NYT Comment Worthy of Your Upvotes
Recommend Mimi's Spot-On Comment re Transgender
Here’s a comment by NYT reader “Mimi” from Seattle, responding to “Bonnie Huggins,” plus a gift link to the article in question for anyone who otherwise would be paywalled. You can recommend Mimi’s comment (the permanent ID link to her comment is here and can’t be gifted, so if you already subscribe to the NYT, you can go straight to it; otherwise, you’ll have to search for it in the comments section). It’s straightforward, plain-spoken, logical. I don’t see how anyone can dispute what she’s saying. Hello, my fellow liberals?!
As an “L”, just have to note that Mimi’s comment lumps us together with “trans” as attention-seekers. We are not, and this comment demonstrates one of the many, many deleterious consequences to gays and lesbians of including us in this alphabet soup. Folks use this nonsense grouping without thought. A friend wrote me a note using the grouping just recently. This, even though we had had a good discussion not long ago on this very issue. I got that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, knowing I should not let this slide, but was going to have to have one of those many, many uncomfortable discussions with a well-meaning friend. I wrote to her: “as I noted to you when we talked about this initially, I strongly object to that “LGBTQ” framing. It really is not a coherent category, and mixing LGB in with whatever TQ consists of is doing LGB people a lot of harm. Young lesbians, for example, are harassed by men claiming not only to be women, but that they are lesbians, invading lesbian spaces and causing a lot of trouble. Also, a lot of very sex-non-conforming lesbians (so-called “butch” lesbians) have been talked into thinking they are trans, lopping their breasts off and worse, only to realize later, after irreversibly harming their bodies, that they were simply same sex attracted. This is not a criticism of you, it’s just to note that this truly is a problem on several levels, including data collection, and it is terribly under-recognized.” She noted she understood, and I do hope next time she’ll think twice.
I take issue to being included with the trans crowd regarding attention seeking behavior, speaking as an older gay man…it may appear to be that way when observing the younger crowd…but many of the younger Queer crowd are gender identity heterosexuals who want to join the LGB party…it’s the Gender stuff that craves public affirmation.