In the NY Times, Sullivan, long a proponent of gay rights and marriage and a talented writer, argues in a long piece that the trans activists and their focus on children were over the top and have harmed the cause after it had been largely won.

Gay marriage is backed by around 70 percent of Americans, and discrimination against gay men, lesbians and transgender people is opposed by 80 percent. As civil rights victories go, it doesn’t get more decisive or comprehensive than this.

But a funny thing happened in the wake of these triumphs. Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains and staying vigilant but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the social justice left, they radicalized.

In 2023 the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights group in the country, declared a “state of emergency” for gay men, lesbians and transgender people — the first time in the organization’s existence. It had not declared a state of emergency when gay men were jailed for having sex in private, when the AIDS epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of gay men or when we faced a possible constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in 2004. In fact, we found out, this “emergency” was almost entirely in response to new state bills proposing restrictions on medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria, bathroom and locker room bans and transgender issues in school curriculums and sports.

Nonetheless, the money has poured into gay, lesbian and transgender groups in the past decade....

But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with white supremacy, they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with gender identity in the law and culture and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological queerness — which is then meant to subvert and queer language, culture and society in myriad ways....

* * * *

The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect — live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one’s straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged. You can bring up your children however you like. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.

But in the wake of victory, L.G.B.T.Q. groups reneged on that pledge. They demanded that the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth — it was now merely assigned, penciled in. We got new terms like “chest-feeding” for “breastfeeding” and “birthing parent” for “mother."

And so on. Well argued, IMO. I wonder (sort of, but not really) what some of the people on the other board would say. Debate is unwelcome.

This is likely gated.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html?searchResultPosition=2