Gentrification

Another way of saying this, to me, is that the trans wing of the LGBTQ+ is facing a crisis over its betrayal of the corrupt bargain reached to establish gay marriage. Gays, by booting us out, promised we would keep our hands off kids. Making that deal was a shameful betrayal of gay liberation's commitment in the 1970s to queer youth. A youth movement existed in the 1970s alongside and in fundamental alliance with gay liberation. It could have accomplished something. In reaction to a fear campaign -- a sex panic -- about gays making kids gay (today it's trans people making them trans), gay leadership stepped away from youth liberation. If you are a gay man or an adult male boylover and you are as old as I am and you were in the US at the time, that's on you, just as it's on me. But gay leadership had become what I call gentrified. In a pretty literal way, it got taken over by people with money who had been closeted and they kicked out the rowdy faggots who had made the fuss. All movements face gentrification. It's how elites control movements. They trade privilege and create compliant leadership. The trans movement is asserting the right of very young people to make important decisions about their sexuality. That's the exact issue at the center of "Stranger Danger" mythology, that sexuality itself is too dangerous for kids to have to deal with. Protectionist nonsense. All kids have to make important decisions about their sexuality. It's only trans kids the new sex panic has focused on. A regime of supportive medical care that was developed responsibly and in response to the vigorously expressed needs of a population of traditionally marginalzed people is now being withdrawn across much of Europe and in many US states. And at the center of the whole thing is youth sexual agency. If it doesn't sound like the same issue to you, try to look down the road a way. Do we become a community that has twice sacrificed an opportunity to stand up for the sexual rights of youth? hugzu ;-p