Sexual progressives are feuding among themselves. You could almost call it a civil war. The trouble is with the “T” faction of the movement’s holy tetragrammaton, LGBT. Transgender activists are spoiling for a fight with their fellow sexual revolutionaries. Too many gays, lesbians and feminists are failing to meet all the trans movement’s latest demands. Too many are questioning or opting out of the new ideology of gender.

The latest furor is over tennis great Martina Navratilova. Something of a pioneer and hero to the gay community, she’s weighed in on the issue of “trans-women” (biological males) competing in women’s sports. It amounts to cheating, she says. It’s an injustice to female athletes who’ve trained for years, never imagining that men claiming to be women would one day stand in their way.

Predictably, this launched a barrage of twitter reactions. Trans activists branded her “transphobic.” They demanded apologies. “Athlete Ally,” an advocacy group for LGBT athletes, condemned Navratilova’s essay.

We Should Have Seen it Coming

It didn’t require great prophetic insight to see this coming. It only took some awareness of what the LGBT movement has been saying for the last decade.

“If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid,” he contends, “you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights.”

Andrew Sullivan explained it well. Sullivan’s been an advocate for gay issues since long before the trans movement. “If you abandon biology in the matter of sex and gender altogether,” he explains, “you undermine the very meaning of homosexuality.”

His beef isn’t with persons who suffer with gender dysphoria. It’s with activists’ “deeply confusing and incoherent” arguments for dissolving gender. “If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid,” he contends, “you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights.”

Sullivan is certainly right about this. The LGB at the leading edge of the acronym is itself a glaring presentation of the gender binary. But now the trans movement questions whether this is, to quote one writer, “closed-minded — or worse, harmful and exclusionary.”

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If Western culture fully accepts this new trans ideology, it’ll dissolve the basis of the old binary. That’s true whether you look at it from a straight perspective or a gay or lesbian point of view. As one feminist pointed out, the “T” in the acronym blows the whole thing up. “If the biological terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ have no bearing when defining people,” she asks, “what’s the point of defining sexuality?”

What Should We Learn?

This splintering of the LGBT coalition is part of the larger erosion of a confused culture.

Sin infects even the mind’s reasoning abilities. Zealous trans activists push the logic of the sexual revolution to its absurd conclusions: There is no God. There are no first principles. Humanity was unplanned and is contingent. Marriage is a mere social invention. Gender is fluid and subjective.

These ideas have been quietly presupposed in the past, if not always spoken aloud. But beliefs have consequences. False beliefs have victims. An ideology’s foundational principles affect its entire structure. Sexual progressivism has continued to add new floors to its expanding high rise. But the sand it was built on will ultimately cause it to collapse in on itself.