// The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity // 13.05.20
John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part, and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in time - if unchallenged - itself become lost.
There is a difference between debate and dialectic. Debate means you are trying to win. Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true.
The person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Anyone who is unbothered is ignored. In an age of shouting for attention on social media, the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.
The metaphysics that a new generation is imbibing and everyone else is being force-fed has many points of instability, is grounded in a desire to express certainty about things we do not know, and to be wildly dismissive and relativistic about things that we actually do know.
You cannot tell people simultaneously, “You must understand me” and, “You cannot understand me”.
Claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there
There are places where gay men can hook up and places where gay women can hook up, but there have hardly been any places in the decades since gay liberation where gay men and women organize or assemble to be near each other on anything like a regular basis. It is worth bearing these internal frictions and contradictions in mind when people talk about the LGBT community, or try to co-opt it for any political purpose. It barely exists even within each letter of its constituent parts.
Gay men tend to believe that men who claim to be ‘Bi’ are in fact gays in some form of denial (‘Bi now, gay later’).
After becoming a woman Jan writes, "My scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than for the telling detail".
Gay people are gay when they say they are and when they do the things that show them to be gay. Likewise, perhaps, people are trans when they say they are, and no outward sign - or any biological signifier - need be there in the trans case any more than it is expected (or demanded) in the case of being gay.
John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part, and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in time - if unchallenged - itself become lost.
There is a difference between debate and dialectic. Debate means you are trying to win. Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true.
The person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Anyone who is unbothered is ignored. In an age of shouting for attention on social media, the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.
The metaphysics that a new generation is imbibing and everyone else is being force-fed has many points of instability, is grounded in a desire to express certainty about things we do not know, and to be wildly dismissive and relativistic about things that we actually do know.
You cannot tell people simultaneously, “You must understand me” and, “You cannot understand me”.
Claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there
There are places where gay men can hook up and places where gay women can hook up, but there have hardly been any places in the decades since gay liberation where gay men and women organize or assemble to be near each other on anything like a regular basis. It is worth bearing these internal frictions and contradictions in mind when people talk about the LGBT community, or try to co-opt it for any political purpose. It barely exists even within each letter of its constituent parts.
Gay men tend to believe that men who claim to be ‘Bi’ are in fact gays in some form of denial (‘Bi now, gay later’).
After becoming a woman Jan writes, "My scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than for the telling detail".
Gay people are gay when they say they are and when they do the things that show them to be gay. Likewise, perhaps, people are trans when they say they are, and no outward sign - or any biological signifier - need be there in the trans case any more than it is expected (or demanded) in the case of being gay.
