What Does Defeating Pride Month Even Look Like?

This isn’t something we just want to live with.

Jonni Skinner was 13 when his therapist told him that the only way to be happy as a gay man with a “feminine essence” was to become a woman.  You can’t exactly blame Skinner for believing her. He’d been bullied for liking butterflies and the color pink, and acceptance in society was something he, like every human on the planet, craved. He hadn’t hit puberty yet and had no idea that flooding his body with estrogen and testosterone blockers would result in debilitating pain and permanent damage that his doctors would dismiss. He later discovered his doctors weren’t quite sure what that kind of medication would do to him either. His mom was told her son would likely commit suicide if he didn’t transition. When she asked an endocrinologist if he was just gay and suggested delaying any permanent changes until Skinner was older, the doctor threatened to find a new home for the teenager. Skinner is now 23. He considers himself gay — a label his family used to describe his behavior when he was still in kindergarten. He’s detransitioned and is speaking out about what he went through. But he’s hardly alone. Some 22 percent of his generation identifies with some letter in the LGBTQ acronym, a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone given that libraries hosted drag queen story hours when they were kids while Target dressed them in rainbows every June.  (READ MORE: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 219: Lesbian Minister Cancels July 4th to ‘Understand Our Own Whiteness’) There is good news, though. It’s June now, but when I went to grab bagels at a local shop, there were no rainbows in the window; meanwhile, Megan Basham isn’t getting doxed for telling the Republican senators who celebrate this kind of degenerate stuff via social media to stuff it. Last year, in the wake of the Bud Light boycott, major corporate sponsorships of Pride parades simply dried up. That, fortunately, wasn’t a one-off. Pride organizers in Pittsburgh told NBC that they expected to secure just “30-40 percent of the spon...