Views of the Human

An email arrives from the rector of Ashlake, who is coordinating the local engagement with Living in Love and Faith. There will soon be an LLF introductory course to which all the Deanery churches are invited to send up to four people; the first date, typically, falls when I’m on holiday. Meanwhile it is the month of Pride and my LiberFaciorum feed is full of rainbow flags and declarations of support, especially for the surge in people self-defining as trans or non-binary (nobody ‘comes out’ as homosexual any more as this is a matter of no controversy or even note). I haven’t joined in and I wonder why: I try to dig beneath what, I must confess, is sometimes, just sometimes, a sense of irritation. Transphobe is currently the worst accusation that can be levelled at someone of would-be progressive opinions, but I don’t think I’m that.

I think it’s about how you conceive human identity. Some time ago, I was told that a classmate of my god-daughter changed gender identification from day to day; the name they used showed which pronoun they wished to be employed for that period. That may have been what this particular student needed at that time in their life. But it’s the extreme end of the kind of ultra-liberal individualism which I do think is odd. I consciously abandoned that way of thinking years ago, although I still carry shreds of it – I could hardly do anything else considering how it so totally dominates the culture I belong to.

Its first proposition is that individual choice trumps every other factor in life. Genetics, history and culture are minor elements compared to sovereign choice: I am, ultimately, whatever I decide to be. Now, honest liberal individualists have to accept this is an aspiration rather than a fact, but the assumption is that it should be made as much a fact as possible. Choice is right; ideally it is the only thing that should make a difference to a person. Certainly, it is not appropriate to examine the context of choices, to suggest that other factors may be in play than pure self-volition: merely to ask the question is an insult.  

Secondly, liberal individualism asserts that choices don’t have any real consequences, because that would limit the sovereignty of choice in the future. We can decide to be something one day, and the opposite the next, and these choices have no effect on us or the world around us.

Dare I suggest (I do!) that this ideology is seen so acutely at work in the field of gender and sexuality because those choices don’t matter in a capitalist economy. Individuals can be consumers and producers regardless of their sexual identity, and regardless of whether they choose to change it. From a capitalist point of view, breaking down gender roles is actually more worthwhile than maintaining them, as it allows individuals to be exploited in different ways as either workers or consumers. Liberal individualists barely ever talk about class, mind, because the whole notion of economic class opens up debates about money and power concerning which liberal individualism has nothing to say. Surely, you can wake up in the morning and tell yourself, ‘today I do not identify as a wage-slave’, but your sovereign choice will do absolutely nothing.

On a personal level, I became a lot happier, existentially, when I gave up this sort of thinking. I accepted that there is no ‘real me’ to be expressed, and that ‘I’ am a locus of negotiation between forces that exist outside me, some that existed millions of years before I did, and that will do millions into the future. The choices I make decide the direction I will travel, but that means that even if I decide to change trajectory completely I will be doing it from a different place from where I made the previous choice. Ceasing to be a liberal individualist was so very liberating, and life became much less of a surprise and much less angst-ridden as a result, presumably because my view of the world was more truthful than it had been.

One of the ancient, unfolding forces that shape who we are is sexual difference. Many of my friends are very anxious to claim that sexual difference doesn’t exist, because of all things it doesn’t fit with the ultra-liberal model of what human beings are; but there does seem to be some basis to it. Of course it’s a matter of averages and aggregates, of spectra and fuzzy boundaries: although I think that God has a use for maleness and femaleness, I can’t see that the actual content of either is very stable. Instead we all pick our way across that landscape working out how to manage, each of us a wavering, uncertain compromise between physical being, memory, experience, genetics and ideals. That makes us all unique, but unique in very similar ways to one another – variations on a theme, if you like – and it means that none of us owns who we are, in no way is our identity a fixed kernel of being that we carry around inside us. Instead, it’s truer to say that we are owned by energies beyond us. If that undermines the notion that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are stably expressed in any individual, it also means that labels like trans and non-binary don’t refer to anything stable either.

Here in Swanvale Halt I know a couple of gay people and if there’s anyone trans about it’s hard to tell. Even admitting that, their numbers are almost certainly vanishingly small. Things seem different in London where many of my more radical friends are based, and it's easy to see them as living in a very rarefied world. But I have to hold on to that idea of gender as being a landscape, possibly a scarred and pitted battlefield, which we all have to find our way across, and the excitable adoption of labels and identities as an aspect of just that, driven by the sudden liberation of possibilities which never existed before.

And the fact is that, at least for now, this is a secondary issue. The primary one is whether human beings are safe and free, or whether their lives are made hazardous and constrained by threats of violence made against them justified by their membership of particular groups, whether self-defined or socially-defined. And it remains the case that, however kooky and self-involved a lot of modern gender politics especially in Western liberal democracies seems to be, humans continue to attack and violate other humans on the basis of who they love, what they wear and what label they carry. Over recent years I have become much more concerned about illiberal politics in other places because I realise how fragile our liberty is: authoritarianism anywhere undermines liberty and fraternity everywhere, and in the same way regressive violence anywhere encourages bigotry across boundaries. So wave the rainbow flag and leave the philosophy for another day.