Why the LGBT community is lacking pride this year
June is ending, and LGBT Pride celebrations are coming to a close across the globe.
But as marches and parades pour through London, New York, and San Francisco this weekend, shame is actually the best sentiment that describes our community right now.
Even in the wake of last year’s topless reveler at the White House’s annual pride party, 2024 has been a banner year for LGBT bad behavior.
Indeed, from an obsession with pseudo-science and gender ideology to a blasphemous “queer” funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to LGBT hordes bafflingly chanting for jihad, gay folk around the world have embraced crusades and causes that are, ultimately, likely to hurt us most.
In Britain, April’s Cass Report laid bare a national public health system failing gender-dysphoric kids and teens. “Gender medicine for children and young people is built on shaky foundations,” declared Dr. Hilary Cass, a pediatrician whose nearly 400-page report revealed the recklessness of juvenile medical interventions that are often irreversible.
Rather than helping teens fully engage with their developing bodies, said Cass, activists, academics, and physicians on both sides of the Atlantic are fast-tracking them to hormones and transgender surgeries with “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
The Cass Report echoes a similar brief from February by Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a top adolescent psychiatrist at Finland’s Tampere University.
That study debunks the notion that medical interventions are the best way to prevent trans kids from considering suicide.
“It is most unethical to say that kind of thing to parents,” Dr. Kaltiala said. “It’s not based on facts.”
Instead, she continued, gender clinics must focus on the larger mental health issues often impacting trans-identifying youth.
Suicides, Dr. Kaltiala concluded, were more likely to be caused by severe psychiatric problems, not gender distress.
Distress, however, is now a way of life for gays and lesbians in Ghana, whose parliament has made it illegal to identify as LGBT.
The law, which passed in February, imposes three-year prison terms to folks who call themselves LGBT and up to five years for anyone who funds or forms LGBT organizations.
It’s among the most punitive laws of its kind today. And yet there were few global protests, demands for sanctions, or calls for boycotts. Black lives, it seems — at least for LGBT Ghanians — apparently do not matter.
So what has mattered this past year? Shock-and-awe tactics, such as the spectacle masquerading as a funeral for long-time trans activist Cecilia Gentili, who passed away in February.
The service — which appeared more like an episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” than a solemn memorial — was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan, where Gentili was eulogized as “St. Cecilia, mother of all whores.”
The outre language and flashy crowd were an odd fit for the reverential Catholic setting. So much so that St. Patrick’s said it had been “tricked” into hosting the event, for which it had little knowledge and later held a “Mass of Reparations” to atone for Gentile’s “sacrilegious” ceremony.
The affront was particularly distasteful considering the recent pro-LGBT edicts recently issued by Pope Francis, including his approval, last December, of blessing for certain same-sex unions.
Then there’s the war in Gaza and the Hamas attack on Israel last Oct. 7th.
Somehow, despite Hamas’ paper trail of anti-gay violence and anti-gay laws throughout the West Bank and Gaza, myriad queer groups have backed the Palestinian cause over Israel.
Never mind that Israel has the most progressive LGBT laws in the Middle East, or that Israel offers state-sanctioned refuge to gay Palestinian asylum seekers.
As a transgender Palestinian poet and activist named Yaffa told the progressive publication Prism in February, “Palestine . . . is literally better than here” when it comes to LGBT rights.
By “here” she meant central Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal for more than two decades. (Try getting a similar license in Rafah or Ramallah.)
With leading LGBT groups such as ACT-UP echoing such silliness, the queer embrace of anti-Zionism is the most craven display of LGBT communal rot.
The most disheartening aspect of this farce is that Zionism and LGBT liberation actually share so much ideological DNA. Both are rooted in the demand for respect and self-determination — for nationhood by Jews, the freedom to love by LGBTs.
And both reject historical conventions that have left each minority group vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence and disenfranchisement.
Recognizing these commonalities would not only further the freedom of imperiled gays and lesbians but the freedom of Palestinians as well.
This is the most tragic missed opportunity this past year — and our community’s most shameful sin of all.
