While tangential to the above, the concept of Allies has me scratching my head. These seem to be people who are 'outside' of the victimized 'group' but keen to be seen as in sympathy with them. The obvious corollary seems to be that if you can't demonstrate your Ally credentials then you must be an Enemy.
Certainly the rhetoric generated in response to *any* dissent from Woke ideology reinforces mutual antagonism and reinforces the silos.
Ugh, I shudder to think on when I spent insane amounts of time trying to "learn to be a good ally." And all the times someone would accuse me of not being a good ally and then propose ways to be a better ally, such as directly giving them money or specifically "platforming" a particular view or writer. I also had several activists attempt to co-erce me to leave the directorship (monthly salary: 400 US dollars) of the publishing organization I co-founded and give it to someone they chose in order to be a "good" ally. And I recall during a very large social media crusade against me that the only way to be a true ally was to accept all the criticisms, admit I was a shitty person, and shut up for awhile. My favorite statement from that time was when I was told the only way to prove I was a good ally was to stop writing altogether.
Oof, sorry to vent. Lots of memories there.
But yes, absolutely. "Ally" is a fascinating and really absurd concept that gets used to coerce people into penance for their skin color or genitals, while also being used by grifters to position themselves as superheroes.
I gave up on the term "ally" not long after I saw it overused in social media--which didn't take long.
My tarot reader / natal astrology chart interpreter and I had an interesting talk about "ally." She's black American, although she has a German grandmother--which is typical of many Americans, including black Americans (and makes the whole transracial issue even more complicated). Nevertheless, she pointed out that people should be accomplices, not allies.
Allies ended up being people who wanted to be publicly nice. Hey, we don't want to burn gayfolk at the stake today. We're allies!
Bless you for writing this! I can't wait to read the book and am so grateful someone is tackling this from an academic-philosophical position too. As one of the cancelled, still trying to get on my feet 5 years after my career and reputation were destroyed for defending complexity in the underground performance art world-- my complaint was always-- IS YOUR VIEW OF THE WORLD ACTUALLY MAKING IT BETTER? And the answer is no. We've been living under the dominant of Wokeness for many years and it still sucks.
We let all of this happen because people are too afraid to wear their back bones anymore because they will be ripped out by the mob. If you wear Woke glasses to look at the world, all you'll see is the problem of race and gender that you claim to be trying to solve. If you really want change, it doesn't work that way. This is the same as wearing "shit-colored" glasses-- all you'll be able to see is shit. This is a spiritual sickness to my mind. It's a lack of faith in our life purpose and our perfectly imperfect wholeness as human beings.
My solution is a re-enchantment project. If you want to use your manifestation powers to make a better world, you can't do it with shit-colored glasses on. Every spiritual tradition is right on this front-- Love is the only way. Not fuzzy-wuzzy new age love. Real LOVE is fierce and doesn't suffer fools. It requires the strong among us to uphold integrity and insist on a world held together with what is more true.
One thing to note, while I do address the academic and philosophical arguments influencing Woke Ideology, I am myself not an academic nor do I have any university degrees.
I find this to be an important fact, specifically because the academic language and theory occupies a kind of sacred narrative space for many. Really the only reason it is able to hold this power is that the language (jargon) employed is highly obfuscating. The long essay I quote in this piece from the Boston Review could easily have been written in a fifth of the amount of words they used. Of course, that also would have shown up the contradictions they were skirting around much more clearly, which is why they had to write it all out so obtusely.
That doesn't bother me! It seems more effective to rebutt the nonsense in the vernacular in which it is spoken. I applaud your efforts! I do not speak this language very well...I believe in magic and that seeps in and discredits me in those arguments...Wokeness can only happen within a materialist world view, I believe.
Personally, I think garden variety ssxism is behind the acxeptance of transgenderism and the denial of transracialism. The left has long maintained a double standard on women's rights. For example, feminists are still expected to apologize for the racism of suffragettes a century or more ago. Yet the sexism of organizations like the Black Panthers is dismissed as a "product of the times". There is a strong a growing tendency within the left to deny or trivialize women's oppression. Thus we see claims that racism is incomparably worse than sexism- despite the fact that far fewer men of color are being routinely raped and beaten in their own homes than even white women. The basic premise of woke ideology is not that gender is a immutable part of the soul that must be recognized while race is an immutable part of society that can't be trascended but that women's oppression is imaginary and thus can be pretended to.
I'm sure some find that offensive, so explanation is in order. Let's take me and my brother. He was given every opportunity and (literally) bailed out of every mishap. My family was torn apart to prevent him from facing the consequences of his actions. Meanwhile he physically abused me and I never recieved any care for my autism. Instead, I was moved from school to school often in midyear to accomodate his drama. He could decide to be trans tomorrow but he would never face the oppression that *girls* face in society. He might experience transphobia but would never experience the entire life- conditioning of being born female which affect everything from how much a mother holds her baby (boys are held more on average) to the conditioning to be pretty and stupid. A transwoman who passes can experience sexism at the moment but cannot experience the lifetime impact of sexism from an early age. And my inclination is to view transphobia as a more significant factor than sexism in the mistreatment of transwomen. Unless they pass, they are usually treated poorly by those who do not view them as women, so sexism is not really coming in to play there.
The left likes to imagine that women are privileged whiners whose concerns are not real. One has only to look at the vitriol directed at these supposed "white women feminists" who presumably run white society in a woke twist on the patriarchal claim that women secretly hold all the real power.
Intergenerational trauma among women does exist. Women have been raped, tortured, burned alive, killed, and systemically denied equal inheritance or education to males. This pattern is forced upon female children from birth. The fact that a woman's male childen are exempt from this oppression is not evidence of it's non-existence. Unless we suppose that only the experiences of male children matter, of course. The entire argument is based on the invisibility or irrelevance of the experiences of female children. But ciswomen don't spring fully formed from some raw material of humanity as a transwoman does. Ciswomen carry the baggage of generations of unfair treatment of female children. There are places and families which treat female children well. Just as there are rich Black people. Either way, the member of an oppressed caste, no matter how privileged their position still has to deal with soul-crushing societal pressure to submit and conform to stereotyoes of their caste
Woke ideology presents (especially white) women's issues are being high on Maslow's heirarchy of needs or even frivilous in comparison to issues of race which are percieved as seruous issues. Of course, the statistics on the physical abuse of females and the prevalence of poverty among women and the epidemic of poor body image that can often turn self-destructive show this view to be simple ignorance of women's conditions. But sexism has long relied on trivializing women's oppression or presenting women as having some mystical undefined sexual power to deflect feminism
"garden variety ssxism is behind the acxeptance of transgenderism and the denial of transracialism".
Yes! I completely agree.
I view the trans movement as the revenge of the partriarchy: you women thought you had carved out safe spaces and places and events for yourselves, but guess what??? We men are now women too! We can barge into your spaces and places and compete and win and take the prizes in your sports events!!!
Note that per the US Equality Act (proposed legislation backed by all Democrats), any man can declare hinself to be a woman for any period of time, long or short, and must be treated legally as a woman during that time.
That there is so little pushback to this is both astonishing and disheartening, though there are some nascent steps in this direction:
Though I'm a bit agnostic on the existence of an overarching Patriarchy that manifests itself in all matters of sexism (mostly because this is the same model used by Woke Anti-Racists for white supremacy, or by trans ideologues for transphobia), I absolutely believe there are historical processes which continuously put burdens on women and excuse assaults against them and these processes are directed exclusive towards women.
One concern that I've heard around trans identity and women which I think really deserves some serious attention is sudden increase in younger women identifying as trans men and seeking surgical interventions as young as 13. This absolutely seems to point to an established pattern of limiting what kinds of expressions women are allowed to have, and if you do not fit into those expressions you must therefore not be 'really' a woman. In such a position, it seems pretty obvious why a young female who doesn't conform to this limited role would then believe the only way to be a whole and integrated person is to become a man.
At the same time, I absolutely think that there are some people who really do best living out another gender. I just really suspect, as with many of the trans people labeled 'truscum' by other trans people, that this is a much rarer occurrence than the current Woke framework would have us believe.
I would tend to agree with you that there are a couple of definitions of patriarchy floating around that get swapped out for convenience all the time. I would tend to define patriarchy in the way Gerda Lerner did- as a system that has developed within society built by men and women which values men over women and socializes girls into a marginalized role. Then there is the nebulous Patriarchy which is assumed to interpenetrate each man (but in the view of radical feminists, only women who don't share their disdain for men). I have a certain level of exasperation with what I see as wishful thinking that sexism can be simplified to women vs men or masculinity vs femininity. A side note here is how some radical feminist view sexism from women as not being their responsible in a "Patriarchy [the Devil] made me do it" kind of argument. Which to my mind infantilizes women we disagree with.
But as far as the ROGD, I'm just glad I'm old enough that when I was a teen it wasn't a thing. I've always been quite masculine and for a time considered whether I was trans. I went through years of suicidal depression where I hated myself. Trans logic seemed to offer an explanation for my self-hatred and misery in light of my lack of connection to femininity. I never pursued transition because it would have destroyed my family. Come to find out, I have celiac disease. I can turn that self-hatred on and off based on whether or not I accidently eat a bit of food cross-contaminated with wheat. Men generally are less affected by the mental health aspects of my condition. It is likely that if I had transitioned I would have felt better on testosterone supplements- right up until untreated celiac took me right into type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis like my grandfather. So I have personal reason to be very wary of the push to medicalize transgender people without turning over all the other rocks first. Telling depressed and potentially self-harming people that sometimes transitioning helps could lead the desperate to talk themselves into being trans in ways they can regret later.
Thank you, Rhyd, for this discussion. I particularly appreciated your citing Adolph Reed, Jr., whose analysis gave me refuge during the summer of riots in 2020 in the US, when a millionaire relative of mine (cis white female) was telling me I needed to read Robin D'Angelo and Ibram Kendi (although she knew I had lived 5 years in a marriage to a leftist Ghanaian intellectual, back in the '70's). Something always raised my class conscious hackles about the whole antiracist movement as conveniently helping rich people from ever acknowledging economic injustice, which I saw reflected in all the multinational corporations jumping on board with antiracism. I also as a cis straight woman agree with what you say about men invading our space. I was a victim of a violent body crime by an angry young black man - after my marriage! - and yet I am supposed to apologize to him for my oppressing him? (I reported the crime but it went nowhere, including partly because I did feel it was a political act on his part - he just failed to pick a true oppressor white woman. I would otherwise have been his ally.)
Apr 13, 2022·edited Apr 13, 2022Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
"Gender" is the postmodern, post-Freudian soul (just relocated from the heart to the crotch). Gender Theory states we all are born with a sacred unique "gender" that fluctuates constantly based on mood and feelings and yet is also immutable and the most distinct part of you, your sacred singular essence aka "Your True Self" (TM).
"Gender" really is "Have you heard the good news!?!" but for upscale secular liberals, it is the sacred essence of every human that needs to be protected and propagated by every person and institution at all times, in all settings.
This is also why the Gender people think it's appropriate and necessary to never stop talking about it, and why it only makes sense to them that children need to learn they have a "gender" and how to cultivate it as soon as they're old enough to talk. We wouldn't want a child not to spend their formative years contemplating their "gender," it could lead to the great tragedy of them never becoming Their True Self (TM) or even more terrible to contemplate, they may someday mention it to someone who responds in a less than reverential way. That would be blasphemy!
It is interesting too how Gender Theory coalesces so easily with our market society, because so much of it is based on superficial markers like clothes, earrings, makeup, Prozac, etc (not to mention pharmaceutical and surgical interventions), which the corporate state is more than happy to sell you.
Also, the Gender craze is such a quintessentially American phenomenon because it supports and is rooted in one of our absolute foundational beliefs (which really should be printed on our money and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty): REALITY IS AN ILLUSION, ILLUSION IS A REALITY.
I am glad that you placed the categories of race and gender into a seeming soul in your essay. I have been thinking for quite some time that issue is equality and justice (note that I don't write "social justice"). In short, by shifting the focus to a distinctive kind of psychology, the wokesters and many others don't have to address politics--which means not addressing justice, solidarity, freedom, and equality.
The attempt to place race and gender into a soul is also a part of what I consider decadent U.S. Protestantism. So much of discourse, so much of U.S. life, hangs on people doing a form of Baptist testifying and Methodist sermonizing. (You may have noticed when you got to France and Luxembourg that the testifying and sermonizing diminished.)
So we are dealing with the revenge of the dualism of monotheism.
Also, I note that if one avoids the awkward term "transgender" and uses the term "two spirits," one ends up in a different relation to what is happening. Just as the classical world of the Mediterranean recognized hermaphroditism--as a kind of unification--so two-spirit persons in the Native American ethos are a unification--and, as has been pointed out, are not always a self-assertion.
Apr 14, 2022·edited Apr 15, 2022Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
Maybe this has come up around these parts before, but I have always found it interesting that Woke seemed to have been implanted like malware into the left/liberal sphere just after the Occupy movement. While far from perfect, Occupy did (at least at the start) have a clear, concise message; and did a great job of drawing people's attention to the real crux of our society's problems. If intentional, as a virus to disrupt and distroy real opposition, Woke seems to have been wildly succesful.
Rhyd, this is such an important part of a broader dialectic which seems to me to be the hunger for diverse and multi-layered debate around the effects of dogma on our current censored and propagandized mindsets. I encountered this full on in a post play discussion zoom with the audience after a presentation of my rather tame play, “The Jab”. In that play, written in March 2021, I simply presented two sides to the vax debate. The dogmatic and somewhat venomous rhetoric that ensued was shocking to me and yet it was only the tip of the iceberg to what was already forming in our societal and cultural neoliberal “woke” landscape. For the months to follow I found myself almost constantly, often in a fight or flight state, attempting to make sense of what was happening to those around me with whom, I, at one time, could enter into “normal” dialogue. The questions you pose here are no different except I applaud you for breaking down and breaking through to one of the central nuggets which is dogma itself.
Thanks for sharing this. As always, your perspective on Woke ideology is helpful and informative for me. In terms of the "inherited traits" of race my mind went to intergenerational trauma. The physiological, bodily effects of trauma are passed down epigenetically. What feels so insidious about the current Woke ideological framework is that it continues to perpetuate this trauma through reifying it as a categorical inevitable- as something given that can never be transcended. This is where seeing this in terms of Original Sin is so interesting. The soul is typically seen as transcendent, yet in this way of seeing it the soul is the exact site of what makes race eternal. Kind of a quandary.
It is only in and through the body, through lived experience and the influence we can each individually have on our bodily inheritance, that these things can be transcended. Different categories form from different bodies.
I'm very much looking forward to the book.
While tangential to the above, the concept of Allies has me scratching my head. These seem to be people who are 'outside' of the victimized 'group' but keen to be seen as in sympathy with them. The obvious corollary seems to be that if you can't demonstrate your Ally credentials then you must be an Enemy.
Certainly the rhetoric generated in response to *any* dissent from Woke ideology reinforces mutual antagonism and reinforces the silos.
It's pitiful, really.
Ugh, I shudder to think on when I spent insane amounts of time trying to "learn to be a good ally." And all the times someone would accuse me of not being a good ally and then propose ways to be a better ally, such as directly giving them money or specifically "platforming" a particular view or writer. I also had several activists attempt to co-erce me to leave the directorship (monthly salary: 400 US dollars) of the publishing organization I co-founded and give it to someone they chose in order to be a "good" ally. And I recall during a very large social media crusade against me that the only way to be a true ally was to accept all the criticisms, admit I was a shitty person, and shut up for awhile. My favorite statement from that time was when I was told the only way to prove I was a good ally was to stop writing altogether.
Oof, sorry to vent. Lots of memories there.
But yes, absolutely. "Ally" is a fascinating and really absurd concept that gets used to coerce people into penance for their skin color or genitals, while also being used by grifters to position themselves as superheroes.
I gave up on the term "ally" not long after I saw it overused in social media--which didn't take long.
My tarot reader / natal astrology chart interpreter and I had an interesting talk about "ally." She's black American, although she has a German grandmother--which is typical of many Americans, including black Americans (and makes the whole transracial issue even more complicated). Nevertheless, she pointed out that people should be accomplices, not allies.
Allies ended up being people who wanted to be publicly nice. Hey, we don't want to burn gayfolk at the stake today. We're allies!
An accomplice shares in the deeds and actions.
Bless you for writing this! I can't wait to read the book and am so grateful someone is tackling this from an academic-philosophical position too. As one of the cancelled, still trying to get on my feet 5 years after my career and reputation were destroyed for defending complexity in the underground performance art world-- my complaint was always-- IS YOUR VIEW OF THE WORLD ACTUALLY MAKING IT BETTER? And the answer is no. We've been living under the dominant of Wokeness for many years and it still sucks.
We let all of this happen because people are too afraid to wear their back bones anymore because they will be ripped out by the mob. If you wear Woke glasses to look at the world, all you'll see is the problem of race and gender that you claim to be trying to solve. If you really want change, it doesn't work that way. This is the same as wearing "shit-colored" glasses-- all you'll be able to see is shit. This is a spiritual sickness to my mind. It's a lack of faith in our life purpose and our perfectly imperfect wholeness as human beings.
My solution is a re-enchantment project. If you want to use your manifestation powers to make a better world, you can't do it with shit-colored glasses on. Every spiritual tradition is right on this front-- Love is the only way. Not fuzzy-wuzzy new age love. Real LOVE is fierce and doesn't suffer fools. It requires the strong among us to uphold integrity and insist on a world held together with what is more true.
I really like your view!
One thing to note, while I do address the academic and philosophical arguments influencing Woke Ideology, I am myself not an academic nor do I have any university degrees.
I find this to be an important fact, specifically because the academic language and theory occupies a kind of sacred narrative space for many. Really the only reason it is able to hold this power is that the language (jargon) employed is highly obfuscating. The long essay I quote in this piece from the Boston Review could easily have been written in a fifth of the amount of words they used. Of course, that also would have shown up the contradictions they were skirting around much more clearly, which is why they had to write it all out so obtusely.
That doesn't bother me! It seems more effective to rebutt the nonsense in the vernacular in which it is spoken. I applaud your efforts! I do not speak this language very well...I believe in magic and that seeps in and discredits me in those arguments...Wokeness can only happen within a materialist world view, I believe.
Personally, I think garden variety ssxism is behind the acxeptance of transgenderism and the denial of transracialism. The left has long maintained a double standard on women's rights. For example, feminists are still expected to apologize for the racism of suffragettes a century or more ago. Yet the sexism of organizations like the Black Panthers is dismissed as a "product of the times". There is a strong a growing tendency within the left to deny or trivialize women's oppression. Thus we see claims that racism is incomparably worse than sexism- despite the fact that far fewer men of color are being routinely raped and beaten in their own homes than even white women. The basic premise of woke ideology is not that gender is a immutable part of the soul that must be recognized while race is an immutable part of society that can't be trascended but that women's oppression is imaginary and thus can be pretended to.
I'm sure some find that offensive, so explanation is in order. Let's take me and my brother. He was given every opportunity and (literally) bailed out of every mishap. My family was torn apart to prevent him from facing the consequences of his actions. Meanwhile he physically abused me and I never recieved any care for my autism. Instead, I was moved from school to school often in midyear to accomodate his drama. He could decide to be trans tomorrow but he would never face the oppression that *girls* face in society. He might experience transphobia but would never experience the entire life- conditioning of being born female which affect everything from how much a mother holds her baby (boys are held more on average) to the conditioning to be pretty and stupid. A transwoman who passes can experience sexism at the moment but cannot experience the lifetime impact of sexism from an early age. And my inclination is to view transphobia as a more significant factor than sexism in the mistreatment of transwomen. Unless they pass, they are usually treated poorly by those who do not view them as women, so sexism is not really coming in to play there.
The left likes to imagine that women are privileged whiners whose concerns are not real. One has only to look at the vitriol directed at these supposed "white women feminists" who presumably run white society in a woke twist on the patriarchal claim that women secretly hold all the real power.
Intergenerational trauma among women does exist. Women have been raped, tortured, burned alive, killed, and systemically denied equal inheritance or education to males. This pattern is forced upon female children from birth. The fact that a woman's male childen are exempt from this oppression is not evidence of it's non-existence. Unless we suppose that only the experiences of male children matter, of course. The entire argument is based on the invisibility or irrelevance of the experiences of female children. But ciswomen don't spring fully formed from some raw material of humanity as a transwoman does. Ciswomen carry the baggage of generations of unfair treatment of female children. There are places and families which treat female children well. Just as there are rich Black people. Either way, the member of an oppressed caste, no matter how privileged their position still has to deal with soul-crushing societal pressure to submit and conform to stereotyoes of their caste
TL; DR
Woke ideology presents (especially white) women's issues are being high on Maslow's heirarchy of needs or even frivilous in comparison to issues of race which are percieved as seruous issues. Of course, the statistics on the physical abuse of females and the prevalence of poverty among women and the epidemic of poor body image that can often turn self-destructive show this view to be simple ignorance of women's conditions. But sexism has long relied on trivializing women's oppression or presenting women as having some mystical undefined sexual power to deflect feminism
"garden variety ssxism is behind the acxeptance of transgenderism and the denial of transracialism".
Yes! I completely agree.
I view the trans movement as the revenge of the partriarchy: you women thought you had carved out safe spaces and places and events for yourselves, but guess what??? We men are now women too! We can barge into your spaces and places and compete and win and take the prizes in your sports events!!!
Note that per the US Equality Act (proposed legislation backed by all Democrats), any man can declare hinself to be a woman for any period of time, long or short, and must be treated legally as a woman during that time.
That there is so little pushback to this is both astonishing and disheartening, though there are some nascent steps in this direction:
https://womensdeclaration.com
Thank you for telling us your story.
Though I'm a bit agnostic on the existence of an overarching Patriarchy that manifests itself in all matters of sexism (mostly because this is the same model used by Woke Anti-Racists for white supremacy, or by trans ideologues for transphobia), I absolutely believe there are historical processes which continuously put burdens on women and excuse assaults against them and these processes are directed exclusive towards women.
One concern that I've heard around trans identity and women which I think really deserves some serious attention is sudden increase in younger women identifying as trans men and seeking surgical interventions as young as 13. This absolutely seems to point to an established pattern of limiting what kinds of expressions women are allowed to have, and if you do not fit into those expressions you must therefore not be 'really' a woman. In such a position, it seems pretty obvious why a young female who doesn't conform to this limited role would then believe the only way to be a whole and integrated person is to become a man.
At the same time, I absolutely think that there are some people who really do best living out another gender. I just really suspect, as with many of the trans people labeled 'truscum' by other trans people, that this is a much rarer occurrence than the current Woke framework would have us believe.
I would tend to agree with you that there are a couple of definitions of patriarchy floating around that get swapped out for convenience all the time. I would tend to define patriarchy in the way Gerda Lerner did- as a system that has developed within society built by men and women which values men over women and socializes girls into a marginalized role. Then there is the nebulous Patriarchy which is assumed to interpenetrate each man (but in the view of radical feminists, only women who don't share their disdain for men). I have a certain level of exasperation with what I see as wishful thinking that sexism can be simplified to women vs men or masculinity vs femininity. A side note here is how some radical feminist view sexism from women as not being their responsible in a "Patriarchy [the Devil] made me do it" kind of argument. Which to my mind infantilizes women we disagree with.
But as far as the ROGD, I'm just glad I'm old enough that when I was a teen it wasn't a thing. I've always been quite masculine and for a time considered whether I was trans. I went through years of suicidal depression where I hated myself. Trans logic seemed to offer an explanation for my self-hatred and misery in light of my lack of connection to femininity. I never pursued transition because it would have destroyed my family. Come to find out, I have celiac disease. I can turn that self-hatred on and off based on whether or not I accidently eat a bit of food cross-contaminated with wheat. Men generally are less affected by the mental health aspects of my condition. It is likely that if I had transitioned I would have felt better on testosterone supplements- right up until untreated celiac took me right into type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis like my grandfather. So I have personal reason to be very wary of the push to medicalize transgender people without turning over all the other rocks first. Telling depressed and potentially self-harming people that sometimes transitioning helps could lead the desperate to talk themselves into being trans in ways they can regret later.
Thank you, Rhyd, for this discussion. I particularly appreciated your citing Adolph Reed, Jr., whose analysis gave me refuge during the summer of riots in 2020 in the US, when a millionaire relative of mine (cis white female) was telling me I needed to read Robin D'Angelo and Ibram Kendi (although she knew I had lived 5 years in a marriage to a leftist Ghanaian intellectual, back in the '70's). Something always raised my class conscious hackles about the whole antiracist movement as conveniently helping rich people from ever acknowledging economic injustice, which I saw reflected in all the multinational corporations jumping on board with antiracism. I also as a cis straight woman agree with what you say about men invading our space. I was a victim of a violent body crime by an angry young black man - after my marriage! - and yet I am supposed to apologize to him for my oppressing him? (I reported the crime but it went nowhere, including partly because I did feel it was a political act on his part - he just failed to pick a true oppressor white woman. I would otherwise have been his ally.)
"Gender" is the postmodern, post-Freudian soul (just relocated from the heart to the crotch). Gender Theory states we all are born with a sacred unique "gender" that fluctuates constantly based on mood and feelings and yet is also immutable and the most distinct part of you, your sacred singular essence aka "Your True Self" (TM).
"Gender" really is "Have you heard the good news!?!" but for upscale secular liberals, it is the sacred essence of every human that needs to be protected and propagated by every person and institution at all times, in all settings.
This is also why the Gender people think it's appropriate and necessary to never stop talking about it, and why it only makes sense to them that children need to learn they have a "gender" and how to cultivate it as soon as they're old enough to talk. We wouldn't want a child not to spend their formative years contemplating their "gender," it could lead to the great tragedy of them never becoming Their True Self (TM) or even more terrible to contemplate, they may someday mention it to someone who responds in a less than reverential way. That would be blasphemy!
It is interesting too how Gender Theory coalesces so easily with our market society, because so much of it is based on superficial markers like clothes, earrings, makeup, Prozac, etc (not to mention pharmaceutical and surgical interventions), which the corporate state is more than happy to sell you.
Also, the Gender craze is such a quintessentially American phenomenon because it supports and is rooted in one of our absolute foundational beliefs (which really should be printed on our money and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty): REALITY IS AN ILLUSION, ILLUSION IS A REALITY.
I am glad that you placed the categories of race and gender into a seeming soul in your essay. I have been thinking for quite some time that issue is equality and justice (note that I don't write "social justice"). In short, by shifting the focus to a distinctive kind of psychology, the wokesters and many others don't have to address politics--which means not addressing justice, solidarity, freedom, and equality.
The attempt to place race and gender into a soul is also a part of what I consider decadent U.S. Protestantism. So much of discourse, so much of U.S. life, hangs on people doing a form of Baptist testifying and Methodist sermonizing. (You may have noticed when you got to France and Luxembourg that the testifying and sermonizing diminished.)
So we are dealing with the revenge of the dualism of monotheism.
Also, I note that if one avoids the awkward term "transgender" and uses the term "two spirits," one ends up in a different relation to what is happening. Just as the classical world of the Mediterranean recognized hermaphroditism--as a kind of unification--so two-spirit persons in the Native American ethos are a unification--and, as has been pointed out, are not always a self-assertion.
Maybe this has come up around these parts before, but I have always found it interesting that Woke seemed to have been implanted like malware into the left/liberal sphere just after the Occupy movement. While far from perfect, Occupy did (at least at the start) have a clear, concise message; and did a great job of drawing people's attention to the real crux of our society's problems. If intentional, as a virus to disrupt and distroy real opposition, Woke seems to have been wildly succesful.
I address that a bit in my manuscript. I think it absolutely shifted after Occupy, and I mention a bit of the shift as I saw through anarchism around then in this (very long) essay: https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2021/9/6/antifa-anarchism-and-the-desperate-search-for-an-enemy
Rhyd, this is such an important part of a broader dialectic which seems to me to be the hunger for diverse and multi-layered debate around the effects of dogma on our current censored and propagandized mindsets. I encountered this full on in a post play discussion zoom with the audience after a presentation of my rather tame play, “The Jab”. In that play, written in March 2021, I simply presented two sides to the vax debate. The dogmatic and somewhat venomous rhetoric that ensued was shocking to me and yet it was only the tip of the iceberg to what was already forming in our societal and cultural neoliberal “woke” landscape. For the months to follow I found myself almost constantly, often in a fight or flight state, attempting to make sense of what was happening to those around me with whom, I, at one time, could enter into “normal” dialogue. The questions you pose here are no different except I applaud you for breaking down and breaking through to one of the central nuggets which is dogma itself.
I can only imagine how crazy that got for you. So sorry!
Thanks for sharing this. As always, your perspective on Woke ideology is helpful and informative for me. In terms of the "inherited traits" of race my mind went to intergenerational trauma. The physiological, bodily effects of trauma are passed down epigenetically. What feels so insidious about the current Woke ideological framework is that it continues to perpetuate this trauma through reifying it as a categorical inevitable- as something given that can never be transcended. This is where seeing this in terms of Original Sin is so interesting. The soul is typically seen as transcendent, yet in this way of seeing it the soul is the exact site of what makes race eternal. Kind of a quandary.
It is only in and through the body, through lived experience and the influence we can each individually have on our bodily inheritance, that these things can be transcended. Different categories form from different bodies.