“The Ocean Is Queer”
For years, radical gender ideology appeared unstoppable. The media framed transgender identity as the next frontier of liberation. Pride Month drew enthusiastic endorsements from nearly every university, corporation, and school district. Dissenters were often marginalized, and the prevailing narrative allowed little room for debate.
No longer. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the movement has begun to retreat. The Supreme Court recently upheld a Tennessee law banning medical transition procedures for minors. Many corporations have withdrawn support for this year’s Pride events. An ideology that once seemed culturally dominant has lost significant ground in public opinion.
In retrospect, this reversal may have been inevitable. The gender movement sought to enshrine a rejection of biological reality in law. Its core claims—such as the idea that a man can become a woman—reflected the movement’s hubris and delusion.
Americans have the right to believe that human beings can change sex (though they cannot). But the gender cult pushed further, insisting that institutions adopt its tenets as official policy and punish dissent. What followed was a kind of petty tyranny—one that policed adult speech and imposed contested ideologies on children—exposing the hollowness of its favored slogans: “love” and “equality.”
I recently attended a Pride Month event in Seattle to take the temperature of the gender movement. The occasion was Queer Community Day at the Seattle Aquarium—temporarily renamed the “Aqueerium.” Staff had placed LGBTQ+ flags inside the fish tanks and set up for Drag Queen Story Hour and a lecture titled “The Ocean is Queer.” One of the ticket attendants wore a bisexual flag pinned to her hat; several attendees wore Covid-19 masks and buttons bearing political slogans.
The drag event featured a tall man with an aquiline nose who introduced himself as Miss Stachio and read from the book Me and My Gender Dysphoria Monster. The book conveys the trans movement’s belief that children can be born in the wrong body and that society must affirm their “true” identity, even when it conflicts with biological reality.
The story follows a young boy who tries to tame the anger and confusion of his “dysphoria monster” by adopting new pronouns, wearing girls’ clothing, and calling himself Nisha. The audience—which included infants, toddlers, and young children—clapped along with the story and affirmed each step in the boy’s gender transition.
Though the children in the audience had already internalized the storyline and could anticipate the triumphant ending, one could sense that these narratives—so ascendant just a few years ago—had lost some of their novelty and force. Next to me sat a heavyset “trans man” in a pink shirt with a wispy beard, nodding and nearly in tears, capturing the emotional intensity of a cult’s last true believer.
Then came the science segment. The next presentation, titled “The Ocean is Queer,” attempted to ground transgender ideology in nature. A docent explained that the ocean serves as a metaphor for the “queer community.” She highlighted how male seahorses can become pregnant, clownfish live in matriarchal groups and can change sex, and bottlenose dolphins sometimes form gay male “throuples.” These examples, she told the children, are part of “queer ecology” and show that heterosexuality is not the only pattern found in nature.
This, too, carried an air of desperation. One could just as easily note that sea creatures breathe underwater or sometimes eat their young—neither of which offers a useful model for human behavior. Like much of what’s labeled “transgender science” or “gender medicine,” the lecture reflected a grasping for analogies, metaphors, or justifications. But when stated plainly, these comparisons verge on the absurd. “Pipefish change their sex, therefore children should, too” fails as a logical syllogism.
Perhaps this was always the central weakness of the gender cult: its reliance on euphemism and analogy to obscure the harsh realities of its practices. Proponents sought to maintain public support by repeating phrases like “life-saving, gender-affirming care” rather than confronting the clinical details—injecting children with cross-sex hormones, surgically removing the breasts of pubescent girls, and, in some cases, castrating boys to create the appearance of a female body.
The movement was always predicated on a fairy tale—not in the Walt Disney mold, but in the original, dark and disturbing sense. At the aquarium, Miss Stachio read from another book, Nen and the Lonely Fisherman, which adapted The Little Mermaid into a gay romance with a happy ending. The author, and the drag queen, seem to have forgotten the original Hans Christian Anderson version of the story: the little mermaid makes a bargain with a sea witch to acquire human legs, endures immense physical torment, and, in the end, does not win the affection of the prince.
The moral of that story is relevant. While the gender movement may still cast its spell over some children, its reach has limits. These limits may appear political, but at a deeper level, they are imposed by reality itself.