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I happen to know someone who works in management at a rather large multi-national, and they shared a copy of their internal comms strategy for pride month. It was quite interesting in general, but one aspect in particular may be of interest here.
They distinguished between their internal comms and public comms. If employees asked about their plans for pride month, they would talk about the various internal activities/resources/whatever they had set up for it, but the story on public comms was different. "Due to the unprecedented backlash in the US market," they wouldn't be doing/saying anything publicly. Their "stakeholders" have decided that it wasn't worth the risk, and even though they totally totally TOTALLY support everything about pride, they just feel like they have to protect other equities too. Ya know, like, continuing to make money.
They emphasized that this was for the US market only, and that other localities would make decisions locally. Insert twitter meme about various companies having rainbow logos on their US twitter accounts, but not on their "[Company] Middle East" twitter accounts.
I chalk up points for two things. 1) The backlash is actually having an effect, at least for now, this year. 2) The theory that these things have been done so far in large part not because the market cared, but because employees cared. The classic example is that if you're a tech company in the Bay area, you're not really asking, "Should we signal support for this because it will improve our perception in the market?" You're asking, "How many of our employees will revolt if we don't signal support for this?"
Now that the market is showing signs of actually caring about this a little bit, they're rushing to make a distinction: do what they can to continue to placate their internal bands of radicals while not being publicly perceived as political. I'm left with two questions: 1) How long will this distinction be tenable? Perhaps that depends on how strongly the market continues to backlash against overt pride support (i.e., can the right take another scalp next year). 2) Is there sufficient internal appetite in any companies to revolt against the internal shit? If the prior theory was, "They're listening to the market," and this shift in the market response is actually generating a shift in public comms, and if the current theory is, "They're still listening to employees at least enough for internal efforts," then perhaps some companies could well be primed for an internal backlash that actually results in changes there, too.
I don't think I expect (2) to be probabilistically super common, but from what I'm hearing, lots of upper management folks who really just want to make money actually know that woke radicals in their ranks are a serious threat... and really are gradually working on, uh, marginalizing them, to the point that if they have an excuse, any excuse, to move them out without inciting too much leftist backlash, they'll absolutely take it.
I think if pride just meant LGB then there wouldn't be much backlash during pride month.
Gay men and lesbian women seem largely accepted by society, and I don't know of many recent controversies surrounding them.
The TQ part of the alphabet seems to be the lightning rod lately. The Ts mess with long established gender dynamics, more than LGBs ever did. The Qs often seem like they are faking for diversity points or engage in levels of ridiculousness that is hard to take seriously, for example there are popular videos out there of people identifying as birds and goblins. There is a real question of how much I have to buy into some strangers' fantasies and fetishes.
Importantly, as a matter of sheer numbers the TQ part is also a very small section of LGBTQ.
This makes me wonder if some kind of split is coming. LGBs can either continue allying with TQs and risk some society wide backlash. Or they can jettison the political hot potatoes and go fully mainstream tomorrow. I suspect democratic politicians in swing districts will be doing this, and so will large multi-national companies.
I think that the jettisoning's going to happen in five to ten years. We'll wind up with a de facto third and fourth gender (trans man, trans woman); I sure as hell hope that membership there doesn't imply or require irreversible medical treatment. As for queers...they're kinda the sex/gender liberals. We need 'em...but we also need conservatives in order to keep liberals from going insane.
*Consider the aphorism that conservatives are stupid and evil, while liberals are simply insane.
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I don’t think this is true. It certainly wasn’t, historically. L and G were every bit as much the hot potatoes of their day. Monkey pox has nothing on the AIDS panic!
The culture war is always going to be fiercest on the edge of the Overton window. You know—highlighting each others’ worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric.
Asking when the LGBs are going to jettison the TQs is kind of like asking when the Republicans are going to jettison fundamentalists. There can’t be that many of them, right? And they say the darndest things.
I feel that conservatives quietly have jettisoned fundamentalists. Conservatives still accept their votes and donations, but it's not clear to me anything is being done to appeal to fundamentalists.
Roe was overturned. That's a fairly big win for us.
I think that is a win for the religious in general, not just fundamentalists. A fundamentalist specific win would be something like the biblical version of creation being taught in public school classrooms.
Comparable to a general victory for LGBTQs like a ban on discrimination by sexual preference vs a specific win for trans like opening women only institutions to MtF transitioners.
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There's a difference: fundamentalists vote in large numbers so they provide continuing value to the general conservative movement.
Meanwhile:
the Ts are a small number, even within the movement.
Many of the gains of the Ls, Gs & Bs are locked in by judicial ruling so aren't going anywhere. Their allies certainly wouldn't dare roll them back if they sat this one out. Even the GOP has large numbers or even a bare majority in favor of gay marriage.
But I also don't think there'll be a jettisoning for that reason.
Because the "normie" gays like Andrew Sullivan either went on with their lives after winning the important battles or were turned off or defenestrated by the TQs and radicals who still need the movement - either for their unpopular goals or whatever psychological need for belonging or the perception of radical politics they have.
It’s not just voting- you would be unable to run a conservative movement without using fundamentalists to do, well, almost everything. From staffing institutions that help no one’s career path on a resume to activism and volunteering to coming up with ideological veneer to accommodate different groups’ self interest to just providing a safe, cozy community conservative figures can wind up in if they want some time out of the limelight, the right is just critically dependent on fundamentalists constantly and in a wide variety of ways.
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There already are orgs like the LGB Alliance, but unsurprisingly they were declared far-right Nazis. Even non-Queer Theory aligned pro-Trans orgs suffered that fate
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