Crises

We have a cost of living crisis in New Zealand.

Basic foodstuffs, housing, fuel etc are getting beyond the reach of the low waged, whose numbers and levels of desperation are increasing. 

We have a deepening political divide.

There is a growing impatience among a wide range of working class people with what is perceived to be an affluent, urban, liberal elite mainly employed in well paid, white collar, government or corporate jobs, who are investing energy and political capital in what are seen by many people as fringe issues. 

We have trade unions seemingly more concerned with being the C21st equivalent of politically correct than addressing the causes of their loss of influence and relevance, and with that, their ability to protect their members’ foundational employment rights. 

We have a growing health crisis in New Zealand. 

If you’re poor in NZ, your chances of dying earlier/unnecessarily are far higher than if you are affluent, and that’s getting worse. 

There are massive waiting lists in public hospitals for treatments of all sorts. Where I live, if you need an urgent ENT appointment it could be several weeks before you get one. If you need a hip replacement, unless you have insurance/can pay privately, you could wait in extreme pain and with limited mobility for years. If you are a menopausal woman and need to see an endocrinologist – even privately – there's no chance. 

Doctors use chemical cudgels and blasts of radiation to treat some cancers wherein the side-effects of the treatment are often worse than the disease, and even getting timely access to that is now a postcode lottery. 

Emergency departments in cash-strapped public hospitals are struggling to deal with those who are being failed by largely privately owned primary health provision.This week, in Auckland, a woman died of a brain haemorrhage because triaging failed in an over-stretched emergency department. A couple of years ago, a man dying from liver failure was dumped at a bus stop by hospital staff in Christchurch.

We are lagging behind the rest of the OECD in lots of areas while doctors in private practice are coining it.

Globally, there is a widespread capitulation to forms of unnecessary medicalisation, eg, to enable a transwoman to experience breast feeding, doctors prescribed a drug which is contraindicated for pregnant and breastfeeding women because of possible adverse effects on the foetus/newborn. 

Clinics in the USA provide so-called sex nullification surgery or other forms of appearance-altering procedures to bring the body into some sort of approximation to a person's sense of self as being of the other sex, of no sex, or of another species.

Lupron, a cancer drug, is used off-label to treat central precocious puberty (CPP) because it delays sexual maturation. Despite evidence of longterm harm from that use, for the past decade or so, it has been used off-label, to suppress puberty in kids who believe they are transgender.

This is part of a much wider and deeper social/political malaise which is building to a crisis point, but the actual numbers of transgender kids affected by the so-called, Dutch Protocol, at the moment is very small.  

Far greater numbers of children are affected by a global explosion in developmental and reproductive disorders and childhood cancers. Alongside a global drop in sperm quality over the past 50 years, there has been an increase in CPP which studies have linked to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, especially in agriculture/horticulture. 

We live in a chemical soup, and immature bodies are more powerfully affected by that than mature ones. To add to this environmental chemical cocktail, powerful drugs, used off-label and with as yet inadequate evidence as to their long term adverse side-effects, is something that needs to be approached with the greatest possible caution. 

No one, and especially children, should be exposed to massively invasive and lifelong medicalisation unless it's absolutely essential. 

Trans-ideologues and activists have played a huge role in persuading/enabling/ forcing medical professionals to reach for these off-label drugs and the scalpel to treat what is, objectively, a suddenly emergent, and rapidly growing epidemic of sex-related unease and anxiety among kids and adolescents, which manifests especially among girls, many of whom have pre-existing co-morbidities. 

The big issue with this for me remains – kids who go on the trans-medical track, way more often than not, stay on it, which means being exposed to:

the as yet unknown long-term adverse effects of puberty suppression, followed by

the forcing of a counter-puberty with synthetic cross-sex hormones, followed by

the very high probability of multiple surgeries to remove pre-pubescent primary reproductive organs, and to refashion genitalia, followed by,

a lifetime of medical treatment (ongoing cross-sex hormones and testing for metabolic organ and cardio-vascular health) and the accompanying state and/or corporate surveillance. 

The well-documented adverse effects on sexual pleasure aside, because immature gonads will not produce viable gametes, most of these kids will be rendered sterile.

That’s a massive price tag which MAY be reasonable in some instances but there are some spectacular twists and leaps in logic and ethics needed to justify in all cases.

It's Just A Joke

How a person handles great power and influence is the greatest test of their character.

Humour in a profoundly stratified world is seldom politically neutral. 

Humour which relies on taking the piss out of any given demographic, is never politically neutral.

Humour can be a powerful weapon in defence of the powerless; it can also be used to strengthen power – directly and indirectly.

Rickey Gervais’ trademark is pushing the boundaries of acceptability – taking “edginess” to the extreme.

He uses his humour as a weapon, and he uses his working class background to justify a style of humour that is essentially just a laddish, “taking the piss”. 

He mocks religion but he’s also capable of being mawkishly sentimental. 

Although he's mildly self-deprecating, he never takes the piss out of himself to the same degree as he does others, ie he hurls his barbs at pretty much everyone other than himself. 

I suspect he has always used his sharp wit as a defence. People back off because there’s nowhere he won’t go – nothing he won’t say, no weakness he won’t exploit. 

His humour is an extension of the adolescent style of humour which gave rise to:  “Mummy, mummy, why do I keep going around in circles? Shut up or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.”  

Or the legion of Biafran jokes back in the day which made me cringe long before PCness made people stop and question the role that sort of “humour“ can and does play in diminishing social problems, and/or reducing others’ humanity.

We ALL have things we can’t find funny and which we may actually find profoundly hurtful or offensive – jokes about burying a baby being a case in point.  

In a world that remains homophobic and in which we know the far right is making big strides, how defensible is the “risk” Gervais took with the crass and unfunny AIDs joke? 

Or the way he mocked gender identity which totally relied on laddish “cock” jokes. 

This is not a sophisticated defence of women’s sex-based rights, it’s a piss take of men who identify as women. 

I also ask - why now? 

Why did Gervais back off when the TRAs challenged him a couple of years ago, but suddenly he’s emboldened? 

Why is Netflix suddenly enabling it?

Why is Bill Maher suddenly on the anti-genderist bandwagon? Ditto Chappelle?

A black man finds a cache of deeply offensive material in an all-male and white, uniformed workplace where he’s covering a vacancy. He reports it.  It includes such things as a picture of a starving black child with the caption “Greedy little wog bastard.” A picture of an elderly black victim of a gang rape captioned, “Be gentle with me, boys”. A pamphlet from a rest home captioned, “Piss-ridden old hag” and “Your cunt smells like rancid shit”. And loads more.

How far are some of Gervais’ “jokes” from those men’s ideas of what was funny?

I get dark humour; I understand it can be a way of coping with hard, dangerous, and shitty lives, and it can also serve to forge bonds. 

But when you are also living a hard, dangerous, and shitty life, maybe one that’s objectively worse because you are black, a woman, old, gay, or disabled, and you are the target of that sort of humour, or when the bonds being forged are ones which exclude you, even harm you, it’s not funny. 

To then be told to lighten up or be told it’s his right to be offensive – can we blame people for being angry?

I find Gervais’ humour often to be so laddish, as a woman, I don’t relate to it. I don’t feel Gervais is setting out to be an ally to women; if he was he’d have done what Graham Linehan did and put his career on the line at the off.

Did the group of men who wrote that vile shit referred to above, and who all thought it was funny, have the right to do so?

How about the senior officers who minimised it by saying they’d “seen worse on the walls of rugby club locker rooms”? Did they have a right to their opinion? 

Not one of those men were bothered by how that black officer felt, or were concerned by the fact that the workplace happened to be a stone’s throw from where a black lad was beaten to death by racist thugs whose crime was covered up by a racist police force, or that those men were supposed to be public servants, protecting the very people they were busy taking the piss out of.

Humour can be a scalpel – in the right hands it can delicately peel away layers of hypocrisy and bland acceptance to reveal essential truths; at the other extreme, it can be a cudgel used to coerce or to bludgeon selected others into silence and submission.

Roe v Wade

I don't know enough about the arcane US politico-legal system to speak with real authority but it seems to me that if the right of women to bodily autonomy gets kicked back to state legislatures to determine, those states in which ultra-conservatives hold political and economic sway will carry on enacting laws that are harmful to women, and repealing ones that protect women, such as the criminalisation of spousal rape. (1)

And they will not stop there; they will also roll back minority rights which are protected by Supreme Court judgements.

Roe v Wade was a wedge which forced open a door the US ultra-cons want to remain closed or even to have bricked up.

It's a door that had led to changes in laws and social norms that undermine ideas and institutions which ultra-cons see as the very bastions of the American way of life. 

Following hard on the heels of the shock to the ultra-con psyche, of the anti-racist and civil rights' movement, women's and gay and lesbian rights had them reeling – abortion, decriminalisation of homosexuality, criminalisation of spousal rape, equal employment opportunity, same sex marriage, trans rights and latterly, the morphing of that into the Hydra of queer rights.

There's a powerful tension between social and political conservatism and what may be termed, social and political transgressivism. 

In a healthy society a balance is maintained between the extremes of social conservatism and social transgressivism – imagine it as a spring that is calibrated to hold the extremes in tension. 

If one extreme starts to pull too far or too fast, social forces which would usually remain gathered around the centre may move towards the other extreme to counter it. If enough of them move, the rebound effect can be extreme and sudden.

It is gender identity, with its core of hyper-individualism and its politically vague and theoretically tenuous conflation of sex and gender that led irrevocably to gender self-identification, which has proved to be the step too far for many. (2)

This step too far is not just for ultra-cons but for a rising number of women from across the political spectrum who have moved towards the ultra-con side, many of them on this single issue. 

Also moving are a load of opportunists and coat-tailers who see a political advantage in forcing a political and legal rebound.

That the first federal level move the US ultra-cons are making is an attack on women’s reproductive autonomy is an irony which seems to escape far too many.

Women, and especially left-leaning women and lesbians who have liked arms with the right on the gender identity question need to know that a political and legal rebound will adversely impact on them. 

Notes:

1) Spousal rape only became a crime in all states in the late 1990s and is still treated differentially in some states.

2) Ironically, post-modernism which has served the Neo-liberal project well with its undermining of Marxism, its emphasis on the individual, its essential idealism ... seems to have carried the seeds of its own destruction. 

 

On global corporate capitalism and its helpmates

The ruling class has always been adept at exploiting divisions – be that religious or political sectarianism or nationalism. It has also learned how very effective ideological controls can be, allowing it to keep more overtly coercive measures in reserve, or targeting them at specific groups or countries. 

For example, dipping into the old well of Russophobia was useful in fomenting anti-communism, and is useful now in whipping up a fever for war against Russia even among many of those who would usually call for détente.

Several inter-linking phenomena characterise what we call the neo-liberal era in which we have seen a massive surge in the power and reach of global corporate capitalism. 

All these phenomena were aimed at cementing the power of the global elites and  include:

declaring the “end of history” and of class-based political theories, heralding increasing political fragmentation on the left, and consolidation of the power of elites;

use of powerful global financial institutions coercively to enable the predacious stripping of public assets, and increasing global corporate profits by driving down pay and conditions, eg. the IMF's insistence on denationalisation, and imposition of “austerity measures”; 

the destruction or neutering of working class collectives which were not just important for wresting concessions out of capitalism and its compliant states, but in creating and transmitting alternative narratives to those of the capitalist hegemons;

the crushing by force of some liberation movements, and the co-option and corruption of others, (eg. the rise to dominance of corporate or choice feminism after a blitzkreig of opposition to socialist and radical women’s liberation);

the promotion of hyper-individualism which deemed the Individual Person to be paramount, and not just the Individual as a Body but the Individual as an Identity; 

expanding the ever useful cult of celebrity beyond Royalty, Iconic Heroic Figures and Movie / Sports Stars into the virtual world of Those Who Are Famous For Being Famous (and almost always, Fatuous).

 

All of the above required the expansion of the strata of enablers –  the dense insulating layer of a technocratic-professional-managerial class.

Enablers have always existed but GCC has consolidated and expanded them into a dense insulating mass of a well remunerated, high status technocratic-managerial-professional class whose stake in the status quo is as deep as the controllers/owners of global corporate capitalism themselves.

Lower layers aspire to be part of that stratum and/or are beholden to it by virtue of being dependent on its spending power. More importantly perhaps, they are fearful of falling into the stratum below – the huge and increasing mass of the indigent which increasingly includes the working poor, those whose work doesn't cover or barely covers the costs of their subsistence.

Anything which threatens global corporate capitalism also threatens both its enablers, and all those others who have bought into the superficiality, short-termism and egocentrism of its various ideologies and their fragmenting, diversionary intent.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in relation to the cult of individualism and its partner in crime, identity politics.

The digital era has not just facilitated the explosion of global corporate capitalism, especially finance capitalism, it has granted GCC and its compliant states unprecedented control, including over information.

Faced with the subversive potential of the internet and social media, one countering strategy has been the enabling of a host of large-scale and miniature Influencers, each peddling their monetised aspirational and individualising messages, and gathering unto themselves, a virtual congregation.

Humans are profoundly and instinctively social. We clump – only damaged humans are extreme isolates – but we did not evolve in massive congregations, like wildebeest, for example. We evolved in small clans and possibly the relatively (in evolutionary terms) recent phenomenon of being forced into vast physical (and latterly, virtual) populations is stressful, so smaller scale convocations are comforting. They fulfil the need to belong, and they also allow the person to feel they are more than just a cog in a vast impersonal machine.

In a world in which the notion of the Individual has become not just reified but heavily commodified, and in which people are constantly exhorted to be “the Best Possible Version of Your Self” – in order to stand out from the teeming on-line masses as an Individual, you must have not just have (or pretend to have) the Best Possible physical form, you also need a Special Identity. 

The rush of young people to embrace the ever-expanding notion of a bespoke gender identity may on one level be seen as just another sub-cultural phenomenon. 

However, its core attachment to the notion of a soul-like, immutable gender essence housed in a mutable body – which can or even must be tailored to match the gender essence as far as various forms of surgical, chemical, prosthetic body modification will allow – takes it into the realms of a quasi-religious movement.

Unlike most youth sub-cultures, in which style, language, intra-group mores etc serve to signal a separation from, and rejection of outsiders, gender essence adherents want to impose their beliefs and sub-cultural attachments on others – ALL others. 

It has become like a proselytising cult and at the moment it is being actively embraced and promoted by a host of powerful institutions – giant corporations, governments, NGOs, trade unions, voluntary organisations, lobby groups, media –  hardly a mainstream voice is raised to question any of it. 

The questioning voices initially were socialist and radical feminists who dared to point out that the emperor’s dangly bits were on full display. For their principled stance they have been consigned – most viciously and vociferously by the neo-liberal left – to the realms of not just social conservatism or the moderate right, but to literal Nazism. 

The hyperbole or extremism implicit in the use of that inaccurate and offensive label owes a lot to the proselytising nature of the cult with its "pick a side" rhetoric that is worthy of George Bush in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.

Coat-tailing those gender critical feminists are rising numbers of right wing or socially conservative institutions and individual right-wingers who have realised this is a useful weapon to advance their own political and economic game plan – their start point being to label the gender essentialists as being on the far-left. 

That an essentially individualist and individualising ideology which seldom comes close to questioning, let alone posing a threat to the status quo should be deemed to be far-left is a measure of how far right politics has slid in the past half century. It's possibly also a measure of how incredibly dumb some right wing commentators are, and/or how dumb they think their audience is.

Sadly, some gender critical feminists, including some who ought to know better, think they can hunt with a predatory beast and not at some point become its prey du jour but that's a theme for another day.

The resulting inchoate mess has been aided by the failure of the old Red Left to pull its collective head out of its 20^th century schisms, and work to re-establish a broad alliance to take back some ideological and political control – to at least regain a power balance, before we’re all toast.

 

 

 

 

Tick tick tick

I had hoped to steer clear of this most vexing and vexatious of topics.Time will tell how successful my new year's resolution to widen my focus will be but in the meantime, needs must when the pronouns drive.

I wrote something in response to one of the now ubiquitous Tik Tok videos posted by young, mainly white, middle class people who have adopted various permutations of transgender identity to position themselves on the oppression hierarchy. This particular example took youthful self absorption right up to the level of full-blown narcissism.

"I am stitching this video to give further clarification –  again – because cis people keep asking stupid questions –again – I’m fed up with it I go by any and all pronouns – this includes neo pronouns I’m non binary not gender fluid – my preferred pronouns are they/them however I go by any or all pronouns because I know if I go by they/them I will face misgendering and I don’t have the mental energy for that so if I go by any or all pronouns people can’t deliberately misgender me. If I have told someone I am non binary and they refuse to use any pronouns other than she/her I will get a little bit annoyed..." 

In response to those who think this is something the grown ups have to accommodate, I wrote elsewhere: 

Youth subcultures are often alien and inexplicable to older people - that's the whole point of them. This current non-binary phenomenon is a youth sub culture, a form of social contagion fuelled by social media and US-style hyper individualist, aspirational culture. 

The tyranny of neo-liberalism's cult of the individual dictates you must BE and you must MARKET the best possible and most distinctive version of yourself. But humans instinctively ‘clump’ so young people want to be seen as different but not in total isolation – hence the proliferation of sub-sub cultures. And subcultures always develop their own forms of language and subcultural signifiers –  a facility with which signals belonging to the sub group or sub-sub group – or in the case of gender identity, sub to the point of literal absurdity.  

Usually subcultures don't want outsiders to use their language or adopt their style – let alone impose any of it on others – it defeats the purpose. 

To me, there’s a world of difference between the valid demands of people around use of language which serves to enable/strengthen forms of legal discrimination and bigotry, and the demand for others to use individually or small group tailored third person pronouns. What this young person is doing is play acting oppression – appropriating the real struggles of people with verifiable disadvantages arising from legal discrimination and wider/deeper forms of oppression and economic exploitation. 

This is a phenomenon largely of the anglophone world for the simple reason that in some languages, gendered pronouns are the least complicated part of a gendered language. If these young people did not speak a language which has only gendered third person singular pronouns, they would be trying to change the way the entire language signals contrasts of person, sex, number, time, place etc. And of course these demands for a bespoke set of third person pronouns are accompanied by other, wider, changes to the use of language which challenge some very deep rooted beliefs which run across class, race, sex, age etc.  

What this results in is a loss of focus on the fact that at the centre of this burgeoning forest of bespoke gender identities,  always was, is, and probably will remain, a group of people for whom this is not remotely a style choice or a sub-cultural attachment of the moment, but a real, crippling sense of alienation – a disconnection between the objective, material body, and the subjective sense of self.   

It’s like if being disabled became ‘cool’ and something to aspire to being, and a load of people started claiming that being a bit myopic was on a “spectrum of visual disabilities” all of which have equal validity.  

Bottom line for me is – neo-liberal identity politics in general, and gender identity politics in particular, are part of a stage managed process of ideologically breaking down all forms of mass resistance to economic power.  If that makes me an old school economic determinist - then so be it. 

The issue of bespoke pronouns is actually a smokescreen for far more foundational political shifts. Just as we should all be alert to what is actually going on in the economic and political backrooms around the covid pandemic, we should be keeping a very close eye on who really benefits from the divisive power of gender identity ideology.

Take the question of who can be a mother or a father. 

Can those terms really be a matter of a self determined identification into a bespoke gender identity?

Is calling a man who is married to another man, a "husband", the same as calling a biologically female person – the sex which gestates new life –  a child's father because that person identifies as male?

Does a penis become a differently structured vulva/clitoris, and testicles, external ovaries, if the person they are part of identities as having a female gender identity?

Have we collapsed and lost sight of the central distinction between biological sex and the ideological wrapping of gender as a set of socially constructed or conditioned roles, attributes etc?

And by doing so and by elevating gender identity in this way, have we done any favours to those who are legally discriminated against, oppressed, and/or hyper-exploited economically on the basis of their social class, their biological sex, their ethnicity or culture?

The start point for all this surely is what is gender and what is a gender identity? The simplest take on this is also the most profound – there would be no such thing as gender without the foundation of dimorphic sex. 

A deformed and deforming ideology

It's good to see Marxist feminist theory on social media fighting back against neo-liberal leftism and feminism.

What we need also are Marxist-informed examinations of the roles that gender, as a deformed and deforming ideology, has played, and still plays in the socialisation of women and men into rigid sex roles which both embody and perpetuate relations of male domination and female subordination.

The self centred posturing of a tiny minority of privileged people inside the imperial bubble is not going to change that. In truth, it does the opposite by serving to divert possible opposition, and to distract attention away from the undeniable truth – that outside the well-padded buffer zones, the world still moves to older, and often more oppressive and exploitative rhythms.

Unless we expose the role that individualising ideological constructions are playing in the context of the rampant corporate capitalism which dominates the world economically, and which almost completely controls all discourse – we will never get to grips with either the origins, or the extant realities of the oppression of women, and the economic exploitation of female productive and reproductive capacities.

Neo-liberalism drives forms of extreme individualism that serve to increase the range and severity of alienation, (in both senses of the word), and of nihilism and anomie.

It attacks and undermines all forms of collectivism except where they serve its interests and invariably, any collectives it supports are forced to be in competition with each other.

It appears to build bridges over social divides while actually deepening them, and it has mined the approaches so they can be blown if and when it suits the suits to drive even deeper wedges into any alliances that threaten its hegemony.

It promotes extreme short-termism, and the commodification of literally everything – even intangibles.

It drives insanely high levels of consumerism, promoting a toxic culture that deifies acts of taking and squandering, and denigrates cultures and movements that are based on giving and conserving.

Gender – as an aggregation of culturally-specific patterns of behaviour, beliefs, social rites and rituals is rooted in the foundational reality of species reproduction –which is dimorphic. Because we are not a powerfully instinctually driven species – we don't just learn how to be human, we are also socialised into the ways that our culture arranges the business of reproduction – processes that are both natural and immutable, and intensely social and changeable.

Gender became ideology when the essential complementarity and interconnected-ness of the two parts of the reproductive whole were utilised by a minority of men for their individual or clan (later class) advantage.  

Central to this were moves towards a rigid binary of sex roles, reinforced by religious and political ideologies which cemented ideas about an essential maleness and femaleness.

Limited authority over their females and offspring was tossed like a compensatory bone to men who were also being oppressed and exploited.

The easily observable fact that the bones thrown to men at the bottom of the social heap had usually been so thoroughly gnawed and emptied of marrow they were barely enough to sustain life – was covered over with thick layers of ideology which justified the extremes of both advantage and disadvantage.

The densest layers of that ideology were, and remain, male and class superiority – followed, in the capitalist era, by racial superiority. 

Drilling down to expose the essence of all this always was, and remains the most important project for the left. 

However, instead of building and wielding industrial weight drilling equipment, neoliberal leftists either flit round on the margins waving little archaeological trowels and engaging in localised digs, or they have concluded there is nothing worth drilling for, and appearance is the new reality.

The reason I bang on about gender identity being a powerful tool of neoliberalism is, it spreads a dense layer of obfuscation over arguably the most essential of truths.

The extent to which some women have become alienated from their sexed bodies, reaches the extremes in the idea that being pregnant is to be infected with a parasite. 

This should be as worrying as the wave of what has been termed rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls in the anglophone world which has resulted in large numbers of young women believing they are better off being approximations of men, or creating a place somewhere on the manufactured gender identity spectrum.

These phenomena have a counterpart in the outcomes of trans-humanist re-writes of Cartesian duality – in which severely alienated people come to see the body as a mere vehicle – a flesh suit or meat sack that can, or even must be surgically, chemically or prosthetically altered at the whim of the individual to match whatever sense of self dominates at any given point. Or, just as worryingly, in an ego-fuelled pursuit of some form of digital immortality.

You have to be either a blinkered ideologue, or so mired in misogyny that your world view can't extend beyond the swamp of your own sexism, or just unaware of even very recent history – not to see the pappy hands of some malignantly narcissistic puppet-masters in all this. 

And I used that gendered term advisedly.

Pass the identity parcel

Some musings on a damp Sunday about the identity politics phenomenon and the way it has become a major focus of the left – which these days is defined more by what its various factions are AGAINST than a broad consensus on what they are all FOR. And who does that benefit?

The most recent and polarising wing of identity politics is our pushy friend, gender identity. Its supporters claim it is the quintessence of progressivism while its detractors claim it is the greatest threat to what they hold dear – from women's sex-based rights and science, to conservative religious beliefs about the heteronormative nuclear family.

I get the sense that gender identity is a practical joker's version of "pass the parcel". As the glossy gift-wrappings are removed, the parcel will get smaller and smaller until what is revealed is a tiny box containing the message, "The joke's on you, suckers."

Why has so much of what passes for the left immersed itself in what must surely be seen as a neoliberal sponsored and promoted theory and praxis which is essentially accommodative, individualist and individualising, and based on the existence of a wholly subjective and thus empirically unverifiable, concept?

Who benefits from the reifying of a bespoke, individualist and individualising sense of a gendered identity, and privileging that over the category of biological sex, a material and collective reality which underpins the millennia-old and still extant oppression of women?

How progressive is the idea of an authentic self, conceptualised as an immutable gendered essence, which inhabits a mutable, inauthentic (ie wrongly sexed) body? (Or in the parlance of the weirdly alienated – flesh suit or meat sack.)

How progressive is it to ignore the fact that states which happily accommodate and promote individualist gender identity demands also serve economic and political interests which have proven themselves to be inimical to traditional forms of collectivism?

Who can take the following exchange seriously, except as a reason to get angry about transactivist airheads giving smug right-wingers an open goal?

TA: Trans women are women.

RW: Okay, so what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman.

RW: What is it they are identifying with?

TA: A woman.

RW: But what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman....

And so on, ad absurdum, until most of the progressive forces in our increasingly unstable world have disappeared up their own rear ends, or died of embarrassment.

How is it that otherwise intelligent and aware people are happy to stake their political and academic reputations on such a rickety framework of circular definitions, lazy conflations and stark contradictions? 

It's a puzzle.

Well, no, it's not a puzzle at all. There's no doubt in my mind that the astonishingly rapid move from valid and reasonable demands for equality and dignity from people who suffer forms of psychological distress, to the current epidemic of narcissistic toy-tossing and anomie, has been stage managed, to some degree at least.

It also acts as a salve to the consciences of those liberals who either capitulated to, or colluded with the swingeing attacks on working class collectives and the cruel austerity measures that followed – especially those who picked up their middle-class credentials and sprinted for a place in the political and coordinator classes.

It allows lefties who were outflanked and outmanoeuvred by neoliberalism to feel there is something at least on which they can claim a win. 

And of course it's an opportunity for closet misogynists to indulge in a bit of payback to feminists for actual or imagined slights.

Fact is, it's a mammoth con and the sooner that sodding parcel is finally unwrapped, the better.