Identity Politics
I grew up in a white Christian melieu. There were men and women who never doubted their identity and normal white people and everyone else. And Santa Claus brought the toys that magically appeared under the tree during christmas eve when I was asleep.
As I grew older my school mates taught me to never wear green and yellow at once - that was a flag that I was 'a queer'. I didn't know what a queer meant and didn't ask. I didn't want to wear green and yellow anyway.
I guess I've been a leftist since as early as I can remember such stuff. I remember somebody saying scathingly that communists said "To each according to need. From each according to ability" as if it was an absurd idea. It always seemed like a great idea to me.
For me, left wing thinking revolved around the economics of providing a good living for everyone. Left wing people also were concerned with racism. We gave lip service to feminists. And I remember the time when feminists said - look guys - we need a seat at the table too. A radical idea! Who would get the coffee ready?
I moved into the counterculture. The counterculture was much like SL in a way. It was pretty permissive of all sorts of quirks in appearance and behaviour. We identified as hippies but hippies came in a huge variety of sizes and colors.
Around that time identity politics became a mainstream issue for the left. I very much sympathize with the movement to not discriminate against anyone and give everyone an equal opportunity. But what is equal opportunity for people who have very different education and experience because of race or gender?
The answer was affirmative action now morphed into DEI. The idea is to correct past discrimination with present discrimination. It's an idea that makes sense on the level of social engineering (if it works) but also will still leave a lot of people feeling that they've been screwed because of their race or gender.
By the time I was in my 20s I was comfortable with 4 genders - male, female, gay male, and gay female. We could all be comfortable with that because in large part sexual matters were private. Trudeau once famously said that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation" capturing the zeitgeist of the time.
I first heard of gender dysphoria 40 years ago. I read of a kid in Manitoba (iirc) who transed from boy to girl. The report was positive. I've since learned that it's a syndrome that affects .6% of the population - not common - but still a lot of people in a population of 350million (about 2million people).
The idea of gender dysphoria has a profound misfit with gender based sports. Lots of people present trans girls in sports as boys competing with girls. I don't have a solution to that sort of issue.
But - returning to my leftist roots - is gender dysphoria the main problem we need to be solving now?
For me, the fundamental problem with identity politics is that it is divisive - the more we look the more identities fracture into subidentities and then subsubidentities and so on. We need to find a way to the common good.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.