A group of individuals allegedly from the gay and bisexual community have launched a petition to “drop the T” from the larger LGBT community.
According to the authors of the “Drop the T” petition, the transgender community is “ultimately regressive and actually hostile to the goals of women and gay men.” Therefore, the petition calls on the Human Rights Campaign, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Lambda Legal, The Advocate, Out magazine, and HuffPost Gay Voices to “stop representing the transgender community.”
The petition authors take grievance with “vilification and harassment of women and gay/lesbian individuals who openly express disagreement with the trans ideology,” transgender individuals intruding “traditional safe spaces based on sex,” “[t]he appropriation and re-writing of gay and lesbian history and culture,” and the view many transgender people have towards gender roles.
The petition claims members of the transgender community have been “persuading parents and health professionals to diagnose children as young as four as transgender, despite considerable research that shows that more than 90 percent of children who express ‘gender dysphoria’ at a young age grow out of it by adolescence and, in most cases, grow up to be well-adjusted gay men and women.”
The petition authors state the view of gender espoused by the transgender community is contrary to the view of gender held by the gay community.
“[W]hereas feminists and gay men/women advocate for expanding and re-defining gender concepts, the trans movement is regressive, insisting upon re-asserting and codifying classic gender concepts of what is masculine and what is feminine.”
The petition explicitly notes it is “not advocating intolerance or prejudice against the transgender community,” but that a “discussion must be opened up to these issues, which for too long are being suppressed and censored.”
The petition, which was created on Wednesday, has over 700 signatures as of 2:00pm ET Friday.