Pride Goeth Before The Fall Of Gender

The costs of totalizing hubris in a social movement, spelled out in dollars and sense

Copying the color-coded annihilation of all that is stale, male, and pale

“Can a man become a woman? Not — no.”

Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago, former Obama chief of staff, and 2028 Democratic Party presidential hopeful, to Megyn Kelly on Monday

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As I said at the beginning of the year, the summer of gender love is over. We are now one month past midsummer of 2025, the winter of gender’s discontent is definitely coming, and the fall season of ‘gender’ is already at hand.

On New Year’s Day, I wrote that we “will see the gender hippies splitting into factions” in 2025. “Some are acting out, and lashing out, hardening public attitudes against their agenda. Others, like Brianna Wu, appear on Triggernometry in hopes of salvaging something from the wreckage of ‘we just want to pee.’”

Last week, transsexual libertarian Sara Higdon’s appearance on the Dad Saves America podcast served up every TERFy talking point except the autogynephilia controversy. The tide is turning and we are going to win.

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The Summer Of Gender Love Is Over

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For a decade now, Pride has been dominated by a large, powerful, and politically-connected community that regularly, overtly, and loudly calls for the deaths of their enemies, namely women who say “no” to men who say they are women. This ‘community’ is now on the wrong side of events and social shift, i.e the wrong side of history.

Any larger social movement that tolerates a smaller group using a violent political slogan (“Kill All TERFs”) is bound to eventually deteriorate into wider displays of violence. Sensational stories about the Zizians death cult, trantifa shooting attacks on ICE agents, and ‘Queers for Palestine’ exert a cumulative effect on public perceptions of what the LGTBQ+ contrivance stands for.

Meanwhile, Pride has become a proven brand-killer this year. From Bud Light to Jaguar to Hollywood to the Democratic Party platform, eliminating ‘toxic’ white heterosexual males in favor of ‘queer’ imagery and emasculated men supporting mediocre feminist women leaders (e.g. Tim Walz, Pedro Pascal) has been a recipe for disaster, from beer booth to box office to ballot box. It is all coming to an end, now.

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Pride, Defunded: The Summer Of Gender Love Is Over

Grok AI. The Democratic Party’s new million-dollar sponsor will surely win the kids over to your progressive candate with the scheme for communist grocery stores

Normies feel excluded by Pride. They sense that Pride has become an ersatz civic religion for Democrats and the left. Pride is actively hostile to the mainstream even as it receives the spotlight on every prominent mainstream platform. The fad is its own undoing.

The BBC cannot report on a fart without asking a drag queen for their opinion. NPR cannot get through a Sunday without a transgender person’s thoughts on God. Branding experts call this ‘overexposure’ and it has deleterious effects on sales.

While the Pride organizers universally blame Donald Trump for their situation, he is the backlash they created themselves with drag queens in libraries, public drag-themed misbehavior in the presence of children, and blinkered policy agendas from queer academic frauds.

Turns out that men cannot be shamed into liking content or candidates that says out loud, ‘this is not for you, guys’. Turns out that women enjoy masculine men, who knew? Turns out that a beer brand is a boy brand, and feminizing boy brands is a loser in any domain, even — perhaps especially — politics.

The engineered devaluation of heterosexual masculinity in favor of feminized man has been an epochal marketing disaster because no one outside the Pride fringe is actually asking for movies like Emilia Pérez to be made at all, let alone to win Oscars. The Pride brand manages to be both street-slimy and elitist at the same time, an off-putting uncanny valley.

Rainbows and glitter have now adorned too many failed schemes to monetize and package the Pride product to fool anyone with promises of future profit. Billions of dollars have been left on the table in the last decade. In this sense, Pride has been a pyramid scheme, with the greatest profits going to the financial gurus who sold the idea in the first place.

The jig is up, though. Wall Street is over Pride, now. Stockbrokers are selling off their classic Jaguars because they no longer code as masculine objects. Pride and greed are both sins, but avarice at least has material rewards, whereas ‘Pride’ is a costly virtue to signal.

For a Pride event that survives on ticket sales, such as the San Diego Pride Festival this past weekend, where consumers paid $28.83 for a one-day early bird pass, there must be a local pool of Pride culture sufficient to sell out tickets. The free market model does not work as well in, say, Peoria.

Luckily for San Diego Pride, the local CBS affiliate remained a sponsor this year, affording the event free publicity and parade coverage. Also sponsoring San Diego Pride: Kaiser Permanente, one of the worst offenders in the pediatric medical transition scandal. Few Pride events have been so lucky this year.

But one group was not present at Pride in San Diego last weekend. Jewish queer people were having their own get-together across town in a sectarian schism. More than 500 attendees refused to “bifurcate their identity in order to feel safe,” according to an organizer of the first ‘J Pride Festival’.

It seems that Kehlani, a musical act with very vocal ‘Queers for Palestine’ opinions, was scheduled to appear at the regular Pride event. Organizers of San Diego Pride are tolerant of “free speech,” such as “globalize the Intifada,” but not “hate speech,” such as mispronouning an overly-sensitive person.

As a brand, Pride represents a very narrow set of views, outsider sexual lifestyles, and the totalitarian demands of gender communism. It has been sold to corporations as a cultural marker that can be used to tap billions of dollars in new consumer spending and avoid cancelation by online boycott mobs. There has always been a whiff of racketeering in that formula. Now the ‘community’ itself is increasingly the mark in the Pride marketing.

Executives are pleading Trump for this situation, but Trump in fact controls very little direct Pride spending, such as NEA funding. His ‘disapproval’ has not stopped Pride funding altogether, surely not in the United Kingdom, for example, where it is also declining. Instead, Pride has become what it has been because of generous corporate giveaways in the form of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are ending because they are both illegal and unprofitable.

Before last November’s election, those programs were expected to exceed $15 billion in costs by 2026. Seven months post-November, the DEI industry is either going out of business or rebranding across the Western world, and Pride funding has reduced commensurately. This is the actual ‘Trump effect’ on Pride: a market correction.

Everyone who thought this was a good idea was not actually thinking

Organizers of the Denver Pride Parade blame reduced DEI funding for the loss of 62% of their own corporate receipts. Nashville Pride has coped with a 30% drop in corporate sponsorship money. “While attending the parade is free of charge, access to the full festival, which begins June 27, is ticketed at $10 a day,” the Nashville Banner explains.

“And this year, Kim Petras headlines a concert with general admission tickets priced at $39. The organization is also leaning into grassroots and individual giving.” To put on a big show, with big acts, requires resources. Kehlani costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the heart of Tim Walz country, Twin Cities Pride was $700,000 short this year. But even abroad, Pride events struggled to get off the ground this year, with several canceling and others downsizing in the UK. An effect this broad and deep cannot be explained by a public policy choice in Washington, DC.

Public funding is an even harder ask than corporate money because taxpayers have more ‘sunshine’ powers than investors do. Efforts to squeeze Pride funding out of cities thus generally fail unless the community is insanely blue. With the ‘community’ itself now increasingly asked to pay for its own parties, the old annual advent calendar of Pride events is being simplified and streamlined. This threatens to become more than a phase. It represents a broader decline in the perceived value of Pride.

‘Intersectional’ Pride events, such as Black Pride St. Louis struggle for a share of the funding; the small town Pride events are already bankrupt. Large events are trying to strengthen relationships with vendors and remaining sponsors, and lower expectations until better times come along. If they ever come along.

Many queer activists never wanted corporate sponsorship for their countercultural revolution in the first place. If Pride becomes culturally passé, however, then even its revolutionary character will go stale. It will be the new disco.

When Disney execs asked their test audience whether they would see the gay coming-of-age film Elio, not one audience member raised their hand, according to reports. Elio was then stripped of its gay theming and given a low-marketing push into theaters at a loss. Pixar employees whined to The Hollywood Reporter about how sad it was to see the queer coding “sanded down” throughout production.

Disney will never let Pixar make another Elio. Not because Disney is homophobic, but because they like money. Executive Producer Latoya Raveneau told a 2023 Zoom meeting about her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda … adding queerness” to childrens’ programming. She is now invisible, unheard-from, not because her ideas have changed but because she enjoys having a job.

The days of Pride in programming are over. With its cultural power at an ebb, Pride has been defunded, deadnamed, and disempowered. People can see Pride for what it is: narrow-minded, unfair, and exclusionary of the mainstream. It is brand poison in every domain, and it is taking ‘gender identity’ down with it.

Beyond the cost in dollars is lost influence for the ‘community’ that Pride purports to represent. Public support for two key issues, marriage equality and protections for same-sex attracted people, has slipped in recent years. Public support for transgender rights demands has evaporated as Americans have realized the ‘protections’ that transgender activism demands are actually privileges, and there is no separating Pride from transgenderism in the public mind.

With shameless embraces, Pride became associated with drag queens performing in front of children, and children performing as drag queens. Pride became the animating spirit of a cult as the publishing trade, librarians, and the woke educators of Montgomery County, Maryland forced children to read the propagandistic books at issue in the Supreme Court’s recent Mahmood v. Taylor decision.

Pride became hubris. Now it goeth before the fall of gender.

This is not a good way to increase public acceptance of LGB people

Controversies have costs. Accumulated controversies have demonstrated that a ‘family friendly’ culture of sexual license and open-air vice is not possible without creating public opposition that, if repressed by law and policy, still presents in the privacy of the ballot booth, responsive to “they/them” ads.

Pride was always raunchy, adult, transgressive, immoral, and therefore an anti-mainstream counterculture. A campaign to ‘stick it to the straights’ and offend the normies is not going to sell products to normal people. It was never going to work as consumer branding becasue its appeal was limited, and it was always bound to backfire in application as marketing because its actual goal is public moral offense to the majority of consumers. If you are going to sell sex, at least sell the sex that 95 percent of humanity wants.

Pride was never fit to be mainstreamed, a moral pollution by design, and forcing it into the mainstream has the same effects of stimulating public outcry as any other form of pollution would have.

But there are also costs in time lost. A decade has passed since the Obergefell decision established marriage equality for same-sex couples. What has Pride accomplished in that time, other than spending a lot of money to have a lot of big shows? For the revolutionaries like Chase Strangio who attack the institution of marriage itself as bourgeois capitalist violence, it makes perfect sense. For everyone else, especially voters and consumers, it is a repellent hypocrisy.

Pride is ugly. Its two aesthetic choices are (A) pornography, or (B) unremarkable, tasteless clip art with pink and blue color theming. For a decade, woke cultural programming has embraced this ugliness at huge cost: video game makers have left billions on the table by defeating the male gaze, Kathleen Kennedy tried to gender-swap Indiana Jones with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and so on. All this aesthetic ugliness was supposed to normalize moral ugliness. It was Pride as praxis from the American elites.

It is an error to assume that the rising generation will resuscitate Pride by default. Despite relatively high ‘identification’ with the LGBTQM-O-U-S-E club thanks to endless saturation with pronoun propaganda, Gen Z is going to end up just like every generation before it because actual same-sex attraction is innate rather than a political option. The kids will sort themselves out, and then many of them will be embarrassed they were ever part of the fad.

For structural reasons, the commerce and the culture are leading the candidates. Democrats are lagging behind the money-men or the movie-makers in the Great Vibe Shift. Pride is woke, and woke is broke. As the Pride events decline, their utility for candidates to meet and greet voters in the summer campaign months also declines. Fewer employers use Pride events as job fairs. The larger culture, whether at home or the office, becomes ever more disconnected from Pride.

The ‘community’ is not dead, but it is shrinking, and so is its cultural power, and so will its political valence, assuming the trend continues, with no signs of a reversal on the present horizon.

There was never a moment when the left passed around a memorandum to the effect that drag queens reading to children and teaching them to twerk was a necessary development in late-stage capitalism and everyone just needed to be a good comrade about it. As late as 2010, the Pride parade was a joke that progressives told each other about the silly conspiracy theories of Glenn Beck. It was just a party for grown-ups that had a handful of sponsors from the ‘community’ rather than a cause.

Then support for ‘drag queen story hour’ was a knee-jerk, reflexive defense of a ‘marginalized community’ — one that just happened to have gained banks and defense contractors as sponsors. ‘The left’ was for it because ‘the right’ was against it, and the chuds had to be owned.

Pride became something much more sinister with corporate sponsorship. It got too big, too much, too proud. The same is true of ‘gender identity’. When elites adopt outsider beliefs that annoy regular people, the backlash tends to be permanent. The public will simply tune out the Oscars, perhaps forever, if the only drama of the night is whether the movie about the brutal transgender gangster will win Best Picture over the movie about the brutal life of a sex worker. Pride does not resonate with the masses.

Do not expect Pride to vanish. Rather, the value of Pride, in both dollars and sense, is increasingly diminished for reasons beyond the capacity or willingness of the ‘movement’ to fix. Expect slow shrinkage, year-on-year, slowly, as the cultural marker becomes an embarrassment instead of a source of pride. Winter is coming, and it will be a long season.