The New York Post just ran what is perhaps the dumbest opinion piece about LGBTQ+ issues of the year.The op-ed gravely warns New Yorkers that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is going to force gay men to get bottom surgery and hormone therapy to make them into straight women, based on what appears to be little other than the authors own fever-induced nightmares. Related The conversion therapy case shows the right wants to talk to kids about sex but only to shame them The piece is by Ben Appel, the author of a book with the title and Im not making this up Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, where, according to the books Amazon description, he describes growing up in a conservative Christian community and then becoming a transphobe, all while bravely refusing to join the Cult of Queer.The Appel doesnt fall far from the tree, so to speak. Dive deeper every day Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues Subscribe to our Newsletter today Anyway, in his NY Post op-ed, he describes how some gay men are forced to transition in Iran because of homophobia, which is horrific, but also is not occurring anywhere in the U.S. or likely anywhere else in the world. Somehow, Appel uses this claim to insist that Mamdani is going to impose the same practice on gay New Yorkers because Iran is a Muslim-majority country and Mamdani is Muslim. Appel is very hand-wavy about the connection to Mamdani, writing, Suppress a boys puberty, inject him with estrogen, get him on the operating table, and voil youve transed the gay away And guess who wants to expand access to these regressive practices? Zohran Mamdani, whose mayoral campaign was fueled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Yes, the same CAIR linked to Iran-backed Hamas.Sure, Ben.I have worked for decades in LGBTQ+ media and I have never heard of a single case in the U.S. of a cis gay person being forced by the government to transition to make them straight. I have heard of trans people being denied access to gender affirming care by their parents, by doctors who refuse to believe them, by insurance companies, by state governments, and because of pressure from the current president. And thats also horrific, right? Because the horror of cis gay men being forced to transition is that they are denied control over their bodies in an extreme way, the same as trans women being denied access to health care for nothing more than political reasons.The bottom line is that if Appel is actually worried that Mamdani is going to force him to transition, he should seek therapy for his paranoia, not write about it in the U.S. newspaper with the third-highest circulation.Of course, the U.S. is a very big country, and if some fantasy can be dreamed up, someone out there will believe it. Instead of wondering why Appel is scared of something that will definitely never happen, the better question is why the Post is publishing such an idiotic screed. Sure, the Post is conservative, but pushing the idea that an overwhelming majority of queer New Yorkers voted for someone who has a secret plan to force them to transition is, really, beneath even them. What it is, though, is part of a larger issue of LGBTQ+ people with terrible opinions on LGBTQ+ issues running to straight media to get their opinions published. Opinions that LGBTQ+ media would never publish because LGBTQ+ media is usually run by people who actually understand a thing or two about how the world works and how LGBTQ+ people are treated in this country. We also arent invested in giving straight people permission to treat our population like a political football that neatly fits into someone elses worldview.And it happens on all parts of the political spectrum, not just the right, with its token LGBTQ+ commentators like Caitlyn Jenner and Dave Rubin. Take, for example, this article published by the progressive The Nation just weeks before the 2024 election, where Charlie Markbreiter argued apparently earnestly that Kamala Harris wouldnt be much different from Donald Trump when it comes to access to trans healthcare.While that might sound absolutely bonkers now, I assure you that it was also quite obviously incorrect in October 2024. Their argument was that Harris was unwilling to use her magic wand to force Congress to pass single-payer health care, which meant that the 19% of trans Americans without health insurance would have difficulty accessing gender-affirming care. Markbreiter refers to the other 81% of trans people as white bourgeois trans people and says not to worry about them; theyll be able to access and afford whatever care they want, even if their health care is taken away and banned.Regardless of who is elected, however, the system of private healthcarewhich bourgeois trans patients access through employers and private wealthwill remain intact, Markbreiter promised on behalf of Donald Trump. Just as the movement for a free Palestine finds both candidates guilty of genocide, we should see liberal and conservative anti-transness, represented by both Harris and Trump, as two different levers of the same anti-trans machine, they concluded. Its hard to see the point of an essay like this other than to assuage the guilt of leftists who didnt vote for Harris but may have genuinely cared about their transgender friends. Markbreiter didnt go to LGBTQ+ media with their piece since its unlikely that LGBTQ+ publications would have published something so transparently false Trump made his opposition to trans rights one of his top campaign issues and LGBTQ+ people overwhelmingly voted for Harris since we knew what was at stake.Its a similar phenomenon to those articles from different parts of the Democratic coalition published in 2019 and 2020 about Pete Buttigiegs presidential campaign, like the one in The New Republic written by a gay man named Dale Peck that called him Mary Pete and speculated about what sexual positions he prefers in an overt attempt to degrade Buttigieg for being gay.The point was to give straight people permission to be openly homophobic. Or when the LA Review of Books published an essay by queer and trans studies professor Greta LaFleur that called Pete Buttigieg and his husband an image of heterosexuality without women because they didnt have sex on the cover of Time magazine. LaFleur dropped a lot of academic language about capitalism and whiteness while mocking Buttigiegs clothes repeatedly, saying that he wasnt dressed in an obviously queer way (queerness is an aesthetic to people like LaFleur) and concluding that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one despite the fact that she was talking about two dudes who were married to each other.Another queer writer running to straight media with an opinion about LGBTQ+ issues that would be derided as homophobic if a straight person said it, and the point was to portray gay people as not queer enough to be deserving of basic respect, like being seen for who they are. Like Pecks essay in The New Republic, but woke. I would also include in this phenomenon the regular articles that appear in tabloids about out gay people married to straight people of the opposite sex (usually out gay men with straight women). The Daily Mail this week published one where the gay man, Jacob Hoff, claims his fears [about sex with a woman] melted away after he and Samantha Greenstone decided to become a couple. Then they got married and had a kid, and he insists that hes not bisexual.Tabloids constantly return to this particular theme. Hoff and Greenstone, in particular, have appeared in at least half a dozen mainstream publications, fulfilling some need of theirs but, more importantly, a need of those publications audiences, which may be to imagine that gay people could stop being so gay all the time if they just met their right woman or man.This isnt about diverse or bizarre LGBTQ+ people seeking representation in the media. When an LGBTQ+ person with an odd perspective or story goes to straight media and presents themselves either as representing the whole LGBTQ+ community or as someone rejected by the LGBTQ+ community, its not about them anymore. Theyre presenting an image of us. When editors at these publications greenlight these essays, its because they want to invite their cisgender and heterosexual audiences to look at LGBTQ+ people a certain way, and thats usually about giving them permission to be homophobic or transphobic.Mamdani isnt going to force gay men to transition, Trump was clearly worse on trans rights than Harris, Buttigieg is obviously gay, and a gay man who is truly happy to be married to a straight woman doesnt constantly need attention for doing so. None of this is actually complicated.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.