Another really significant event was the legalization of gay marriage. The left had been fighting for decades (given fuel following the AIDS crisis especially) to have national recognition for same-sex partnerships. The advocacy, the grassroots organizing, the funding, the campaigning, the political leaders riding for that particular platform and policy agenda—all of that was necessary to finally get Obergefell v. Hodges up to the Supreme Court, where it was finally passed in 2015.
The fight for gay marriage was (alongside abortion rights) one of the most critical single issues mobilizing the left as a voting bloc. In politics, both the left and right have specific highly-divisive policy issues that are meant to drive voters into the ballot box in support of one side or the other. Generally, the importance of issues like these also compel voters to support policies and individuals they may not otherwise support or agree with (e.g. “i don’t agree with Sen. X about economics, but at least they support Y!”).
Gay rights and abortion are the two big ones for the left. So what happens when one of the issues is resolved and a vacuum appears? People who have fought long and hard for equality will look for the next issue they can help lend their experience to; organizations and politicians will continue looking to mobilize volunteers, donors, and voters to mobilize around another issue that has as much influence and power as the fight for gay marriage. It is literally an existential question because without the LGBT+Ally voting bloc (especially the allies who want to feel good about their voting choices), Democrats and the left don’t have the same kind of leverage against other policy issues.
There’s actually an argument to be made here about if this partly explains why Democrats in power were not able or willing to pass full nationally-legalized abortion rights in the decades before Roe v. Wade was finally overturned—once abortion stops being a divisive policy issues, it stops driving donors, volunteers, and voters to the Left over that one issue.
So in the vacuum of Legal Gay Marriage grew another policy linked to a marginalized group of people under a narrative that read just like gay and civil rights: people rejected for who they were by conservatives and bigots, people attacked senselessly for what was beyond their control, people who deserved respect, dignity, and recognition. Defending trans rights became the next big issue. A narrative that I myself believed was, “why would a man (privileged) choose to be a woman (marginalized), and go though the social and physical difficulties of coming out as a woman, unless that was truly their identity? Don’t they deserve protection, as perhaps the most marginalized [gender] class of people, because they clearly had no choice?” It wasn’t until later, when i was still grappling with my own gender dysphoria, that it became increasingly obvious how sexism remains intact through transitioning, and how sexism (and fetishization) is in fact the foundation of the trans rights movement. And it’s a testament to this sexism that nearly every trans rights issue is directly counter to women’s rights issues, and uses the values of feminism to degrade (sex-based) protections for women, girls, and all female people.
And politically, trans rights is big money because it promotes consumerism as identity (as Dr. Based says above) AND it supports the pharmaceutical industry via lifelong medical care (hormones, plastic surgery, treatments following the damage caused by hormonal issues eg reduced bone density in females). It’s big money because there’s a black-and-white narrative that has been constructed to mirror every major civil rights issue of the past century: “we just want to exist, stop hurting us” which is VERY easy to take at face value as a political group (Left especially) who values harmony, equality, social justice, and diversity.
Unfortunately this also leads to male rapists placed in women’s prisons, willful ignorance toward how males (throughout ALL OF HISTORY) pose a unique and significant threat toward female people that has nothing to do with mindset or “identity” and everything to do with sex (+reproduction and reproductive control), the comparative social/economic/political capital of trans women over that of trans men, the pressure to deprioritize female issues or make everything “gender neutral” specifically for female health issues.
When Obergefell passed, every LGBT+ organization and major Democrat/Leftist platform in the US switched gears to trans rights, which was a smart economic move to continue holding onto power. Not only that, but the most politically advantageous fight is a fight that never stops. The goalposts will keep moving, the demands will get more extreme, and any backlash will be villainized to further drive supporters into echo chambers.
What’s also ironic (not) is how many Republican/right-wing individuals (and even countries like Iran) are being given credit for being “progressive” about trans issues, even when it’s because trans ideology actually supports a strict binary of gender performance: you “act like a” boy/girl, so that must mean that you are one.
In a less sexist society/world, we wouldn’t need different—or any—“genders”. The way we express ourselves would be an individual personal choice, and statements like “wow he’s beautiful in that dress” or “she’s so handsome in her suit” would be completely unremarkable—why should one’s “expression” relate at all to one’s “gender”, other than because of sexism? Every culture that has developed genders outside of male/female has done so in order to “correct” the “misalignment” of a person’s expression (or their sex characteristics, as with intersex individuals) with the socially-mandated “requirements” of what sex you must be to do xyz tasks. In an equal world, being male or female would be a neutral fact with no relation to your perceived intelligence, skills, or expression.
