Big cause envy

The yearning that helps explain the left's obsession with transgender issues

The lead story in Sunday’s Washington Post decried recent “LGBTQ laws” which, according to the article’s subtitle (print edition), constitute a “repressive turn” and “an echo of the past.” I don’t know how old Casey Parks, the author of the article, is but I doubt she was around during the days when gays and lesbians were repressed. The current environment bears no resemblance to that past.

Back then, homosexuality was “the love that dares not speak its name.” Now, it’s the love that can’t stop talking about itself.

Back then, gays and lesbians hid their sexual preferences to avoid being discriminated against. Laws banned their sexual practices. Lawful gay marriages were out of the question.

Now the law outlaws discrimination against gays and lesbians and, in any event, there’s very little desire to discriminate against them in employment, housing, etc. Meanwhile, gay marriage has become a constitutional right.

To compare the current environment to the repressive past isn’t just inaccurate. It dismisses what gays and lesbians had to endure half a century ago. If anyone who answers to “LGBTQ” has reason to be proud, it’s the old-timers who came through the bad old days.

To me, the Post’s article smacks of what I call “big cause envy.” That’s the yearning by youngish Americans to have fought the genuine civil rights battles of the past — most notably the battle for equality for blacks, but also the early feminist battles and the struggle for gay rights.

We see big cause envy when Joe Biden’s clownish press secretary, a black woman who probably owes her position to her race (and maybe her sexual preference), claims that she’s “a historic figure” who “certainly walks in history every day." Maybe in her mind she does. In real life it’s BS she’s walking in on a daily basis.

The big civil rights battles were pretty much won decades ago, hence the need for a new struggle. For lack of a more plausible cause, transgender rights is now the craze, notwithstanding the substantial legal protection this group enjoys.

The obsession with transgender rights is clear from the Post’s article. Almost all of the “LGBTQ” grievances cited therein are actually “T” grievances, only.

According to the Post, only 1 percent of the population is trans. I suspect this figure overstates the true number. But even if we accept it, we’re talking about the alleged civil rights of a very small slice of America — nothing like the groups whose rights were at stake in the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, the early feminist movement, or the gay rights movement.

Still, one percent of the population — even one-tenth of one percent — is a lot of people. But what does the “repressive turn” against the “T” portion of “LGBTQ” consist of?

The Post points to prohibitions against trans youths participating in school athletics. But no such prohibitions exist or are contemplated. The issue is a ban on boys who identify as girls competing against girls.

Boys who identify as girls are free to compete against boys. So the issue isn’t deprivation of their right to participate in competitive sports. It’s deprivation of the opportunity to have an unfair advantage in competition.

The Post also mentions bathrooms. But the alleged right of boys to enter and use girls’ bathrooms and showers is a very far cry from the right of blacks to stay at a hotel, be seated at a lunch counter, or sit other than in the back of a bus.

Deprivation of the latter set of rights was truly repressive — mistreatment of blacks on the theory that, as members of an “inferior” race, they don’t deserve to mix with whites. Keeping boys out of girls’ bathrooms is no such thing. It’s just an attempt to respect the privacy of girls.

The Post complains that conservatives are “showcasing a small group of detransitioners who have flown to multiple states to testify that they felt abused and fast-tracked by gender-affirming doctors.” (“Gender-affirming doctors” is a euphemism for doctors who perform sex-transition surgery.) But these “detransitioners” are exercising free speech rights, and their warnings deserve to be heard, as legislators wrestle with questions about these types of surgeries and parental involvement in the process.

The Post counters that “transition-related surgeries on minors are rare.” It cites a study finding that while more than 42,000 young people nationwide were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, only 282 had “top surgery” that year.

It’s fair, nonetheless, for advocates on both sides of the issue to agitate. However, the Post’s numbers suggest that even if one agrees with the “T” position, this is not a momentous civil rights issue.

In my view, it’s not a genuine civil rights issue at all. It’s a medical issue and a parental rights issue.

The Post also mentions the issue of LBGTQ-oriented books in libraries. At least this matter applies to more than just the “T” component.

But it’s difficult to perceive a civil rights issue here unless libraries are featuring books hostile to those who fit the LGBTQ categories. The Post cites no evidence that this is the case.

Again, we’re not dealing here with a genuine civil rights issue. The issue is the age at which schools should expose students to material about sex and gender. Reasonable people can disagree about that age, but demands that elementary schools expose their students to this kind of material seem unreasonable, and indeed outrageous, to me.

The idiotic claim by Maryland governor Wes Moore that bans on such material in school libraries amount to “castrating' children” strikes me as an extreme example of big cause envy. It’s no accident that in his quest to make the library issue seem big, Moore absurdly invoked a grotesque practice from the slavery and Jim Crow eras.

Wes Moore and Karine Jean-Pierre are dwarfs hoping to sit on the shoulders of true civil rights giants of the past. But unlike Bernard of Chartres, they aren’t using that small advantage to see further than the giants did. Their gaze is backward, to a heroic past they wish they had been a part of — although it’s far from clear they would have acted heroically back when the repression was real.