When Gay Men Forget Who Their Real Enemy Is
The same disgust that once told us we were wrong is the disgust coming for them. Stand with trans people, or side with the shame that still lives in your chest.
He scrolled past the headline without slowing. Another bathroom bill. Another politician calling gender-affirming care “child abuse.” Another trans kid about to lose healthcare.
My client kept talking about his weekend. The new gym. How good life is now that he’s out, stable, finally allowed to exist without the constant fight.
I asked him, “Do you think about trans rights much?”
He glanced at his phone. “Honestly? Not my battle. I’ve got enough going on.”
I felt that clench in my throat. Not surprise—recognition. I’ve sat across from dozens of men who’ve said some version of this. Men who survived homophobia themselves. Who still remember what it felt like when their existence was up for debate at dinner tables and in legislatures.
And now they act like transphobia is unrelated. Distant. Someone else’s problem.
Like the hatred that taught them to hide isn’t the exact same hatred erasing trans people right now.
The Voice That Named You Wrong Is Still Speaking
You remember it, right?
The one that said your desire was disgusting. That you were broken, confused, a threat to children and families and everything decent. That your existence required explanation, apology, maybe even cure.
I remember it. That voice followed me through most of my twenties.
Here’s what I need you to understand: that voice is still here. It just aimed somewhere else while you weren’t looking.
The people who called you a predator for being gay? They’re calling trans women predators now. The ones who said you were grooming kids? Same word, just a different target. Drag queens. Trans teachers. Anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into the gender boxes they drew.
Politicians who wanted conversion therapy for you are writing laws right now to block trans kids from transitioning.
Same playbook. Same disgust. Different marginalized body taking the beating.
I watch gay men distance themselves from this like it’s unrelated. Like the revulsion aimed at trans bodies has nothing to do with the revulsion once aimed at theirs. But I’ve been to anti-trans rallies. I’ve listened past the sanitized language.
“Protecting children.” “Biological reality.” “Against nature.”
These are the exact arguments that kept us closeted. Got us fired, disowned, hospitalized, killed. We stopped being the primary target, and now some of us act like we graduated into permanent safety.
We didn’t graduate. We’re just not first in line anymore.
Your Safety Is Conditional, Not Permanent
I know a man who told me he’s “done with activism.” He came out twenty years ago. Lost his entire family over it. Rebuilt everything from rubble—new chosen family, new life, new sense of home. Now he has a partner, stability, the life he fought like hell for.
He earned the right to rest, he said. To finally exist without carrying everyone else’s fight.
Then his state proposed legislation allowing businesses to refuse service based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
“Wait,” he said when I brought it up. His voice went tight. “That includes us?”
Yes. That includes us.
The laws being written to exclude trans people don’t have special footnotes protecting the gays who stayed quiet. The disgust coming for trans rights is the same disgust that’s been waiting, patient as a predator, for the moment it could come for us again.
You think assimilation saves you? That playing respectable buys lasting protection?
I’ve watched couples get refused wedding cakes. I’ve worked with men fired after mentioning their husbands. I’ve sat with people who heard “love the sinner, hate the sin” and felt their stomach drop like an elevator with cut cables.
The people writing anti-trans legislation don’t see us as allies. They tolerate us at best. Only when we’re quiet. Only when we distance ourselves from the “too much” queers. The ones refusing to apologize for existing.
They’re counting on our silence.
Then they’ll pivot back to us. I promise you that.
Shame Taught You to Throw Others Overboard First
Here’s what comes up in sessions, over and over. Gay men who spent decades learning that survival meant staying small. That safety came from being the least threatening queer in the room. That you lived by proving you weren’t like those people.
“I’m not flamboyant.” “I don’t do the whole pride thing.” “I’m just a regular guy who happens to be gay.”
Regular. Palatable. Safe.
I get it. I performed that same dance for years.
Now trans people are the new “too much.” The new risk to our hard-won respectability. The ones making it harder for the rest of us to blend. And I’ve watched gay men feel privately relieved the spotlight moved elsewhere.
One client said it plainly: “I don’t want people lumping me in with them.”
There it sits. The fear underneath. That by standing with trans people, we’ll remind everyone we’re queer too. That the fragile tolerance we earned, the conditional safety we clawed toward, will evaporate if we’re too loud about supporting the wrong kind of different.
Shame taught us this equation early: throw someone else under the bus, and maybe the bus won’t hit you.
It always does.
The bus is never satisfied with one body. It just circles back around.
Your Liberation Was Never Yours Alone
Let me remind you of something we conveniently forget.
Stonewall wasn’t led by respectable gays in button-downs doing careful politics. It was trans women. Gender nonconforming people. Drag queens throwing bricks and heels at cops while the palatable queers were still trying to convince psychiatrists we weren’t diseased.
Trans people have been in this fight since before it was remotely safe. Before corporate sponsors slapped rainbows on everything. Before pride became a branding opportunity. Before any of us could hold hands in public without running threat assessments in our heads.
Now that some of us made it to conditional safety, we’re supposed to just forget?
The rights you have now didn’t appear because we asked nicely. Marriage equality. Employment protections in some states. The ability to exist in public without constant terror coursing through your veins.
Those came because people with nothing left to lose fought like their lives depended on it.
Because their lives did depend on it.
Trans people were there. They’re still there.
And when trans rights get dismantled—when the legal scaffolding protecting them collapses—you really think the homophobia is just going to sit there quietly? You think hatred stops at gender identity and politely leaves sexual orientation alone?
They’re coming for all of us. They always were.
The Bathroom Panic You Already Lived Through
Remember when they said you couldn’t be around children? That your presence in locker rooms was predatory? That letting you exist openly would corrupt the young, destroy families, end civilization as we know it?
They’re saying the exact same thing about trans people now. Word for word.
The bathroom panic is just reheated locker room panic. The “protecting kids” rhetoric is recycled “recruiting children” propaganda with a fresh coat of paint and a new target.
This isn’t new territory. It’s the same territory with a different group painted on the target.
I know a trans woman who was told she makes people “uncomfortable” in the women’s restroom. The language was nearly identical to what gay men heard in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Your existence makes people uncomfortable. Your body in this space is a threat. You don’t belong here.
We know how that story ends.
We lived it.
So when gay men tell me trans rights aren’t their issue, what I hear is: I survived that targeting, and I’m relieved someone else is taking the hit now.
That’s not neutrality. That’s just siding with the people who hurt you.
The Choice Is Simpler Than You Think
You can keep scrolling past headlines. Keep believing this fight belongs to someone else. Keep telling yourself that staying quiet protects what you built, that you earned the right to just live without carrying anyone’s struggle.
I understand the temptation. I really do.
Or you can remember.
Remember what it felt like when no one stood for you. When family chose doctrine over you. When friends went silent. When you needed allies and got empty rooms and averted eyes and maybe a few thoughts-and-prayers.
Remember that the shame you still carry—the hypervigilance you can’t shut off, the way you calculate safety in every new room—all of that came from the same hatred now targeting trans people.
The choice isn’t between trans rights and your safety. The choice is between standing with people who’ve always stood with us, or siding with forces that want all of us erased.
Some gay men think they can negotiate with disgust. That if they’re respectable enough, separate enough, distant enough from trans people, they’ll be spared when the legislation comes.
I’ve watched people try this. It doesn’t work.
Disgust doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care how well you assimilated. How many years you’ve been out. How acceptable you’ve made yourself.
It’s patient. It waits.
Right now it’s watching to see which of us will abandon trans people the way we were abandoned. To see which of us learned from shame that the safest way to survive is letting someone else take the hit.
What Your Throat Knows
Feel it right now. That tightness when you’re deciding whether to speak up or stay silent. That weight settling in your chest when someone makes a transphobic comment and you calculate whether responding is worth the cost.
I feel it too. Every time.
That’s not caution. That’s the old fear. The one that taught you survival meant silence. That making yourself smaller meant staying safer.
Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget. The shame that made you hide your first crush. The disgust that made you change how you walked, talked, existed in space. The terror that taught you to monitor every gesture, every word, every visible sign of difference.
That same terror is what trans people are living through right now. While you’re deciding whether it’s your fight.
It was always your fight. The hatred didn’t retire when you came out. It just shifted targets while you weren’t paying attention.
Where We Land From Here
Trans people don’t need our pity. They don’t need our guilt.
They need our voices. The ones we spent years learning to use. The ones we’re still afraid to raise because maybe, maybe if we stay quiet, the hatred won’t remember we exist too.
It remembers. It’s just giving us the opportunity to choose.
Stand with the people who stood with us, or stand with the people who taught us shame in the first place.
I see gay men still deciding. Weighing their conditional safety against someone else’s survival. Calculating whether speaking up risks the fragile acceptance they’ve built.
That’s not a calculation. That’s just becoming the thing that hurt you.
Where does it live in your body when you’re choosing silence? That familiar clench. The throat closing. The breath going shallow. That’s not protection. That’s the old training. The one that taught you hiding was safer than standing.
Trans people don’t need us to be perfect. They need us to remember what it felt like when we were the ones everyone debated. And then speak.
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any mental health condition.
Client and personal examples have been altered to safeguard privacy and maintain confidentiality.
If you lose any subscribers from this, I’d take it as a badge of truth/proof.
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Thank you very very much for this passionate and clear reminder of the structures that encourage us to separate ourselves from the targeted, the same way people separated themselves from us when we were the targets in school. The storm of resentful rage is actually targeting all of us whether we admit it or not.
When gay men were being killed by the AIDS epidemic it was trans folks and bi folks and lesbians who stood by us. Gay men aren’t the primary target now, so this is our chance to pay back our debt by supporting our queer siblings (particularly Black and Latin people, those who are undocumented or unhoused).
And by fighting to protect the main targets we stop the juggernaut before it turns on us full force. We got this!