Whenever “Pride Month” ends, I find myself reflecting more on the social movement that once was—and what can be done today. Maybe it adds to this meditation that just a few days after the end of June we observe the Fourth of July. I have been thinking about independence, too, for lesbians and gay men who find ourselves exploited in service of causes that ultimately do us damage.

Historically, one well-known example has been pedophilia, where adults, largely men, have equated their desires for children with homosexuality. I do intend on revisiting this past controversy for whatever it may teach us today—although not at this time. Another far more recent piggybacking of sorts, however, has been contemporary transgender rights activists equating the medicalization of gender with homosexuality.

While I have been told anybody can declare a “trans” identity, without needing medicalization, hormones and surgeries remain framed as “life-saving.” As therapy assumed a religious character into the twentieth century, the widely accepted paradigm of “sickness” and “treatment” has still held us—much like “sin” and “forgiveness.”

It took years of campaigning for homosexuality to become more publicly accepted in terms of lesbians and gay men simply being left alone. We did not aim for worship but simply mutual respect. Even when challenging homophobic social institutions, early LGB activists held a commitment to reality. There was really no other way to make the social change we needed. 

But the notion that one can be—or is actually—“the opposite sex” based on “discordance” of “gender identity” has found unprecedented institutional support. Alienating, the denial of the body as the self does not seem capable of producing anything but problems. It seems quite different to understand that our bodies are ourselves versus being reduced to the body. Thoroughly authoritarian, even in lesser forms, we may find it nevertheless paternalistic. That is, the new fundamentalism operates by the principle of telling us what is for our own good.

I have chosen an image of Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day, from 1970, because I think it matters for us to reflect on where we have been—and where we are going. Among the emerging groups on the New Left, “liberation” meant challenging existing social institutions, which, to whatever degree, meant resisting tradition and prejudice. During the 1960s and 1970s, “sexual-liberation ideology,” as Andrea Dworkin terms it in her 1983 book Right-Wing Women, did influence these movements. And, while I think both movements for women’s liberation and gay liberation can be critiqued, I wish to consider the value of resistance.

A quality of modern transgenderism, I think, has been that it allows one to fantasize of the self as being a “gender outlaw”—while, in reality, following the rules. The individual can place virtually blind faith in legal and medical institutions to be the arbiters of “truth.” Indeed, the assertion of “the authentic self” becomes enforced upon others by the power of these institutions.

But we know that social institutions do not always work as expected—and, in fact, resistance becomes necessary. Part of the problem with assuming these institutions act intrinsically in the best interests of all people has been that, often, they do not. Benevolence transforms into malevolence over time, primarily by relation to profit. It should not be surprising. Not coincidentally, the person whose beliefs align with the culture, where such ideas become legally and medically enforced, is not aligned with the counterculture.

Although it has been commonplace to assume that capitalism always falls on “the right,” what has become of “the left”? Founded by the likes of Jane Addams, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Helen Keller, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has become little more than a promoter of social and medical transitioning. The same has been true of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Planned Parenthood.

Numerous Twitter account users self-declare “communism,” “Marxism,” and “socialism,” who do little more than defend varying flesh markets—including prostitution, surrogacy, and transgenderism. Conveniently, they may claim buying and selling is about the people, but it is about the profits. What even is “the left”? “Anyone who has spent a little time among ‘the left,’” Matt Osborne writes, “understands ideological coherence is the very first problem for ‘the left.’” Sometimes “the left”—which, in most cases, now means “liberalism”—argues that capitalist exploitation must be opposed on ethical and political grounds. Other times, however, “the left” seems to argue that capitalism may be good if the identity of the individual consumer “needs” it. Apparently, certain identities do “need” certain industries.

Perhaps we should consider that corporatized political regimes at present do not best represent our interests. There have been changes from past to present that have been significant. But I cannot stop myself from thinking we have been losing ground, loss which, in part, has to do with neoliberalism. According to George Monbiot, neoliberalism “redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling.” The consumption mindset seems of significance to our present gender trouble.

Other excesses abound, however, in the emphasis on the individual and the narcissism that has seized us. We have witnessed a decline in the individual sense of ethical and political commitment to others. In place of such an ethics and politics, we find manipulation in the form of blackmailing and guilt-by-association tactics. Under these conditions, it seems impossible to have the coherence necessary for a social movement that actually promotes civil rights and civil liberties. Modern social movements appear antisocial and paralyzed, with this symptom being especially true for women’s rights and gay rights.

Still, I do have much hope. Langston Hughes begins his poem “I, Too,” from his 1926 book The Weary Blues, with the line “I, too, sing America” and closes it with “I, too, am America.” Like Hughes, the alienation we feel may well feel insurmountable, yet it can be overcome. I believe we, collectively working, sing the movement and, indeed, are the movement for reaffirming human rights. An urgency confronts us regarding the infringements on women’s rights and gay rights. Let us recall the words of the freethinker and abolitionist Frances Wright from 1828: “To be free we have but to see our chains.” I challenge the reader to resist, for the will to think freely remains the barrier to all totalitarianism. When our institutions fail us, we must invent. Liberty awaits.