Progressives Capture the Rainbow Flag for Transgender Politics

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Neil Munro

Progressive and transgender activists are capturing and converting the six-colored rainbow flag that was created in 1979 by lesbians and gays to represent their single-sex movement for gay rights.

Many gays and lesbians are protesting their flag’s forced conversion into the multi-identity, pro-transgender “Progress Pride” flag, including ajlieshere:

The six-striped rainbow flag — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet — represented a demand for recognition and respect of gay men and lesbian women. “The rainbow came from earliest recorded history as a symbol of hope,” said the flag’s designer, Gilbert Baker.

Baker’s 1978 flag had eight colors, but he cut it down to the simpler set of six colors one year later.

Whether or not the cause was good or bad, popular or not, the flag served as a clear and recognized symbol for what Baker described as:

a gay nation … [during] a battle for equal rights, a shift in status where we were now demanding power, taking it. This was our new revolution: a tribal, individualistic, and collective vision.

In 2017, progressive politicians in Philadelphia directed that their priorities be added to the top of the rainbow flag. So black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow as “a symbolic representation of Philadelphia’s commitment to centering the experiences, contributions, activism, and dedication of black and brown members of our community,” said a city official.

In 2018, a designer moved the black and brown colors over to the left of the 1979 flag while adding the pink-and-blue colors of the transgender cause. DeZeeen.com reported in June 2018:

[Daniel] Quasar‘s Progress Pride Flag adds five arrow-shaped lines to the six-coloured Rainbow Flag, which is widely recognised as the symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities.

The flag includes black and brown stripes to represent marginalised LGBT communities of colour, along with the colours pink, light blue and white, which are used on the Transgender Pride Flag.
…

He says the main section of the flag incorporates the six-stripe flag so as to not take away from the initial meaning, while the additional elements form an arrow shape that points to the right, to represent “forward movement”. They are placed along the left edge of the flag to state that “progress still needs to be made.”

Many gays and lesbians oppose the intrusive arrow because the transgender cause — and the racial causes — are fundamentally different from the gay and lesbian cause.

Gays and lesbians want respect, social status, and political recognition for their single-sex relationships.

But transgender groups fundamentally deny the existence of any stable sexual identity. They argue that a man can become a woman, and vice versa if they have an internal and unverifiable “gender identity” of the opposite sex.

The ideology claims that “gender identity” is independent of sexual desire — so a heterosexual man can declare himself to be a “transgender woman,” complete with a “female penis.”

Many “transgender” men are cross-dressing heterosexuals, not gays. The Pentagon’s medical records show that a very small share of people claim to be transgender, and less than 10 percent of them have cosmetic surgery on their genitals.

So transgenderism’s denial of inherent male-bodied gayness, and female-bodied lesbianism, makes it a “homophobic” ideology, according to an April 2021 article in LesbianAndGayNews.com.

The alphabet soup happened. Instead of representing a community that is interconnected by our same sex attraction, it became a symbol of something else. As more letters were added that had little to do with each other, it became a symbol of a political ideology that many of us recognise as being homophobic and working against our interests …. It has been stolen from us and twisted into something that is the antithesis of what it was meant to be.

Transgenderism reinforces traditional “gender roles” even as it tries to blur the public recognition of the biology-driven physical and psychological differences between males and females. Transgenderism performs this ide0logical flip by claiming that people actually change their sex once they adopt the clothes, works, or cultural preferences associated with men. For example, transgenderism argues that a girl tomboy is really a boy because she prefers to play with, and dress like, pre-teen boys.

In practice, say critics, this logic is hateful towards women — including lesbians — because it denies women the freedom to remain female if they want to live like men or work in male-dominated careers.

The hate is socially pressuring lesbians to convert themselves into “transgender men,” say lesbians:

Writer Katie Herzog said:

The number of dykes, of former lesbians, I know who have transitioned over the past 10 years is shocking. I’m not talking about teenagers, but I’m talking about grown-ass women. And I find this out mostly through social media like Instgram — I’m scrolling through Instagram and another one of my friends comes out as non-binary or trans and shows off their top-surgery scars and announces their new name.

This happened twice yesterday, twice while I’m scrolling through Instagram. This is happening at such a bizarre rate. So for the first 18 years of my life, I need one trans person. And then the last 18 years of my life, literally half of the lesbians I know have transitioned or have decided that they’re non-binary, and I’m not exaggerating when I say half. It’s just an immense and immense number. And it makes me feel like I am crazy that I am the only person within these circles saying, “Wait a second, guys, what are you all doing? What is going on here? Why have you all had top surgery? Why are you all changing your names? Why are the people that I knew 10 years ago as all lesbians –why are you all men now? You hated men! You were anti-men! And now you’re all men. What is going on here?

“I know that many lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are angry about the incursion of the alphabet soup into the movement to protect same-sex attraction in law and throughout public policy,” feminist author Kara Dansky told Breitbart News. She continued:

Sexual orientation is about attraction to another, and same-sex attracted people are just that – people attracted to members of the same sex. In particular, lesbians are women who are attracted exclusively to other women, i.e., adult human females.

>So-called “gender identity,” or “trans” is about a self-identification – a made-up delusion that one can actually belong to the opposite sex class, or to some entirely invented sex class. The T, Q, etc., are not grounded in the material reality of sex. As such, many lesbian, gay, and bisexual people do not think that these letters ought to be affiliated with L, G, or B people at all. The lie that men can be women is anti-woman and politically regressive.

Dansky’s book is titled, “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls.”
Transgenderism is powerful because it is paired with “critical queer theory,” which is popular among young activists, says activist Natasha Chart.

Queer theory, she told Breitbart News, is a run-amuck “grey goo” idea that attacks all of the useful intellectual and legal distinctions that allow humans to understand and manage their complex lives and conflicted communities:

The basic premise of critical queer theory is that clear definitions and boundaries are oppressive, in and of themselves. If any belief is an unquestioned majority belief, then it is considered “hegemonic” and “oppressive.” And so every belief, every category, must be queered, must be broken down, and the category boundaries must be erased.

We’re in a world where they decided that [biological] sex is one of those definitional boundaries that is oppressive just for existing. Just the fact that everybody knows that sex exists, and it’s unchangeable, and there are two [male or female] kinds, is by definition under the [queer]

All of our rights and freedoms depend on having clear meanings for terms, they depend on having clear understandings of common ideas., And queer theory is the idea that having clear understandings of anything is categorically oppressive.

“It is categorically homophobic — it’s heterophobic for that matter,” Chart added. “If a man can declare himself a [transgender] woman and insist that other men be attracted to him and that [relationship] should still be considered a heterosexual relationship, what do you even call that? That would be ridiculous.”

If a lesbian is in a relationship with a woman who declares herself to be a transgender man, then transgender activists relabel the lesbian as a “straight” heterosexual woman. And when a lesbian refuses to have sex with a “transgender” man and his “female penis,” then the transgender advocates redefine her as a “transphobic” bigot who enforces the “cotton ceiling” against the desires of men.

But the queer theory — and funding from wealthy donors — has overwhelmed the groups that once championed lesbians and gays.

“I can’t think of a single LGBT organization or formerly lesbian rights organization looking out for the interests of lesbian and gay men,” Belissa Cohen told the Bay Area Reporter in September 2021. “We used to have lesbian bars, gay male bars, and now they’re all ‘queer.'”

This queer theory ensures that progressives — including transgender activists — feel entitled to attack the distinct message pushed by the six-color rainbow flag.

“Pride is about both progress and protest, [so] company involvement in Pride should focus on those in the community most in need of support and change,” argued a June 2021 pro-transgender op-ed in Newsweek.  “Right now, that particularly means trans people and people of color,’ the op-ed said.

“Queer liberation includes all of us which means we have to honor Black, brown, and trans identities in all queer liberation works,” Rhode Island state Sen. Tiara Mack told CNN in August 2021.

The Expanding Flag

The Philadephia politicians added the black and brown arrows to tout claims for Black and Hispanic rights. The transgender groups put themselves on the flag, just behind the black and brown arrows.

Other activists then added a purple circle on a yellow background to tout the tiny population of “intersex” people who are born with some genetic, hormonal, or even physical features of the opposite sex:

Advocates for getting more women into prostitution added an umbrella:

Environmentalists are also colonizing the rainbow flag:

Blackshirted Antifa groups are annexing the flag for their purposes:

The progressive push is very aggressive. For example, it broke up the planned 2020 and 2021 gay pride parades in Boston. “Boston Pride celebrated a half-century-plus of existence by collapsing into social panic and canceling itself,” said an October 2021 report in Quillette.com. The collapse came after the group’s organizers submitted:

…a complete ideological surrender to board critics who’d sought to reimagine Pride as an explicitly anti-racist social-justice organization that prioritizes the demands of trans people—black transwomen, in particular—over other members of the LGBT community. The board members also took the extra step of humiliating themselves by noting that they were under the close oversight of minders who might slap them down if they went off-script.

Queer theory and transgenderism are used as clubs by political activists, Chart said:

I guarantee you that most of the people who are spouting this nonsense do not have any idea what they’re talking about … It’s not an army of philosophy PhDs out there. The average person supporting this is someone who has opportunistically seen that this movement gives them a chance to gain power over other people if they are willing to aggressively and abusively spout utter nonsense that can change on a whim.

Whatever you say [in response], they can come up with something that contradicts it or something that makes what you’ve said “phobic” and wrong. They can hold two contradictory opinions, and say that if you don’t agree with both of them, you’re transphobic … They can use this [critical queer theory] dogma to abuse anyone that they dislike, anyone that they resent … It is a blunt force power grab by anyone who is willing to lie in public about sex. And that is a wide range of people, apparently.

Unsurprisingly, the progressives are pushing the rainbow flag to a smaller, narrower slice on the starboard side of the progressive flag:

Still, gays and lesbians are jeering at the progressives’ drive to seize space on the rainbow flag.

The progressive flag is aesthetically horrible and hideous, say gay activists:

The business-backed transgender ideology has captured and converted the gay rights movement into a revenue-maximizing commercial enterprise, says U.K gay author Dennis Noel Kavanagh:

Progressives factions and businesses will keep adding more stripes to the rainbow flag, tweeted P.S. Real Talk:

The progressive flag needs an extra symbol to show progressive imperialism, said @DecChee:

“What a lot of us used to see as a happy flag of [lesbian and gay] liberation has become a banner of mob rule,” said Chart,

The “progress flag looks like the perfect symbol of the … thuggery that has characterized every move that the gender identity movement has taken to attain power,” she said. “It’s become a threat and it looks like one — it looks like what it is.”

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