On the Merits of “Debating My Existence” this Coming Out Day

Attitudes towards the LGBTQ community have regressed because the movement has lost its ability to persuade. 

Credit: Ted Eytan, The Denver Clarion

It’s been over five years since I sat in a corner of my bedroom and forced myself to entertain the nagging thought that I was not straight. I didn’t grow up in a tolerant environment where my realization could have been just another aspect of hitting puberty. And I figured it out far too early for any sort of libertine college experimentation phase. The loneliness was crushing. 

Yet, looking back today, on Coming Out Day 2025, I’m still thankful I came out when I did. 

For the past three years, a consistent 64 percent of Americans have considered gay or lesbian relations to be morally acceptable—down from 71 percent in 2022, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. By party, Democrat acceptance currently rests at 86 percent and Republican support is at 38 percent, an 18-point drop from 56 percent in 2022. When asked whether gay marriage should be recognized with the same rights as traditional marriage, Republican support decreased by 14 points from 55 percent in 2022 to 41 percent today. 

What may seem like a rapid regression in tolerance has actually been years in the making. Over the past decade, the LGBTQ movement has failed to shore up and sustain support for its members. The movement has “lost the art of persuasion” as Representative Sarah McBride—the first openly transgender member of Congress—told Ezra Klein for The New York Times earlier this year. 

With an era of good feelings post-Obergefell, activists brushed off the doubts and resistance that lingered in parts of the American populace, McBride argues. This hand-waving affected the transgender community most. After marriage equality was won, activists believed that enough of the population embraced the “T” of LGBTQ as part of “the same movement,” seeing no further need to engage and sway their opponents. 

It’s a classic case of “dead dogma,” a concept introduced by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. If we unflinchingly accept a view as true, our belief in that view—even if we’re convinced it is the truth—weakens. Thus, we file away the reasoning for our convictions and parrot the formularies—in this case, the “love is love” and “trans people are people” sloganeering. We then forget how to defend our beliefs against dissenters. 

In part because of this ideological insulation, the movement’s tent no longer includes unlikely coalitions that can secure tangible victories. Consider the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which, in 1998, supported Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato for re-election instead of Democratic challenger Chuck Schumer. Their endorsement strategy favored incumbents when candidates’ records were comparable, and D’Amato had supported anti-discrimination measures and bills allowing gays to serve openly in the military. The HRC sought out winners for their cause, not leaders who’d signal their sanctimonious political correctness all of the time.  

Today, with groups like “Queers for Palestine” and theories like “Queer Ecology,” the LGBTQ movement has been subsumed under a broader progressive one. Say what you will about how intertwined these allies’ needs are or how unified they are in spirit. The fact remains that the LGBTQ movement has transformed itself into a reactionary monolith, one bloc joining forces with other “oppressed” groups to resist politicians, corporations, religious groups, and “oppressors” of all stripes. 

Lesbian author Camille Paglia observed this tendency as far back as the 1990s in her book Vamps & Tramps: “Get rid of victimology and oppression politics…Gay activism has got to get off its knee-jerk oppositional mode and into an affirmative articulation of first principles.”

This “oppositional mode,” a high-strung and zero-sum mindset, has become more popular in the movement today. Some of us snap too quickly. We no longer want to “open hearts and change minds,” to quote McBride. This is a departure from the strategies of the past, political commentator Andrew Sullivan says, when activists explicitly sought out conversations at “fundamentalist churches…Catholic universities…[and on] right-wing talk shows.” 

Sullivan, a gay man himself, believes that the LGBTQ movement has not only neglected to engage its opponents, but also its internal dissenters. Today, disagreement abounds between older queer generations and younger ones. There are tensions between those who pursue marriage and the white-picket-fence, and those that reject that “heteronormative” lifestyle, for example. 

Sullivan has long observed the great diversity of opinion within his community. Yet today, good-faith questions and dissenting opinions, be they about youth gender medicine or LGBTQ content in schools, are ignored at best and derided at worst. The movement attempts to put up a “unified” front—to its own detriment.

When Sarah McBride claimed she would follow the rules of the House’s bathroom restrictions, she caught flack. Her insistence that this policy was a distraction—that the community must ignore these “manufactur[ed] culture wars” and choose their battles wisely—drew the ire of many. “She should be using [her] power…not promoting messaging that suggests trans people should fall in line,” one transgender individual responded in an interview for The Washington Post.

This individual’s comment represents the broader aversion of having to “debate one’s existence.” It’s a common refrain—as if defending one’s identity invalidates it.

The fact of the matter is that conceptions of sexuality and gender are not passively understood, nor are they automatically embraced. This has become especially evident over the last decade, as the queer community has rapidly adopted complex ivory tower cultural norms and queer theory lingo, McBride observes. The movement has left many people—and most concerningly, many LGBTQ people—perplexed. 

If you find that you can best describe your identity with neopronouns, “xenogenders,” or other hyperspecific—and, frankly, confusing—labels, you must be ready to explain, and yes, defend yourself. Candidly, so should any lesbian woman or transgender man. Resting on your laurels, naively believing that any debate has been “settled,” is what got us here. Confusion drives fear, which drives hatred. 

I get it. In middle school, I had no desire to speak to the classmates and parents who protested a textbook’s mention of Sally Ride’s sexuality. In high school, I certainly didn’t want to cross paths with the Bass Pro Shop enthusiasts and athleisure-loving popular girls who thought homosexuality was a mental illness. And outside of the occasional conversation with peers who believe I’ll be heading to hell, I wouldn’t say I’m doing much in the way of persuasion right now, either.

However, even if we personally aren’t willing to “debate our existence,” we must endorse its strategic importance. We must demand this approach from non-profits and advocacy groups, activists and influencers, that are able. We must see the community for what it is: a political entity seeking to preserve its existence. 

All communities must justify themselves through sustained persuasion. They must choose their battles carefully, even if it means making occasional concessions to fight another day. From the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to vaccination policies, deliberative—though often tedious and frustrating—consensus-building leads to a more convicted and enduring base of supporters. 

Rights secured by law do not remain secure by inertia; they must be defended, explained, and renewed through an ongoing commitment to engage with dissidents, both from without and from within. There is an art to building coalitions broad enough to withstand cultural and political headwinds. 

If the LGBTQ movement wishes to reverse the erosion of public support, it must rediscover how to argue for itself, to listen, to disagree, and to master the hard work of persuasion. This is the only way we can ensure that the freedoms won in previous generations remain secure for ours—especially for the closeted youth hoping to find their way out.