The politics of privilege
Leya makes a point I wish people would make more often, and much louder.
See, identities are so much more fun than wages and benefits and hours. So much more sexy, so much more ersatz-clever, so much more about dressing up and haircuts.
Leya goes on:
It is a politics of privilege. It is wholly lacking any reality based analysis re changes that would make a difference to the lives of those facing real hardships & injustices.
The only structural changes arising from woke politics is that institutions can ignore addressing the hard issues in practical & informed ways, & instead perform the right language & forms of signalling & pretend this is making progress.
It is how we are in the position where generally working class people are ignored as marginalised by the very bodies & decision makers who should be working to lessen & address that marginalisation, despite working class people being the most economically & politically marginalised class of people.
This is why I fight the woke takeover of our governments & institutions. It offers no challenge to actual material oppression, patriarchy, or neoliberalism. And @janeclarejones points out, it is so, very American.
It is. We’ve been crap at the labor part and the class part and the genuine, class- and money-based inequality part for generations.
I think a lot of the worked-up unconvincing fake-seeming fervor around the trans thing has to do with envy of the real lefty politics of all those generations ago. Then again I also think it’s to do with our fundamental frivolity and self-obsession. We should harness angry Twitter to talk about that for a few years instead of Who Is the Transphobe of the Week This Time Lulubelle?
I’ve been reading Terry Eagleton’s “Why Marx Was Right” and came across this early in the book. Writing about how Marxism is still relevant to modern post-industrial societies, Eagleton describes Marxism as having an end goal, not being a forever project.
I think that a study of ideologues and ideologies over time reveals that those who have become convinced that they and they alone are in posession of THE TRUTH consider themselves duty bound not just to go forth and preach it to the world, but to never stop doing so until the whole world is converted.
So counselling all and sundry to get in touch with their inner trans would be a logical next step. Before the movement repeats the history of religion and divides into a schemozzle of squabbling sects. (NB: It may have done so already.)
I suspect the end goal of TRAs is to be a lifelong project of being special and being noticed. If they were given everything they wanted tomorrow, they would want (make that need, to the point of possible suicide) more. And then more. And more. Narcissism is a goal that cannot be fulfilled enough; it must constantly be fed. Being out of the spotlight, burning their “Death to TERFs posters”, taking up the long-neglected cello, and talking about more interesting things than gender identity is not what they want. They want to be different than the rest of us, the boring rest of us who are too busy to go around identifying as things, and are just living our life without the world as a whole taking much notice of us. They are not content to be who they are; they must be something grand, great, and celebrated.
I could be wrong, of course.
conversely, “identity politics” is a code used to ignore the specific concerns of the victims of racism, sexism, etc, It’s the Left’s “I don’t see colour”
I was going to post a thread by Lara Adams-Miller, but the thread is now gone…but fortunately Ophelia posted about it a while back, just to refresh our memories.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2019/more-like-an-addiction-than-an-orientation-or-identity/
To some degree, the rank and file TRAs are just stooges, as far as long-term goals are concerned. We’ve all noticed that, politically, transgenderism has nothing to do with feminism, and nothing to do with gay rights. Its larger project is transhumanism: every baby born in a machine, every child on puberty blockers, every elective surgery (and its reversal) necessary for the chosen identity of the transhuman.
So the libfem “feminism is about equality for everyone” is going to be a big disappointment to them.
Would the dedicated transhumanists be a smaller, seperate group from the AGPs? Or is there overlap? The goals of the former seem so fantastical, otherworldly and science-fictiony compared to the latter’s desire for getting their rocks off while wearing a dress. The timescales for their respective end goals and gratification seem so disparate. Maybe there’s a strategy that could drive a wedge between these two “wings” of the movement, assuming they are two discrete-ish groups with little to no overlap?
Bruce, if the rank-and-file support for the Republican party can’t ever wake up to the fact that they do worse every time they elect a Republican, then the rank-and-file TIMs will never wake up to the fact that they are medical cannon fodder.
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/martine-rothblatt-a-founding-father-of-the-transgender-empire/
Once the actual doctors like Stephen Levine were left behind by the political goals of the trans movement, WPATH was taken over by idealistic oligarchs like Martine Rothblatt.
But you are not.
Although I would phrase it differently by saying there’s no endgame. Do vampires stop to worry that when everyone has been vampired there’ll be nobody left to eat? There’s no plan. It’s the slow bleeding away of other people’s* rights and dignity that’s important. I see it every day. They bit me but fortunately I haven’t been vampired. They’ve been latsoted.
* Preferably those of women, but homosexuals will do in a pinch.