Years ago, before I felt safe enough to be out of the closet I asked my conservative Christian father why whenever he would hear about a homosexual couple his mind would immediately pry into their intimacy, why when he saw two men holding hands in the street he would think about what they might be doing in their bedroom and not about the life they share, why does this never happen when a man and a woman are cuddling on a couch at the lounge bar, why is the latter just love and the former a lifestyle?
Obviously I knew why.
He did not answer.
The next day he called me and said : “You are right, I never thought about it before.”
He never thought about it because this mindset is embedded in our culture, we are all goldfishes in a bowl and homophobia is the water.
Homophobia does not always look like a slur yelled at you from a car, it does not always look like your skull becoming one with the concrete because you dared to exist outside of your home, sometimes - most of the time - it is your parents joking about not wanting a gay child, it is a lawyer and a contract of cohabitation because marriage is not for people like you and yes sometimes it is hearing friends and family say that they support you but please don’t flaunt it in front of the children.
And what am I flaunting?
I bring my wife flowers, we cuddle on the couch, we cook, we come home exhausted, we clean the stupid oven, we play with the cats, we mourn together, we pay the bills, we yell at politicians on the news, we don’t mop today because it’s Saturday and we are tired - we live like every other couple on the planet but none of this matters because the moment I use the word “lesbian” my apartment becomes just one bedroom with eyes for windows and my love the lifestyle of a disgusting sexual deviant.
Before I dive more deeply into the reasons why I am writing this piece I want to make one thing very clear: I do not believe anybody’s sexual life should be discussed in places where it is inappropriate; when I say that I want homosexual people to be visible I mean that it should be fine to mention Alan Turing to a class of middle schoolers without showing them any pornographic content, he was homosexual and persecuted for it, we can move on the same way we do when we mention Marie Curie’s husband or Einstein’s wife.
I am aware that many of you do not believe gay kids exist, but I need you to reflect on that notion and ask yourself why you assume a gay kid must be having sexual relationships in order to acknowledge their homosexuality when it is perfectly normal to see innocent heterosexual love stories in children’s cartoons, truth is that in a heteronormative society when the term sexual orientation is used nobody includes straight people in that definition, it’s a reality you might not like but reality doesn’t adapt itself to your displeasure, in a mixed group the concept of sexuality is not brought up nor taken into consideration as a political matter unless a lesbian or a gay man are present, that’s one of the many things I was not ready to sign up for when I came out: my simple existence becoming everybody’s political problem.
By all means I am not telling you to brush off every single thing you’d consider a red flag but if your first reaction upon hearing a kid utter the words “gay” or “lesbian” or even “bisexual” is to imagine the worst case scenario, if you panic as soon as a regular rainbow flag appears on a TV show aimed at children do take a moment to assess whether or not you might be the one applying malice to something that has the potential of being innocent.
I was a lesbian child, no amount of teachers casually telling the class about their husbands and kids nor girls talking about their crushes on boys has made me heterosexual, it doesn't work that way, in fact not having ever heard the word lesbian, not having ever met a lesbian, or seen a cute same sex love story in a cartoon during those years of my life has only prolonged the suffering and inner turmoil I could have been spared by a little less homophobia in the world - it shouldn’t be normal nor is it good for a 14 year old girl to desperately try not to be a lesbian, to hide her own reality from herself, to not feel comfortable with her completely innocent crush on her female classmate.
In truth I was not aware of the fact that there are women who prefer to seek romantic relationships with other women until I reached my 22nd birthday, until then I knew what my feelings were but I had no words for them, I did however have plenty of words to define how wrong and terrible and disgusting this unnamed thing was: faggot, inverted, weird, unnatural, trauma induced - more insidious than those words were the worried looks and the quick change of channel as soon as Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe came on television.
I knew homophobia before I knew homosexuality.
Most of us if not all of us grew up in an hostile environment where we learned that we were wrong before we learned what we were.
Mainstream culture making homosexuality a trivial matter would help create a safe line of dialogue and would spare parents the cloak of darkness and secrecy that could make a child seek the advice of the wrong people, and it would hopefully make homophobic households less and less common.
So yes, gay children exist, trans children do not, the two things aren't even comparable because being homosexual is just that, a state of being, no body modifications or hormones required to be who you are. Everybody knows it is impossible to be born in the wrong body, it is impossible to change your sex by calling it a gender, but it is not impossible to feel uncomfortable in the roles that society has imposed on your sex, it is not impossible to feel like you don't belong in the pigeonhole you were forced into; for some this is just part of growing up, for others it can be dysphoria, and if the way out of this discomfort is offered by a person who is obsessed with the idea that sex doesn't really exist then we are in front of a recipe for disaster.
Let’s not labour under the delusion that the ideology we are fighting against has sprout from the ground out of nowhere, it didn’t. It was lovingly cultivated in all our homes, a great number of people still want gender roles to go back to what they used to be, tight little boxes crafted based on our sex, stereotypes that go miles beyond clothes and career choices - misogyny, homophobia, and racism are all pervasive notions that poison our lives daily whether or not we are being affected by them, they exist independently from our willingness to acknowledge them, you could say they are like an involuntary muscle moving under the surface.
This is why I find the wording of the "Parental Rights in Education" bill quite insidious, and I know what you might be thinking now, the bill does not mention homosexuality anywhere and it doesn’t even say the word “gay” anywhere, so why would I be concerned about a law that will protect children from gender ideology being forced on them?
Because the law conflates sexual orientation with gender identity.
As we established before nobody thinks of heterosexuality as a sexual orientation, in the homophobic society where we all live only homosexuality is a choice induced by some bizarre trick of nature while heterosexuality is normal, nobody finds anything credibly weird when a teacher has a picture of his wife on his desk, it is not “a lifestyle” it’s his life, his romance, his family.
There is an abyss of difference between the grooming narcissistic behaviour of a person who wants children to believe that wearing a dress and looking feminine makes anybody a woman - even if they were born with a penis - and the simple quiet existence of a homosexual person whose desire for acceptance doesn't require any drastic modification to anybody's personal life let alone to science as a whole.
I will never approve of schools using LGB inclusion as an excuse to teach children as young as five about sexual acts and genitals when they should be kept safe from these matters until the time is appropriate.
But should I remove my wedding band when I am around children? Should I ask my wife to not come pick me up so nobody asks questions? Should I not let my employer know that I am married? Should I hide who I am from society because a group of homophobic people have decided to latch onto what used to be my community to make it look like all of us under that goddam rainbow flag are actually monsters just waiting for a chance to abuse your child? Should I go back in the closet?
Maybe the answer is yes.
The goal of a parasitic plant is to survive without killing its host but it happens that the host is killed anyway and sometimes the death of the host is caused by an attempt to save it from the parasite - this is the relationship between homosexual people and queer people, between LGB groups and gender ideology, and as harsh at it may sound it is sometimes the relationship between homosexual people and their allies.
During the past decade or so it has become increasingly impossible to have nuanced conversations about any topic, dissenting opinions are taken as attacks and a shade of light grey added to the ideas you have stubbornly established as milk-white is enough to cause an uproar; treating the problems of minorities as virtuous badges of purity to wash your conscience with does nothing but force those minorities to lose their voices in favour of a self appointed saviour. A saviour that might not be in a position to understand the scope and subtlety of the problem.
One must consider the power of inertia, setting something into motion without checking what is on the path beyond the limits of your field of view can be extremely dangerous, words like "privilege" and "oppression" have been overused and misapplied to the point that a knee jerk reaction happens as soon as they appear in any context and offence is taken before any critical thinking ability can be applied.
To give a relevant example I noticed recently that defining an idea as homophobic often makes people assume that the bearer of said idea must be homophobic as well, especially when that word is uttered in gender critical circles; this might come as a surprise but it is possible to say homophobic things without actively being homophobic, I urge you to return to the image of the goldfish and the water mentioned a few paragraphs above, you might not be part of it but you are immersed in it whether you like it or not.
Thinking about the effects and the consequences of our words on the lives of others is not always easy and nobody is perfect or omniscient, this is why I don't want my words to be taken as a form of condemnation or scolding, but I do believe it is important to exercise our muscle of awareness, especially but not only when we happen to have privilege in this world - I am able bodied and white, this means that I don't experience ableism or racism on my own skin everyday therefore if I truly care about these problems and I don’t want to only think about them once a year when there is a fresh tag on social media I must make a conscious effort to put myself in other people's shoes and hopefully try not to push policies that would harm those I am trying to help or make my voice louder when I should let somebody else speak. Nobody can change the world on their own but we can take care of the square of it that we inhabit, make sure that within our capabilities and possibilities we aren't making it worse than it already is.
Take the label lesbian for instance, you might find it innocuous of a trans identified male to use that label when he is in a relationship with another trans identified male, or of a bisexual woman to use it when she is in a relationship with a lesbian - it isn't innocuous, and it isn't harmless because the meaning of that label extends beyond the limits of one person's relationship, once it's established in the real world through real actions that lesbians can be male or that they can not be exclusively homosexual then every homosexual woman’s life will be affected, it will make young lesbians doubt their boundaries because they are being told those boundaries don't really exist, or worse, that those boundaries make them wrong and in need of correction.
Drawing a parallel between trans right activists and gender critical people is a rather popular silencing tactic I’ve noticed being used on twitter, archetypes are very useful in many forms of communication, the enemy and the hero, the good and the bad; this distinction fuels our resolve and believe it or not makes even a political fight easily marketable, a well oiled hate machine can become an infinite source of profit as long as society induced bias is maintained and regularly replenished through the exploitation of the collective unconscious.
The gender cult is painting the gender critical movement as the enemy and placing itself as the hero of trans children, similarly many gender critical people are placing themselves as the saviours of all homosexuals while often forgetting to think critically about their own actions, sometimes in a subconscious effort to get our oppressor to listen to us we speak in a way that goes against our interest and sometimes when allies speak for us they forget to consider interests that go beyond their own objectives.
Now don’t misunderstand my words, it is very clear who is the enemy here, it is completely obvious who is doing the damage and who is bearing the brunt of that damage and whatever contribution is being made towards raising awareness and ending the monstrosity we are fighting against cannot be as bad as the monstrosity itself, but even when we act at the polar opposite sides of a political spectrum we are all human and similarly capable of mistakes, damage can be done even with good intentions.
The gender critical movement is not a group with very defined borders nor it is composed of people with beliefs that align with each other beyond the universally obvious notion that no man can become a woman, so it is paramount that we all truly listen to each other when disagreement happens, it is not wrong or humiliating to ask a question, to admit that we might not have considered other angles or that we are confused about somebody else's point of view on something that could affect them more directly than it does ourselves.
There is no doubt that we must stop this degeneration, but I am no longer inclined to believe that every mean we use or alliance we make will be a good one, nor do I believe we don’t need to be more careful with our language, in fact I am deadly afraid of the backlash against gay people that I already see looming over the horizon thanks to the colonisation of LGB groups and to the consequent sloppy political decisions that have been taken across the board while hiding behind the giant virtue signalling column of acceptance, we should not contribute to this confusion by letting our language be vague and sending the message that homosexual people gaining rights might have contributed to the current state of things, if you understood my points about the way the loudest voices of society influence us independently from our political position or our intentions you will also understand by now that the way we word broad concepts that happen to be delicately intertwined with the rights of a minority matters immensely, you are after all trying to separate a strong parasitic plant from a tired and depleted host.
I am reminded of a story I read some time ago, about a man who never had breakfast because he really disliked eggs, he would starve until lunch time because of this, until somebody told him that he didn't have to eat eggs for breakfast, he didn't have to eat cereals either, nobody could stop him from having cold roasted chicken in the morning if he wanted to.
Oftentimes the rules we apply to our lives are nothing but a mirage induced by society, a fatuous, ideological wall that limits us without a reason; this is what being open minded means to me, consider that what you see as a drop of water could be a disaster to somebody much smaller than you, consider that your lunch being somebody else’s breakfast doesn’t spoil the food, consider that we don't know everything.
Maybe this is all too idealistic, if everybody on the planet could remember that the limits of our freedom stop once the limits of somebody else's freedom are reached we would have no wars, no genocide, no intolerance - maybe this is the point.
— cathemerality