Parsing Out Dystopia: Ben Shapiro Stumbles Around The Future

I just read “The Fight Over Identity” by Ben Shapiro, a column posted just a few hours ago.  I respect Shapiro, not to the extent I do conservatives like George Will and Jordan Peterson, but Shapiro definitely has a bright mind.  In this case, he is attacking the freedom of humans to choose their identity.

Shapiro's critique is biting and spot-on.  The only problem with it is that everything he criticizes is inevitable.  He is arguing against a future that has already happened.  He complains that gender fluidity “flattens” everything into an "aesthetic."  In truth, identity was already an aesthetic decades ago.  There was (and is) a feminist aesthetic, for example.  Abortion was (and is) part of that aesthetic.  An aesthetic has hard consequences and does not “flatten” anything in the way Shapiro suggests.  He wants to make identity politics one-dimensional, failing to see that, in reality, it is multi-dimensional.  

What we call “identity politics" today is not new.  What used to be called “the Gay Rights movement” has been around for over a generation.  The only thing that is new is what is technologically possible.  Shiapiro's intellectual diatribe fails to take the role of technology into account.  Furthermore, he reduces identity politics to transgender politics, which is a bit disingenuous, slight-of-hand.

Identity politics is a tapestry that has been around long before “gender fluidity” became a political lightning rod.  And gender fluidity itself has been transformed by the recent medical possibility for physical gender change.  This potential physicality takes matters beyond simply “presenting” as whomever, as a theoretical representation or mere symbolism.

The other problem with Shapiro's critique is that he equates identity politics to “opposition to society's rules.”  He frames the whole piece as if the changes to identity politics are a rebellion against peace and order.  He is correct that it is disruptive.  But in a larger sense he is wrong.  Identity politics like the right for women to vote or what was once referred to as “the Civil Rights movement” were strange in their beginnings and in opposition to their respective societies.  

Shapiro asserts carte blanche that because transgender rights (under the cloak of “identity politics”) are strange and bizarre by the standards of “society” therefore those established standards should not change.  Further, that transgender rights somehow inherently assault the rights of others. That gender fluidity is an enemy of society.  If you get to “choose” your identity it somehow nullifies all traditional ways of identifying, which is nonsense.  I am still a heterosexual male regardless of anyone else's identification.  If you are open-minded you don't give a damn about how other people identify (genderfy) unless, of course, you find someone attractive.

It might be that transgender rights are precisely like the women's right to vote in the respective context of its time.  Or it might be the latest “slavery” issue that America seems so insistent on maintaining culturally and politically. In either case, the conservatives historically lost the debate.  That is because, at some point as change accelerates, “society's rules” become backward and are changed, as with our recent recognition of the right of marriage for gay people.

And conservatives will lose on this version of "identity" too.  Recently, I have posted on this blog not against transgender ethics, but against their claim that our grammar should also change - “neopronouns” as Shapiro points out.  I was opposed to this but my thinking has changed in the last few weeks.  I now see the transgender movement as totally undermining society's standards and I see that as inevitable.  The number of transgender people is now exploding, particularly among young people.  

This is certainly the most controversial aspect of today's identity politics.  Why are so many young people suddenly identifying as what society thinks of as their opposite sex or as gender neutral?  The reason is, as I said, technological.  For the first time in history, we have the capability to be fluid with gender medically.  This not only leads to an explosion of transitioning procedures but it changes the dynamic of every aspect of the transgender debate, on all the other levels that do not involve medical intervention.

Freeing humanity from gender is a strange thing.  But that is another aspect of our dystopian reality.  I don't see transgender rights as being infringed at the Federal level unless those who oppose it as an absurdity on largely religious grounds manage to hold America back.  But, even if America somehow bans transgender people, such people are still likely to become the fastest growing segment of our population globally in the years ahead.

As their suddenly exploding numbers suggests, they are emergent harbingers of the future.  Shapiro characterizes transgender politics as “a battle for control.”  He's not wrong.  That is why he feels so threatened by the whole thing.  His critique details the challenges this creates for society.  But expecting identity politics to ultimately lose this debate and not gain at least its fair share of “control” makes Shapiro look more absurd than the criticisms he presents in his column.