#82 The Shift No One Explained · Inside the LGB → LGBTQIA+ Break

Something happened to the movement that began as L-G-B.

It expanded — then expanded again — until the letters outgrew the definitions they were built on.

This Think First investigation walks through the quiet fracture inside the modern LGBTQIA+ umbrella, guided not by critics, but by insiders: gay-rights pioneers, lesbian activists, queer commentators, and left-leaning journalists who’ve watched the ground shift beneath their feet.

Equal parts history, psychology, and cultural clarity — with a dose of dry humor — this episode maps how a civil-rights movement rooted in biology transformed into an identity coalition with no fixed boundaries.

Chapters

• 0:00 Two Parades, One Fracture
• 3:20 Questioning The Official Story
• 7:30 Who Changed The Acronym
• 12:30 Expansion Versus Definition
• 18:00 Marketing The Rainbow
• 23:00 History Rewritten For Unity
• 27:10 Sullivan On Diverging Logics
• 36:50 Identity Fluidity’s Tradeoffs
• 44:20 The Book Plug: Distorted
• 46:30 Five Layers Of Receipts
• 53:00 Movement Creep Explained
• 58:40 Academic Drift Takes Hold

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

You're standing on a street you almost recognize. It's June. Warm. Too warm. The kind of heat that makes everything feel a little unreal. A parade is forming, not the kind that takes over a city. The small kind. Neighborhood scale, improvised, hopeful. And the year isn't today. It's 1998. There's a hand-painted banner at the front of the first float. The letters wobble a little, like someone painted them in a rush the night before. LGB. Three letters. Three identities. One shared reality. Sexual orientation. A lesbian couple holding hands, still nervous to be seen. A group of gay men laughing too loudly. The kind of laughter people learn after decades of hiding. A cluster of bisexual marchers reminding people they exist at all. It's fragile, serious, small enough that one bad news story could shut it down. But clear. You don't need a glossary to understand it. You don't need a graduate seminar to decode it. It's a civil rights movement. Narrow, defined, biological. You blink, and now it's 2025. The parade didn't just grow, it exploded. Floats stacked two stories high, corporate logos stamped on every surface, flags with more geometry than a NASA control panel. Teams with laminated labels announcing identities that didn't exist five years ago, not because they were suppressed, but because they hadn't been invented yet. The acronym isn't three letters anymore. It's a procession. LGBTQIA 2S Plus. A keyboard spilled across a banner. Somewhere behind the spectacle, way behind, is a small group holding the old sign. The original one. The one from 1998. Folded, worn, fading. Nobody cheers when they walk by. A few people don't even recognize what the letters refer to. You watch them long enough to notice something subtle and devastating. They aren't leading the parade anymore. They're following it. And in the space between those two scenes, 1998 and 2025, something changed. Not the people. Not the hopes. Not even the core definitions. What changed was the story. A story that used to be about who you loved, slowly becoming a story about who you felt like, eventually becoming a story about who you said you were in the moment, and then, somehow, becoming a story about everything and nothing at all. And as another float rolls by, this one declaring infinite gender futures in 12 different fonts, you can feel the contradiction pressing against your ribs. How did a movement that once had boundaries become a movement that treats boundaries as bigotry? It's not a moral question, it's not a political one, it's a narrative question, a structural question, a question of incentives, drift, and silence. And today, we're going there. This is Think First, where we don't follow the script. We question it. Because in a world full of poetic truths and professional gaslighting, someone's got to say the quiet part out loud. There's a dominant story about the LGBTQIA Plus umbrella, a polished, rehearsed, institutional story. You've heard it. We're all one community. We're all fighting the same fight. Sexuality and gender are inseparable. Expansion means progress. It's a comforting story, simple, symmetrical, easy to repeat, but here's what you don't hear as often. And this part matters. The loudest signs of fracture aren't coming from the outside, they're coming from inside the alphabet. Lesbians saying, quietly at first, then publicly, we're being erased. Gay men noticing their category was folded into a movement that isn't about sexual attraction anymore, and wondering when that vote was taken. Bisexual activists asking why their identity is now treated as a footnote under an ever-expanding gender rubric that has nothing to do with attraction. These aren't right-wing talking points. They're not culture war lightning bolts. They're the voices of the original members of the movement. And the moment they started asking questions, the labels began flying. Exclusionary, bigot, transphobic, gatekeeper, traitor. Not because these people changed their beliefs, but because the story changed around them. Let's ask the real questions, the ones most people tiptoe around. 1. Who expanded the acronym? No global vote, no summit, no referendum among gay or lesbian communities? It just lengthened. Organically at first, then institutionally, then aggressively. 2. Why did gender identity become the central gravitational force? Sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing. Different biology, different psychology, different political needs, different histories. So why were they merged? 3. Why did major institutions adopt every expansion instantly? Nonprofits, media outlets, universities, corporate HR departments, school systems, every new letter was absorbed immediately, without debate, without friction, without explanation. Movements don't usually work like that. 4. Why do insiders now whisper that they feel displaced? Not conservatives, not skeptics, not pundits, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, people who marched in 1998. And here's the poetic truth. The version of the story that feels right but hides a fracture underneath. The movement got bigger, and that's good. But bigger isn't always clearer. Bigger can mean blurred. Bigger can mean chaotic. Bigger can mean captured. Because when a movement expands faster than its definitions, the definitions start to dissolve. That leaves us with the stakes, the part most people miss. What happens when the terms that won civil rights no longer describe the group they were meant to protect? Where does the lesbian who's same-sex attracted fit in a framework that tells her same-sex is exclusionary? Where does the gay man fit in a movement that increasingly defines man as a self-declared category? Where does bisexuality fit when sex itself becomes a negotiable term? The tension isn't ideological, it's structural. And this is where the book Distorted offers a useful lens. Confusion isn't an accident, it's a tactic. When definitions multiply and categories blur, and the story moves faster than the people inside it, clarity becomes a liability. Which brings us to the question at the heart of this entire episode. Did the LGB movement expand or did it get absorbed? That's where we go next. There is an official story about the LGBTQIA Plus movement, a story polished enough to fit on a parade float, clean enough to fit into corporate training decks, and emotionally satisfying enough to silence most questions. It goes like this. We're one community, one struggle, one family, one movement that keeps expanding, because expansion means love. It's a beautiful story, a cinematic story, a story tailor-made for marketing campaigns that want to feel righteous without ever risking controversy, but like all beautiful stories, it hides the seams. Let's pull back the curtain, carefully, calmly, without judgment, and examine the narrative as it's been sold, refined, and repeated. Because before we talk about what shifted, we have to understand the version most people never think to question. If you search the press releases, corporate pride decks, nonprofit mission blurbs, and university DEI slides, they all describe the movement with the same formula: the lesbian struggle, the gay struggle, the bisexual struggle, the transgender struggle, the queer struggle, the intersex struggle, the asexual and aromantic struggles, the two-spirit representation, and a plus sign, holding space for identities that have not yet been invented. That's the selling point. Everyone belongs because everyone is welcome. The slogan writes itself. The branding is unstoppable. Who wants to be the person asking questions about inclusion? You watch a corporate pride video and each letter flashes like a Marvel character reveal. LGBTQIA 2 Spirit Plus. Each with its own color scheme, each with its own story, each supposedly marching to the same moral drumbeat. And the messaging is always the same. Different letters, same fight. Even if, quietly, the letters want very different things. One of the most effective features of the official story is its historical narrative, a curated, simplified timeline that blends sexual orientation and gender identity into one seamless arc. But if you rewind far enough, you notice something strange. The history didn't start that way. Gender identity, activism, and sexual orientation activism emerged from different eras, with different leaders, different demands, different legal frameworks, and different scientific discussions. But in the story we're sold, they merge perfectly. The timeline becomes Stonewall was trans-led. The early rights movement was always a shared struggle. Gay and lesbian pioneers were fighting for the same ideas we fight for today. Everything has always been one big rainbow family. It's tidy, it's moving, it's marketable, but history, real history, is not tidy. It's messy, it's full of tension, conflict, and competing visions. The official story smooths all that out. Not to deceive people, but to keep the coalition looking unified. Once a movement becomes an umbrella, the language must be elastic enough to cover every identity under it. That's where the euphemisms enter soft, melodic, emotionally warm, lived experience, authentic self, expansive identity, affirming language, gender euphoria, fluidity, words designed to trigger empathy and discourage scrutiny, because fluidity sounds beautiful until the ground beneath you becomes liquid too. The power of the official story is not academic, it's emotional. The movement says, if you question the acronym, you're questioning human dignity. If you draw a boundary, you're excluding someone. If you see differences, you're dividing the community. Unity becomes morality, boundaries become bigotry, and to the average person who wants to be kind, fair, and compassionate, the emotional conclusion becomes obvious. Just accept the whole thing. And for years, most people did. Here's where the irony appears quietly but unmistakably. The official story says every letter belongs equally, but inside the movement, some letters became louder than others. Some became politically useful, some became symbolically vital, and some, like the original L, G, and B, became quietly sidelined. Because once the story demands infinite inclusion, any identity rooted in biology, boundaries, or definitions becomes inconvenient. Before we continue, it helps to hear from someone who has lived inside this movement for decades. Andrew Sullivan, a gay writer, an early voice in the modern gay rights movement, and someone who supported same-sex marriage long before it was mainstream, explained in a recent conversation that something changed in the underlying logic of the movement. Here's how he put it in a conversation on the podcast The Unspeak Easy with Megan Daum, an episode titled Where Trans Activism and Gay Rights Collide. It's Sullivan speaking as someone who lived the early movement and who's now watching its center of gravity shift.

SPEAKER_08: 13:18

I mean, you are somebody who has been talking about gay civil rights for decades now. You were really you were on the forefront of that movement in the 80s and 90s. You had a lot of skin in the game. You had you faced significant professional consequences, or, you know, you took significant risks professionally and otherwise, talking about this. What is it like now to see this movement so I don't want to use the word hijacked, although maybe I just should. It feels hyperbolic. But I mean, what is it like to kind of just sit back and look at what's happened?

SPEAKER_04: 13:54

What began to happen in the 80s and 90s is that a bunch of us who were coming of age back then looked at the gay rights movement and what was going on, realized we were in an extreme crisis because we were facing an epidemic of just immense proportions. And we still had no basic civil protections, certainly almost no real public face that people understood or could acknowledge or understand or interact with. And therefore, a bunch of us decided, well, instead of just sitting around letting this define us, we who this doesn't define are gonna actually start coming out, being public, making arguments about how this movement, this left movement, really is not serving the interests of gay men and lesbians. And there is an alternative possibility. And that alternative possibility was the the pursuit of not assimilation but integration, uh, equal civil rights in terms of what the government does for people, in other words, granting marriage licenses and allowing people to serve in the military openly. Those are the two key factors and policies which the government itself was in charge of, and insofar as we were citizens, the government was explicitly treating us unequally. And so the argument was we just demand equality. We're not going to we're not going to call ourselves queer, we're not going to demand that you decide that your cultural agenda is different. We don't want you to endorse the subversion of all bourgeois society or the queering of every heterosexual norm. We just want simple equality, integration, and the what we have in common with heterosexuals is much more important in terms of our civil rights than what we don't have in common. Well, this movement is over. Let's shut it down, let's move on with our lives. It's an amazing success. And meanwhile, these organizations were, of course, being taken over by much more radical leftists for whom the agenda was shifting very quickly. And the same way that the woke revolution began to happen from 2015-16 onwards in academia and in journalism, it sort of reached this crisis point, so it took off there. And we suddenly hear the term LGBT, and then we had LGBTQ, and then of course we have LGBTQ, and then we have 2S LGBTQIA plus, and you realize that we were headed into this completely crazy zone. And then, of course, you began to realize that the trans argument really is about something much deeper.

SPEAKER_08: 16:54

And totally separate, I would say completely distinct. Yes, it is distinct. Gay is about sexual orientation, right? But trans is about identity. Identity is different than orientation. How you identify is different than who you're attracted to. So I'm wondering what kinds of conversations do you have with gay people, either your age or any age, younger, whatever, about how these movements intersect? Because I can tell you that, as like, you know, a regular straight liberal who hangs out with, you know, progressive, educated, often elites, they have an awfully hard time understanding the difference between the new trans movement and the gay civil rights movement. They are so haunted by all the mistakes that were made, the real abuses, conversion therapy, all the rest that happened, you know, before the 90s, essentially, in the gay movement, and they are unable to separate the two. And they don't want to have any, they don't want to criticize the movement at all because to their ear, it sounds like people in the 60s being bigoted homophobes.

SPEAKER_04: 18:09

The vast majority of gay men are as clueless about this as the vast majority of heterosexuals.

SPEAKER_08: 18:16

Okay, that's what I was trying to get at.

SPEAKER_04: 18:18

New stupid flag. They don't notice that essentially this ugly piece of hideous bullshit flag is somehow which is defining us as supporting BLM for God's sake. And so this makes sense to them. And one of the ways that they have helped do this is this term LGBTQ or LGBT as a simple, as a single adjective, yeah, which immediately conflates the gay and the trans experience in ways that is so they talk about LGBTQ people. They even say an individual is an LGBTQ person.

SPEAKER_08: 19:02

That sounds very overwhelming. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 19:04

Well, it's impossible. You can't be a lesbian and a gay man and a trans person. You can't. They're they're extremely different uh experiences.

SPEAKER_02: 19:16

This isn't coming from an outsider. It's coming from someone who fought on the front lines of gay rights for decades. Once you hear Sullivan say it out loud, the narrative equation becomes clearer. The early movement was built on clear biological definitions: sexual orientation, same-sex attraction, equal rights, legal recognition, freedom from discrimination. Today's expanded movement is built on identity fluidity, self-definition, subjective experience, infinite categories, anti-boundary politics, a philosophical opposition to fixed definitions. Those two frameworks aren't just different, they're incompatible, which is why the original activists, the ones who marched under that LGB banner in the 1990s, now find themselves overshadowed inside a movement they helped build. But the story we're sold doesn't mention that contradiction. It can't. Because the moment you acknowledge internal conflict, the simplicity collapses, and that collapse, that quiet break inside the rainbow, is what we will explore. In another conversation, this time with Barry Weiss on her podcast, Honestly, Sullivan went even deeper. Weiss, who identifies as queer and often reports on fractures within progressive movements, asked him to explain the widening gap between sexual orientation issues and gender identity politics. Here's how he framed it.

SPEAKER_01: 20:44

So recently, the author, our friend, fellow gay rights activist Jonathan Rausch, published an article where he said, until fairly recently, like most gay Americans, I've seen the trans movement as an extension of our own. I believe trans people deserve equality in all meaningful respects. This notion, right, of seeing the trans movement as an extension of the gay rights movement has changed, right? It's really something that's up for debate. And I know you feel the same way, as do many people who took part in the fight for gay equality and for same-sex marriage. So I want to start by asking why. What makes this movement, which some people call gender ideology, but sort of resists being categorized? What makes it different? I think a lot of people who are just straight, normy people going about their day, and are like LGBTQA plus, it's one thing. How are you sitting there, Sully, saying that they're separate, right? What makes the LGB different from the TQ?

SPEAKER_04: 21:56

Here's a very fundamental way. The challenge for a gay kid, for example, uh, let's say a gay boy, is to own his own sex. To believe the fact that he's in love with other boys does not make him any less of a boy. It's incredibly important. A trans child has to be actually compelled by a desire to disown their own sex, become something else entirely. Those are two radically different psyches and psychological formations. They really are. And a lot of gay boys and lesbian girls often have, because you will often have a range of gender expressions. Little boys will play with dolls sometimes. They will not be so much into rough and tumble sports, although some gay boys are, and again, they they need to be understood as well. There are plenty of gay boys that are absolutely great at sports and and and hide there in their uh machismo, as it were. But others have slightly what you would call uh gender nonconforming, I hate these words, but it basically means you're not a stereotypical boy or a stereotypical girl. Um and they're being told, you know, uh maybe that makes you actually not gay, but trans. And of those kids that feel this way and have this gender non-conforming capacity and predilection, almost all turn out to be gay in adulthood. So the question simply is uh in general, you'd say, well, let them all sort it out, let them grow up and figure out who they are and who cares. But when there is a movement coming in to say, if you are not stereotypically acting as a girl or a boy, you could be trans, and you're telling people this at the age of three, four, and five, you're telling kids at a very impressionable age all sorts of incredibly confusing things that are gonna particularly, it seems to me, destabilize a gay boy or gay girl's psyche. So that is the conflict. And it's always been a conflict. And and if we just had the civil rights movement, trans people would already have civil rights, we'd be fine. But we don't. We we we we we we have something else, a much more pernicious uh product of critical gender theory, critical queer theory, which really doesn't believe in biology at all, believes biology itself is a function of white supremacist culture, that really believes the sex binary itself is a function of white supremacist culture, that previous civilizations didn't have it, which is of course untrue.

SPEAKER_01: 24:32

Aaron Ross Powell But it's smuggling itself in under the guise and in the language of the next, you know, the next civil rights movement. And I think in that is why it's inclusive. Well, that but that is why I think it is it will sound maybe strange to certain people who don't follow this debate.

SPEAKER_04: 24:53

Sex is replaced by gender, and gender is chosen. Then what happens to homosexuality itself? What happens is it disappears. It becomes being homogendered, which is how they're now rewording it, which means you're just attracted to this sort of concept of masculinity. And if homosexuality is the attraction to the same sex, you get rid of sex, turn it into gender, then it's perfectly possible for a gay person to be gay and have sex with a woman as an expression of gayness. No, I'm not kidding. I know if you if you and if you then say I'm only attracted to men with dicks, to put it bluntly, in other words, to men, they'll say you're a bigot.

SPEAKER_01: 25:40

A bigot. Yeah, it's very, very strange because this claims to be a movement that is about radical inclusion and progress. But in my experience, it is solidifying, it is reifying some of the most sort of retrograde ideas that there are about gender, and in in a lot of my experience, especially about women, that to be a woman means to be submissive, that to be a woman means that you wear heels and get a blowout and you know, a facelift, or whatever the most extreme stereotype is. That rather than the progressive argument being, you're a girl and you're a tomboy, great. You're just as much a girl as the one who likes to play with Barbies. It's instead saying, if you're a tomboy, well, maybe you need a massectomy. Maybe you're actually a boy inside.

SPEAKER_02: 26:33

Again, this is not an external critique. It's an internal observation. And now that you've heard it from the inside, the rest of the story becomes easier to see. The story we're sold is clean, smooth, unified. But the story underneath, the one held quietly by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, queer journalists, leftist academics, cultural commentators, and movement insiders, is something else entirely. A story of drift, a story of expansion, a story of erasure wrapped in the language of inclusion, and it leads to the question we explore next: what happens when the movement outgrows the letters that built it? We're living in a moment where truth feels strangely negotiable. A headline can be technically wrong, yet emotionally persuasive. A narrative can fall apart under scrutiny and still survive in the group chat. And institutions keep saying, trust us, even when the facts have quietly drifted out of play. Distorted is the book that asks the uncomfortable question behind all of this. How does a society lose its grip on what's real while believing it's becoming more informed? It's not a memoir, it's not a manifesto, it's a map of the psychological shortcuts, storytelling maneuvers, and cultural incentives that shape our perception long before we notice the shape. Drawing from behavioral science, media history, political strategy, and hundreds of real-world examples, distorted shows why even thoughtful people, especially thoughtful people, get pulled into narratives that feel true but aren't. If you sense there's a pattern beneath the chaos, you're right. And this book helps you see it. Distorted arrives February 10th on Barnes Noble, Amazon, Audible, and your favorite bookstore. It's your book for understanding the moment we're all living through, and why questioning the script might be the most rational thing you can do. Alright, back to the show. Every major cultural shift leaves a paper trail. Not always obvious, not always loud, but always there. And if you look carefully at the LGB to LGBTQIA plus expansion, you notice something striking. The loudest contradictions aren't coming from skeptics. They're coming from the people inside the acronym. Today, the last half of this episode isn't about proving anyone wrong. It's about noticing what insiders have been saying, often quietly, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes at personal cost. We'll move through five layers of receipts: movement creep, academic drift, institutional incentives, historical reframing, the internal rebellion. And each layer will be voiced, in part, by the people who lived through it. Not pundits, not critics, not outsiders, the insiders. Let's begin. 1. Movement creep. When a cause outlives its original goal. Movements are like organisms. They adapt, expand, and, once their primary goal is accomplished, they look for new battles to justify their ongoing existence. By 2015, same sex marriage was legal nationwide. LGB activists Many of whom had fought for decades had achieved the central legal victory they were told was impossible. Normally, when a movement wins, it winds down. But modern activism doesn't slow down, it scales. Nonprofits need new missions. Foundations need new grant categories. Universities need new programs. Corporate partners need new causes to sponsor. And in that environment, the acronym expanded swiftly. Not because LGB people suddenly needed radically different rights, but because the movement needed continued momentum, and so gender identity became the new nucleus. A shift supported by institutions, amplified by academia, and embraced by a generation that found identity exploration more compelling than sexual orientation advocacy. This isn't a judgment. It's structure. A movement built on a narrow biological definition was replaced by a movement built on identity fluidity, a category broad enough to remain permanently open-ended. 2. Academic drift, when queer theory became the engine. Sexual orientation has clear parameters, who you're attracted to, biological sex, patterns of desire. Whereas gender identity, as framed by queer theory, is different. Self-definition, self-concept, rejecting normativity, deconstructing categories, prioritizing social constructs over biology. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, gender theory departments and universities began teaching frameworks that redefined identity as something infinitely fluid. These frameworks weren't malicious. They were academic, sometimes useful, sometimes abstract, often intentionally provocative. But, around 2010 to 2015, something unusual happened. Those abstract frameworks left campus and entered activism. Suddenly, man and woman became open categories. Identity replaced biology as the central axis. The word queer shifted from a reclaimed slur to a broad aesthetic and ideological identity, and the original LGB boundaries became gatekeeping. No one held a vote. There was no memo, no democratic process. The language simply shifted. And the people most affected, the original L, G and B, were expected to adapt to a movement that now viewed their boundaries as outdated, which leads us to the third layer. 3. Institutional incentives, the power of the plus sign. When institutions adopt a framework, the framework becomes reality. Nonprofits rebranded overnight. LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQ ⁇ , LGBTQIA Plus. Corporate HR departments followed suit. Universities expanded identity centers. Media outlets adopted the full acronym to avoid backlash. Each new letter felt like progress, but also diluted the original foundation. Because once you add a plus sign, you create a permanent incentive to keep adding more. Infinite identity categories mean infinite relevance. Again, this isn't conspiracy, it's incentive structure. Institutions reward growth, activism rewards novelty, social media rewards identity differentiation. And a movement built on three letters, L, G, B, was never designed for infinite expansion. Which brings us to a more delicate point, how the story of the movement itself was rewritten. 4. Historical reframing. Movements tell origin stories, they anchor identity, and as the acronym expanded, history began to shift to accommodate the newer letters. The most famous example, Stonewall. Historically, Stonewall was an uprising involving gay men, lesbians, drag performers, street youth, and a complex set of community tensions with police, not a monolithic group. But in recent years, the narrative has been simplified in some circles to Stonewall was trans-led. It's a statement about how narratives shift to support current needs. Because if the new movement is identity-based, then the early movement must be framed as identity-based too, even if that means compressing or reshaping details. This rewriting isn't malicious. It's mythmaking. All movements do it. But it matters when the rewrite obscures who built the original movement and who feels pushed out today. Which brings us to the part insiders rarely say publicly, but have increasingly begun saying privately, and sometimes bravely. 5. The internal rebellion. When the founders feel erased. You don't have to dig far. Just listen. Listen to the gay men who say, I don't recognize my own movement. Listen to lesbians who say, our category is being replaced, not expanded. Listen to bisexual activists who say, we fought for sexual orientation rights, not vibe-based identity politics. And listen to the organizations forming outside the mainstream acronym, not against anyone, but in defense of the original mission. This brings us to our third clip. One of the clearest examples of this internal fracture comes from a UK-based group made up of lesbian and gay activists who feel the original movement has drifted far from its roots. These aren't outsiders. They're the people the LG and B were created to represent. Voices from the LGB Alliance, a group formed by lesbian and gay activists who felt their identities were being sidelined. This clip is from a GB News interview.

SPEAKER_00: 36:13

So talking to you now, I mean, everything that you're describing seems it seems eminently reasonable to me. And even if I fundamentally were to disagree with your points of view, I don't see any reason why we couldn't sit down and have that conversation. And yet, I see commentators in the media, very prominent people, calling you hateful, bigoted, fascist? Far right.

SPEAKER_06: 36:31

I mean, what do you how how can you Well, what's happened is that that what was once the gay rights movement, which I was proud of and which I think has achieved lots of things, has been kind of subsumed into the transgender movement, which says sex isn't important and everybody has their own gender and children know from an early age what gender they are. And we are disrupting that narrative. People used to be afraid before LGBT, I think LGB Alliance has played an important role, and I hope that's not just a feeling of self-importance, because before we came along, people who opposed the idea of gender identity were told, oh, you're being homophobic, because all the gay organizations everywhere were LGBT. They were LGBTQ or LGBTQIA, whatever. And it was homophobic, and people were afraid they had been told and they believed that the push for gender identity was the new civil rights, the new step in the civil rights movement, and they thought, oh, you mustn't oppose that, that's homophobic. And then we came along and they said, sorry, actually, there's lots of people, lesbians and gay men and bisexuals, who don't agree. And so we disrupt the narrative. And that is why we are, we I think that we are called a hate group and and all these unpleasant things, which are i i i it's difficult to live with.

SPEAKER_00: 37:50

It's very confusing to me, though, as well, that to say that because you you're an LGB charity, that you are being exclusionary. But but trans rights was never part of your remit to begin with. That wasn't something you were you were you were focusing on sexual orientation.

SPEAKER_06: 38:02

Well, lots of organizations are focusing on trans rights, and they have every right to. Why shouldn't they? That we have a pluralist society. And and uh for those people who do have a gender identity, which is something that you know we don't have and lots of people don't have, they they have every right to to to represent those people, but we represent different people, people who, just as the people I represented in 1970, are attracted to other people of the same sex. But in order to be that, you have to accept that there are two sexes. And as soon as you say, oh, hang on, there aren't two sexes, no, no, no, no, what we've really got is is a gender, and there's an infinite numbers of number of genders, and some people are not any gender at all, and and then you can't basically haven't got homosexuality anymore.

SPEAKER_00: 38:44

So this is a key point, isn't it? Because I'm just gonna bring you in here on this, Kate, because Stonewall, on their website and in their promotional materials, have redefined homosexual as same-gender attracted. Yes. But of course, that's not what it means. It means same-sex attracted, and actually a recognition of the biological reality of sex has been at the heart of the gay rights movement forever, really. Um when LGB Alliance came about, so what what what was your thinking? I mean, had you tried to engage with Stonewall uh uh in those early days? So can I come to you on this, Bev? Because I've been shocked at the rise of homophobic, openly homophobic remarks that I've seen online, uh very some very vicious homophobic things, often from people who propose gender ideology as a thing. So what's going on here and why why are Stonewall failing to uh address it?

SPEAKER_06: 39:30

Up until 2015, um, Stonewall was uh an LGB organization. It promoted the rights of of uh LGB people, of, of, of, of uh it it uh re originally was against same-sex marriage, but then came on board with it and played a good role in in achieving same-sex marriage. And then it found itself, perhaps in in 2015, without much left to do, and decided it had to embrace a new mission. One new mission it could have embraced, and I think perhaps it should have embraced, was to fight homophobia around the world, because there are still 69 countries around the world that criminalise homosexuality. That's something that we really ought to be fighting against. And they had another choice which was perhaps more lucrative, I don't know, and that was to promote gender identity. And I think it's really important to say it's about gender identity, because every time we talk about gender identity, it gets into the papers as new trans rights round. It's not about trans rights.

SPEAKER_00: 40:28

So I mean, you because you've been described as anti-trans, an anti-trans hate group by some commentators. I mean, how do you respond to that? I mean, do you have a problem with trans people and their rights?

SPEAKER_06: 40:36

Well, of course not. I mean, with the lots of trans people support us. Uh, and and we were called a hate group from within 12 hours of us having our first meeting. There is so much difference between people who are um attracted to others of the same sex and people who have some kind of uh um uh uh a problem, I think, with their identity. It's it's just such a separate issue that it's very unfortunate that these things have been stuck together. And you hear, for instance, on the BBC, you hear people talking about LGBT relationships. What on earth is that? Or an LGBTQ person has been who is an LGBTQ? It's not helpful to put all these letters together.

SPEAKER_00: 41:19

Well, also, I mean so many gay people I know. In fact, I don't know any gay people who feel that Snowmore represents them anymore. So it there's clearly a sense that there's a need. But where do you stand though when people say, I mean, I've heard critics say there's no need for a charity for gay people anymore. We've got equality, we've got it all now. Why do we need this now?

SPEAKER_06: 41:33

Well, we need it particularly now because uh um uh uh a lot of uh um gay and and lesbian, especially lesbian teens, are now being persuaded that they are really um the opposite sex. I mean, in the 1950s, if uh if an uh supposedly effeminate uh uh boy uh um he might be teased and told that that he he was like a girl, which was which was a horrible thing to say to a boy. It made him feel really awful. And these days, if you have a boy who's quite a feminist, he's told that maybe he is a girl. I mean, how is that progress? It's called progressive. It is not progressive, it's the most regressive doctrine.

SPEAKER_05: 42:12

I I think I also want to just bring in here the fact that the homophobia that we see now is the worst that there's ever been.

SPEAKER_02: 42:23

This sentiment from inside the LGB community is one of the strongest receipts we have because it reveals a truth that rarely reaches the surface. When boundaries disappear, definitions collapse, and when definitions collapse, the people whose identities rely on those definitions get pushed to the margins. You can feel the ground shifting beneath the acronym. Now we move to the next insider perspective, not as audio, but as a published, verifiable observation. Freddie Debor is a leftist academic and longtime critic of fashionable activism. He's not conservative, he's not anti-LGBT, he's not reacting to headlines. He is pointing out structural problems inside the acronym. In one widely read Substack essay, he explained that the acronym has grown into something that no longer makes intellectual sense. Freddie De Boer wrote that the acronym has expanded into a kind of dumping ground for identities that don't belong in the same category, a coalition held together more by political convenience than coherent definition. His point wasn't emotional, it was conceptual. You can't build a stable movement on categories that operate in different dimensions. And again, that's not coming from the outside. That's an insider-adjacent academic who supports LGBTQ rights, criticizing the structure, not the people. Next comes a voice from inside the queer cultural world. Megan Daum, who you listened to earlier with Andrew Sullivan, has spent years analyzing how identity language drifts across generations. She's not anti-LGBT, she's not dismissive, she's someone who identifies with queer communities and studies cultural meaning. And in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, she made an observation that reveals why the original L, G, and B categories began to lose their clarity. Daum wrote that queer had stretched so far beyond its original meaning that it now functions less as a sexual identity and more as an aesthetic, a vibe, a cultural posture, a mood. That's not inherently wrong, but it's different from an orientation-based movement, and pretending those are the same thing forces the older categories to dissolve. Again, insider perspective. Not political, not attacking anyone, just naming a shift. Finally, from inside LGBTQ journalism, we have Jesse Singal, a reporter who has documented movement dynamics for more than a decade. He's interviewed insiders, activists, organizers, and community members who feel things they cannot say publicly. And in a 2023 Substack essay, he summarized what many LGBTQ identifying people have told him privately. Singal wrote that many people inside LGBTQ organizations confide privately that they're afraid to express even mild disagreement with the expanded framework. Not because they're hostile, not because they're bigoted, but because there's very little room for nuance. And once a movement stops making space for nuance, it becomes an orthodoxy instead of a conversation. That line is crucial because it shows the frame from inside, not from people critiquing the movement, but from people within it. So here's what we've gathered calmly, carefully, through insiders only. The movement expanded, but without democratic consent. Academic frameworks replaced biological ones. Institutions adopted the broadest possible identity models immediately. History was reframed to match present narratives. LGB insiders began to feel erased. Journalists documented internal silencing. Cultural analysts observed identity becoming an aesthetic. Progressive academics identified intellectual incoherence. No hysteria, no moral panic, no political sermonizing, just the record. Just the receipts. And these receipts point to the same conclusion. This isn't simply a story of expansion, it's a story of redefinition. Which brings us to where we are now, where we look at how the official story collapses when these contradictions are placed under pressure, and we introduce a new mental model, one that explains how movements drift, why definitions dissolve, and how identity clusters grow until the original shape disappears. There's a moment in every movement where the official story meets the real one, and the frame collapses. Not because anyone wants it to, not because anyone engineered it, but because contradictions accumulate until silence can't contain them anymore. To understand this collapse clearly, without judgment, without heat, we have to begin with empathy. We have to steel man the mainstream narrative, because the people who expanded the acronym weren't trying to break anything. They were trying to include everyone, and that aim, on its face, is good. Let's give that argument its strongest version. Imagine growing up feeling out of place, not fitting into gender norms, not fitting into sexuality norms, feeling like the world has a script, and you never got the lines. For many young people, the expanded acronym is a lifeline, a place to belong. For transgender individuals, it offers safety and solidarity. For non-binary youth, it offers language they didn't have before. For queer identified people, it offers community and culture. For intersex individuals, long overlooked by both medicine and society, it offers visibility. For asexual and aromantic individuals, it offers recognition. For two-spirit individuals, it offers cultural restoration. When you see the world this way, inclusion becomes a moral project, and if inclusion is the goal, then expansion feels like compassion. The plus sign feels like welcome. A bigger umbrella feels like progress. Under this interpretation, LGB is too small, TQI is expansive, and the unified acronym is a symbol of solidarity against oppression. There is truth in that, a great deal of truth, and for people who found safety in the broader acronym, that truth is deeply personal. So we must hold that truth gently. But here's where the steel man starts to bend under pressure. What happens when inclusion requires dissolving the definitions that the original movement was built upon? That's not a culture war question. It's a linguistic one, a structural one, a psychological one, and it leads us into the fracture point. If the expanded movement had unified needs, this story would be simple. But they don't. The needs of a lesbian, same-sex attracted female, a gay man, same-sex attracted male, a bisexual, attracted to both sexes, a transgender person, gender identity, a non-binary teenager, identity expression, an intersex adult, medical variation, an aromantic person, relational modality, and a two-spirit individual, cultural role are not the same. They're not even in the same domain. You cannot treat biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, medical conditions, relational modalities, and cultural traditions as one category without losing the integrity of each of them. And that's where the frame buckles. Because when you fuse incompatible needs into one acronym, the group with the clearest definitions loses the quickest, and the group with the most elastic definitions fills the space. Not by force, but by gravity. Movements follow gravity. Here's the simplest way to understand the collapse. Boundary inflation. Most movements begin with tight boundaries to achieve a clear goal. Boundaries aren't exclusion, they're definition. But when a movement's original goal is achieved or becomes less urgent, its boundaries begin to soften. New identities enter, new priorities arise, new narratives merge. At first this feels progressive, expansive, compassionate. But then something happens. The boundary expands faster than the shared definition can keep up, and eventually, the boundary inflates so wide the category collapses. It's not malice, it's physics. A movement built to protect sexual orientation can't remain coherent once it must also deconstruct biological sex, absorb every new gender identity, merge political ideologies, incorporate aesthetic identities, interpret medical conditions, and adapt new cultural frameworks. Boundary inflation leads to category blur, definition loss, internal contradiction, narrative confusion, silence dissent, identity fatigue, and eventually, a collapse. Not into chaos, into ambiguity. Ambiguity feels inclusive, but it's very hard to legislate around, very hard to build rights movements around, very hard to anchor definitions around, and the group that relied most on clear boundaries, the L, G, and B, is the group that feels the collapse first. You also hear this from inside journalism itself. In one episode of Blocked and Reported, Katie Herzog and Jesse Singall, two reporters who've spent years documenting internal newsroom tensions, described how LGBTQ identity desks inside major media organizations can effectively act as gatekeepers.

SPEAKER_03: 52:43

Good.

SPEAKER_07: 52:44

Yeah, not good. And uh so there was some trans stuff in here too, right?

SPEAKER_03: 52:48

Yeah, so this did I don't think this came as a surprise to us or to our British friends. This was another area where I think it's really important to consider the similarities between what's happened at the BBC and what happens, continues to happen in American Outlets. Will you just read this bit from the memo?

SPEAKER_07: 53:03

A BBC presenter contacted me about a month after I started working with the EGSC. What's that?

SPEAKER_03: 53:09

That's this um sort of governance group at the BBC.

SPEAKER_07: 53:11

He put me in touch with a reporter and a producer. All three were from different parts of the BBC, but had shared concerns with about BBC coverage of the trans issue. The story that each person told me was what sounded like effective censorship by a specialist LGBTQ desk within news, as virtually all shows had lost their own reporters. Program editors had to make requests to news if they wanted a correspondent to cover a story. I was told that time and again the LGBTQ desk staffers would decline to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans debate. The allegation the allegation made to me was stark that the desk had been captured by a small group of people promoting the Stonewall view of the debate and keeping other perspectives off air. Individual programs had come to lack their own reporters as a counterweight, and Stonewall is the um it's that UK charity that the BBC has been closely linked to.

SPEAKER_03: 54:00

Yeah, now that was a bit of a scandal in its own right because um BBC and other important British institutions had taken part in this workplace equality index thing that was like a bit of a protection racket. So basically Stonewall would rate you highly if you you know used the right language. Well, yeah, if you if you use the right language or whatever. And then if you did not score highly in the workplace equality index, um one of the solutions it would offer is uh you can pay us to offer you consulting. Um yeah, there was a good podcast uh on the show Nolan Investigates, I highly recommend all this other stuff, but that's very specific to the UK. What I found similar here, and and I feel like you've you've probably come across this, um, this idea of like you have a big media organization, but a relatively small number of staffers who might work for sort of an identity vertical or be part of sort of an employee resource group. And if there's a possible story on a certain subject, it sort of gets routed through them and they have veto power, even if they're young and inexperienced, right? I haven't seen veto power like that in my own experience, but I've I think it's not like formal veto power, it's just like they will make it much harder to run certain stories than others, and it's like this sort of fucked up organizational structure where like people off to the side who might not have a direct role in the story in question, otherwise, are consulted because they're like the LGBTQ staffers or whatever.

SPEAKER_07: 55:24

Um Right. And there's also just a lot of internal pressure within Slack groups, or I mean, there was last time I was at an actual institution that had Slack. You know, they have these resource groups that are little mafias that sort of police other people.

SPEAKER_03: 55:39

They will kill they will kill you. They'll bury you under the bridge. Um Dydam also wrote coverage sympathetic to the transactivist cause was framed as uncontroversial human interest, whereas the feminist cause was always a debate, and then she includes video of her involved in a debate.

SPEAKER_02: 55:57

The point wasn't that these people were malicious, it was that newsroom culture had evolved to the point where even seasoned reporters felt they couldn't raise legitimate questions without risking reputational harm. This is not a right-wing critique. It's not a culture war shot, it's not an attack, it's a sociological observation. A movement can absorb many identities, but it cannot absorb infinite identities and maintain the clarity needed to advocate for any of them effectively. And that brings us to the last act, the part where this story meets the real world. You don't need to be a political scientist to notice boundary inflation in the wild. You only need to pay attention to three things. 1. Listen for the phrases that become uncomfortable to define. When a movement avoids defining its own terms, that's a sign the boundary is inflating faster than the meaning can keep up. Watch for the following phrases. This is complicated. It's more fluid than that. Labels are limiting. It's not about biology. It's not about attraction. It's about my truth. None of these phrases are wrong, but when they replace definitions, they signal drift. 2. Watch for the moment the founders go quiet. When the people who built the movement become the quietest people in the room, something structural shifted. If gay men and lesbians, the original category, hesitate to speak, it's not because they're bigoted, it's because their definitions no longer anchor the movement. And when founders whisper, the narrative is no longer theirs. 3. Notice when history gets recast to match the present. This is subtle, not malicious, not conspiratorial, just telling. When a new ideological framework takes over, history adjusts to justify it. Stonewall. Early activist groups. Who led what? Which identities started the movement. If the story keeps changing with each acronym expansion, you're watching identity-driven mythmaking. That's not evil, it's just a pattern. Two early signals to watch next. Signal one, the LGBTQI plus split, going mainstream. More organizations are forming to defend sexual orientation as a distinct category. If those groups begin to gain cultural legitimacy, the split is no longer fringe. It's structural. Signal two, corporate retrenchment. If organizations begin shrinking the acronym back down, quietly, subtly, visually, that's a sign internal fracture reach the institutional level. Corporations follow incentives. Incentives follow stability, and instability is beginning to show. And, before we end, three questions worth holding on to. When a movement grows larger than its original purpose, who gets to decide what stays at the center? If definitions keep expanding, at what point does the meaning quietly slip away from the people who built it? And when the loudest story no longer matches the lived reality of its own members, who is allowed to say so? Return to the parade. The heat, the noise, the glitter, the overwhelming alphabet stretching across the sky, and somewhat, way at the back, the old LGB banner. Soft, faded. Still carried by people who remember what it meant. They aren't angry, they aren't bitter, they aren't nostalgic for a smaller world, they just remember a time when a movement had a shape. When the letters fit inside the story they told. When the story fit the people, it represented. When unity didn't require dissolving definitions. Movements evolve, cultures shift, identities expand, but when the boundary grows faster than the meaning, even a parade can lose sight of its front. And that brings us to one closing line, the line that ties the whole episode together. A quiet mirror. A movement can grow bigger than its banner, but not bigger than its meaning. At this rate, the acronym might need its own zip code. Somewhere, a Fortune 500 intern is already designing next year's 37-letter PRIDED logo. I checked the latest acronym guide, and apparently I'm a limited edition. If we add any more letters, Scrabble may sue for trademark infringement. I even tried updating my own identity settings, but apparently I need a software patch. You don't need all the answers, but you should question the ones you're handed. Until next time, stay skeptical, stay curious, and always think first. Because even acronyms deserve a little self-reflection. Want more? The full six-step framework we use is at gaslight360.com. You can also dive into the deeper story, the bio, the podcast, and the mission at gymdechen.com. And if you like this one, tag it. Save it. Share it. Because noticing the obvious is a superpower now.