When Victory Became a Turning Point: Gay Rights Movement Radicalized

When Victory Became a Turning Point: The Queer Movement’s Drift into Extremism

A decade ago, the LGBT rights movement seemed poised to step back after monumental victories: marriage equality was won, HIV was nearing eradication, yet today, many feel that movement energy has mutated into something unrecognizable. In a recent guest essay for The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan laments that "far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives ..., gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the 'social justice' left, they radicalized."

Sullivan traces this radicalization to a turn away from biological realities: "They focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with 'White supremacy,'" pushing for the erasure of "natural distinctions between men and women in society," and shifting from biological sex to "gender identity" in both law and culture. Increasingly, "homosexuality [was defined] not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological 'queerness' meant to subvert and 'queer' language, culture and society in myriad different ways."

In Sullivan’s view, as the movement expanded its vocabulary beyond "gay and lesbian" to include "L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+ ... more letters and characters kept being added ... the plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities, and, by some counts, more than 70 new 'genders.'" The word "Queer" now looms large as the standard bearer of "the new regime," and Sullivan resists this shift: "I didn't and don't believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I'm attracted to the former and not to the latter." He calls the idea of abolishing sex binaries totally "madness," warning its imposition amounts to a fundamental societal rewrite.

But the movement, he insists, crossed a line most blatantly when it began involving minors in ideological battles: "this illiberalism made a fateful, strategic mistake. In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it ... So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors." Sullivan criticizes efforts that allow hormone treatments, transitions and male athletes in women’s sports with minimal oversight, arguing that these developments exposed the movement to harsh backlash rooted in genuine concerns about children’s wellbeing.

Polling supports Sullivan’s argument. He points out that Gallup found increasing resistance to transgender athletes––from 62 percent in 2021 to 69 percent in 2023––and reduced support among people who personally know a trans person, dropping from 40 percent to 30 percent over those years. On medical care for minors, Pew Research shows support for banning gender transition treatment rose from 46 percent in 2022 to 56 percent today. Republican support for gay marriage has also diminished, falling from 55 percent in 2022 to 46 percent by 2025.

Sullivan concludes with a plea: the movement must reclaim its roots in civil rights and resist wandering into radical ideology. "Let's not throw it away."

  Adapted by ASEAN Now from NYT  2025-06-28