Earlier this month, I published a long essay over at Substack on the “vibe shift” sweeping the Western world. One much-noted aspect of that shift is the Trump administration’s flurry of executive orders on gender ideology, ranging from the reaffirmation of the male-female sex binary to a refreshingly frank condemnation of the surgical mutilation of children. Combined with a handful of high-profile atheist conversions to Christianity, many are asking the question: How far might this “vibe shift” go?
As I noted in my essay, there are many reasons for profound gratitude in this moment – but no room, in my view, for triumphalism. In fact, many of Trump’s executive orders are potent evidence of how staggeringly far our culture has fallen. If you had told social conservatives in 2010 that the big victories of 2024 would be a presidential condemnation of sex changes for children and a proclamation that there are only two sexes, we would have gaped at you in disbelief. The president had to condemn what? We were … doing that?
It is one thing to observe that the pendulum is swinging back; it is another thing to determine why and how far. Politically speaking, the hubris of progressives – which led to the alienation of even liberal allies such as J.K. Rowling – is responsible for much of the backlash. We may be witnessing the high tide of the transgender movement, but the sexual revolution itself remains firmly entrenched. The giddy musings of some social conservatives that “Obergefell is next!” is, I think, a profound misreading of what the Trump administration is actually doing.
The U.S. State Department is clearly indicating the limits of this pendulum swing. It now refers to “LGB” on various websites. It appears that as far as the MAGA political operation is concerned, “LGB” is fine – recall that Trump hosted a victory party at Mar-A-Lago to celebrate a federal law enshrining same-sex “marriage” – it’s just the “TQ” that goes too far. The pendulum is swinging back, in short, to … circa 2010. (It must be noted, as well, that the transgender movement is by no means beaten. The victories are real. So are the challenges, and this culture war is far from over.)
In fact, there are plenty of veteran homosexual activists who despise the transgender movement and feel that trans activists are taking credit for revolutionary victories that do not belong to them. While doing research for my recent book How We Got Here: A Guide to Our Anti-Christian Culture, I interviewed Fred Sargeant.
Sargeant is an icon of the gay rights movement, participating in every single night of the 1969 Stonewall riots, co-founding the first “Gay Pride” march in New York City in 1970, and staffing the country’s first gay bookstore with his partner Craig Rodwell in Greenwich Village. He even appeared as a historic character in the 2022 graphic novel The Stonewall Riots: Making a Stand for LGBTQ Rights.
In our conversation, he consistently returned to a theme that he often emphasizes on X: that the “trans movement” had nothing to do with the Stonewall riots, and that their attempt to insert themselves into those events is historical theft. Thus, he was thrilled that the U.S. National Park Service, at the direction of the Trump administration, recently erased the term “transgender” from the Stonewall Monument website. Instead, the website refers only to “LGB” people. Furious trans activists promptly showed up outside the historic inn to protest. According to Sargeant, it’s the first time they showed up.
“It’s been great watching the trans historical revisionists losing their collective minds all day over the record being restored,” he wrote on X. “It’s not trans history and they aren’t being erased. They have nothing from back then to be proud of unless two cross-dressers named Malcolm Michaels, drag name Marshal Johnson, and Sylvia Riveria, who pimped gay kids, is what they want to claim. Riveria and Michaels were 40 blocks away getting high in a hooker park when the Stonewall riot happened.” In a follow-up post, he stated, “Trans people steal the history of LGB people because they have none of their own to be proud of.”
The Trump administration picking a side in a fight between the revolutionaries as to who should get more credit for the riot that kicked off the LGBT movement is not “Christian nationalism” or whatever. Deciding that sterilizing kids and affirming 72 genders is crazy isn’t even a return to 2004, when George W. Bush campaigned on a constitutional amendment upholding natural marriage.
Let me be clear: I am profoundly grateful for these executive orders, and especially the attempts to protect vulnerable kids. But let us be clear-eyed: an endorsement of the “LGB” movement would have been unthinkable even during the last Republican presidency. It has been a long slide to the bottom, and we’ve barely begun to inch back up the slope.
