On the Link between Current Elite Support for Transgender Rights and Neoliberalism
Before we start on talking about this topic, I would recommend that you read this post completely before commenting on it. I also believe that no person or institution has any right to tell or enforce how another person should live their life or who they have sex with as sexual orientation is based in biology. The same cannot be said for “gender identity” or similar “identities” based in solipsism. So let us begin by defining certain terms used in this post. Elite = people who are rich and powerful because they, or more likely their parents, got lucky; e-Liberals = credentialed people who are enforcers for the establishment, but not independently wealthy; Neoliberalism = parasitic ideology based on increasing levels of financialization in society and economy; identity-based politics = using emotive social issues to exploit people on both sides of those issues.
So what inspired me to write this post in the first place? The short answer is- a set of observations about the nature of public discourse in USA over the last decade. The somewhat longer answer is that I have noticed a peculiar trend among the supposedly "liberal" establishment class (both elites and their e-liberal cronies) in many western countries, especially the USA over the previous 15 or so years. As many of you know- for the first 3-4 decades after ww2, western liberalism was associated with ideas and movements meant to improve the economic and social conditions of everyone in those countries. But along the way, liberalism stopped being associated with attempts to improve social and economic conditions for the majority. Instead, it morphed into an ideology devoted to retaining power, for its own sake, through the division of people along various lines of their identity- racial, sexual, educational etc.
To be fair, living in the pre-1990 era as an openly gay or non-white person in the west meant that you were seen and treated as a second-class citizen or worse. Therefore any elite or institutional support for movements to improve the treatment of sexual and racial minorities in those countries should be seen as a good thing. Except that this seldom occurred during that era. A bit confused by what I just said? See.. prior to the late-1990s or even the early-2000s, movements dedicated to improving the status of sexual and racial minorities had sparse elite or institutional support. Indeed, elites and "e-liberals" in those eras frequently saw such movements and people they represented with open disdain and contempt. As late as the mid-1990s, these supposed "pillars of western society" still openly talked about gay or non-white people as if they were second-class human beings or worse.
So what changed? why can’t the elite and e-liberals of today stop talking about how much they like people who are gay, trans, “non-binary” etc ? Why can't they stop talking about how much they love non-white people and how they want to promote diversity? What explains this abrupt shift in their public attitudes towards groups which they were previously complicit in marginalizing? And what does any of this have to do with neoliberalism and late capitalism?
Here is my theory..
1] Contemporary elite and e-liberal support for all progressive causes has nothing to do with the extent of their belief in those causes. Almost all the motivation for doing so comes down to virtue signaling to themselves, their peers and all those underneath them. Such signaling serves many purposes- from feeling good about themselves and making sure that they fit in with their peers to feeling morally superior to all those people underneath them. Their support of certain socially progressive causes is not dissimilar from some of them adopting a token Chinese or African orphan. It is about the public optics and gaining small temporary status increases in their circle of peers.
2] More relevantly, it serves to perpetuate the idea (at least in their minds) that they are somehow moral and deserving of their ill-gotten wealth and power. Supporting such social issues also enables the elites and e-liberals to partially deflect attention away from how they keep on exploiting and robbing everybody else. You may have noticed that elites and e-liberals go to considerable lengths to avoid talking about socio-economic issues that affect the majority. However they never tire of telling everybody within earshot about how they like gays, trans, “non-binary”, non-whites and pretty much any and every minority identity they can invent.
3] Which brings me to why so many elites and e-liberals take every opportunity to express their empty support for people who are, or feel, transgender. Newsflash- It has nothing to do with elites and e-liberals feeling any real solidarity with people in those social groups. But it has a lot to do with signaling that they are morally superior to 'all those other people below us' aka deplorables. Therefore, all their current support for legislation to improve the legal status of that and other similar groups is self-serving. As far as the elite and e-liberals are concerned, expressing enthusiastic public support for transgender people is just the latest cause to become fashionable- not unlike how supporting gay rights was the current thing during early 2000s or adopting non-white babies became hip was during the late-2000s.
4] It should be noted that the hard work on securing equal legal rights for gay people was largely done by gays themselves. Similarly adopting non-white children from non-western countries became mainstream because ordinary people who wanted to adopt children could not do so easily in the west. However, in both cases the elite and e-liberals adopted what was becoming mainstream and promoted it as if they came up with the ideas and did all the hard work. Luckily, both those ideas had become mainstream enough to not be tarnished by their association with the elites and e-liberals. The same is not true for “trans” rights and the way it is being supported by elites and e-liberals. They got on this bandwagon at an earlier stage and have thus become associated with that movement in the public mind- to its detriment.
There is, therefore, a real risk that their association with that cause will damage its public image. Public blowback to the extreme levels of establishment propaganda and needless castration of tens of thousands of “gender confused” children is not going to help matters, either. However, none of these concerns are going to stop these morons from using such fringe and unpopular causes to display their alleged moral superiority to provide a justification for their ill-gotten wealth.
What do you think? Comments?