From Civil Rights to Gender Fights

Queer theory enters the chat

Hello, friends, and welcome to Chapter 2 of Strange Bedfellows – our Reflector miniseries on the evolution of the movement that goes by LGBTQ, or some variation thereof.

Listen on: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

If you’ve landed on this page without listening to episode 1, I encourage you to get on board with the concept of chronology and click here, where you’ll find our whirlwind tour of how a civil rights movement focused on securing equal treatment for gay and lesbian Americans gradually expanded into a broader coalition that included the T’s – transgender men and women.

But for today, things are about to get Queer. This is good news for the sexually squeamish: Queer is sort of like Gay, but it’s more Drag Gay, less Sodomy Gay. So this is some content you can listen to with your grandma. Or your grade-school child.

This chapter picks up in the 2010s, at a moment when that earlier project had achieved many of its central goals: decriminalizing gay sex in all fifty states; getting the DSM to replace “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria”; and, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015, legalizing same-sex marriage.

What happened next is more complicated and, depending on your perspective, more contested. This is the moment when “LGBT” became “LGBTQ.”

This addition of the “Q” signaled more than just an expansion of categories. It reflected a shift in how some people inside the coalition began thinking about identity itself. Ultimately it was the start of a shift away from civil rights to something harder to define. And much of it comes down to one word: gender.

Just as the addition of the T’s into the coalition brought conflicts that had to be debated and reconciled, the rise of “Q” would lead to plenty of turmoil – both inside the coalition and for society more broadly. Though, as we explore here, this change coincided with a rejection of debate itself.

One fascinating aspect of this shift was a tension around who now counted as “trans.” Folks like Dana Beyer and Jamison Green, whom we met in episode 1, represent what I like to call Old School Trans. They believed they lived with a condition that should be legitimized in American medicine. But the 2010s saw the popular rise of, well, New School Trans. These were a more deliberately androgynous set who rejected the Old School’s “medicalism,” which they saw as reducing their inner identities to an illness. They often rejected the very idea that society should be at all organized around biological sex and embraced a queer theory–inspired ambiguity about their identities. (Explaining queer theory is above my pay grade, so I’ll hand this one over for Claude to define: “An academic approach that questions and challenges the idea that categories like gender and sexuality are fixed, natural or binary. Instead, it sees them as socially constructed, meaning they’re created and maintained by culture, power structures, and social norms, rather than being inherent biological facts.” Simple!)

In addition to tensions with some of the Old School Trans – many of whom felt that the New School was appropriating their identities – the predominance of gender as LGBTQ’s unifying theme also led to tensions with many gays and lesbians, who defined their orientation around being attracted to the opposite sex, not the opposite gender identity. But, the foundational concept of same-sex attraction was seen by some Q’s as transphobic.

This intra-coalition fight is embodied by this clip from popular nonbinary public figure Alok Vaid-Menon:

Despite these intra-family dramas, the language and ideas from the Q camp started to expand into the most prominent LGBT organizations, as you can see in GLAAD’s glossary of terms. Suddenly, gender and gender identity were front and center. Terms like “homosexual,” “openly gay,” and “gay rights” were now described as offensive or outdated expressions that should be avoided. “Bisexual” was redefined as being attracted to genders the same as and different from one’s own gender, an adjustment that apparently requires us to not use the word in the way it has always been used: “To be clear, we should not write or imply that bi (sexual) means being attracted to men and women.”

And, fascinatingly, these ideas around gender identity swiftly moved from the fringes of academic theory and online sites like Tumblr into policies and laws instituted at the local, state, and federal level – often with little deliberation, and without the fanfare accompanying flashier milestones.

Episode 2 takes you inside that transformation – and why it was poised for a backlash.