Why do discussing LGBT rights and discussing Ukraine feel so similar?
Bear with me on this one
LGBT(QIA+) rights and Ukraine are two of the most divisive topics around, and by ‘divisive’ I mean that you can either support them unconditionally, or if you have any questions or concerns, you must therefore hate them and be an icky bad person. I’m barely exaggerating - if you’ve ever tried expressing a sceptical opinion on one of them online or in real life then you will know that there is a fairly large subset of people, including your friends and family members, prepared to frown disapprovingly, feign disbelief, make straw man arguments misrepresenting what you’ve said, and very possibly bombard you with news stories showing you how wrong you are. Such is the power of Current Thing propaganda, amplified exponentially with social media. But why is this, and what do these two seemingly disparate topics have in common?
LGBT(QIA+) rights
The acronyms LGBT, or LGBTQ, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+, have become catch-all terms for anyone who considers themself unconventional in either sexuality or gender identity. The first time I can remember hearing about sexual orientation referred to as an abbreviation was LGB - Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual - when I was at school, 20+ years ago. Talking about gay rights makes sense, because in the past the practice of homosexuality (i.e. homosexual intercourse) was illegal, and in some places still is. I always felt that even the ‘B’ in LGB was somewhat superfluous, since being bisexual was only ever problematic because of the ‘L’ or ‘G’ part, depending on your own sex; bisexual people were never persecuted for their relationships with members of the opposite sex.
The addition of ‘T’ (trans), ‘Q’ (queer), ‘I’ (intersex), ‘A’ (asexual) and ‘+’ (?) takes the original meaning of the classification, as being for a group whose sexual behaviour had been criminalised, and widens that classification to include groups who feel oppressed or victimised, with the definition of oppression, victimhood and even violence being open to interpretation. To go through the groups one by one:
Trans - in the fairly recent past, there were transvestites (people who dressed as the opposite sex) and transsexuals (people who were undergoing surgery to make their bodies resemble the opposite sex). Now there is only ‘trans’, which encompasses anyone who self-identifies as the opposite sex - or as any gender, since gender is now the pertinent classification, not sex. That identification doesn’t require any medical interventions, it’s simply a question of how one feels about one’s self. Gender dysphoria is the psychological condition of feeling that your gender does not match your physical sex.
Queer - historically a pejorative term for homosexual, but it’s been adopted as a term to describe "people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender". You could say that queer therefore covers everyone in the previous LGBT categories.
Intersex - people whose sexual characteristics at birth are not exclusively male or female, including people who might also be termed hermaphrodites. This represents a tiny proportion of the population, but out of all the categories represented by LGBTQIA, it is the only one that refers to a person’s physical characteristics before any medical intervention.
Asexual - people who feel a "low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity". Not to be confused with asexual reproduction in biology, which is how organisms reproduce without the need for a partner.
+ - anyone else who wants to be involved, but somehow doesn’t fit into any of the other categories. More on that later.
As is probably obvious, none of the groups defined above can claim to have suffered legal consequences for their behaviour the way gay people have. Trans is a definition of how you feel about yourself, intersex is a physiological condition and asexual is simply a lack of sexual desire (has anyone ever been arrested for not wanting to have sex?).
Since none of these defined groups are legally targeted in any way, the definition of oppression is widened to include things like bullying, denial of the right to have ‘gender-affirming’ surgery (i.e. elective plastic surgery) or to take hormone therapies to make a person appear more like the opposite sex, and perceived discrimination. Trans people aren’t forced to sit at the back of the bus or use a different water fountain, so the term discrimination is expanded to include negative attention they receive. This is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if a person dresses or changes their appearance in an unconventional way then they want to stand out, which implies an element of attention-seeking. Positive attention (e.g. compliments or flirting) is discrimination as much as negative attention (e.g. insults or physical violence) is, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
This can easily be used to score debate-points: it’s certainly upsetting to hear about trans people being assaulted or murdered, but it’s cynical and manipulative to then use this as evidence of discrimination or ‘anti-trans hate’, because lots of people are assaulted and murdered, each one an unjustifiable tragedy. But unless the law permitted their murder because they were trans, it’s not an issue of rights. This perception of discrimination can also be applied to unknowable quantities like acceptance for employment: how can an employer prove that they weren’t biased against a candidate because of their gender identity?
That pesky ‘+’
The + category in LGBTQIA+ is problematically vague, since all the standard sexualities have already been covered. Is bestiality OK, if the animal consents? Can an animal consent? What about necrophilia? What about paedophilia? Being sexually attracted to children is something that could be classified as a psychological condition or a sexuality, but acting on it is most definitely a crime, one that surely no one would want to defend. But LGBTQIA+ is supposed to be ‘inclusive’, meaning it can include any sexual orientation, so why not paedophilia? Paedophiles certainly have been targeted by laws based on their behaviour, but that’s because it involves taking advantage of children, and the laws are there to protect children.
On the subject of protecting children, there’s the bizarre trend in the US of inviting drag queens into schools and libraries which, if you object or ask a question like ‘why?’, is taken as evidence of your own anti-LGBT bigotry. Never mind that drag shows have always been a form of entertainment meant for adults, and parents are objecting for the same reason they would object to strippers or burlesque performers coming to their kids’ school, even if they were just coming to read them stories.
Speculation about what the ‘+’ category could mean is to say nothing of the potential harm to women’s rights posed by trans rights, if a statement like “trans women are women” is taken literally and to its logical conclusion. If women are entitled to maternity leave, and trans women are women, why shouldn’t trans women be entitled to maternity leave? Or if trans women are women and therefore not all women can have babies, why should ‘cis’ women have the unfair advantage of maternity leave? These might seem like absurd questions, but if you take a statement like “trans women are women” seriously and literally, then there’s no longer any limit on what else might follow from it. The question, therefore, is what makes women women, if not their bodies?
A wom-what?
Human beings are mammals, which means we procreate sexually, which means there are biological males and females, but in the last few years the media has pushed very hard the idea that gender norms are somehow outdated, and it’s only stuffy old conservatives who still think in terms of men and women. It’s not clear what exactly the end goal of trans rights activists is, because a trans person doesn’t lose any rights when they decide to come out as the opposite (or another) gender. The only rights that seem to be at stake are trans women’s ‘right’ to be treated like women and have rights intended for female bodies, and the rights of people - including children, with or without their parents’ consent - to have the aforementioned ‘gender-affirming’ surgery or hormone therapy. Despite the insistence on a multiplicity of genders, there’s no getting away from the fact that hormone therapies boost either testosterone or estrogen, and puberty blockers suppress them.
The debate about whether trans women should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms typifies the nature of the discussion around trans rights. Sex-segregated bathrooms and changing rooms exist for a reason, which is to protect women from men in private, unsupervised spaces, because women are understood to be inherently vulnerable to men, because of our respective bodies. This doesn’t mean that all men are predators and rapists, but it acknowledges that all men have the potential to be. The argument for allowing trans women into women’s bathrooms hinges on statements like “trans women are women, they’re not predators” - but clearly, if a trans woman can be a man in women’s clothes, that trans woman is no less a potential predator than a man in men’s clothes, and even a post-op transsexual is likely to be able to physically overpower a lot of women. It’s not ‘transphobic’ to expect trans women to respect cis women’s rights or privacy. It is misogynistic for trans women to demand that cis women accept them as women, when that clearly puts cis women at risk.
There’s a good chance that some people might have read this far and surmised that I have something against trans people, but I really don’t (and thank you for getting this far). There are some very obvious ways in which men could exploit sympathy for trans people to harm or intimidate women, but I’m sure most trans people aren’t predators. I think people genuinely suffering from gender dysphoria should be treated and given counseling to help them come to terms with their bodies, not encouraged to believe that their condition is in fact reflective of reality and that they should therefore have invasive and irreversible surgery or medication to make their body reflect their own self-image. The only group that benefits from the push to ‘treat’ the condition with medical interventions is the medical industry, and there is no reason to believe that this treatment helps the patients. As a trite analogy, imagine a psychiatrist told a patient that the voices in their head were real and the patient should do as they say - that would be a very bad psychiatrist.
One of the most insidious - and to my mind, evil - arguments that gets thrown around is that gender-affirming treatment is ‘life-saving’, because people who want it but don’t get it are supposedly at higher risk of suicide. The reason I find this so evil is that by saying it, and having it publicly repeated and endorsed by celebrities and on social media, it becomes true in the minds of impressionable, and especially young, people. It therefore follows that if a person is denied this treatment and kills themself, their decision was in some way justified by this accepted ‘truth’, and blame in the court of public opinion is shifted onto whoever denied it to them, whether that was a parent or a state authority. It’s the pharma-aligned media saying to parents, “nice kid you’ve got there, be a terrible shame if they were to get depressed and kill themselves”, while they do their best to confuse children and alienate them from their own bodies, and push medical procedures as a solution.
Jeez Louise, what does any of this have to do with Ukraine?
Russia’s Special Military Operation has been grossly misrepresented since it began in February 2022. Western media have forever lost credibility in the eyes of millions of people as have they unquestioningly repeated Ukrainian reports of events, even as those reports have changed and become inconsistent. The Russian justification for its SMO - to stop Ukrainian nationalists and the AFU, with the help of western fighters and possibly NATO commanders, from murdering people in territory that Ukraine considered its own - has been shown again and again to be valid, but the media swears blind that it is not. It’s become clear that the media is an information cartel, in that if one outlet starts noticing the Nazis and their atrocities, and that it doesn’t make sense for Russia to blow up its own gas pipeline, attack a nuclear power plant that it’s also defending or (just today) destroy a dam causing massive flooding in areas under Russian control, an ecological catastrophe and disruption to Crimea’s water supply - this immediately puts pressure on other outlets to explain why they didn’t notice, so they are all having to double down repeatedly on less and less tenable lies.
As more and more people become aware that ‘Ukraine’ (i.e. the leadership of the country) is either prepared to massacre its citizens for the sake of a fake news story blaming Russia, or unable to control the nationalist militias who are prepared to do such a thing, the idea of supporting Ukraine becomes harder and harder to sell. Supporting Ukraine, it seems, means supporting a deeply corrupt political elite indifferent to the fate of most (especially poorer) Ukrainians. The Russian military seem to be far more concerned about Ukrainian civilians than ‘Ukraine’ is, for the simple reasons that Ukraine is run by outside forces in Washington and London, who see Ukraine as a great investment in their semi-declared war on Russia, and nothing more.
What trans ideology has to do with ‘Ukraine’ is that both ask you, the member of the public, to approve of a monolithic concept without any space for reason or nuance, to accept something that goes against your rational understanding of the world and to gradually overwrite your understanding of concepts like gender, fascism, truth or proof, through the constant repetition of new standards and the denigration of proponents of the ‘old’ standards. This is especially true for children, whose understanding of these concepts is being written, not overwritten.
It’s no coincidence that so many articles have been written conflating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with its less permissive LGBT laws, even though Ukraine is still not particularly LGBT-friendly and the Special Military Operation has nothing to do with LGBT rights. The average person may have internalised through repetition LGBT rights as a generally positive social force, thinking of them as a benign extension of gay rights, so Russia standing in opposition to some of them complements the negative image of Russia that the media presents. Those people might actually find Russia’s position on the particulars of this ‘anti-LGBT agenda’ quite reasonable and humane, but it will always be presented as a manifestation of tyranny.
While proponents of trans ideology tell us to reject the reality of our own bodies in favour of a new set of rules presented to us across our media, that same media simultaneously tells us that its reporting of the Ukraine conflict is the only truthful one, and that any media or individual presenting anything contradictory - for example Ukrainian nationalists proudly saluting in front of swastikas, or evidence that atrocities ascribed to Russia were perpetrated by the Ukrainian army or nationalist groups - is by definition a Russian propagandist, and should not be believed. When our media offers allegations with no evidence or questionable evidence, their word is always to be taken over the ‘Russian propagandist’ presenting allegations with copious evidence.
Definitions of ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’ and ‘mistruth’ have all crept up to include anything the mainstream media decides is false, and so-called ‘fact-checking’ websites (many of which are compromised by their links to government agencies) are used by media outlets as supposedly impartial third parties. This circular logic of turning lies into truth and vice versa by playing with definitions of words and exploiting empathy, feels exactly like the logic that justifies trans women entering women’s spaces and justifies mutilating people in the name of care and gender expression. Putin is a modern-day Hitler, so denying that Russia has done what they are accused of is the same as denying the Holocaust. Trans women are women, therefore it is bigoted to deny them access to female spaces. Russia is a terrorist state, therefore any of the terrorism visited daily on Donetsk and Lugansk with Western weapons is a necessary response, even if it’s been going on for much longer than the SMO. Gender-affirming care saves lives, therefore denying anyone access to this treatment is tantamount to murder, the same as it would be to deny a diabetic insulin1.
So what is to be done?
The emotionally-charged rhetoric around LGBT rights and Ukraine is intentionally divisive and polarising, especially on social media. Everyone is expected to take an either pro- or anti- stance on every issue, with no criticism of your chosen side permitted. When it comes to LGBT rights and Ukraine, you are either “with us or against us”, with no room for debate.
To say that you are in favour of gay rights, including gay couples being allowed to marry and adopt, and that you support trans people’s right to wear whatever they want and use whatever pronouns they want, but you also think that gender-affirming surgery and elective hormone therapy should not be allowed (at the very least not for children) and biological men should use men’s bathrooms and changing rooms - would class you as anti-LGBT amongst the self-consciously progressive clique. To say that trans women are capable of taking advantage of cis women in female-only spaces will be received as accusing all trans women of being predators.
Expressing concern for the people of Ukraine and wishing for an end to the conflict even if that means accepting Russia’s terms, and acknowledging that there are numerous well-funded, well-trained and well-armed militias who want to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers from the country and who represent a much bigger threat to ordinary Ukrainians than Russian missile strikes, and who have been terrorising the Donbass for 9 years with the support of the West - will get you called a Putin shill. To say that the Ukraine conflict is a money laundering operation for US political elites who are keeping it going by refusing to let Ukraine negotiate with Russia, and with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives the acceptable cost, will label you a conspiracy theorist and may lose you friends.
The thugs and Nazis marauding across Ukraine, and the self-serving politicians in Ukraine and abroad, are to Ukraine what sexual predators and those prepared to exploit the ‘+’ category are to the LGBTQIA+ cause. If supporting ‘Ukraine’ means supporting the people who are killing Ukrainians, then no one should support Ukraine. If supporting LGTBQIA+ rights means putting women at potential risk and potentially legitimising groups like paedophiles, then no one should support it. But that only becomes an issue if you accept that you have to support one side unconditionally, which you don’t.
Standing your moral ground and insisting on taking a humane and nuanced view on complex topics is ultimately the only way to retain your self-respect in an age of gaslighting and demoralisation. Anyone who refuses to discuss a topic and demands all-or-nothing support against your own better judgment is, ultimately, not your friend.