I have been asked often over the years why so many same-sex attracted individuals support their own erasure, via the addition of a disembodying ideology (Trans) to the LGB corporate banner.
There is currently a little movement underway of same-sex attracted individuals to re-center their own rights. They are aware of the cognitive dissonance of having a sex-denying ideology positioned within their movement for acceptance of same-sex attraction. The corporate deconstruction of sex into a spectrum of profitable identities is being used to obscure the reality of human sexual dimorphism. This conceals same-sex attraction while simultaneously framing it as bigotry against body dissociation.
But why don’t the majority of LGBs get it? How can the gay men (and some women) at the very pinnacle of the LGBT juggernaut, like Jon Stryker, Tim Gill, Drummond Pike, David Bohnett, Mark S. Bonham, and Beth Brooke Marciniak just overlook the harms being manifest against gender non-conforming children and women?
My sense is we are underestimating the unconscious shame fomented and carried over from an early, blatant, and rampant homophobia in western cultures. This shaming has manifested an almost maniacal compulsion for power over others.
Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist, has examined shame concerning serial killers and how this fuels their compulsion to regain dominance over early childhood experiences of being humiliated. It might seem odd to compare gay men, with a penchant for power, to serial killers. Still, it resonates for me when I consider the deep levels of shaming done to gay men when they are children (there is no counterpart to the previously culturally accepted female tomboy for effeminate boys) and how so many of them having gained political dominance are currently running roughshod over any semblance of democracy. They exhibit an inability to listen to others, to understand alternate perspectives, and to work with others who do not conform to the narrative being sold by the gender identity industry. The LGBT NGOs run by gay men are driving punishing assaults against any person, state, or institution who gets in the way of their profiteering, their power, and their introduction of an insane body-denying ideology into the culture. This ideology is, in essence, dismembering humanity.
Gay men are throwing potentially gay children under the medical-industrial complex bus for their fetishistic brethren. As usual, some lesbians follow their lead, hoping the power spoils will be shared. This has certainly been true for some lesbians. Sheila Jeffreys, a lesbian feminist scholar who analyses the history and politics of human sexuality, has argued that this attachment of gay men to men with a fetish of disembodiment, is predominantly an issue of men prioritizing male sexual gratification over everything. I believe there is more to it than this. I think it also goes beyond profiteering, which I have written about extensively.
Once the AIDS crisis was minimized in the US, a generation of young gay men, previously brutally bullied for their effeminacy and/or their same-sex attraction as boys, growing up in homophobic societies, suddenly found themselves with some social currency. Between the investment of the medical-industrial complex in their same-sex attraction as a medical issue and corporate identity, they were no longer marginalized to the outskirts of society. This confluence of AIDS and their political activism gave them power as a group that brought inroads into the larger heterosexual community. These inroads didn't happen quite the same way for lesbians. Lesbians, as women, didn’t have the social power men had, and they weren’t the ones who got sick. They were not the ones society stigmatized for spreading a deadly virus into the culture.
Political solidarity against common oppression can be as strong a bond as any deep friendship or romance. Effeminate gay men seeking transition to avoid the humiliation of living in a homophobic culture didn’t look all that different than those with autogynephilia, a sexual obsession with possessing female biology. Little do many gay men and women understand the grave mistake in conflating paraphilia with same-sex desire, one based in sexual embodiment and the other in sexual disassociation. Gay corporatists explicitly created an alliance with transsexuals for profit, but the glue in their allegiance has also been entrenched in solidarity against heteronormativity and shame. LGB individuals cling to their fetishistic siblings over other friendships and family, even as gender ideology seeks to erase them.
Where the social advantages fought for by gay men and lesbians but secured by gay men and trickled down to lesbians, most lesbians established social communities, opened bookstores, and created concerts and cruises for other lesbians. Gay men, having amassed more power, entered the corporate culture, banking, politics, and technology, where their influence and acceptance of their sexual orientation were magnified in direct relation to their financial and political power. Suddenly there was a way through the humiliation of being othered.
Tim Gill, the largest individual funder of LGBT causes in the US, and founder of the Gill Foundation, one of the most prominent LGBT NGOs, gave voice to this newfound power in 1992. Just before founding the Gill Foundation, Gill called Norwest Bank Colorado, which held about $20 million of his technology company’s cash and Gill’s wealth. He wanted to know if the bank’s gay employees were protected by an internal policy. They were not. Gill threatened: If Norwest didn’t get a nondiscrimination policy on the books, he’d withdraw all $20 million. Within weeks, the bank complied, and then 39-year-old Gill realized his wealth could influence more than technology markets. It seems reasonable that this sudden access to incredible power after being socially shamed as a young person for something so intimate as one’s sexual orientation would have a substantial impact.
Gill befriended Jon Stryker, another gay male, in their alliance against heteronormativity (read: sexual dimorphism). Stryker created Arcus Foundation, a global LGBT NGO Goliath, within a few years of Gill creating his LGBT NGO. Stryker grew up in the same overtly homophobic era as Gill. In his opening introduction for Jon Stryker at the 2015 GLSEN Respect Awards, Gill commented that since knowing each other, he and Jon have “plotted, schemed, hiked and skied together” while also “punishing the wicked and rewarding the good.” “Punishing the wicked” is odd phraseology for successful political activism. It seems overly vengeful.
Two young gay boys born into the entrenched homophobia of 1950s America, with all the internalized shame, undoubted bullying, and secrecy that must have entailed, were finally able to show the enemy who was boss.
There have been few lesbians garnering this much corporate power, though there are some exceptions. Because they are so few, they are perhaps even more conditioned to keeping an alliance of power with their gay brothers and, increasingly, their fetishistic comrades. Some lesbians still sew themselves, politically, to gay men for the same reasons straight women sew themselves to straight men. It’s where the power, protection, and money are.
It’s easy to see how a shared trauma around sexual humiliation has created a bond between many LGBs to each other and men with a fetish for objectifying female biology. As many LGBs project their struggle for sexual acceptance onto autogynephilic men, they create for themselves a blind spot for the destruction now being manifested by their entrenched alliance.
Unfortunately, the gender identity industry will unmoor these lesbian and gay men from their sexed roots, along with the rest of us. Understanding how homophobic shaming has created social tyrants of some gay men may help toward unwinding our support for the sexual objectification of others and body dissociation.
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Image by Gan Khoon Lay
