There have always been and will always be more lesbians than trans people

On Monday morning, noted Substack blogger Andrew Sullivan claimed in British right wing publication The Spectator that lesbians are “going extinct,” bemoaning the alleged loss of lesbians he thinks should take care of him when he gets old or becomes infirm or sick.

It’s a frequent hobbyhorse for The Spectator, which seems to publish this exact argument on a once-quarterly basis. Most recently Andrew Sullivan wannabe Chadwick Moore claimed in the publication that actor Elliot Page’s coming out as trans was a loss for American lesbians in early December. Moore wrote essentially the same piece earlier this year in January.

Interesting, isn’t it, how so many of these articles come from cis gay men? Patriarchy-but-gay is still patriarchy. Being gay doesn’t exempt men from paternalism. Moore and Sullivan have no business telling trans people what we can and should do with our bodies or identities, but they feel entitled to do so anyway.

Sullivan himself hosted noted transphobe Katie Herzog on his Substack in a special Thanksgiving edition of his blog throwing out the very same idea. I wonder if this is what Sullivan spends his holidays thinking about? Maybe tryptophan triggers his transphobia brain.

The disappearing lesbian claim, so it goes, is that more and more butch lesbians are coming out trans men and transitioning, thereby “erasing lesbians.” It’s a laughable claim, akin to a gender-induced QAnon-level conspiracy theory.

There have always been and will always be more lesbians than trans people. According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, 4.5 percent of all Americans are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, while just 0.6 percent are transgender.

Sullivan bemoans the loss of lesbian bars, but that has nothing to do with trans people. In reality, as lesbian and gay people have been assimilated into cultural acceptance, as Sullivan himself desperately campaigned for for years, it’s become easier and easier for cis lesbian and gay folks to exist in predominantly straight spaces. But with trans acceptance lagging far behind, and even regressing in recent years, thanks in part to the likes of Sullivan and his ilk, it’s pretty clear why gay bars struggling for foot traffic would turn to welcoming trans people into their spaces.

Now to be clear, I’m not a lesbian, so I don’t really have much at stake over this largely academic thought experiment. But what’s blatantly obvious to most normies is that there’s a very small, very loud, and well publicized minority who object to trans people existing in the first place. These people will leverage every little bit perceived evidence to demean and ostracize trans people, and this “lesbian panic” is just the latest conspiracy these people have cooked up.

The picture presented in the media is pretty skewed, and you realize why when you consider that there are more ardent transphobes employed in national and international level media than there are trans people. There is no trans writers with the platform of Andrew Sullivan, for example. There are few trans people with the Patreon dollars of Katie Herzog. There are, however unfortunately, plenty of trans people as insufferable as Chadwick Moore.

The funniest bit of this is that all three, Sullivan, Herzog, and Moore, all pride themselves for supposed “heterodox opinions,” meaning they self-identify as counterrevolutionaries against what they say is creeping woke-ism in media. But the kicker is they tend to discuss these issues within their own ideological bubble and almost always all come out with the same opinions on things like the 1619 project, or in this case, trans people. I don’t know what trans people ever did to any of them to earn their intellectually flat ire, but I wish they’d maybe try therapy.

But returning to the immediate issue at hand, lesbians are still out there, even if a few of your friends have decided to take steps to be more comfortable existing in their own bodies. They aren’t helpless victims of a sinister trans movement, you just hate trans people.

Honestly, who gives a flip what other people are doing to their own bodies? Do you really feel so entitled to butch and other bodies that you seek to control them for your own political or pleasurable purposes? You sound like the straight men of yesteryear bemoaning the loss of wives to the “lesbian movement.” It’s embarrassing for you.

Maybe just once you can leave trans people alone without inserting your conspiracy-addled brainwormed opinion into the lives of people you don’t even know. Sorry about your elderly lesbian nurses, Andrew but it’s maybe time to log off.