The Tallest Short Man & the Shortest Tall Man

A shaky construct

I wrote most of this post some while ago, but concluded I really had nothing to contribute on the subject, and should probably just shut up. Reading it again, it seems more coherent than I had thought at the time and, even if I still have nothing terribly original to say, writing these posts with the awareness and intention that they may be read by others is the best way I have of getting my thoughts in order. I suppose I'm just one of those people who doesn't know what they think until they say it out loud.

So: there was a lot of fuss a while ago about the politics and practicalities of elective identity, or what some might dismiss as the pursuit of wishful thinking. Frankly, I'd never heard of Rachel Dolezal or Caitlyn Jenner before those social media kerfuffles, but the issues their cases raise are interesting and very much of the moment. Attention spans being what they are these days those Twitter storms will have long passed on, but I have a few belated reflections to offer.

When I was an impressionable lad, the two lessons I learned at university from the brightest, most forward-thinking people I knew (which, it has to be said, didn't include any of the actual teaching faculty) were these:

First, in addition to social class, that one of the main enemies of progress is essentialism i.e. the insistence that any person has a "natural" essence which is generally derived from their biology – particularly gender, race, or sexual orientation (though as a short left-handed person I always wanted to add height and handedness...) – which determines who they are and what they are capable of. Those of a conservative, reactionary cast of mind really like essentialism in the same way they really like class, not least because of the way that, put together, they explain and justify the existing order of society, with the "natural" result that the right people (them) come out on top, for all the right "natural" reasons.

Second, that most, if not all, of these so-called essential qualities are actually as much social constructs as social class itself i.e. they have been invented by humans, generally by imposing rigid frameworks of categorisation onto fluid, complex realities. These categories get embedded into a society's way of doing things, generally giving a significant power advantage to one constituency in its relations with all the others. The job of ideology is to disguise this constructedness, and make the categories and power relationships seem, again, "natural" or, even better, invisible. But, being social constructs, they can be changed by society, given the will, generally by some political means aimed at redressing the imbalance. Thus, just as trade unions give workers collective strength in negotiations with employers, so legislation can make discrimination on various grounds not just bad manners but illegal. Impossible?  No!  Ideological...*

Simple! In fact, although these ideas can be (and often are) dressed up in some truly appalling, impenetrable academic jargon, they amount to little more than debating the scope of "nature vs. nurture", which anyone can understand, combined with a fair-minded and democratic rejection of "making generalizations about" or hanging limiting labels on people. Even those people we find odd, baffling, or even distasteful (Conservative voters, for example).

However, a more extreme version of these arguments seems to have evolved in subsequent years, an explosive combination of some Frenchified academic prestidigitation, an assertive politics of identity, and a trans movement which has taken to its extreme logical conclusion the idea that "biology is not destiny". Now, obviously, if the idea of, say, race is really a construct, then we can and should arrange society in such a way that superficial characteristics such as skin colour are never an impediment to equitable treatment. But the new, extreme position goes further. If a category does not exist essentially, then it does not really exist at all: a person's race is nothing more than an arbitrary label imposed on them by society, and thus – in the most controversial version, that reverses this logic – a matter of choice.

Ah. You don't have to be James Baldwin or Ta-Nehisi Coates to see that we have a problem here with the dodgy use of words like "real" and "choice". There is a fallacy here. You can no more choose to be white than I can choose to be tall. (Yet, anyway; who knows what consumer choices lie ahead for humanity?) Race and height may be constructed categories, but to grow up black within a white majority society is a real social fact, and is an experience and a heritage that cannot be faked, bought, or appropriated at will. Well, that's not quite true: the long history of white appropriation of black culture is both hypocritical (my, how beautifully you express your oppression by me!) and piratical (gimme!). But, hey, it's what we do best.

But there is an obvious contradiction here. Do races exist, or don't they? I suppose the answer is that they both do and they don't, like any category. Once created, however arbitrary, a category has real-world effects. In a variation of Parkinson's law, consciousness shrinks to fit the boxes it finds itself in. Take height. What if there was a simple medical procedure  – a pill, say – that would transform your physical appearance overnight?  Go to bed short, wake up tall. Yay! But would you then be tall, in anything but a superficial sense? No matter how much you'd always wanted to be tall, or resented the oppression of tall people? Of course you wouldn't. Your entire physical and social being would have been formed as a "short" person. It would take a complete recalibration over many years to acquire the self-image, reflexes, and attitudes – not all of them positive – that go with a significantly different height, even though this is theoretically merely another random point on the same spectrum. How much more complex, then, if a similar pill could transform one from white to black, or black to white?

Which brings us to gender. Cards on the table: I am a straight, white, grey-bearded male who, despite left-libertarian leanings and a complete commitment to gender equality, finds recent developments on the LGBT scene much more challenging than younger folk do. Which is probably exactly as it should be. Men of my generation were brought up by fathers who feared and did their best to eliminate any signs of gender-wobbliness in their sons. We may have gone on to grow our hair long and flirt with androgyny, but – as any woman or homosexual man who grew up in those years will tell you – this had considerably more to do with male peacockery than feminism or gay rights. But I'm afraid my comfort zone was set in those years, and does not include anything that involves piercings, tattoos, elective surgery, ostentatiously transgressive sex, or even rather too much pink. I concede that I am now, sad to say, The Man. But then so are Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel.

But life, lived properly, is not all about comfort zones. I also happen to have a good friend in the States with a trans-gender child, whom I met last summer for the first time in 15 years, and who had recently undergone gender reassignment. The levels of courage and commitment involved in that – not to mention self-knowledge and sheer, determined optimism  – are not to be dismissed lightly. There is nothing frivolous about it. I was impressed, and felt my ready-made opinions shifting.

Sure, everything I have written above still applies. I just don't know how a wannabe trans-gendered male can ever really identify as a woman, for example, without first having been brought up as a girl; my sympathy is with those feminists of my generation who resent and resist the self-declaration of former "men" as "women", only to find themselves "no platformed" at universities by virtue-signalling zealots. So much for sisterhood! But here we are adrift in that liminal territory where "identity" and "essence" and "biology" and "social construct" and "ideology" all overlap confusingly. And it's hard for us older folks to understand why gender fluidity has become a chosen battleground for so many young people who are, presumably, personally unaffected by the issues. Although I suppose it's not so very different from all the privately-educated radicals from wealthy families agitating for proletarian revolution in our day.

Besides, it's really none of my business. In the end it is the realities we make for ourselves and our contribution to what we might grandly call the Human Project that really matter. My life has been straightforward: pretty much every step along the way has been signposted, approved, supported, and rewarded. Even allowing for my class origins, my height, my handedness, my introversion, my lack of interest in sports, and a certain indefinable arty oddness, as a straight white male I have only rarely felt the sting of rejection or systematic exclusion simply because of who or what I am. Others will have had quite the opposite experience in their lives, whether because of race, gender, disability, or some acute internal hurt or confusion that does not yet have a name. Why on earth should my comfort zone take precedence over theirs, and why would I feel entitled to sit in judgement over them, simply because of who and what I am?

Though I have to say that I'm still not comfortable around those Conservative voters. Especially the tall ones. What is their problem?

A male spectrum, plus outlier...

* Sorry, but I will never tire of that idiotic joke.