Pseudonyms for Safety

A short note on why progressives must often remain anonymous when critiquing gender ideology or the LGBT movement

Everybody gives lip service to free speech. Until it runs counter to what they believe. It is not easy nowadays to have a reasonable discussion about topics such as gender ideology or the effect of the T on LGB without some zealots making life miserable for those with whom they disagree. Debate often quickly devolves into a verbal food fight. No wonder so many of the smartest people I know stay away from these topics as if they are social third rails. That is especially true of my progressive friends. They have discovered that it is not just high-profile public figures, such as J. K. Rowling, who become targets of a woke mob. Ordinary people suffer the consequences of free speech by running the real risks of getting cancelled at work or in social settings.

Next Monday at 7PM EST,

Trisha Posner

and I will be guests on a Twitter/X Space hosted by Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG). It will be a wide-ranging discussion on how our institutions, the Democratic party, and many progressives, have been captured by gender ideology.

DIAG is an all-volunteer 501c3 formed by Democrats, or politically homeless former Democrats, who still embrace liberal values but think the party has “veered way off track” when it comes to gender. DIAG’s members include parents, public health professionals, lawyers, teachers, and policy experts, all focused on the issue of gender and minors.

DIAG is trying to have a voice on the gender issue inside the Democratic Party. On the Team Bios page of its website, thirteen of the sixteen people are identified by pseudonyms (one of the three listed under a real name is Jenny Poyer Akerman, some of you will remember that I was a guest on her

TransMuted

podcast a few weeks ago).

Why are 80% of DIAG team members hiding their real names?

"Many of us are balancing family situations and jobs that require us to remain anonymous."

They know that merely expressing public opinions about gender ideology could cause problems with friends or families and might even put them in jeopardy professionally. It is a shame but that is where we are in 2024 when it comes to progressive censorship on issues such as gender.

DIAG members are not the only ones concerned about getting into a public fray on hot button issues.

A Bard professor, Omar Encarnación, wrote a New York Times opinion piece last week, “America Got Gay Marriage, but It Came at a Cost.” He argued that American gay activists who successfully pressed the campaign for same-sex marriage framed their efforts too narrowly as about “tax advantages, inheritance rights and hospital visitation privileges.” Instead, Encarnación contended, such a narrow focus “limited the transformative power of gay marriage and helped enable today’s backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”

I am passing along below the smart and well-reasoned email from a friend and colleague who had drafted a response to that New York Times OpEd. My friend, a respected community activist in Florida, is himself gay, and has a unique perspective on why there has been some pushback on LGBT rights in America. However, as with the DIAG volunteers, he prefers anonymity, avoiding those activists who would prefer to make his life miserable for progressive heresy.

“I do not agree that the lack of emphasis on moral equivalency of gay and straight marriage is the cause of backlash.

When same-sex couples won the right to marriage, I viewed that as the culmination of gay rights activism, the normalization of gay households as additional building blocks of a traditional society with flexibility.

I believe many heterosexuals felt the same way, and grew used to gay marriage, and their children gave not a thought to it.

Then, gay rights organizations, having fulfilled a mission, needed to justify their existence with a new cause. This is called the March-of-Dimes effect.

The March of Dimes aimed to fund the creation and distribution of a polio vaccine.

They succeeded. Rather than disband, they moved on to another cause: birth defects. That, at least, was quite worthy.

The gay organizations latched on to ever more initials, LBGQTIA, with ever more arcane and bizarre aims far removed and often in direct opposition to their original cause.

In 1973, I believe, the psychiatric organizations removed homosexuality from their lists of mental illnesses.

We were not insane, sick, and did not need treatment or therapy. Society as a whole needed therapy to let us live normal lives.

Now, the trans agenda says the exact opposite. They cry that trans children suffer from an illness, gender dysphoria, and demand medical and psychiatric treatment.

They are trying to normalize the therapy but not the people. The idea is to transform the trans people into the correct sex. It is as though their birth sex was a birth defect.

It turns out that many young people thinking they have dysphoria are gay and will outgrow the confusion. But these organizations would rather trans away the gay, and sometimes without even asking the parents. I wonder how gay parents would feel if schools started using different pronouns from the birth sex of their children and secretly encouraged transitioning.

Like any straight parent, they would go ballistic.

This is the real attempt to destroy marriage and the nuclear family and have the state control everything. By latching on to this transexual revolutionary Marxist agenda so corrosive to a family-based society, gay organizations have greatly alarmed society. Their methods remind me of the Soviet Union, which would encourage students to spy on their parents for counter-revolutionary activity and betray them to state authorities.

No wonder there is a backlash. Heterosexuals, after believing gay marriage was the goal, see the same organizations that fought for marriage equality, now fighting for goals that would destroy the family's ability to defend their children. They are beginning to think that we are insane, and I don't blame them.”

Personally, I look forward to a time when it is possible to discuss gender with a group of Democrat party mothers and professionals, or print a critical email from a gay man about LGBT rights, and they will use their real names without fear that modern day McCarthyites will punish them for expressing independent opinions that do not fit into a progressive orthodoxy,.