The Accelerating Acceptance survey from the LGBT media monitoring organization, GLAAD recently uncovered a dramatic drop in “LGBT acceptance” among young adults aged 18-34. Taken aback, LGBT activists immediately laid the blame on “an increase in hateful rhetoric in our culture”, but a more likely explanation is that the consequences of the LGBT movement have come home to roost, and the resulting effects on women's rights, child health, and First Amendment protections are just too glaring to ignore.
The 2019 Accelerating Acceptance Report asked American adults how comfortable they would be in a variety of social interactions with LGBT-identified people. Study participants weighed in on seven scenarios, including finding out their child had a lesson on LGBT history in school, learning a family member is LGBT, and discovering that their child’s teacher is LGBT. Respondents who stated they were “very” or “somewhat” comfortable in all seven LGBT-related scenarios were classified as “allies” by GLAAD. It was the “ally” category that took the biggest hit in the survey. In the 2016 GLAAD survey, 62 percent of young men ages 18-34 were classified as “allies”; in 2018, that number had dropped to just 35 percent. For women aged 18-34, the number of allies dropped from 65 percent in 2016, to 52 percent in 2018. If young people are supposed to be the staunchest supporters of all things LGBT, then things aren’t looking good for the movement.
The GLAAD survey has been capturing American attitudes towards LGBT identified people since 2016, one year after same sex marriage was rendered legal by the Supreme Court. That was the year that the LGBT lobby went into full T mode, funneling all their money and organizing clout into transgender “inclusion”. The same old equal rights slogans were put right back to work, this time with the aim of cajoling everyone into believing it’s a form of bigotry to accurately recognize a person’s sex. But as ‘Love is Love’ faded into ‘Transwomen are Women’, something else happened: consequences. Lots and lots of them.
There was the Obama bathroom mandate, when many of us came to realize that “inclusion” meant boys in our daughters’ locker rooms. Then we learned that “diversity” requires that library toddler story time be led by drag queens. And who could forget the headlines exclaiming “sex is a spectrum!” and “men can get pregnant, too!” Privacy, decency, and science, cut down in one fell swoop.
In fact, I could do a quick Google search and turn up thousands of incidents that should shake anyone out of their diversity and inclusion slumber: there is the Canadian man pretending he’s a woman who has filed human rights complaints against a number of female estheticians who (rightly!) refuse to wax his genitalia, there’s the California gender specialist who is referring thirteen year old girls for “gender affirming” double mastectomies, the lone lesbian on the Baltimore City LGBT commission who lost her post after stating that male rapists should never be housed in women’s prisons, the French teacher from Virginia who was fired for refusing to use ‘preferred pronouns’, and the Samoan female powerlifter who lost her bid for Gold in the 2019 Pacific Games when a man identifying as a woman predictably bested her lift. Sappy slogans can’t stand up to real consequences that, in some cases, have utterly destroyed people’s lives. The fact is, it’s becoming harder and harder to make that case that the LGBT movement is about equal rights and easier and easier to point out how this movement erodes rights. If actions speak louder than activism, then it’s obvious that this movement could care less about women and girls, about kids making it to healthy adulthood, or about our cherished First Amendment freedoms.
But GLAAD CEO and president, Sarah Kate Ellis, isn’t interested. Though I fully agree with Ellis that the LGBT movement has taken it for granted that young people are “a beacon of progressive values”, the rest of her take on the survey results is deeply naive. The GLAAD CEO offers two explanations for the drop in LGBT “allies”: First, Ellis blames the “Trump factor”, claiming that the current administration has perpetuated “rhetorical attacks” against the LGBTQ community. Second, Ellis cites something she calls “the newness factor”, which she defines as the discomfort that results from a lack of familiarity with the neo-identities that teens are claiming, like genderqueer, non-binary, and pansexual.
Let’s take the “newness factor” first. I won’t disagree with Ellis that 18-34 year olds might get uncomfortable when their co-worker announces their zie/zir pronouns and asks everyone to pretend they don’t have a sex, but I think the discomfort stems from something called “annoyance” or maybe “exasperation” instead of surprise. Being forced to play the neo-identity game gets a little tiring, especially for those who’ve recently spent a few years on a college campus.
As for the so-called “rhetorical attacks” that Ellis referred to, those started in 2017, when the Trump administration began working to untangle the legal quagmires transgender activism had created. There was the rescinding of the Obama “bathroom mandate” in 2017, which revoked the Executive Order that forced public schools across the nation to mix boys and girls in the same restrooms or face loss of federal funding. Then, in 2018, the Bureau of Prisons in the Department of Justice adopted a policy that called for housing transgender-identified inmates according to sex in federal prison facilities, clarifying that female inmates deserve privacy and safety protections.
In May of this year, the Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule that would remove “gender identity” from the definition of sex in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), preventing violations of medical practitioners’ conscience rights to refuse to perform “gender reassignment” procedures. That these efforts were read as an “attack” by GLAAD is telling. Clearly, they don’t care one iota about basic-level defense of legal sex distinctions and conscience rights.
Worst of all, transgender-identified people are increasingly realizing that the movement supposedly fighting on their behalf has left them out in the cold. Where is GLAAD’s advocacy when hurting young people need therapy to recover from years of pretending to be something they’re not? Where is GLAAD’s advocacy when someone detransitions and needs to heal from unneeded surgeries? And where is GLAAD’s legal fund to help people put the accurate sex marker back on their ID? Answer: GLAAD is nowhere to be found.
GLAAD needs to wake up to the fact that buyer’s remorse has set in for many of those who once supported the LGBT movement. All that time, money, and effort spent on injecting society and the law with transgender ideas is only serving to erode support for their actions as young people realize that LGBT ideas come with serious consequences. Try as they might, GLAAD can never overcome reality with well-funded activism.
