a gay cis man. This is not because I am ashamed of being gay or trans, and it is not because I believe we deserve the bigotry directed at us. But I do believe it is dishonest to pretend that the LGBT community, as it currently exists, is a safe space or a healthy one. I also believe that some of the hostility we face has been exacerbated by our own behavior, our own rhetoric, and our own refusal to engage in self-critique.
Before anyone rewrites my life into a convenient narrative, I want to be clear that I did not arrive at this position lightly or out of ignorance. In high school, my best friend was a gay guy. Most of my close friends from the 2000s through the mid-2010s were cis gay men. When I came out as trans, my best friend at the time, also a gay cis man, responded with “no shit, Sherlock,” followed by “honey, I knew you were a gay man from the moment I met you.” Unfortunately, life happened, we lost touch, and I learned the hard way that many cis gay men do not extend that same recognition or generosity to gay trans men. We are often treated as interlopers, as invaders, or as straight women trying to infiltrate gay male spaces. I have been reminded, over and over, that many people still see me as female, no matter what words they use.
After I came out in 2013, I went to Tumblr looking for community with other trans people. Instead, I found myself dropped into the truscum versus tucute wars, arguing with people on both sides because neither camp reflected my reality or my values. By 2015, the atmosphere had turned openly hostile. In 2016, I left Tumblr entirely after sustained harassment, including an incident where a non-binary person targeted me and successfully pulled TERFs into dogpiling me.
In 2018 and 2019, I was part of an LGBT Discord server. I was the oldest person there by a wide margin, which was uncomfortable enough, but the rhetoric, the absolutism, and the constant moral panic made the space unbearable. From 2020 through 2024, I blogged on Dreamwidth, where most of the people I interacted with were queer. For about a year, I co-moderated a group for LGBT people over 30. That, too, became an exercise in frustration. I ultimately left Dreamwidth in 2024 after discovering that someone had put me on one of the large, well-known anti-trans hate forums.
In 2025, I drifted apart from the last couple of queer friends I had. One became openly pro-Hamas and antisemitic. The other lived safely in the Bay Area and would repeatedly initiate unsolicited conversations to panic about how the government was going to round up trans people and send us all to death camps. I found both dynamics destabilizing, irresponsible, and emotionally unsafe.
At this point, I keep to myself. I do not participate in LGBT spaces. I do not trust them to be grounded, protective, or honest.
A lot of the rhetoric inside the LGBT community has become genuinely ridiculous. We expect people to keep up with constantly shifting terminology, hyper-specific micro-identities, and university-level-critical-theory language that almost nobody outside Extremely Online spaces actually uses. When people fail to keep up, the response is not education or grace but punishment. People get scolded, dogpiled, or labeled harmful for being behind the curve.
When I came out as trans in 2013, it was still common to say GLBT. Fast forward to 2022, when I co-founded an LGBT+ group for people over 30 on Dreamwidth, and I was excoriated for saying LGBTQ+ instead of appending additional letters after the Q. This was treated not as a minor wording choice but as a moral failure.
At the time in 2022, I was 42 years old. I was, and still am, chronically ill. I live with chronic pain and chronic fatigue. I have ADHD. I cannot reliably remember my own phone number or zip code without writing them down. Expecting me to keep track of an ever-expanding acronym and treating failure to do so as evidence of malice is detached from reality. It is not a serious or humane expectation.
More importantly, it does not matter in any material sense. Me saying LGBTQ+ instead of whatever longer version is currently in vogue does not change the living conditions of queer people who are homeless or precariously housed. It does not help people who are stuck in shitty jobs because they look gender-confusing and had the audacity to put pronouns on an application for something better and got rejected. It does not help queer and trans people who are disabled, including those disabled by very real PTSD. It does not prevent trans people from being killed, doxxed, swatted, or harassed. Policing acronyms does not save lives.
Despite this, I was branded exclusionary for forgetting letters. This is especially obscene given that a decade earlier I was actively fighting extreme truscum and transmed ideology. I argued with people who insisted that you had to pursue medical transition at any cost to be considered legitimately trans, regardless of health risks, financial ruin, or access barriers. I argued with people who claimed that if you kept running into walls like insurance denials, uncooperative doctors, or medical contraindications, it meant you were not trying hard enough and therefore were not serious about your identity. Back in the day, I also argued with people who insisted that to be truly dysphoric, you had to be repulsed by your own natal genitalia, hate your body to the point of celibacy, and want full bottom surgery in order to count. That ideology was cruel, coercive, and detached from the realities of trans lives. I did not accept it then, and I do not accept it now.
My objections were not abstract or academic. They came directly out of my own lived experience. I ran into real barriers to medical care. And my top dysphoria has always been far more severe than my bottom dysphoria. I do not want a metoidioplasty or a phalloplasty because neither would look or function like a natal penis, and I am not willing to subject my body to major surgical intervention that would not meaningfully improve my quality of life. That does not make me less trans. It makes me someone making informed decisions about my own body.
Calling people like me illegitimate while pretending that acronym policing is the real inclusion work is not just hypocritical. It exposes how shallow and performative much of this so-called community discourse has become.
This is where I am going to say something that has been treated as heresy for years: a little gatekeeping would have done us some good, and the community has swung too far in the opposite direction.
When I came out as trans in 2013, people who identified as non-binary were relatively rare compared to binary trans men and women. It was generally understood that non-binary people experienced themselves as something other than male or female, and that this often came with an intentionally androgynous or gender-confusing presentation. I understood that. I respected it. I had, and still have, no problem with it.
What changed, beginning around 2018 and 2019 and accelerating sharply from 2020 onward, was not simply an increase in non-binary visibility. It was a complete shift in what the label was being used to mean. Suddenly, there were far more AFAB people identifying as non-binary than there were binary trans men. Many of them were visually indistinguishable from cis women, or at most had dyed hair, a septum ring, and some tattoos. Their distress did not center on a deep or persistent sense of being neither male nor female. Instead, it often revolved around "microaggressions" like a cashier "assuming gender" and calling them “ma’am,” and framing these interactions as serious harm.
At that point, non-binariness began to look less like a genuine experience of gender outside the binary and more like a combination of aesthetics, vibes, and rejection of traditional femininity. In many cases, it read less as “I am not male or female” and more as “I do not want to be what I think womanhood is.” Those are not the same thing. Disliking sexist expectations placed on women does not automatically make someone gender-nonconforming, let alone trans.
I kept this opinion to myself for years because I did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings or invite harassment. But it is 2026, I'm not involved in the community in any meaningful way anymore, and I am done pretending this has not caused real damage. It has harmed LGBT optics, and it has profoundly altered how the trans community is perceived by people outside it. There was a period when public sympathy was growing because the narrative was clear: people like me experienced a genuine body-brain mismatch, wanted to live as men, and needed medical transition in order to function and thrive. Now, that narrative has been drowned out by people who treat gender as an aesthetic choice and insist that vibes are equivalent to identity.
The shift away from dysphoria as the basis for permanent medical intervention has been especially destructive. We moved from “dysphoria is why people pursue hormones and surgery” to “anyone should be able to access hormones and surgery for any reason,” reframing transition as a lifestyle choice. Then everyone acts shocked when TERFs seize on that framing. To be clear, TERFs would be hostile no matter what. But we handed them a narrative that allows them to claim we are all like this, and we let the loudest, least grounded voices speak for everyone else.
This fear of being labeled exclusionary has warped other parts of the community as well. One example I have never spoken about openly until now, again for fear of hurting anyone's feelings, is asexuality. I believe asexuality exists, and I believe it is valid. What I do not believe is that it belongs in the same political or social category as being gay, lesbian, bi, or trans. In practice, when asexual people enter LGBT spaces, they often complain that conversations or media focus too much on sex and relationships, even when those conversations are relatively tame. It feels like inviting a vegan to a barbecue and then being scolded for grilling meat.
More importantly, asexual people do not experience systemic discrimination in the way gays, lesbians, bi people, and trans people do. The social, legal, and material risks are not comparable. Treating these experiences as equivalent flattens real differences in oppression and struggle. At times, it feels less like solidarity and more like cultural appropriation, a way for otherwise cis and straight people to gain access to a marginalized identity without sharing the cost.
We also need to start having honest conversations about the fact that some people in our community are bad actors. Pretending otherwise has not made anyone safer.
If an AMAB rapist suddenly decides to transition in order to be transferred to a women’s prison, the correct response is not “yas doll, you’re valid.” The correct response is “hold up, what the fuck is going on here.” Questioning motives in situations like that is not transphobic. It is basic safeguarding. Any movement that refuses to acknowledge the existence of bad faith actors is not progressive, it is reckless.
Similarly, if a traumatized cis woman does not want to work with a transfeminine rape counselor because that counselor has a penis, we should not be forcing her to do so or telling her that her boundaries are bigoted. Trauma does not operate on ideological purity. Survivors do not owe anyone access to their bodies, their stories, or their trust in order to prove they are sufficiently enlightened. And to be blunt, insisting that a traumatized woman is the problem for not wanting to be in what is supposed to be a safe space with a penis-haver is a deeply male-socialized response. It centers entitlement over empathy. It prioritizes ideological validation over survivor care. Calling this out is not an attack on trans women. It is a refusal to let feminist language be hollowed out and repurposed to coerce vulnerable people.
We also need to talk honestly about how the trans community has decided that optics do not matter, and that caring about them is dismissed as respectability politics; this is historically illiterate.
The gay and lesbian community has had decades of working toward public visibility through figures like Elton John, Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul (for better or worse), and now a broader range of mainstream actors, musicians, and activists who present queerness in a way the public can either relate to or feel charmed by. It is not perfect. It has been heavily whitewashed and commercialized. But it has at least provided digestible entry points for the average person to say, “Oh. I get it. You’re human.”
Trans people are not there. Not even close.
Right now, one of the most visible trans people in the United States is Dylan Mulvaney, who presents a highly exaggerated version of girlhood, complete with musical numbers about shopping and giddy commentary on skincare routines. Dylan absolutely has the right to be herself and should not be harassed or dehumanized for it. The problem is not her existence. The problem is that, in the absence of broader representation, she has become a caricature in the public imagination. Not because of who she is, but because there are not enough other visible trans people to counterbalance that image.
Elliot Page is often pointed to as the transmasculine counterpart, but he presents a similar problem in terms of optics. He went from coming out as a lesbian to becoming one of the most prominent trans men in the public eye, identifying as he/they and presenting in a way that reads more like a teenage boy than an adult man. He should not be attacked for that. He does not owe anyone masculinity. But the reality is that this representation has handed TERFs exactly the narrative they want: that trans men are just women fleeing womanhood, that we do not actually want to be men, but boys in some kind of eternal Peter Pan state.
The face of “trans” in mainstream culture right now is increasingly a teen or twenty-something who thinks “space” is a gender and uses fifteen different neopronouns. And we are all expected to respond with “heckin’ valid uwu,” or risk being labeled gatekeepers.
Meanwhile, people like me, actual trans adults, are struggling to access healthcare, trying not to get murdered, and being told we are not inclusive enough if we do not treat “mushroomgender fae/fung” with the same seriousness.
I am sorry, but this is not the same thing.
There is a massive difference between genuinely exploring gender identity and confusing gender with aesthetics. When the loudest and most visible trans voices are people who look and present completely cisgender, who came out as “she/they demigirls” during lockdown, who never change their name, voice, style, or pronouns in real life, but still expect full recognition, praise, and authority within the community, it becomes a problem.
Let me put it this way. I am 1/16 Black. My maternal grandfather was the child of a Black woman and a Scottish man from Nova Scotia. That is my ancestry. But I do not look Black. I am pale. My natural hair was red before it turned grey. I do not get pulled over for Riding While Black. If I went around calling myself Black and demanding access to Black spaces and celebrating Kwanzaa wearing a dashiki, I would be rightfully called out. Because identity is not just something you declare. It is shaped by how the world interacts with you.
And yet we have people with zero dysphoria, zero gender-based marginalization, no change in pronouns offline, no transition, and no risk, calling themselves trans because they watched a few TikToks and got bored during the pandemic. We are expected to welcome them unquestioningly while they center themselves in every conversation.
They are the Rachel Dolezals of the trans community.
And if you say that, if you even suggest that something about this feels disingenuous, you get screamed at, cancelled, and branded cruel, exclusionary, or oppressive.
The general public sees this. And when they do, they stop taking any of us seriously.
Here’s what happens when we decide that being trans is “just a vibe.”
People like me disappear.
People with dysphoria. People who have been navigating this long before it was trendy. People who have been misgendered, threatened, denied care, assaulted, locked out of housing or work, or quietly crushed under the weight of living in the wrong body. People who transitioned not because it was cool or affirming or fun, but because there was no other way to survive.
When everyone gets to be trans, including people who have experienced no meaningful gender-based distress or risk, then trans people stop being taken seriously. It becomes an aesthetic. A trend. A social club. And transmascs, especially, get hit the hardest.
Because we are already invisible. Even within trans spaces, we are either ignored or treated as having it “easier,” which we do not. So when people with zero stake in our reality start claiming our label like an accessory, and then center themselves in every discussion about “trans issues,” it does not just irritate me.
It erases me. It makes my life materially harder. It undermines the legitimacy of my needs. It muddies the waters so thoroughly that when I talk to a doctor, a social worker, a policymaker, or anyone else, they do not hear “trans man with dysphoria and medical necessity.” They hear, “maybe you just use neopronouns and call your gender fog.”
Additionally, the gay community did not achieve same-sex marriage and adoption rights by telling the broader public to go fuck itself. Right now, we look unserious and hostile to anyone outside our bubble. We look like a movement more interested in shocking people than persuading them. The constant in-your-face posture, the reflexive contempt for anyone who is not us, and the embrace of deliberate alienation has not made us safer. It has made us easier to caricature.
This is especially evident in the amount of open hostility toward cis people that has been normalized in trans spaces. I first started seeing phrases like “die cis scum” on Tumblr in 2014. It has not gone away. It is still circulating online in 2025 and 2026, defended as punching up, or as justified rage. I understand the anger. I do not accept the behavior. Dehumanizing language does not become ethical just because it is aimed at a majority group.
The irony is that the people I trust most in my actual life are cis. My two closest friends are cis women, one of whom quite literally saved my life by getting me out of an abusive living situation and keeping me from becoming homeless. My partner is a gay cis man. These are the people who have shown up for me consistently, materially, and without ideological preconditions.
At the same time, a significant amount of the worst treatment I have experienced over the years has come from within the trans and queer community itself, including from non-binary people, trans women, and other trans men. Dismissing that reality because it complicates a preferred narrative does not make it disappear. It just ensures that people like me quietly disengage instead of pretending anymore.
I was sexually harassed by a lesbian who claimed to be an ally. She told me I was “one of the good ones” because I was “both male and female,” which is not how I identify. She clearly saw me through the lens of “trans men are just confused lesbians.” She told me that if something ever happened to Andy, she thought she would “have a shot with me.” No. Because I am fucking gay. She then proceeded to make lewd comments at me and seemed genuinely incapable of seeing the irony in perpetuating the exact behavior she claimed only men engage in.
When I used to blog, I talked openly about how brutal my periods are. Crippling cramps. Heavy bleeding. Severe anemia. Deep dysphoria. It wrecks me physically and emotionally every single month. This is not quirky. It is not funny. It is not empowering. It is a recurring trauma cycle that I have to survive over and over again in a body that already feels hostile to me.
A transfeminine former friend read those posts and said she would “give anything” to have a period.
Excuse me?
You will never hear me say to a transfeminine person, “I would give anything to be bullied as a child, called a sissy and a faggot, and told I was not a real man, just so I could feel more legitimate now.” I would never say that because I am not a sociopath. Because I have empathy. Because I understand that other people’s pain is not a costume I get to envy or romanticize.
And yet, again and again, that empathy has not been returned. Many of the transfeminine people I have interacted with have minimized, dismissed, or openly mocked the experiences of trans men, especially gay trans men. There is resentment that we “left womanhood,” as if it were a betrayal. As if it were a rejection of them personally. I do not judge transfeminine people for embracing womanhood. I respect it. What I do not understand is why I am judged, punished, or resented for leaving it behind.
What makes it worse is the double bind. Some of the same transfeminine people who tell me I am “lucky” to bleed, or act as though I am selfish or cowardly for transitioning, also feel entitled to judge my masculinity and tell me I'm not masculine enough to be a man. I am resented for becoming a man, and I am simultaneously told I am failing at being one. There is no version of myself that passes the test.
This is why I do not have transfeminine friends anymore. Over and over, I was expected to be an emotional punching bag, a scapegoat, a symbol. I was supposed to perform assigned-female solidarity while being criticized for leaving. I was expected to validate endlessly while being invalidated in return. The moment I said, “This hurts,” I became the problem. The bigot. The divider. The bad trans.
I am done with that dynamic. I spent too many years trying to be generous, trying to find common ground, trying to offer support that was never reciprocated. This is not hatred. It is self-preservation.
Within the LGBT community, cis gay men often complain about being treated as the most privileged group, the ones at the top of the heap. I disagree. In practice, it is gay trans men who are treated that way. We are framed as people who chose to be male because of misogyny and then chose to be attracted to men because of misogyny. Our identities are treated as suspicious, opportunistic, or politically regressive rather than intrinsic. I believe this atmosphere has directly contributed to the rise in non-binary identification. Some people who would likely have come out as trans men in the early 2010s are instead identifying as non-binary because they see how trans men are scapegoated and punished for being men at all.
That dynamic would be bad enough on its own. But it gets worse when you factor in how gay trans men are treated by cis gay men. Many cis gay men do not want us in the gay community. I do not believe it is transphobic to have a genital preference. Wanting a partner with a penis is no more inherently bigoted than preferring dark hair over blond, facial hair over clean-shaven, or bears over twinks. Attraction is attraction. Nobody owes you their attraction. Where the rejection becomes transphobia is if and when it goes beyond “sorry, I’m into men with penises” and turns into “ew, you’re really a woman,” “get out of here, fish,” or similar garbage. That is not about preference. That is about contempt.
If you are a trans man who is exclusively attracted to men, you are going to have a hard time. This is why so many gay trans men are single and celibate, or end up in T4T relationships with other trans men, not because that is everyone’s ideal outcome, but because it is often the only time where we are not treated as fraudulent.
To be fair, there are cis gay men who support us and are attracted to us. Those men often receive backlash from within the gay community itself. Gay men who date or have sex with trans men are frequently told they are actually bi, not gay. In my partner Andy’s case, he initially identified as pan. A few months into being with me, a trans man, he realized that what he actually prefers is men. We are of a similar age, and even in the 2000s and first half of the 2010s, being openly gay was not widely accepted, hence him being a late bloomer with coming out as fully gay. Despite that, there are still people who insist Andy must be bi and that our relationship is “straight with extra steps,” even though we are very clearly doing gay shit together.
And straight trans men often also treat gay trans men as lesser, as not “real men,” because we are attracted to men. I have heard straight trans men say things like, “I wouldn’t want to date a man, I’d be seen as the girl in the relationship,” or even that penis-in-vagina sex is a form of self-harm. Meanwhile, Andy and I are read as a gay couple in the world. And interestingly, a lot of straight trans men dating women are read as lesbian couples. Funny how that works.
The end result of all of this is that gay trans men are pushed from every direction at once. We are treated as traitors by people who resent men, as invaders by cis gay men who do not want us there, and as politically inconvenient by a movement that claims to value inclusion while constantly finding ways to exclude us.
We also need to talk about the cis gays and lesbians who have organized themselves into so-called LGB groups, explicitly excluding trans people, and who have fully embraced right-wing talking points. These are the people calling us groomers, accusing us of predation, and openly collaborating with the Christian right. They like to imagine themselves as pragmatic, respectable dissidents. What they actually are is useful idiots.
They do not seem to grasp that once the Christian right succeeds in making trans existence illegal, or as close to illegal as possible, they will not stop there. The same forces that want trans people erased have always wanted gay and lesbian people erased too. There is no version of this alliance where cis gays and lesbians come out protected in the end. History has already shown how this story goes.
One of the more grotesque claims these groups make is that trans people are engaging in conversion therapy by “turning” gay and lesbian kids trans. This argument completely falls apart the moment you consider gay trans men like me. I am not a straight woman who was talked into being trans. I am a gay man who has always been gay. I am not trying to make gay men straight, and neither are other gay trans men. That accusation is incoherent on its face.
What I do not understand about the hostility toward gay trans men, in particular, is how detached it is from reality. Most of us are indistinguishable from cis gay men unless we disclose or someone sees our genitals. If being a gay man were truly about “liking dick,” as these people love to claim, you would expect cis gay men to be lining up to date trans women. That is not happening. The issue is not genitals. It is policing who gets to count as a man on their terms.
Even more damning is the fact that these LGB groups have no alternative proposal for what to do with people who experience gender dysphoria. Their answer is the same thing that was inflicted on gays and lesbians for decades: repression, forced conformity, and conversion therapy dressed up as concern. They want trans people to disappear, and they want dysphoria to be managed through shame and denial, exactly the way homosexuality used to be treated.
It is bitterly ironic to watch people who benefited from the collapse of conversion therapy turn around and advocate for its return, as long as it is aimed at someone else.
That brings us to this point: we need to talk about the classism and ableism that run through the LGBT community, because they are pervasive and rarely acknowledged by the people who benefit from them.
I have been told I have “male privilege” more times than I can count from people in the LGBT community. This usually comes from people who live in liberal cities, have access to trans-competent healthcare, and come from upper-middle-class backgrounds. I am still legally female in my state. I live in the MAGA Midwest. I cannot access trans care. I have been hate crimed. I get harassed no matter which bathroom I use. I have been broke, disabled, scared, and silenced. And I still get told I have “male privilege.”
Meanwhile, a white trans woman working as a computer programmer in the Bay Area, making fifty thousand dollars a year or more, and living in a safe queer neighborhood arguably has more structural privilege than I do. That does not mean I am ignorant of the fact that Black trans women face extraordinary risks of violence. I am not denying that. What I am saying is that privilege is not a single-axis equation, and pretending otherwise is intellectually lazy and emotionally dishonest.
A large portion of visible cis gay and lesbian culture is affluent and concentrated in deep-blue urban areas with very high costs of living. Many of the loudest voices in queer spaces live in places where access to affirming healthcare, legal protections, and community infrastructure is taken for granted. At the same time, the newer wave of highly visible non-binary culture is dominated by people who can afford frequent hair dye, piercings, tattoos, custom wardrobes, and the time and money required to curate an aesthetic identity. None of that is free. All of it signals a level of financial and physical stability that many trans people simply do not have.
Meanwhile, there is a massive homeless trans population that is routinely ignored except when it is useful as a talking point. Many trans people live with chronic illness, chronic pain, PTSD, and other conditions that limit our ability to work or relocate. I am one of them. I am disabled, on a fixed income, and living in a red state. I do not have access to informed consent clinics in my area. I have real health problems that complicate medical transition. And yet I have repeatedly been told that I am “not trying hard enough” to access care, as if determination alone can conjure doctors, insurance coverage, or physical stamina out of thin air.
The other common refrain is that I should “just move.” This is said casually, as though uprooting one’s life, abandoning support networks, and affording relocation to a high-cost blue area is something anyone can do if they really want to. It ignores disability. It ignores poverty. It ignores the reality that many of us are barely surviving as it is.
What makes this especially grotesque is how often LGBT people from affluent areas turn around and mock those of us who live in red states. I have seen endless jokes about “redneck trailer trash,” about how everyone in these regions is stupid, backwards, or subhuman. I have seen people say that if a natural disaster wiped out red states, “nothing of value would be lost.” These comments are not edgy. They are not righteous. They are naked classism and regional bigotry, and they are directed at places where poor people, disabled people, and marginalized people are trapped by circumstance, not ideology.
You cannot claim to care about trans lives while sneering at the people most likely to be poor, sick, stuck, and unsupported. You cannot posture about justice while treating disability and poverty as personal failures. And you cannot build a movement on contempt for anyone who does not have the money, health, or geography to live up to a curated queer ideal.
There is also an epidemic of hive-mind groupthink in the LGBT community, where certain opinions are treated as mandatory and deviation is punished, not debated.
After October 7, 2023, a disturbing number of queer people I knew began openly cheering Hamas as “freedom fighters” and engaging in blatant antisemitism. I have nuanced views on Israel and Palestine. The Nakba was real and horrific. Hamas are still terrorists. Calling for Israel to be dismantled while not calling for the dismantling of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or putting the United Kingdom on trial for colonial crimes is incoherent and selective. I am post-Zionist. I believe both Netanyahu and Hamas are committing genocide. I support a two-state solution, which is where most reasonable adults land.
None of that mattered. My views were deliberately flattened and taken out of context. I was labeled a pro-genocide Zionist anyway. Complexity was treated as betrayal. Refusing to chant the approved slogans was enough to make me an enemy.
The same dynamic shows up around generative AI. The queer community is largely hostile to it and engages in sustained harassment of AI artists, spreading misinformation about how the technology works and insisting that it is all “stolen art.” If you respond with actual facts, or point out that the legal and technical realities are more complicated, you are shut out. If you create with AI yourself, even if you also have a background as a professional physical artist, as I do, you are treated as morally suspect. Dogma matters more than truth.
Gun discourse is another example. The community defaults to “guns bad” without engaging with data from countries like Switzerland or Iceland, which have high rates of gun ownership and do not have the mass shooting problem the United States does. There is little interest in examining the social drivers of violence or acknowledging that, in the current climate, marginalized people may have practical reasons to want the ability to defend themselves. Nuance is not welcome. Slogans are.
Then there is the endless posturing with meaningless words and gestures. People in gated communities loudly proclaim support for “defund the police” while never having to worry about violent crime. Meanwhile, many Black and Latino people who live in high-crime areas are clear in polling that they do not actually want the police abolished. They want better training, accountability, and less racism. White people yelling at other white people for celebrating Thanksgiving as a “colonizer holiday” does nothing to materially improve the lives of Native Americans and does not constitute restitution or reparations. It is performance, not action. And it substitutes moral theater for real engagement.
Two of the biggest drivers of the current backlash against trans people are issues that the community refuses to discuss honestly: trans women in women’s sports and women’s prisons, and transition-related medical care for minors. These are not fringe concerns dreamed up by bigots. They are the exact topics that dominate public discourse, legislation, and court cases. And if you spend any time in public-facing trans spaces like Reddit, what the outside world sees is not nuance, debate, or internal disagreement. What they see is overwhelming support for the most extreme and least publicly popular positions: that trans women should be treated as exactly the same as cis women in all sex-segregated contexts, and that minors should have broad access to medical transition. That appearance of consensus exists largely because anyone with a more complicated or cautious view is silenced, shunned, or outright harassed into leaving the conversation. We're called Pick Mes, or worse.
Take sports. I do not believe this is a problem that can be solved with either a blanket ban or a blanket “everyone is welcome” policy. Bone density matters. Puberty matters. Athletic advantage is not imaginary. At the same time, I do not believe the answer is simply to exclude trans women categorically. This is an area where individual, case-by-case assessment is not only reasonable but necessary. But try saying that out loud in most trans spaces and see what happens. You are immediately accused of betraying the community, parroting right-wing talking points, or wanting trans women erased from public life. The result is that only the most absolutist positions survive public scrutiny inside the community, which then get held up by our opponents as proof that we are unserious and detached from reality.
The same refusal to engage with reality shows up even more starkly around prisons. I do not believe trans women should be housed with cis men. That is a guaranteed recipe for rape and violence. At the same time, I fully understand why cis women, especially incarcerated women with histories of trauma, are alarmed by the idea of being housed with someone who has a penis. Both things can be true. What the community refuses to acknowledge is the existence of bad actors: men who commit sexual violence and then opportunistically claim a trans identity to gain access to women’s spaces. A movement that insists these people do not exist is not protecting anyone. In reality, general population placement in either men’s or women’s prisons is dangerous for LGBT people. The honest answer is that we need separate housing and facilities, and more fundamentally, a massive overhaul of the criminal justice system itself, with far fewer incarcerations for non-violent offenses. Nobody wants to talk about that, because it requires structural thinking instead of slogans.
Transition care for minors is the other third rail. I do not believe in rapid-onset gender dysphoria as it is usually framed. Much of it resembles the moral panics of the 1980s and 1990s, when fundamentalists insisted that Dungeons and Dragons or secular rock music were turning kids into Satanists. However, pretending there is no problem at all is just as dishonest. The sudden post-pandemic explosion of “non-binary” identification among young people, where gender is treated as interchangeable with aesthetics, vibes, hair color, and rejection of femininity, is real. It is not the same thing as persistent, early-onset gender dysphoria. We should be able to say that without being accused of genocide.
There is a middle ground between the extreme gatekeeping I encountered when I came out in 2013 and the current anything-goes model, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. When I sought transition care, I was expected to live socially as male for years before I was even allowed to seek therapy. Only after that was I permitted to enter therapy, where I was required to remain for at least a year before I could receive a referral to a gender clinic. This was not about careful assessment. It was about endurance testing. It was about proving that I could survive harassment, instability, and isolation without medical support, and then rewarding that survival with the possibility of care.
Even worse, parts of that gatekeeping were explicitly punitive. I was discouraged from receiving referrals because of my history of abuse, as though trauma somehow invalidated my gender rather than making careful, competent medical care more necessary. I was also treated as suspect because I am attracted to men. The implication was clear: transitioning to male while being gay was viewed as deviant, confusing, or illegitimate. My sexuality was treated as evidence that I was not really trans, or that I was attempting to resolve trauma through transition rather than expressing a stable identity. That logic is indistinguishable from conversion therapy, just repackaged in clinical language.
That system was cruel and wrong. It denied care to people who needed it, forced trans people to perform suffering to be taken seriously, and treated trauma and homosexuality as disqualifying flaws. But swinging to the opposite extreme, where any expression of gender discomfort is treated as sufficient justification for irreversible medical intervention, is not a solution. It is another form of negligence. We should be capable of saying that the old model was abusive and that the current one is reckless without being accused of wanting trans people erased.
We should not be performing irreversible medical interventions on minors. We should not be medicalizing minors at all unless there is clear, consistent, long-term dysphoria that predates social trends and persists over time. That includes puberty blockers. I would argue that surgical transition should not happen before age eighteen or even twenty-one, and yes, I would apply that standard to myself retroactively, even though I have known who I am since I was four in 1984 and never grew out of it. This is not about denying care. It is about protecting children and protecting the legitimacy of adult transition. Because what is happening now is exactly what many of us trans elders have warned about, and were silenced: backlash against minors transitioning is being used as justification to restrict or eliminate trans healthcare for adults too.
I could go on, but I'm fucking tired.
I don't have a neat set of solutions for fixing any of this. What I do know is that the community’s default response, pretending these problems do not exist or insisting that anyone who points them out deserves to be shunned and harassed, makes us look unserious and unstable. A movement that cannot tolerate internal disagreement, complexity, or criticism is not equipped to create real social change. When everything becomes about purity tests and public shaming, we lose the ability to build coalitions, persuade anyone outside our bubble, or accomplish anything meaningful in the real world.
