Advocates who brook no dissent
FROM MORAL PANICS ABOUT readers’ ability to discern between fake news and mad opinion to legal crackdowns on protest and freedom of speech, the idea that individuals can interpret the world around them without the guiding hand of moral policemen has been called into question. Despite all today’s “awareness raising”, a belief in agency, and individual’s ability to wield it, has been maligned as either mythical or misinformed.
This feverish uncertainty about trusting others’ instincts runs parallel with the move towards the safer, more easily controlled life of the interior. Identity politics, which encourages individuals to negotiate the rocky terrain of modern society using only the lens of their own personal desires and preferences, is deeply mistrustful of other people. The feminist begins every interaction with “as a woman” in a bid to safeguard criticism of the rest of her sentence; the trans activist uses allegations of “harm” to police what discussion can take place.
Two new books reveal something about this shift away from by Shon Faye aims to explain how society “often makes trans people’s lives unnecessarily difficult”, from the serious and material (access to resources) to the banal and personal (pronouns and sexual preferences). Faye’s book is not an attempt to rise above disapproving societal norms, but to argue for a whole set of new ones.
