Trans is the natural progression from ‘gay marriage’

The LGBT political coalition is beginning to fray. Andrew Sullivan is hardly alone among LGB advocates in believing the demands of the T’s are pushing the movement too far.

While I appreciate their contributions to resisting trans tyranny, I must part company with the LGBs on one important point. I don’t believe we can roll back the trans tide without at least revisiting and probably reversing the “gay gains” in general and “gay marriage” in particular.

The successful ‘gay marriage’ movement directly contributed to the falsification of public documents, the ‘born that way’ myth, and the battering of parental rights.

Key ideas in the campaign to redefine marriage laid the groundwork for key ideas in trans activism. I was active in the marriage debate from the 2008 battle over Proposition 8 in California all the way to the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage in Obergefell in 2015. I remember the cavalier manner in which our arguments were dismissed at that time. Let’s revisit a few of them.

Government as arbiter of biological truth

We can start with the rewriting of public documents for ideological purposes. Trans activists claim the right to falsify their birth certificates. Many people across the political spectrum can see problems with allowing them to do so. Yet some of those same people who once promoted “gay marriage” but currently criticize transgenderism (like Andrew Sullivan) seem to forget that removing the gender requirement from marriage introduced and normalized this very process.

Some states changed marriage licenses and birth certificates. No more husband and wife, just “partner.” No more “mother” and “father,” just gender-neutral “parents.” In the state of California, “gay marriage” led to the law permitting three people to be listed on a birth certificate as legal parents.

In other words, California (and 11 other states) redefined parenthood by stealth. Before “gay marriage,” the government document known as a “birth certificate” simply recorded the biological reality of the man and the woman who contributed their genetic material to the procreation of the child. After “gay marriage,” “parenthood” becomes the creation of the state, delinked from any necessary connection between the child’s body and the bodies of the parents.

I can testify that throughout the debate over redefining marriage, few people seemed to care about this redefinition of terms.

‘Born that way’ as founding myth

The gay lobby and the campaign for gay marriage also paved the way for transgenderism by promoting the “born that way” myth. Trans rights activists claim, in all seriousness, that some people are “born in the wrong body.” Many people are rightly skeptical, realizing that this concept has literally zero foundation in any actual biological science.

However, some of these skeptics accept at face value the idea that certain people are “born gay.” The gay lobby has aggressively promoted this claim, in spite of the fact that extensive efforts to prove it have failed. In 2019, a massive study of the human genome concluded decisively that there is no “gay gene.” There is a modest genetic contribution to “gayness” (an inexact term, but that’s another whole story), comparable to the genetic component of other complex behavioral patterns.

Even prior to 2019, studies of identical twins should have ended the “born gay” idea. Identical twins, by definition, share identical genes and an identical prenatal uterine environment. By any understanding of “born gay,” the concordance rate of sexual orientation should be 100%. That is, if one identical twin is “gay,” the other should also be gay, 100% of the time. The actual number is closer to 30%.

When the T’s demand that we rewrite the foundational social institutions of civilization, based on some supposed accident of nature that they have no control over, they are following the path pioneered by the L’s and the G’s.

State ideology as wedge between parents and children

Finally, and most alarming, enacting the trans agenda has put the state at war with the natural right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. Trump’s executive order ending federal support for the trans agenda included a long laundry list of things the U.S. Department of Education would henceforth cease doing. Nonetheless, many public schools continue to teach pro-trans propaganda to impressionable children.

Some states have redefined child abuse to include parents who refuse to sufficiently “affirm” their child’s (mis)understanding of their gender. Some states offer themselves as “sanctuary states” for children in other states whose parents fail to affirm them. Parents in Maryland had to fight, all the way to the Supreme Court, not to direct the education of their children, but simply to protect them from the egregious harm of state-sponsored indoctrination.

I‘d like to remind my former opponents in the Prop 8 debate of a prediction we made at the time: that enshrining “gay marriage” in law would lead to exposing children to pro-gay propaganda in the schools.

“No, no!” you said.

We brought up the case of David Parker in Boston, who was arrested for being too aggressive in his objections to the school reading to his son "Heather Has Two Mommies" in kindergarten. That was in 2005!

You dismissed our concerns. Nearly 20 years later, Scott Smith was arrested for disrupting a Loudoun County school board meeting. Smith’s daughter was assaulted in the girls’ restroom by a boy who said he was a girl.

Could you, just for a moment, admit that advocates of natural marriage had a point?

RELATED: ‘Children as assets’: Gay couple’s viral IVF video reveals just how far Obergefell has gone

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Facing facts

The successful “gay marriage” movement directly contributed to the falsification of public documents, the “born that way” myth, and the battering of parental rights.

As I said at the outset, I respect and appreciate the contributions of self-described gays and lesbians to resisting the pro-trans agenda. But I really urge you to rethink your earlier commitment to the pro-gay agenda. It was not the harmless “advance of freedom” we’ve all been led to believe. Sooner or later, we are all going to have to face this fact. We need to stop falsifying birth certificates, walk back the “born gay” myth, and restore parental rights. It would be great if y’all could help us out with that.