Millennia

The vast majority of gays, lesbians and gender variant people lived in secrecy for millennia. Millions of lives were spent in the silent resignation that one could not be authentic because the societal penalty could be extremely harsh. There are still countries like Iran where to avoid being stoned to death, gay men will undergo gender reassignment despite having no cross gender identification. My first boss's wife married him just to keep up appearances until she eventually summoned the courage to come out as a lesbian woman in the mid 1990's.

No matter how hard each of our journeys has been they could not have been more difficult than for anyone prior to the 1950's. To be a pioneer before that took a certain kind of courage and small wonder then that some of them had resolve and maturity to spare. Seeing interviews with Christine Jorgensen and April Ashley had me realize these were people with fortitude and a strong sense of self I felt I never could aspire to.

As difficult as things might appear today, the tide has turned because it is too late to reverse things. Social critics know they can't put these people back into closets but what they hope to do is shame them into reclusiveness and thus at least stem the tide. Working against them are the public opinion of millenials, GenZ and Gen Alpha who are more accepting of diversity the younger they are. This is why attacks by boomers and GenX will ultimately fail.

Ammunition for them still comes in the form of people who are searching and sometimes make errors. These cases are being magnified and sold as archetypes to a population that readily confuses typologies of gender variant people. Unfortunately, as we have seen with politics, rhetoric and misinformation tends to work in the short term.

The long game is another matter altogether and the prognosis looks good if we view the historical progression of gays and lesbians. Although the Nazis burned down the office and library of Magnus Hirschfeld in the 1930's and sent countless LGBTQ people to the chambers, the strategy did not work. Despite the existence of pushback today from the extreme right, I only need to view my mother's own progression over her lifetime and her love for her transgender child, lesbian and gay grandchildren to realize how far we have come.

If sometimes I appear to get annoyed with older gender variant people for remaining stuck, it is because I wish so much for them to become free of secrecy and stigma.