I love this from Dennis Noel Kavanagh, @Jebadoo2 on Twitter.
Beautifully written IMO and I can't agree more with how social media is fucking up the youth. I can’t imagine how stifling it must be to have your every move potentially captured & made available publicly, forever. I was anxious enough as a teen about feeling judged by my peers, without this threat to back it up, wasn't everyone?
This will not be known as the age of trans enlightenment or LGBTQIAA2++ liberation. It will be known as the age of "genderism". A reductive creed best intellectually situated alongside anorexia, child beauty pageants and mass gym membership as an age of the worship of the self
Genderism will be regarded as a historical folly, a dead end which produced madness. The madness of children not capable in law of getting tattoos but capable in law of forsaking puberty. Adults with shrivelled genitals because of a decision when they were 10.
Genderism will be remembered for silencing and castigating Detransitioners. PHDs will be written about "detransioner voices" - that will be fashionable and counter cultural in 50 years time. They will be the sort of interesting, hidden voices that get academics prizes
Genderism will be the force that revived the 1950s. It called fay boys "Pofs" and "Fggots" and butch girls "d*kes" but the genius was it made them call themselves "non binary". They were chased from their natal genders, convinced they did not even deserve their pronouns.
Genderism silenced the AIDS generation. It ignored the gay men who survived it and the lesbians who held the hand of the dying, nursed them through. It called them TERFS and dinosaurs and spat on their objections to being called "Queer". It was ahistorical.
Yet from history it came. The girls who used to starve themselves under genderism bound their breasts or has mastectomies. The boys who couldn't be muscle men were told to amputate their genitals. What god set wrong, man's knife could make right.
Genderism will be remembered as a leapfrog from the 50s to the 20s. The gender bending of the 80s and 90s, wild with complexity was no match for the iPhone generation and gay rights movements hungry for new markets and soldiers. Everything is recorded.
Just as the mobile phone demanded a personal account of a human on a daily basis with their social media so Genderism demanded an audit of the human soul of the new young. They were to account for their souls to a binary of action man and barbie.
This public form of life by committee meant all those secret, forgotten, private things. Those nights in a forest, that time she got drunk and wore her hair short or he played with makeup. All those crazy wild, tropical butterflies of youth. That vast swarm of colours.....
Each had to be pinned dead to a board and labelled like an exhibit in the natural history museum. This life permanently observed had no space for private, human, wild, nights in the dark. It had no place to accept that something can happen even if it is not observed.
Genderism pinned the butterflies to boards and made them dead and still. The curators told of their wild colours and tropical identities but they had the pallor and stillness of the soul of a thing living half it's life. They became collectors of who they were.
They were observers of their own lives. They were not lived. They were observed. Questioned. Queried. Criticised, pilled on. They were never free from the committee. Genderism depended on expression but it accepted not that for the young it is a beautiful, changing fire.
Genderism was the end point of the human body as a consumer object.
It is closer to anorexia, gym obsession, fad diets, comfort eating, beauty pageants than it is to gay rights.
It reduced the human body to a problem to be solved.
Genderism ended because it brought no joy. It was an empty offer. A busted flush. A bad deal. A con. A form of embodied neurosis far away from human joy.
It was defeated by freedom and humanity. Freedom of speech. Freedom to be who you are without a box or a label.