No, Newsweek, Trans Visibility is Not Homophobia

Newsweek published an Op-Ed this week by Ben Appel titled “The New Homophobia.” The core issue? Transgender acknowledgement in society.

Appel proposes a frightening dose of both rhetoric and transphobia in the lengthy piece wherein he bemoans his suffering as a cis, white gay man whose believes the term “cis” is a slur and grieves for his “sex-based rights” - an often parroted but entirely baseless argument posed by the gender critical lot who’ve reached the bottom of the barrel in their exhaustive search for reason to justify their unprovoked, emotional outrage and intolerance expressed toward innocent transgender people.

Appel tells the 100 Million Newsweek readers that Social Media is responsible for the gender non-conforming and transgender population growing, claiming that the dogma of gender ideology “spreads faster than any religion institution in history” much in thanks to platforms like Twitter and TikTok.

“With the proliferation of social media, which disseminates ideological dogma faster than any religious institution in history, academics-cum-activists can reduce these theories into palatable, easy-to-digest-and-regurgitate maxims, especially on platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and now TikTok. Which is how, suddenly, we have a massive uptick in trans- and “non-binary”-identifying youth. Queer theorists insist that subverting the categorizations which have been imposed upon young people — for example, the sex they were “assigned” at birth — is the ultimate expression of autonomy, and further, the key to liberating society from a system devised largely, so they claim, by cisgender white men. (Never mind the scientific and cultural achievements of women and racial minorities.)” -Ben Appel / Newsweek