In reply to no one in particular but, I wonder how much of this debate - the original debate about the perameters of being female (or male), who polices it, what follows from it - would simply disappear if society was radically reordered?* The reason I ask that naïve question is not so much a banal interjection, more to get into an equally obvious area: how should radicals approach difficult issues, in ways that build solidarity that connect struggles and seek to avoid such shitstorms as this? For me it's about class and prefigurative politics, along with a bit of common decency. Another and perhaps better way of putting this would be to ask 'what would this debate look like in the absence of identity politics'?
* The answer to that is of course that complex issues of identity - personal and political - never actually disappear, but have the potential to become something less fucked up and zero sum - something that reconfigures human diversity and complexity into something actually positive.
I’m not convinced that this debate would look like anything in particular in the absence of identity politics. I’m firmly of the opinion that people’s entire make-up — identity, assumptions about social ordering, where they look politically for answers, behaviours, adoption of roles, you name it — is firmly rooted in the context of the society they exist in. And these things are all interrelated. I’ve spoken at length in the past about the transition from industrialism to consumerism and what that implies for identity construction, political priorities and dominant narratives, and this is an example of social context both making and being made by the people in it.
I think what we’re experiencing at the moment across all of mainstream society is the continued emphasis of the individual over the collective, the commodification of the self into the Marketing Character and the creation of bespoke identities stitched together from pieces of what were previously parts of coherent narratives. It’s both caused by and symptomatic of broader trends — generation rent, infantilisation, disintegration of social structures, changing work patterns, social media, the “global village”, you name it.
I am careful to describe all this as a complex web of self-reinforcing (and sometimes self-antagonistic) forces both internal and external rather than simple cause and effect. It’s not just that people experience a context and therefore become a particular character. People make and remake themselves in the circumstances they’d find themselves in and, in doing so, they make and remake society, and vice versa. That is our defining evolutionary characteristic — extraordinary brain plasticity, which makes us able to adapt to whatever environment (physical or social) we find ourselves in. We aren’t just born a particular way and then cope as best we can with the environment we are in. We are literally chemically and physically made (both in terms of brain structure and epigenetically) by the environment, and we also act to reform our environment.
Looking at this specific debate, one question has been why there is such an increase in transgenderism. I think you have to look at this trend as part of its wider social context. From that point I can only speculate but, at the very least, I am not surprised in a commodified, consumerised world that there would be an increase in people whose core identity contains facets that place them outside of traditional narratives of how to be.
That’s why, returning to your question, I don’t think this debate would exist without also having it in the context of identity politics. Identity politics is part and parcel of the same social context as the thing it is being applied to.
