Useful Idiots. How the Gay Left Fell Out of Love With Biology.
The successor of the gay rights movement, the LGBTQ+ lobby, denies basic biology. This conflict began decades ago when gay intellectuals on the far left embraced a bizarre idea.
It won’t have escaped your attention that the LGBTQ+ lobby is going through a bit of a crisis. Daily, it seems, it champions deeply unpopular policies, whether it’s erasing words like ‘mother’ or inviting drag queens into libraries to have “educational” conversations with 6 year olds while dressed in fishnet tights. Some policies, like gender self-identification, even undermine lesbian or gay rights, which you might think was rather an own goal for a movement that claims to speak for …lesbians and gays.
At the heart of all these strange proposals is a conviction that we can say nothing with any certainty about biology. In particular, someone’s biological sex is, the lobby and its supporters insist, something so vague and fluid it is more like a passing mood than something concrete and embedded in nature. One of the consequences that flow from this “discovery” is that fixed categories for sexual orientation are replaced by definitions that melt as soon as they are formed.
All this means nowadays anyone can be LGBTQ+. Even Jameela Jamil despite the fact she’s been going out with a straight man for the last 8 years. Which is Queer AF as the kids like to say.
All this vagueness is often put down to an inheritance from a strain of thought that swept through universities 50 years ago. Terry Eagleton, a critic, helpfully defined it.
“Postmodernism is skeptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends toward cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity.”
So just how skeptical and …postmodern is the LGBTQ+ lobby’s stance on …biology? Here’s the trans activist Grace Lavery last week saying sex is just a collection of traits. Strange how a collection of traits could produce 8 Billion people; and not just some of them, but every single one of them. That really is beyond queer.
It’s not just folks like Lavery, who wouldn’t know one end of a pipette from another, who now claim sex isn’t as simple as Mother Nature thinks it is. Here’s Colin Wright, the evolutionary biologist, schooling another …biologist, Paul Myers, about …biology. Myers has recently taken to denying the single biggest fact about human biology, that there are two sexes. This despite the fact Myers (he/him, as if we needed a reminder) used to insist two distinct sexes existed, until just before yesterday.
You can read Myers’ hostage plea to LGBTQ+ activism..here… if you feel in the mood for some Stockholm Syndrome. The denial of biological reality by a social justice movement may seem like an extraordinary turn of events, and it is. But when it comes to gays and the gay movement, the uncomfortable truth is we can’t blame trendy postmodernism or even evil trans interlopers. Whisper it gently, we’ve been tying ourselves in knots about biology and its significance for almost two centuries.
It started so well.
From almost the moment the word ‘homosexual’ was coined in 1868 by a young Hungarian, Karoly Maria Kertbeny, the working assumption of advocates of liberalisation of laws against sodomy, perversion (and all the other charming things homosexuals were supposed to get up to) was that homosexuality just had to be rooted in our biology. This was what might be called the Lady Gaga position. In other words, gays were “born that way”.
This is not to say there was any actual evidence of the biological roots of homosexuality. There was none. By the 1920s Dr Magnus Hirschfeld was reduced to trying to find sperm cells in lesbians and measuring the hips of gay men to see if there were hints of child-bearing proportions. It was all bunkum.
As for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who’s widely considered to be the father of the modern gay rights movement, he suggested homosexual men had a female psyche trapped inside a female body. Whoops. Let’s pass over that in silence. He called these men Urnings, by the way, which is only coincidentally suggestive of yearnings. The English translation was ‘Uranian’, which for some reason seems appropriate. It’s not often a social justice movement comes up with a good double entendre.
It’s tempting to ridicule Kertbeny, Ulrichs and Hirschfeld but it’s worth remembering their ideas weren’t much more ridiculous than large chunks of biology at the time. This was an era sunk in medical ignorance. Nobody could look inside the body except at corpses or during surgery which had to be done as fast as possible, because survival rates were so poor. Kertbeny’s coinage of the word ‘homosexual’ came only a year after Joseph Lister first introduced the notion of antisepsis during surgery.
The point is that biology was not seen by the 19th and early 20th Century pioneers of homosexual rights as an enemy but a potential ally. The upside of a biological aetiology for homosexuality was that it suggested homosexuality was an inescapable material reality, not some moral choice or sinful indulgence. Homosexuals were a product of Nature herself and therefore it made no sense and served no purpose to discriminate against them. Thanks mom.
There was a downside though. Defining homosexuality biologically meant it became a medical condition, the result of some sort of physiological or psychological flaw. Despite this when homosexuals began to organise properly in the 1950s and 60s they embraced the “born this way” argument. Apart from anything else it meant homosexuality had probably always existed and it gave clear boundaries upon which a group identity, of sorts, could be built. The early gay rights movement didn’t need to spend time endlessly defining the people it fought for. We’d already been defined- if negatively and pejoratively - in medicine and in the criminal law.
All that was needed was a quick rebrand. The word ‘gay’ (and later ‘lesbian and gay’) was substituted for the medical-sounding ‘homosexual’ as a signal of identification and pride. And hey presto, the movement started its forward march to triumph as protections for homosexuals were written into law across the Western world quicker than anyone who rioted outside the Stonewall bar could have imagined.
There was though one grumpy group who were not happy with the idea gays were “born that way”. It wasn’t the lack of biological evidence that bothered them. It was ideology. A biological aetiology suggested homosexuals might have a fixed identity. This they didn’t like one little bit. Nor did they like the notion that gays had been around since time immemorial.