The Summer Of Gender Love Is Over

The end of the beginning is the beginning of the end

Multiple fights broke out at Washington Square Park during a celebration at the end of Pride Month in 2024. Confusion reigned as New York City police tried to close the park and excited bystanders jumped the police barricades to get in. ABC 7 in New York reported that 22 people were arrested.

Videos of the altercations inside the park appeared on social media immediately. “At one point, two young men threw haymakers at each other before one took a tumble to the ground,” the New York Post reported.

Seconds later, two women briefly took swings at each other while a couple [of] bystanders attempted to break up that kerfuffle, a clip shows.

In another instance of violence, one woman, who appeared to be bleeding from her face with dried blood on her white shirt, went head-to-head with a peer as the crowd loudly cheered, according to footage.

Other spats of savagery included one woman pushing another off the edge of the park’s iconic water fountain while another brawler yanked a woman in a pink shirt to the ground by her hair. The young woman in pink continued to be dragged by her counterpart before others finally jumped in to help.

Rather than a ‘community,’ the park became a coliseum. Bystanders cheered, participated, and eagerly recorded the fighting throughout these events. One man was shot that evening as police worked to close the park, according to ABC 7.

"This is really crazy, Pride is not supposed to be like this," a witness said. "We're supposed to come out and enjoy and you know just love one another and come together. And we hope moving forward there will be no more violence and craziness going on."

What nostalgia. 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. 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.

Pride is not going away all of a sudden. Changes will be gradual. Rather, the progress flags that covered the White House like a Nuremberg rally during the last four years will simply not reappear under the new Trump administration. Cast back out of power once more, the gender identity activists running the alphabetical nonprofit organizations will hold louder and prouder demonstrations to compensate.

Like the Summer of Love in 1967, which gave way to the violence and disorder that helped make Richard Nixon president in 1968, this year will see the gender hippies splitting into factions. 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.”

A recent waypoint on this trend line: in December, a 33-year-old man allegedly attacked Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in the halls of Congress, inflicting an injury to Mace before he was arrested. James McIntyre of Illinois was reportedly angry about Mace’s opposition to trans-identifying men sharing her restroom. The assault, a Class D felony, took place after Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) restricted incoming freshman Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), a close friend of the Biden family, from using the women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill. Fifteen demonstrators, including Chelsea Manning, had already been arrested for an illegal sit-in protest of a women’s restroom at the Cannon House Office Building. As I wrote the day after the attack, a decade has passed since Republicans started on the back foot with men in women’s restrooms. Enough time has passed that America has figured out the con and Republicans have found their feet.

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In the wake of their resounding electoral defeat this November, some Democratic wonks are finding the courage to raise their voices against the demands of the gender lobby. On New Year’s Eve, Helen Lewis struggled to explain to readers of The Atlantic why their refusal to compromise on women’s sports had been such a disaster at the ballot box. The sight of Lia Thomas cheating at NCAA swimming “did not translate into greater approval,” she noted.

If anything, the opposite occurred: In 2021, 55 percent of Democrats supported transgender athletes competing in the team of their chosen gender, according to Gallup. Two years later, however, that number had fallen to 47 percent. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 Americans now think athletes should compete in the category of their birth sex.

I first wrote about this phenomenon, calling it “the Lia Thomas effect,” in June 2023. This outcome was predictable, indeed I personally predicted it when I shared my concerns with fellow Democrats during the first Trump presidency.

Voters are human beings. They see the unfairness of Lia Thomas on the trophy stand in an instant, whereas it takes a full moment for them to remember the new moral code, and fear speaking out about it. A quiet resentment can be activated by a clever advertisement (“Kamala is for for they/them, Trump is for you”), and then the results will tell in the privacy of the ballot box.

Explaining this to fellow Democrats or progressive activists has meant instant cancellation, including death threats. The result is a fractured party. Democrats are now split on a wedge issue, just like the gender identity activists.

This long-delayed reckoning will not be over quickly; historically, Democrats need three successive electoral whippings over six years before they quit pushing an unpopular policy program. Nevertheless, the reckoning has begun. In 2024, the New York Times brushed the rainbow mafia aside, adopting a more neutral editorial line on puberty blockers. Helen Lewis is still using female pronouns for Lia Thomas; she does not name the trans-identified man who destroyed the San Jose State volleyball team this year for fear of being seen as too mean. However, she does acknowledge that the totalizing demands of the gender lobby have become political poison. Some transgender activists have also begun to call out the “unreasonable” tactics that diminished sympathy for their cause.

Too little, too late, but it is change all the same.

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As I wrote in November, this reckoning goes well beyond the election of one president. Donald Trump has promised to make important early moves, such as executive orders to protect women’s sports and eliminate gender ideology from federal departments. Perhaps more importantly, however, congressional Republicans will have an administration that is friendly to their investigations of Biden-era gender ideology scandals, such as the role of Health and Human Services (HHS) deputy secretary Rachel Levine in shaping the WPATH standards of care.

During 2024, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health was exposed online, in newsprint, and in a Supreme Court brief as an activist organization pretending to do scientific medicine. For a decade, the motto “this is not a debate” held strange power over everyone. But in 2025, all three branches of the federal government are forcing the debate that gender activists demanded America should never, ever have.

Politics can only reverse so much of what has gone wrong. As the saying goes, politics lie downstream of culture. Democrats lag behind the culture in adapting to the new reality: 2024 was the year that corporate America ditched ‘wokeness’ in general and ‘gender identity’ politics in particular. They had to, for they were going broke. Turns out that the audience absolutely hates ‘woke.’ Here again, cancellation came for anyone who tried to warn the comic book industry, the gaming hobby industries, or the media makers that their products would not sell. Disney shills framed Star Wars fans as “toxic,” “white supremacist,” and “Nazis” for the crime of disliking Disney’s terrible content. Legacy media amplified this message. Turns out that Americans hate political messaging disguised as show scripts.

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Of course, ‘gender identity’ has its own cultural bastions in the universities. Change is happening even here, however. Campus protests by Hamas partisans have altered the patterns of donors, shifting cultural power from the Ivy League and the west coast to the southeast, i.e. from blue states to red states. This process will be slower than change in the Democratic Party. It is however the most significant long-term change, reaching farther than a single presidency or a congressional committee report or a Supreme Court decision, for the academy produces our doctors, lawyers, technicians, and administrators. Agencies staffed by gender ideology are already captured by it, no matter who is elected president.

Under Biden, the Food and Drug Administration recommended the approval of puberty blockers for minors despite clear evidence that they increase depression and suicidality. Within the federal system are fifty state governments, each with its own departments of education. Within each state, public school systems answer to local boards. Combined with ideological capture of police policy, as well as a flourishing nonprofit sector to roll out a red carpet service for ‘trans kids,’ this system has already transcended the boundaries of partisan politics. It does not matter where your family lives: ‘gender’ is still coming for your kids.

Just ask Krista and Todd Kolstad, a Montana family whose daughter, now 15 and mentally unwell, has been removed from their care by child protective services and sent to another state for medicalization of her ‘transgender identity.’ Gov. Greg Gianforte is a Republican. The legislature has passed a ban on pediatric gender medicine. It has not mattered to CPS or the Montana family court.

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The deepest captures of gender ideology are the ones that torture parents. Trump says he will end the practice of putting men in women’s prisons; the ACLU will beg to differ; for the women being housed with men, this process will take far too long to play out, but ending the war on parental authority will take even longer. The torture will continue too long for far too many families.

In 2024, this website found a new focus on the experience of parents whose children have been alienated from them through the cult grooming of ‘gender identity’. Not only are the schools indoctrinating their children, state foster care systems and police agencies have been indoctrinated into ‘affirming’ the children when they run away from home. The deep capture of American administrative culture by gender ideology will take a very long time to reverse.

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There are a few reasons for this, not least of which is the absolute state of many American family courts. As Bill Corbitt explained to us in our podcast, transgender medicalization is already weaponized in contested divorce cases all the time. And as we revealed in 2024, when teachers, therapists, and state officials are all captured by gender ideology, facts and logic go out the window as soon as any child professes to be born in the wrong body. The more corrupt a family court is, the worse the capture will be.

Corbitt was reacting to our podcast about Brent Bowlby, a Minnesota father who has not seen his children in years. His case exemplifies the problem with getting family court stories into the press. Unless a celebrity is involved, news agencies are leery of reporting on contested divorces because they almost always involve deeply personal ‘he said/she said’ charges and countercharges. Just publishing this podcast resulted in further prosecution of Mr. Bowlby for the crime of objecting to the ‘gender transition’ of his 12 year-old daughter in secret. Yes, you read that right: ‘trans your child or go to jail’ is really happening in America.

We will have more to report on this story in 2025, as the Sherburne County Sheriff’s department has taken actions which tread upon the First Amendment rights of this publication. Stay tuned.

This arduous fight to make parents great again is essential because the impact of gender identity ideology is global. It started in the United States; it has produced worse results in, say, Germany than Italy; it has been answered by the Cass Review in the UK this year. Still, the Labour government wants to leave as much of the ideology in place as they can, even if they repudiate the Tavistock experiment. Meanwhile, families across the world are put through hell by government agencies and courts over their childrens’ feelings of gender. America must lead by example. Restoring sanity must become our chief cultural export.

Transgender ideology is not good for children. It requires the circumvention of parental authority, which has made children worse, not better. During 2025, this will become ever more apparent. Harms will become ever more ‘visible,’ to use the activist language, because violence was always intrinsic to the project of ‘gender identity’ medicalization. Exulansic, who tracks a number of ‘trans’ influencers, says that during just the last six months, four trans-identifying women she follows have died, all of them under 40 years of age: 37, 26, 24, and 22 years old respectively. Critics of gender medicine have expected detransition lawsuits and they arrived in 2024. We expected that a decade of ‘trans rights’ ascendancy would harm thousands of children, reducing their lifespans and overall health, and now the evidence is here.

Our New Year’s resolution at The Distance is to raise hell about the violence done to the kids. We will not forget. We will not forgive.