The Growing Divide in the Rainbow Coalition
Summarize
More gay people are speaking out against the gender ideology of trans and queer activists.
Pamela Paul
“It was awful,” Appel, now 42 and married to another man, recalled. “I realized I wasn’t going to survive, so I made it my full-time job to defeminize myself as a form of self-protection.” In his 20s, Appel lobbied for gay marriage, and in 2017 he interned at Glaad, an LGBTQ advocacy group, determined to fight on behalf of kids like him.
But when Appel later enrolled at Columbia University, eager to learn about the theories behind his activism, the rhetoric he encountered felt more like dogma than inquiry. “According to queer theory, if you’re a man who behaves in ‘unmasculine’ ways or wears eyeliner you must be a woman inside, which I thought was regressive,” Appel, who graduated in 2020, recalled. “Saying that those superficial attributes are what make women women, and that any variation on the rough he-man stereotype means you’re not a man, reinforces these rigid sex roles, and I thought we were supposed to be against those.”
In his book “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic,” which comes out next week, Appel argues that gender ideology is “illiberal, regressive and anti-gay”—as much a cult as Lambs of God, the fundamentalist sect in which Appel was raised—and one that he and an increasingly vocal group of gay men, lesbians and bisexual people reject.
More than three dozen in-depth interviews with gay men, lesbian women, bisexuals and transgender people, along with surveys and several new books, including “The End of the Gay Rights Revolution” by Ronan McCrea, also coming out next month, reveal a complicated—and contentious—relationship between the LGB and TQ+ components of what advocacy organizations and the Democratic party refer to as “LGBTQ+ people.”
While gay and lesbian people emphasized that they oppose discrimination and harassment of transgender adults, they resent being “force teamed,” “taken over” or “erased” by trans and queer ideologues, especially when gay people constitute 90% of those Gallup categorizes as LGBTQ+. In private chat groups and burgeoning LGB organizations and on podcasts, many question whether same-sex attracted people should have allied themselves with trans and queer identities in the first place. To most LGBTQ+ groups this attitude is nothing short of trans exclusion and antithetical to their principles.
These disagreements stem from radically different ways of viewing identity. Gay people typically see their homosexuality as fundamentally grounded in biology and based on attraction to people of the same sex. Transgender people instead prioritize gender identity, defined by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither.” Meanwhile, queer theory argues that both sex and gender exist on a spectrum and are often fluid, allowing for labels like nonbinary and genderqueer.
There have always been fault lines within the rainbow coalition. But in the past 10 years, ever since the right to gay marriage was secured in 2015, further divisions have emerged and expanded, along with growing rancor and vitriol. All of which belies the overriding image of inclusion touted by advocacy groups.
“For those of us who work in this field as advocacy-focused political activists, these are hard conversations we have to have as a movement,” said Cathy Renna, communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, which was founded in 1973 as the National Gay Task Force. “To me, this is often about fear of the other, and nobody understands that better than queer people.” As for gay people who don’t believe in gender identity, Renna says, “It’s fine not to believe in it, but why do you have to impose what you believe on everyone else?”
People marching in a WorldPride rally holding rainbow flags and signs, with the Washington Monument in the background.
The WorldPride 2025 march on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., June 8. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
Blowups regularly erupt over these conflicts. In August, for example, John Boyne, author of the bestselling “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” was boycotted by more than 800 writers when his new novel, which addresses homophobia and sexual assault, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, a literary award for gay British authors. Boyne had publicly stated that he supports transgender rights except when they come into conflict with women’s rights, for example in prisons and domestic violence shelters. His fellow nominees removed themselves from contention in protest. The prize was canceled, and Polari vowed to “increase the representation of trans and gender non-conforming judges on the panels.”
‘None of this makes sense’
For LGBTQ advocates, solidarity has been the dominant strategy, one that often requires tamping down on conflicts, especially in the face of what most consider hostile rhetoric and policies from the Trump administration. In the aftermath of Trump’s reelection, with its powerful “Kamala Harris is for they/them” ad campaign, when the Democratic congressman Seth Moulton voiced reservations about trans-identified girls playing on girls’ sports teams, he was excoriated by LGBTQ+ groups for “harmful” speech, and one of his top staff members quit.
“Everyone is hellbent on sticking together because they think there’s strength and validation in numbers, but that’s not true,” says Arielle Scarcella, a 39-year-old Brooklyn-based YouTuber who frequently posts videos critiquing gender theory and trans activism to her 800,000 followers. “I think there’s safety in sanity, because people can understand things that make sense, and none of this makes sense. You now have straight people calling themselves queer because they have purple hair and are non-monogamous.”
To Jose Arango, immigrating to America at 17, after growing up in “conservative, religious homophobic” Colombia, felt like a liberation. “I threw myself into everything gay,” said Arango, now 27. He became president of the Pride club at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson campus. He was awarded an LGBT scholarship from the Point Foundation. For the first time, he felt not only loved but celebrated. He had found his community. Though confused by people using what seemed to him “eccentric pronouns,” he figured, “I’m in this new country where things are more advanced. I didn’t really question it.”
When John Boyne was shortlisted for a literary prize for gay writers, his fellow nominees withdrew in protest of his views on transgender rights.
When John Boyne was shortlisted for a literary prize for gay writers, his fellow nominees withdrew in protest of his views on transgender rights. Marketa Vojtikova/CTK/Zuma Press
But the more he read about queer theory, the more Arango rejected the concept of gender identity. “It was all based on stereotypes,” he said, and anathema to gay kids like himself who were teased for not being “manly” enough. When Arango began expressing these views in 2022, his boyfriend dumped him and denounced him as a “transphobe.” He lost most of his friends. What he had originally understood as a welcoming LGBTQ+ community now felt exclusionary and hostile.
“There’s a ‘Don’t be ungrateful’ tone especially aimed at gays who never knew a gay world before gender ideology took over,” Arango explained. “My view is that it’s they who have betrayed us—insisting there are lesbians with penises and gay men with vaginas and that any straight person calling themselves nonbinary somehow belongs.”
Many gays and lesbians say gender identity strips same-sex attraction of its meaning. “Transgender and queer activists have disappeared the idea of sex, and that means getting rid of the idea of sexual orientation and the whole basis of being gay,” says Ann Menasche, 72, a civil-rights lawyer and lifelong gay rights activist based in San Diego. “I’m on the far left, but this really is not progressive.”
In 2022 Menasche was fired from her job at Disability Rights California after objecting to the omission of the word “women” in a statement her employer put out in favor of abortion rights and speaking out about sex-based rights. “I was called a bigot and a transphobe and such a danger to staff that I was refused unemployment,” she said. (She filed a lawsuit, and the matter was litigated and resolved out of court. Disability Rights California did not respond to requests for comment.)
Menasche was one of several interviewees who lost jobs for expressing similar views. “What we’re seeing is a witch hunt against lesbians,” she said. For their part, trans advocates argue that trans women can also be lesbians and that it is lesbians who are being exclusionary. “Efforts to exclude trans women and non-binary people from lesbian and feminist communities are ahistorical, morally wrong and go against the founding values of those movements,” the National Center for LGBTQ Rights wrote in a statement issued during Lesbian Visibility Week.
A battle over basic rights
Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress, has been in this fight for a long time. In 2007, he sponsored the End Discrimination Now Act, which would have ended workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. He had enough Republican votes to pass it, but transgender activists excoriated him for not including gender identity as well. Frank added it to the bill, dooming it to failure; it would be another 13 years before both classes would win protection.
‘A lot of gay people don’t buy into this notion that there is no such thing as biological gender,’ says former Rep. Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress.
‘A lot of gay people don’t buy into this notion that there is no such thing as biological gender,’ says former Rep. Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress. Dennis Cook/Associated Press
Certain disagreements within the movement are substantive, Frank conceded in an interview. “A lot of gay people don’t buy into this notion that there is no such thing as biological gender or support the insistence that male to female transgender people should be granted entry to women’s-only spaces without clothing,” Frank said.
Despite recent polls showing waning support for gay marriage, Frank said he believes the real threat right now is toward transgender people. Most gay people, he said, support their basic rights, including official documents that reflect a person’s gender identity and access to gender reassignment treatments for minors.
But even what Frank refers to as “basic rights” are fiercely disputed.
Trouble at home 
