The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed.

To find meaning by waging a constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been altered.

The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism.

‘you have to be pretty damn reckless to be leaning this hard on so many untested heuristics your parents came up with in untested fields that aren’t even 50 years old’.5

Notice we don’t have matronizingly in English

femmes

To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven – or at least understood – in turn.

As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology

with no way out. Specifically that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered.

The only lesson unarguably imparted was that if everyone is applauding a trans person you should make sure that you are the last person to resume your seat.

People expressing concern or urging caution in regard to transsexualism may not be ‘denying the existence of trans people’ or claiming that they should be treated as second-class citizens, let alone (the most catastrophizing claim of all) causing trans people to commit suicide. They may simply be urging caution about something which has not remotely been worked out yet – and which is irreversible.

Questions about the age at which people who believe they are in the wrong body should be allowed to access drugs or surgery are worth contesting deeply. Not least because there is growing awareness of children who may have identified as having gender dysphoria but who then grow out of it – many of them to become gay. This heaps problem upon problem. Nobody likes recalling the time when gay people were told ‘it’s just a phase’, but what if trans is (even on occasion)

just a phase? And what if that phase is realized only too late? These questions are not primarily ‘transphobic’ but rather child-centric, and the attempt to pathologize such concern has made this tripwire far uglier than it needs to be.