Gay journalist says LGBTQ movement has gone from civil rights success to ‘madness’

Gay journalist Andrew Sullivan said Thursday that the LGBTQ movement is losing ground in America because it has become “radicalized.”

In a New York Times guest essay, Sullivan marveled at how the gay rights movement traded a legacy of civil rights successes for radical ideas that are turning off modern-day Americans, like trying to rewrite the rules of biology and advocating for child transgender treatment — all the while demonizing Americans who aren’t on board with those ideas.

“Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the ‘social justice’ left, they radicalized,” he wrote.

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Sullivan detailed how the gay rights movement changed for the worse after winning most of the victories for gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights in the past few decades. It became “a new and radical gender revolution” that he said focused “on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with ‘White supremacy,’” dissolving the “natural distinctions between men and women in society,” and replacing “biological sex with ‘gender identity’ in the law and culture.”

He also said modern LGBTQ activists redefined homosexuality “not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological ‘queerness’ meant to subvert and ‘queer’ language, culture and society in myriad different ways.”

Sullivan added that because of this shift, the words “gay and lesbian” in LGBT “all but disappeared” as it became “L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ … The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities, and, by some counts, more than 70 new ‘genders.’”

Sullivan continued, saying that the word “’Queer’ was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement than the gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights movement of the past.”

The author, though he said he welcomed some of the changes brought by this modern movement, said he “simply didn’t buy it.”

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“I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I was supposed to believe the difference didn’t exist?”

He called this development “madness,” writing, “But abolishing the sex binary for the entire society? That’s a whole other thing entirely. And madness, I believe. What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people?”

“They demanded the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted,” he said, noting how dissent with this principle was “equated with bigotry.”

The other major problem with this new version of the gay rights movement, he said, was the preoccupation with children’s sexual orientations.

Sullivan continued, “But this illiberalism made a fateful, strategic mistake. In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids… So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors.”

He detailed how gender ideology proponents taught kids that “being a boy or a girl was something they could choose and change at will,” allowed biological males to compete in female sports, and, in some places, allowed kids to socially transition at school “without their parents’ knowledge or permission.”

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The author then mentioned the “most radical of all: gender-affirming care for minors, which can lead to irreversible sex changes for children.”

After mentioning the advent of these radical positions, Sullivan pointed to current polling showing people’s support for the LGBTQ movement eroding. Citing a Gallup poll, he said, “In 2021, for example, 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent.”

“When people who know a trans person personally were polled, only 40 percent in 2021 supported their competing in teams that matched their gender identity; by 2023, that dropped to 30 percent,” he said, mentioning another set of Gallup polls. “On the medical question, 46 percent of Americans supported banning medical care related to gender transitions for minors in 2022. Today, as people have learned more, 56 percent do,” he said, citing Pew Research data.

Sullivan went on to note that because of this radicalism, the footholds that the gay rights movement carved out among the political center and right “are being lost.”

“Gallup showed Republican support for gay marriage dropping from 55 to 46 percent between 2022 and 2025,” he wrote. 

Sullivan concluded his piece by urging fellow liberals to protect the successes of the gay rights movement and not sacrifice them for radical ideology. 

“Let’s not throw it away,” he said.