The LGBTQ movement is cracking up.
Activists have insisted that the homosexual side of the movement is inseparable from advocacy for transgender ideology, but Log Cabin Republicans has challenged that assumption and the Human Right’s campaign’s response revealed just how fragile the coalition has become.
This news item is no isolated event. It reflects a broader reality: the transgender movement no longer possesses the cultural and institutional power it once used to suppress dissent.
Cutting Off the TQ
Log Cabin Republicans, a major LGB group on the Right that will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, voted to remove the “T” from its advocacy. Ross Hemminger, the group’s president, announced the move in a Townhall op-ed last week.
Hemminger noted that Log Cabin Republicans added the “T” to its mission in 2015, but he attacked the transgender movement for focusing “nearly all of their efforts” on minors, rather than consenting adults.
“They push schools to teach radical gender ideology; they want biological men in women’s sports regardless of the consequences; perhaps most offensively, they support gender reassignment treatments for minors, often without the knowledge or consent of the parents, knowing full well these treatments are mostly irreversible,” he added.
“That is why, after significant discussion with our membership, our Board of Directors voted to refine Log Cabin Republicans’ national advocacy focus to concentrate specifically on issues of sexual orientation and conservative values—in other words, we are an LGB advocacy organization, as our founders envisioned and as our moral center calls us to be,” Hemminger announced.
He said the decision does not mean Log Cabin Republicans will exclude members who identify as transgender, but that the organization will focus on “issues of sexual orientation.”
HRC Condemnation
The Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest LGBTQ+ activist group, condemned Log Cabin Republicans.
“It’s news to us that they ever pretended to care about the T,” Human Rights Campaign spokesman Delphine Luneau told LGBTQ Nation. “Splitting up the LGBTQ+ community and pitting us against each other is exactly what anti-equality forces want to see happen.”
Luneau argued that the LGBTQ+ movement should stick together because “all our freedoms are intertwined.”
The Inherent Contradiction
Yet the Human Rights Campaign cannot deny the inherent contradiction between advocating for sex-based rights and transgender ideology.
A group of lesbians who opposed transgender ideology formed an organization called “Get the L Out” in 2018, claiming that transgender ideology “promotes the medical transition of lesbians and pushes harmful drugs and unnecessary medical procedures on lesbians’ healthy bodies.” The group claims that sex-rejecting procedures constitute “a form of misogynist medical abuse against lesbians.”
While this explicit framing may be rare, the claim that transgender activism encourages transition for young people who might otherwise identify as lesbian or gay is not. Glenna Goldis, the assistant attorney general overseeing fraud whom New York Attorney General Letitia James fired earlier this year, warned that young gays and lesbians might be tempted to accept a transgender identity in order to be “straight.”
The conflict traces back to competing understandings of identity. Lesbian and gay identity is rooted in biological sex, because sexual orientation depends on whether someone is male or female, and whether he or she prefers male or female partners.
Transgender ideology, by contrast, prioritizes an internal gender identity, minimizing sex as of lesser consequence.
Why Now?
Log Cabin Republicans has exposed the emperor’s nakedness, but will the people see it?
I suspect they will — for the same reason the transgender movement seems to be on the back foot legally.
“The social and cultural permission gatekeepers on the Left have sort of lost the battle on whether or not you can speak out on these issues and have a different opinion than the Left and continue to function in civil society,” Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel for First Liberty Institute, told the Daily Signal.
Transgender Maximalism
Not too long ago, transgender orthodoxy was on the rise. After the Supreme Court redefined marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), groups like the HRC demanded corporations implement policies to honor preferred pronouns.
The American Civil Liberties Union took the case of Gavin Grimm, a female student who identified as male and who sued the local school board to gain access to boys’ restrooms—and prevailed.
Even an Originalist Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, effectively rewrote federal law in Bostock v. Clayton County, ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which prohibits sex-based discrimination—also forbids employers from firing workers over their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Human Rights Campaign urged the incoming administration of President Joe Biden to extend the ruling to apply into areas Gorsuch explicitly said it did not affect, such as sports teams and bathrooms, and Biden’s administration did so in 2021.
The Legal Landscape Today
Yet, a few years later, the Human Rights Campaign has lost more than half of its Fortune 500 allies. Even health care companies are rejecting HRC’s mandates. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is investigating medical billing fraud for sex-rejecting procedures, and the transgender movement is making some rather interesting defensive legal arguments.
During the January oral arguments for West Virginia v. B.P.J., a case examining whether males have the right to compete in women’s sports, the ACLU effectively conceded the legitimacy of fairness concerns. The ACLU argued that, while some men may enjoy advantages over women in sports, the men who identify as women in this case had undergone medical interventions that made them less of a threat.
This marked a significant retreat from the maximalist claim that “trans women are women,” and the dismissal of any fairness concerns as bigoted. The argument effectively went from “there is no difference, bigot,” to “interventions reduce the difference.”
FROM MY DESK
📚Reading: Wind and Truth, by Brandon Sanderson
Why I recommend it: This is the fifth book in the Stormlight Archive, and while I didn’t find it quite as satisfying as the other four, I enjoyed it. This one is rightly more controversial, partly because it represents the end of the first phase of the Stormlight Archive.
📰Worth your time: Don’t Trust the Midterm Polls by Victor Davis Hanson
🎲Playing: Wingspan by Elizabeth Hargrave is a fantastic board game with well-crafted dynamics. It’s well-made and well-thought through, though it’s definitely for people who like more complex games.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an activist group often cited as the gold standard on transgender medicine during the Biden years, recently claimed in a legal filing that its Standards of Care represented medical opinion on a topic of “medical and scientific uncertainty.” WPATH wasn’t dismissing the standards as baseless or as “mere opinion,” but it was stating that, for legal purposes, they do not qualify as the kind of truth claims the government can regulate as consumer fraud. It also effectively conceded that there is more than one rational position on the issue.
WPATH even cited the Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti—a ruling WPATH itself condemned—to claim that states have the right to make their own laws on sex-rejecting procedures.
What Does This Mean?
The transgender movement isn’t just experiencing opposition from its enemies, but dissent from its erstwhile allies.
For years, transgender activists convinced Americans that disagreement was beyond the pale. Log Cabin Republicans’ stance suggests that more members of the LGBTQ movement are reconsidering whether those acronyms truly belong together.
That said, advocates for sanity cannot rest on our laurels.
Those of us who know that biology trumps identity must keep up the pressure. We must keep shining a light on the emperor’s nakedness, because the Human Rights Campaign won’t stop insisting that he’s dressed in the most exquisite finery.
This article incorporated reporting from two different Daily Signal reports, one on Log Cabin Republicans and one on the transgender movement’s legal strategy.
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