LGB & TQI+: the history and future of a forced marriage

For years, lesbian, gay and bisexual people have been told they belong under one rainbow with transgender, queer, intersex and expanding ‘+’ identities. But what appeared as a progressive political coalition is now involved in a bitter divorce. Was it ever a natural alliance – or a forced marriage that subordinated same-sex attraction to gender identity?

Same-sex rights were won on a simple claim: some people are attracted to their own sex. ‘Queering’ those rights has recast sex as optional and orientation as a feeling about identity. Lesbians who will not accept male-bodied partners are branded bigots; gay men who do not desire female-bodied people with ‘trans identities’ are told they have a genital fetish. The LGB Alliance, which campaigns for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals to live free from discrimination or disadvantage based on their sexual orientation, has been labelled a transphobic hate group.

Same-sex attraction, once the point of the movement, is treated as a problem to be educated out of existence. How did a liberation movement built on sexed bodies become a movement that treats those bodies as bigotry?

The merger was not inevitable. Stonewall and other campaign groups expanded from sexual orientation to gender identity, often without a mandate from the people whose rights they claimed to hold. Schools, workplaces and law adopted the new package as one cause. Dissenters – especially lesbian feminists and gay men who insisted that sex is real and orientation is toward it – were pushed out. Was this solidarity, or capture?

There are still many challenges. Some fear self-ID could become legally sanctioned via the Conversion Practices Bill, which once again tag-teams LGB and T in policy discussion. Institutional embrace of EDI – especially in the public sector, with an emphasis on ‘inclusion’ – continues to treat LGB and TQI+ as the same ‘protected’ categories.

But a key question: if the costs to same-sex attraction are now so obvious, why do so many in the lesbian and gay movement still go along with trans rights? Fear of the bigot label? Institutional capture? A hangover from the AIDS years, when any fracture felt like betrayal? Or a genuine belief that gender identity is the next, necessary frontier?

Other are more optimistic and argue that the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Cass Review, legal challenges and a grassroots public backlash against a denial of biological sex have already created an irretrievable breakdown of the forced marriage. How did we get here and what comes next for LGB rights?