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Essay:My problem with Queer Majority

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I first discovered Queer Majority via the Twitter feed of Bi.org, which until then I considered a valuable and respectable resource for bisexuals and questioning people. The first article I read on the site had a weird focus on "political correctness", which I thought was unusual for a supposedly "queer" publication, but at that time, I couldn't imagine what it really was.

It was only (not much later) when Bi.org or Queer Majority itself (I don't remember which it was) retweeted an Areo Magazine article with pretty much the same content as a Queer Majority article that I felt there was a problem.

Incidentally, I already knew about Areo Magazine being a Quillette offshoot. This pushed me to do more research about Queer Majority and its ideology. Afterwards, the connection with Areo Magazine became a lot less surprising.

Turns out that Queer Majority is explicitly anti-woke. It's a hub for Unpopular OpinionsTM, contrarianism, and controversial takes. Even its more reasonable and less controversial articles usually feature at least one small remark aimed at the (far-)left, to imply it has its own issues too. One of its contributors once praised a book written by Vivek Ramaswamy of all people.

On Twitter/X, the people behind Queer Majority, on average, seem to think that Dems and the GOP are equally bad. At best, you have people who bash progressives but keep voting blue anyway because they have to admit the GOP is way worse (then blame Dem defeats on "wokeness"), and at worst, you have unapologetic conservatives affiliated with transphobic lobby groups such as the Manhattan Institute. On LGBT and (especially) transgender issues, there is constant doublespeak, where overt homophobia and transphobia are denounced but, say, banning all gender transitions up until age 25 is not considered transphobic (never mind that, given the sheer number of more dangerous activities that have a lower age requirement, only transphobia can justify such a high threshold). People can simultaneously rail against Ron DeSantis' Don't Say Gay or Trans law and praise Elon Musk for seemingly favoring him over Orange Man (we all know how it turned out). Many of them follow transphobic accounts, such as Genspect for example.

How did we end up here? How did a supposedly "queer" publication give a platform to the worst right-wing academic grifters (to paraphrase something that was written about Jerry Coyne)?

I think it has much to do with the organization behind it (the so-called American Institute of Bisexuality). More specifically, its decision to cooperate with J. Michael Bailey, despite the controversial and transphobic nature of his previous works. But I also think it has something to do with the average political leanings of the "B" letter when compared to the other letters of the LGBT acronym (and possibly any other letter that could be added to it). Indeed, most polls (as far as my personal memory is functioning, anyway) seem to suggest that overall, bisexual voting behavior is inbetween straight voting behavior on the one hand and gay/lesbian voting behavior on the other hand. If true, this would make the "B" letter the group that, relatively, is the most sensitive to conservative ideology.

There are several possible reasons for that. Maybe it's true that bi people already have one foot in the straight community, and thus are more sensitive to traditional straight norms than gay/lesbian people are. Or it's the fact that biphobic discourse in the gay/lesbian community often takes the form of railing against supposed "category traitors" or "fence sitters". Biphobia denial is often rooted in an obsession with systemic oppressions and "prejudice plus power" definitions thereof; for some radical lesbians, biphobia doesn't exist since bisexuals are only oppressed insofar as they experience homosexual attraction, and the idea that lesbians may hold power over them is considered lesbophobic. Of course, however, biphobia may exist without having gays/lesbians as the main oppressors of bisexuals.

While this can justify a radical deconstructionist approach (as does Shiri Eisner in her book Bi Revolution, with the concept of monosexual privilege), this can just as well justify a rejection of gay/lesbian radicalism as being politically too binary, too simplistic, too puristic, or hypocritical in its defense of sexual freedom. For some people, this can mean a tendency to reject far-left politics as they are perceived to embody those values. Thus, they may think of themselves as being centrist, neither left nor right. This can lead to a balance fallacy of sorts, where the (far-)left is deemed as dangerous as the far-right, if not more so, in some instances.

Bisexuality also has a rivalry with microlabels (like pansexual, polysexual, etc) that has no equivalent for homosexuality. This can lead the segment of the bisexual community that is most obsessed with "scientific" validation (which in itself was a huge factor in collaborating with Bailey) to feel that the main threat to bisexual identification doesn't come from "above" (heterosexuals), but from "below" (pan, poly, omni, and other microlabels), which can lead to panphobia, gatekeeping, and exclusionism.

Transphobia is a direct consequence of that mindset. Sure, people at Queer Majority will deny they are transphobic, but they'll often rely on transmedicalist definitions of transgender identity. And insofar as they perceive the "tucute" movement as embodying the worst excesses of woke ideology, they will start to see other "anti-woke" groups as being more friendly to them. For example, they will ally with gay/lesbian transphobes (if they are not already aligned with more traditional TERFism, in the latter case), or with groups that have a veneer of commitment to science, like the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, even though they're actually pseudoscientific and transphobic. Frankly, I don't know if it's really out of ideological transphobia or out of a more general attitude of "debate-broism" that they do that, but the end result is that you can run a platform called Queer Majority and let transphobic ideologues write articles for it.

The worst thing about that is that in recent years, the US has shifted so far to the right that, to the average person that would not do much additional research about it, Queer Majority could legitimately appear centrist or even center-left there. By Western European standards, it would be pretty much right-wing or at best "center-right" with a transphobic twist (and given the recent rightward shift of many so-called "center-right" European parties, there isn't much of a difference). Christina Buttons may sound reasonable when compared to Michael Knowles, but comparing the two would be like comparing a traditional Christian antisemite to a full-blown Nazi: the fact that the latter is horrible doesn't make the former acceptable.

Otherwise, the very existence of Queer Majority can also be seen as a sign of the normalization of LGBTQ (or, more accurately and ironically, LGB) issues. In many Western countries, the battle for same-sex marriage is considered won (though it is under threat), and transgender persons can legally change their gender without surgical intervention. Many right-of-centre politicians understand that there will be no going back, and increasingly cater to the LGBT community. What will their next target be? Somehow, woke ideology becomes a threat to LGBT rights, and transphobia doesn't disappear but takes new forms, this time around targeting gender-affirming care for minors.

In this context, Queer Majority becomes the symptom of a new relationship between right-of-center parties and the LGBT community, not of mutual opposition but of opportunistic exploitation and divide-and-conquer strategies[note 1]. In the long run, it will not work. Even those parties will have to admit that far-right homophobic regimes are a far greater threat to LGBT rights than "woke ideology" or whatever, or they will be part of the problem rather than the solution.

Notes[edit]

  1. An article written for Queer Majority took this part out of context to claim I was somehow a "conspiracist". To be clear, I don't think Queer Majority is consciously used as an instrument by any political party (while this could work in theory for a Western or Northern European conservative party, the current GOP is way too right-wing for that). In writing that, what I was meaning is that Queer Majority's editorial line parallels the recent shifts of many Western right-of-center (from center-right to far-right) political parties when it comes to LGBT issues; logically, this tends to translate into a lot of homonationalism and claiming that, for some reason, wokeness becomes a threat to LGBT rights (which is usually coded and not-too-subtle transphobia), and so Queer Majority articles could give them ammunition for their views.