I like to listen to the radio while I make my breakfast. The news these days makes it a potentially enraging or deeply saddening activity. But one morning this past June, I found myself getting angry not at the larger state of the world, but at some run-of-the-mill coverage of Pride. A BBC reporter was discussing how June came to be “Pride” month while interviewing a gay man who participated in New York City’s Stonewall Riots in 1969. These kinds of interviews air every June, like clockwork, across radio, television, and social media, often featuring the same people talking about the same things over and over. If you’re LGBTQI+ and have been around for a minute, you’ve likely heard countless versions of this same conversation. But this time I just could not swallow it. The Stonewall Veteran was chatting away, with breezy conviction, telling the reporter that “we” have always been persecuted for “who we love.”
Why should something so seemingly innocuous make me angry? Because it’s a lie, and a destructive one that stands in the way of lasting and serious change for the majority of the population, not just LGBTQI+ people.
It was never about love. That idea was born only in the last few decades, crafted as a tidy but saccharine message to unite groups fighting for marriage equality in the United States. It was a carefully considered political tactic to appeal to straight, middle class America; to present cisgender gays and lesbians, specifically, as “just like them.” But that “love is love” thinking sidesteps all of the truths of why LGBTQI+ people experience discrimination, harassment, and violence, including deadly violence. Who we love has nothing to do with why little kids who haven’t yet had the chance to even be in love are called s*ssies and f*gg*ts and d*kes by their classmates, as well as the adults in their lives. It has nothing to do with why trans people are denied the chance to make their own medical choices, the very same kinds of medical choices that cis gendered people are allowed to make every single day when they want to medically affirm their gender. It’s not why intersex people are submitted to involuntary medical procedures, sometimes as babies only a few days old; why queer couples are relentlessly asked who the “man” is in the relationship; why even LGBTQI+ people will tell each other not to “flaunt” it so much; why I, as a cis d*ke have had people I love and care about try to shame and tease me into going back to shaving my legs, a thing that matters so little and effects no one; and on and on. The people shaming, hating, or worse, in these examples, are fundamentally upset that we aren’t playing the role of man or woman right. We don’t abide by norms that people cling to as a way to sort who matters, who should have power, who should have money, and who they think they should be attracted to, rather than accepting that everyone matters and that everyone should have access to power and rights, particularly over their own sexual, bodily, and life decisions.
Why does it even matter if that guy and the BBC peddle the lie that gay bars were firebombed because of “love,” that the 49 victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre were killed because of “love”, or even that Stonewall was raided because of “love”? Because telling the truth about why these things happen would mean having to tell the truth about the work that needs to happen to end the violence and everyday discrimination against anyone who doesn’t conform. Because acknowledging that the fundamental issue LGBTQI+ people face is an issue of not performing gender “correctly” would mean that instead of being allies across the queer spectrum, we would actually be involved in the same struggle, to abolish gender- and sex- based discrimination of any kind. It would put me, a cis d*ke, in the same struggle as a nonbinary trans person, as an intersex person, as a gay man, as a straight cis woman fighting workplace discrimination, as a pregnant person fighting for autonomy over their body, even with a straight cis man who refuses to buy into the toxic masculinity that is a huge part of the reason why cis men are dying of suicide at a rate four times higher than others. Being involved in the same struggle doesn’t mean we are the same, not at all—there are significant and meaningful differences in life experiences across these groups. But a shared struggle that has more people in it, and a wider range of people, more people who understand why we’re fighting together instead of separately, can lead to stronger and more binding change.
I am hardly the first person to point this out. An acknowledgement of these shared struggles are at the core of the Gender LIberation Movement, which had its first major event in 2020, just a block from my apartment, in front of the Brooklyn Museum, where thousands of us gathered to uplift and demand safety and autonomy for Black trans women and a world where they can thrive. Our political forebears pointed the way to that kind of alignment five decades ago, perhaps most famously in 1973 when Sylvia Rivera, shouting from the stage at a large gathering of primarily lesbians and gays, demanded to know why they were abandoning the trans people who had been fighting along side them the whole time.
Did that guy speaking to the BBC interviewer have ill intent? I doubt it. But he’d certainly drunk the Kool Aid; having gone from an angry rebel in the 1960s to someone who was happy to ply a party line that doesn’t support the genuine liberation of anyone, serving instead as another demand for us to conform, to hide, and for those who can’t do either to be persecuted.
Notably the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment never got added to the U.S. Constitution because, rightly, its opponents understood it would require an end to gender discrimination of any kind, for anyone, of any gender, that its true impact would never be limited solely to cis women, even though they were the majority of the people pushing for it at the time. The way we tell these stories and make these arguments matters because it shapes the kind of change that is possible, it shapes the laws that are written, and it determines who is included and who isn’t. Love can be beautiful, and it can also be a complicated mess, but it has little to do with what’s really going on for queer and trans people. It’s safety, dignity, access to housing, jobs, and medical care, as well as sexual and bodily autonomy that LGBTQI+ need.
