No, James Kirchick, The Gay Rights Movement Isn’t Over

In a recent article for The Atlantic, the noted gay conservative James Kirchick sets out to prove that the gay rights movement is over, its job accomplished. The only thing remaining, he claims, is a bunch of bitter leaders, desperate for some attention and frantic to cling onto some vestige of the power that they once possessed. To do so, he argues, they have taken to inventing new causes for the movement which, in his telling, are frequently arcane and have no basis in actual oppression. Rather than continuing to drum out this misplaced outrage, Kirchick suggests, the queer left should just admit that it’s one and go home.

Now, that might seem to be a really big claim to make, one that would be difficult to sustain, even in the form of a (long) piece in one of the nation’s foremost magazines of ideas. And, indeed, the piece doesn’t really hold up to even the faintest bit of hostile scrutiny.

Probably most egregiously, Kirchick makes the claim that, marriage equality having been won, the attention of activists has shifted to trans rights. Nor is he subtle about it, writing: “But it is the conflation of transgender issues with the gay-rights movement, a recent development and not one undertaken without some controversy among gays and lesbians themselves, which accounts for much if not most of the evidence cited as…