LONG article, but worth reading. Here is a sample:
“I’ve noticed that enmity toward “cis” gay men (which often seems a lot like straight up homophobia) has begun to permeate LGBT publications and social media, without any sort of consequences. In a 2020 New Yorker article, for instance, trans/nonbinary writer Masha Gessen (they/them) explained why Pete Buttigieg, the former Democratic candidate for president (and now Joe Biden’s transportation secretary), isn’t “gay enough.” Gessen analyzed the Buttigieg phenomenon through the lens of intersectionality, a modern theoretical framework that formulates a hierarchy of disadvantage. The greater the disadvantage you suffer, the more immunity from criticism you enjoy, and the more mercy you command from the Church of Social Justice.
“Gessen reduced the whole of “queer” America into two groups: the group of queers who can hide their queerness and the group of queers who cannot. The author contends that it’s this categorization that determines a queer person’s political worldviews—worldviews which Gessen similarly reduces to two categories. First is the worldview of queers who “pass,” which says “to straight people, ‘we are just like you, and all we want is the right to have what you have: marriage, children, a house with a picket fence, and the right to serve in the military.’” Second is the worldview of queers who cannot pass, which is “rooted in ideas of liberation, revolutionary change, and solidarity.” Gessen adds, “I am not saying that L.G.B.T. people who don’t pass are somehow morally superior to L.G.B.T. people who do.” But then the author goes on to quote an open letter by a group called Queers Against Pete that describes queers who cannot pass as people “who are clear that LGBTQIA people are directly and disproportionately impacted by police violence, incarceration, unaffordable healthcare, homelessness, deportation, and economic inequality.” Queers who can pass (the “more mainstream” ones), on the other hand, are those who “aim to erase difference.” The suggestion here is that since Buttigieg is not a gender-nonconforming ex-con raising an immigrant child on a socialist commune on Portland’s outskirts, he is, Gessen concludes, an “essentially conservative” “straight politician in a gay man’s body”—and so not up to intersectional snuff for the more authentic half of queer America.
“This attitude, which has permeated much of LGBT media in recent years, offers one explanation for the sharp uptick in the number of gay men and women who now identify under the umbrella of “trans/nonbinary.” As I’ve told friends over the last few years, were I to dye my hair purple, start painting my nails and wearing eyeliner, and change my pronouns, I would experience less anti-gay hostility in the “queer” community, since I would have visibly rejected “cis-heteronormativity.” In fact, my change would also be taken as a signal that I’d adopted a whole set of acceptable politics and beliefs, including the belief that people are attracted to others on the basis of their internally felt gender, as opposed to their biological sex.”