BEN APPEL: As a gay person, I’m not proud of Pride month. LGBT bullies threaten to ‘fix’ us

Ben Appel is a writer from New York. His forthcoming memoir is ‘Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic’. Follow him on Twitter @benappel.

I see Pride flags all around me. “It’s time to celebrate the LGBT community!” I’ve been told. But this year, as a gay man, I’m not proud of my so-called “community.”

In fact, it scares me.

Two decades ago, when I attended my first Pride parade, the LGBT world really needed it. Pride is the opposite of shame. And for decades, even centuries, gay people have been told to be ashamed of ourselves, of our same-sex attraction and our supposed inability to act like “normal” people.

We were harassed and oppressed. Homosexuality was criminalized. If a man was convicted of having consensual sex with another adult male, he was given two options: jail time or chemical castration.

Gays were forced to be something we weren’t. We were erased.

And that’s why I’m so heartbroken that 20 years later, the LGBT community is supporting a new practice that threatens to erase gay people.

It’s kindly called “gender-affirming care.”

Today, LGBT Pride marches arm in arm with radical ideologues who argue that biological sex does not exist.

Their extreme doctrine maintains that men can simply decide to become women, and, most disturbing of all, that children can actually change gender.

Educators, policy makers, and doctors tell young boys that if they like to wear dresses or play with dolls, they may be girls; young girls are told that if they choose football over ballet, they may well be boys; and that with some experimental pills and risky surgeries, they can finally all be “normal.”

Magically transformed, forever.

But what if a young person struggling to be ‘normal’ isn’t trans, but gay? What would have happened to me?

In the course of research for my forthcoming memoir, “Cis White Gay,” I interviewed a wide range of experts and people within the LGBT community about this troubling, evolving ideology.

I spoke with Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founder of the first hospital clinic for gender equality in the US.

“There are certainly cases where I strongly suspect that sexuality is the problem with young teens,” Dr. Edwards-Leeper on her work with gender diverse and transgender people. “I also wonder about children.”

I told dr. Edwards-Leeper on my own childhood gender nonconformity and my concern that if I grew up now I would have been falsely confirmed as a transgender girl. “I’m sure you would have,” she said.

Dr. Erica Anderson, a transgender clinical psychologist who treats children, shares the same fear.

‘I’m afraid too often, [gay boys are] consuming social media saying, “If you’re not feeling well when you hit puberty, if you don’t quite fit in with your peers, well, maybe you’re trans,” she told me. “I think it’s a terrible message to children that there is no room for disagreement. And I think it’s the basis under which some transing of the gay takes place in some circles.’

Can the LGBT community really be proud of this?

I can’t overlook the devastating reality that the same pills that were offered to distressed adolescent boys to feminize their bodies and stave off male maturity are the same pills, only decades ago, that were used to make gay men asexual.

I can’t turn a deaf ear to the words of former gender clinics at a UK clinic, who told The Times UK in 2019 about a dark joke among staff, that soon there would be ‘no more gays’, that what was happening in their clinic felt like “conversion therapy for gay children,” or “for some families, it was easier to say, This is a medical problem, “here’s my kid, please fix them!”

“Repair Them”? Children ‘fix’?

I also can’t ignore the testimonies of the detransitioners – adult gay men who tried to escape homophobia in a trans identity and regretted it. Some tell me they were forced to believe their atypical femininity meant they were trapped in the wrong bodies.

“Michael” told me, “The reason why I felt so happy [after transition] was because I got a break from being perceived as gay; I was just this normal, straight-looking girl.”

Brian confessed that, “With estrogen, my libido just sort of died off, and it felt so great because I always thought of my sexuality as something bad, and [transgenderism] appealed to me because my father always hated gays.’

“Steven” said, “I felt like I’d rather be a trans woman than a gay man because that was the lowest and most disgusting thing you could be.”

There are lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people who are shocked by what is being done.

So we write, we talk, we tweet. We call our friends and our relatives and neighbours. We tell them that what is being done to children is medical malpractice.

We explain that recklessly administered ‘gender-affirming care’ is nothing less than the experimental medicalization of homosexuality, which carries significant risks. It leads to infertility and loss of sexual function, and no child can adequately consent to it.

To proponents of these practices, I ask you: Is this what you mean when you say you are on “the right side of history”?

I can’t shake the feeling that a great injustice may be happening right before our very eyes in the name of the so-called ‘LGBT community’. But when gays speak out, we’re called bigots.

Lesbians are told they are hateful if they don’t want to date men, who identify as women. And gays are told they’re hateful if they don’t want to date women who identify as men.

I’ve had the term “cis” spit at me with the same venom that I was once called homophobic slurs on the playground, all because I’m “cisgender.”

I am a man who is only attracted to other men. Is that no longer allowed?

Is this what my “community” has become – the bullies we once battled?

If there’s anything I’m proud of this Pride Month, it’s my new ‘community’ of LGBT heretics.

Those of us who, despite ridicule, stand up to say, This isn’t us. This is not who we are.

I am proud every time we are shouted down by authoritarian activists. I remain proud, even if we are called ‘bad’, ‘right-wing’ or ‘transphobes’.

To that community I say: Happy Pride.