Trans activists are ruling the world
The culture of rights and entitlements is becoming the new orthodoxy
The Colorado River is suing the state of Colorado.
That’s quite something to get my grey head round. The Deep Green Resistance (who are bringing the case on the river’s behalf) is hoping the judge will grant the river ‘personhood’.
It’s a brilliant new level of identity politics. The trick in this modern game is to find some group of people on the margins of society and demonstrate how they have been marginalised by a brutal, dominant culture.
And now activists are demanding rights – and, by the sound of it, human rights – for rivers. That’s taking us back to a long-gone, magical cosmology. And it’s not the only example. Oh, far from it. The world is changing at dizzying speeds.
‘Otherkin’ social media groups cater for people who believe not just that they were born into the wrong-gendered body, but that they were born into the wrong species. Some of them say they are actually goats, dragons or elves. Wikipedia says that their reputation ranges from ‘animal-human relationship pioneers to psychologically dysfunctional’.
One thing experience has taught us: what’s called crazy today will be pioneering tomorrow. What you seem to be should never limit what you really are.
Fifteen years ago, I was talking to a young, gay friend, involved in LGB politics. He said they were resisting the formal admission of transgender people into their movement. I remembered they had been pretty resistant to bisexuals fifteen years before that (we were dismissed as ‘sexual tourists’). ‘What is it about transgender?’ I asked. ‘They’re crazy,’ he said. This was before progressive norms prevented us even contemplating hate speech. ‘How do you mean crazy?’ I asked. ‘Aggressive, violent, disturbed, disruptive, impossible to reason with,’ he said. ‘Really crazy.’
Being naturally regressive about these things, I was happy to take his word for it.
Perhaps as a result, I still go through a mental process when coming across the term ‘transgendered woman’ – ‘Is that a woman who has been transgendered, or a man who’s gone the other way? Is the person actually – or originally – a woman or a man?’
This sort of thinking is a hate crime in Canada, I believe.
Frankly, the science is a bit beyond me. So, politically, I’m still stuck on the basics: bathroom rights, male rapists declaring themselves female to get transferred to women’s prisons, linebackers coming out as women to play professional football. And, if these sound like less serious arguments to do with professional preferment or social embarrassment, how can we let men claiming to be women into refuges for battered women?
I’m very far from being able to dispute the biology of gender – but, for me, the politics is too easy to game.
What a change we’ve seen in fifteen years. Trans activists have not only been mainstreamed; they have swept legislatures before them all over the world. They’ve got a Conservative government here to agree that gender is something you can change with your clothes – and that the law will recognise your choice even far below the age of consent.
Not everyone is on board with their victory. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (hate criminals in their own right) object to men self-defining as women and then explaining lesbianism to lesbians. There are gay men who identify firmly as men and wonder what they have to do with men who want to repudiate their masculinity to the extent of cutting off the most definitive evidence of manhood.
Other, reactionary schools of thought hope this is the progressive movement consuming itself. That the contradictions or cracks in the coalition will swallow the whole thing.
Personally, I don’t think it’s going away. The future is going to be more like this, not less; so we’ll need to deal with it.
At its most basic level, can’t we have some unisex facilities, with everyone thrown in together under the same roof: women over here, men over there, mix and match in the middle. Including those who aren’t bothered or who want to show solidarity?
I doubt this idea will find favour with young progressives. I feel them bristling.
Years ago, I started a campaign to create a network of cycle routes across London.
‘That’s a terrible idea!’ the young woman from Greenpeace blazed. ‘That’s separating cyclists from other road users. That’s excluding legitimate road users. That’s like telling a woman who’s been raped it’s HER FAULT!’
The players of this game are much better at it than the spectators.
Mind you, 30 years later, there is a network of cycle lanes in London; so maybe there’s hope.