It wasn’t going to work.
You can’t erase gender and simultaneously maintain the gains of the gay rights movement in western culture over the last 30 years. The notion of gender is the only thing that determines who can be identified as attracted to the exact same sex. It is impossible to remove millions of gay Americans from their country by erasing gender barriers. This is a fact that doesn’t matter what your opinions are about the gay rights movement. There is no “gay” without gender.
Transactivists are moving quickly to move out of LGB and into their own lettered categories. Lauren Hough, a trans activist.
Lauren Hough, lesbian author and essay collector has received high praise. Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing. She was nominated for a Lambda Literary Prize in the category of “Best Lesbian Memoir.” The Lambda organization describes themselves as a group dedicated to elevating LGBTQ stories and authors.
Lambda Literary is a champion for LGBTQ authors and books for over thirty years. Lambda Literary is the only organization that serves LGBTQ readers and writers better than any other. Our belief is that LGBTQ literature, including lesbian, gay and bisexual and transgender stories, can be a vital part of preserving our culture.
The problem is that Lambda decided they didn’t wanted to affirm Lauren Hough’s critically acclaimed work. The organization quickly revoked her nomination for the prize after nominating Hough. Did Hough send money to Canada’s Freedom Convoy? Did she question the 2020 election out loud, or go on Joe Rogan’s show to debate the efficacy of the COVID vaccine? According to Big Tech, these are all sins. Hough clearly found herself on the wrong end of this issue. How could an accomplished lesbian writer be turned down by an organization that promotes gay voices?
Hough’s infraction was worse than all that. Slate explains:
Hough’s friend, writer Sandra Newman, was embroiled in a social media pile-on when she tweeted an announcement about her forthcoming novel, The men briefly describing it as a dystopian yarn set in a world in which “everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly, mysteriously disappears.” This scenario prompted complaints that the novel was transphobic, although very few of the complainants appear to have read the book. (Here’s a brief Twitter thread about The Men by Slate contributor Isaac Butler, who has read it.) Hough—who wrote in her Substack that Newman had supported and counseled her as she sought to publish Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, her first book—maintains that she took to Twitter to tell Newman’s critics “to read the book before condemning it.” Lambda Literary says that unspecified tweets from Hough “exhibited what we believed to be a troubling hostility toward transgender critics and trans-allies.” The exact content of these tweets is unclear as, according to the New York Times, some of them may have been deleted.
Hough was wrong to defend a colleague and friend, suggesting others read the work and then commenting. Her mistake obviously wasn’t as horrific as the mistake made by her friend, who wrote a work of fiction that posited what would happen if men ceased to exist. According to the Goodreads mob (yes, that’s a thing), Newman’s greatest offense was distinguishing between chromosomes when writing a pretend story about pretend people in a pretend world.
As silly as it is to cancel Newman, it’s even sillier to cancel Hough, who didn’t even write the book. She didn’t sell it. She didn’t participate in it. She didn’t do anything but suggest people read it before criticizing it–and for her friendship, she was rewarded with her own community negating her hard-earned accolades. The group that was formed to represent underrepresented voices like Hough’s ended up turning on said underrepresented voice because it could not bear the weight of a crumbling socio-political alliance. Hough needed to be protected, so they gave in to their ignorance. Hough was yet another woman who has been sacrificed on the altar to misogyny.
Both these movements can’t coexist peacefully. This is something I have only observed. I’m currently watching a progressive phenomenon collapse in itself. Although we might assume that our lesbian sisters would be safe from the current symbiotic thread of misogyny, this is not true. These aggressive ideologies are a problem for all women. “Live and let live” is great, but only when both sides agree to let live. The all-trans-all-the-time mob isn’t willing to simply live their own lives and be happy with living in their own truth. They are so committed to bullying everyone into adopting their own version of the truth that they’ve even turned on the very women who have otherwise sought to be their allies.
Don’t get distracted by the politics around LGBTQ issues. Hough’s fate is more than unfair. It is also discriminatory, and it is irrational. While I wish that I could have helped, I know this was the final result. The LGB and the T cannot live peacefully together–as long as their representatives in organizations like Lambda insist on making gender nonexistent.
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