The Low Tide of Pride

Things don’t look good for the future of Pride month. Not only has a new Gallup poll found that support for same-sex marriage and relationships in the US has fallen after two decades, it was also revealed that about 65 percent of US adults believe same-sex marriage should be legal, down from 71 percent in 2022 and 2023. In 2025, 39 percent of companies backtracked on supporting Pride compared to 2024. On the other hand, several San Francisco Giants baseball players were called out by the MLB for covering up their baseball rainbow-decorated Pride caps with Bible verses. The impetus behind the warning was that any writing on baseball uniforms was forbidden, but no one is buying that excuse, especially when the entire Giants team were forced to wear the rainbow caps for Pride Night. Why would anyone who is not gay be forced to wear a Pride cap?

Senator Josh Hawley asked the same question when he wrote to MLB, reminding them that the league in 2020 put up political slogans and created patches to be sewn on uniforms that read “Black Lives Matter” and “United For Change.” Hawley also wrote that the league “suspended its own equipment rules so that players could display progressive political slogans on their cleats.” Baseball, to its credit, has always maintained a degree of common sense when it comes to far-left talking points, unlike the NFL, which long ago fell into the woke cesspit. The Pride baseball cap controversy, however, promises to accelerate the downward spiral of LGBT acceptance not only among baseball fans but among Americans who answer Gallup polls. When the question of eroding LGBT acceptance in 2026 was posted on reddit, scores of gays and lesbians seemed to agree on the root causes.

“Kids doing puberty blockers, and boys in girls’ sports are 100 percent the cause of the push back,” one man posted. “Gays are just the accepted collateral damage. The movement has been hijacked by the 1 percent who demand attention at the detriment of everyone else. This has brought backlash to the community, causing a relatively large split. Gender ideologues + ‘queer’ straight people have ruined things.” A woman posted: “What the general society doesn’t understand is the whole non-binary, gender fluid weird sh-t. It freaks them out and makes them think there’s a movement to make everyone genderless. Calling people ‘they’ is awkward and strange. I believe in respecting everyone’s wishes, but it’s that part of movement that freaks people out. And it annoys me that simple gay rights are being re-evaluated because men in dresses get upset when you call them ‘sir.’” Most Americans feel some confusion when it comes to trans issues, despite the fact that transgenderism has taken over the gay and lesbian movement. The idea that one can become the opposite sex by getting hormone therapy and making an identification wish (“I identify as a woman”) is just bad science fiction. Biological sex is not a social construct, although you can say that every human being is a composite of male and female qualities and/or mannerisms that “surface” at different times. Perhaps the most famous sex change in modern history was Army vet George William Jorgensen’s transition in 1952. Jorgensen, after becoming Christine, became an instant celebrity. In interviews after her surgery, Jorgensen expressed concern that too many people were clamoring for sex-change operations in a fad-like way. She was adamant in cautioning prospective transsexuals to be very careful before taking this irreversible step. She also stated that there were very few “real” transsexuals. In today’s world, there’s far less caution than there was in Jorgensen’s time when it comes to trans issues. Jorgensen’s warning has been forgotten. Children as young as six or eight are coming out as transgender, and they are being encouraged to do so by parents who supply them with hormones, call them “they,” or send them off as teens to sex reassignment mutilation rooms. As a boy, I sometimes took bed sheets from the family laundry closet and dressed up as a nun. I enjoyed sneaking into the woods and fields behind our country home in a long flowing veil. Indulging in such behavior did not prevent me from dressing up as a Native American chief in a full war bonnet or pretending that I was Davy Crockett in a coonskin hat. But just because I fantasized about being a nun for 30 minutes twice a year when I was 8, didn’t mean that I wanted to become a girl. Yet suppose I was that same 8-year-old boy today with woke Democratic parents who saw my nun costume as proof that I was really a girl. It’s unlikely they would dismiss my indulgence as Kiddy Fun Theater; it is more likely they would search for a physician who would ask me if I felt like a girl trapped in a boy’s body. A study at Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of Children, reported that 70 to 80 percent of children who come to identify with the opposite sex lose these feelings over time. The startling fact is that too many children in the throes of gender role-play are assumed to be transgender and then put on hormone therapy routines.

Since Jorgensen’s time, there’s been a major cultural shift, as evidenced by the San Francisco Giants being forced to wear rainbow baseball caps and four years of the Biden administration’s love affair with transgenderism. ‘Coming out’ today often means coming out as transgender, not gay or lesbian. The latter is old hat; the truth is that many so-called progressive parents would rather their child be trans than gay. A trans identity comes with conventional framing: a very pretty son who would otherwise come out as gay in 1969 can now suffer the delusion that “she” fits in as a “heterosexual” faux female. The parents can also entertain this fantasy without admitting they have a homosexual son. When I think about the general public’s acceptance of LGBT issues, I recall the now famous video with the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and reporter trans activist Zoey Tur. The topic was a Courage Award given to Caitlyn Jenner. Shapiro, who maintained a gentlemanly demeanor throughout the discussion, stated that transgenderism was a mental disorder, while stating that he respects Zoey as a human being but his beef was with “the philosophy” of transgenderism in general. Yet Tur called Shapiro’s criticism of transgenderism hate speech and told him, “You can cut that out or you’re going home in an ambulance.” The general audiences in America hear this sort of rhetoric, and they take note. I have watched a fair number of online videos of FTM and MTF transitions. In the MTF videos the MTF speaker often seems captivated by the cosmetic glamour of being a woman. These young men in their 20s are generally more concerned about looking sexy, than they are about the more substantive aspects of being a “woman.” The looksmaxxing fixation on cosmetic beauty (blue hair, Vogue accents, etc.) is daunting, as if being a woman was only about fashion and beauty. The focus in most of these videos is superficial and narcissistic. Ordinary Americans watch these videos, take in the message, and silently draw their own conclusions. This is especially true when a video touches on the sensitive subject of whether one should ask a trans person whether they still have a penis or a vagina. Generally, the official woke canon states that questions like this are unacceptable. The question is immediately put down as being in bad taste or “gross,” as if having a penis or a vagina had nothing whatsoever with being a man or a woman. This is what America is finding it harder and harder to accept and support. Former University of the Arts professor and author Camille Paglia addressed this question when she wrote: “Sex reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact change anyone’s sex…. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a trans woman, as one of these new gradations along the scale. But ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell, remains coded for your biological birth.” Paglia added: “…. History is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse.” Regarding cultural collapse, it might be wise to recall what St. Augustine said: “It was pride that changed angels into devils; It is humility that makes men as angels.”