"I was... not the right kind of 'queer.' I was just another 'cis'... gay male—in other words, a privileged and unevolved relic of the past."

"After all, I had my rights—the right to marry, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to assimilate into this oppressive, 'cisheteronormative,' patriarchal society. It was time to make way for a new generation of 'queer,' one that had very little to do with sex-based rights and more to do with abolishing the concepts of sex and sexuality altogether.... 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.... Gender-nonconformity, after all, is a very common experience for most of us during childhood. I, for one, was relentlessly bullied in grade school for my femininity... But I have grown up to be a well-adjusted, successful, even masculine man.... [T]oday I am... fearful of the radical activists... who push a regressive, anti-liberal agenda that reifies gender stereotypes, downplays the seriousness of long-term medicalization and ultimately seeks to abolish my identity—for without biological sex, there is no homosexuality. Today, the least-accepting spaces for people like me are, of all places, the halls of LGBT rights organizations, where the threat might not be violence but is nevertheless terrible stigmatization and shame."

Writes Ben Appel in "The New Homophobia" (Newsweek). He is describing his experiences interning with "a major LGBTQ-rights organization" and taking the class "U.S. Lesbian and Gay History" at Columbia University.