It was once possible to participate in cultural debate—and write fiction—without thinking about identity politics. No longer.
From The Wall Street Journal:
A much-remarked recent poll found that more than half of Americans have become afraid to voice their opinions freely for fear of retaliation or severe criticism. The expatriate novelist Lionel Shriver is not among this cowed majority. Over many years of writing articles and essays for the Spectator of London, Harper’s, the Journal and other outlets, dozens of which are now gathered in “Abominations,” Ms. Shriver has persisted in making ornery observations about politics and culture. Her asperity has brought upon her the full flaming rage of the Twittersphere. Unhappily for her enemies, she is not on social media, and her professional associates have stood by her, so the conflagrations have left her unsinged.
In her works of fiction, meanwhile, Ms. Shriver has explored a variety of topics and themes, creating dramatically compelling stories that chase human proclivities to dark conclusions in such novels as “The Mandibles” (2016), a dystopian family saga set amid national bankruptcy and social breakdown; and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), a psychological thriller that tells of a distant mother and her homicidal, psychopathic son. The latter book, made into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton, brought Ms. Shriver’s work to wider attention.
What made her personally notable, or perhaps notorious, was her appearance in 2016 at the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia. Her speech to open the event was as much a plea to her fellow novelists to protect their creative realm from identity politics as an excoriation of the new vogue for policing acts of “cultural appropriation.” Earlier that year, two students at Bowdoin College in Maine had thrown a birthday party where tequila was drunk and miniature sombreros were worn. Such was the subsequent anger on campus that deans decried the party theme as a possible “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Members of the student body condemned an environment “where students of color, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” Ms. Shriver told her audience of writers that the Bowdoin morality play fit into “a larger climate of supersensitivity” that was “giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively make our work impossible.”
. . . .
Ms. Shriver has been quick to note, and brave to say what she thinks about, the progressive catechesis facilitated by the internet. In 2021’s “Would You Want London to Be Overrun by Americans Like Me?” she points out that, despite blithe “no human is illegal” rhetoric, nowhere in the world do people greet mass immigration with unalloyed pleasure. “We are a political and territorial species,” Ms. Shriver writes. “Most people are capable of hospitality toward foreigners who arrive in modest numbers, but balk when outsiders become so populous that they seem to be taking over.” In 2020’s “Just Because We’ve Been OK Doesn’t Mean We’ll Stay That Way,” written in the aftermath of the first Covid lockdowns and the violent Black Lives Matter protests that followed, Ms. Shriver blasts Western governments for failing to do any sort of cost-benefit analysis before shutting down their economies. She also roasts the “woke white activists [who] want to demonize ‘whiteness’ as the sole source of all evil, while mysteriously believing that this does not entail demonizing themselves.”
. . . .
“We are told that a trans woman may have been born a man, but ‘feels like’ a woman,” she tells us. “I don’t mean to be perverse here, but I have no idea what it ‘feels like’ to be a woman—and I am one.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
She will understand what a trans person means when they say they ‘feel like’ a different gender when it is one of her own children or family members who discovers they are in a body of the wrong gender.
Some people seem to have no imagination, but even they might note their trans family member is a LOT happier now. Doesn’t she want that for them?
SOME of the ‘trans’ people are more content – but SOME aren’t. That transition is NOT a decision that should be pushed on minors. Better to wait until that person is fully grown and mature enough to understand the medical consequences.
But, for adult men who want to make those medical modifications because they “feel like a woman”? I’m with Shriver on that aspect. I am a woman by birth and chromosomes, have given birth and nursed my children, and I have to say that much of what transwomen seem to focus on – clothing, makeup, stereotypical ‘feminine’ behavior and pursuits – well, it just isn’t the meat of what makes a woman.
I was always a tomboy, with interests ranging from participatory sports, electronics and computers, and science. There are many like me.
If a person wants to undergo the pain, inconvenience, and cost of that ‘transformation’, I’m not gonna stop them. But, I’m also not going to force actual women to compete in sports against them. Nor will I accept being lectured about what women feel from someone who hasn’t a clue, as they are not an actual woman.
Many like you, indeed [waves]. (Less on sports, more on nerdery.)
Insurance companies don’t offer “adult” rates to anybody under 25 for excellent *neurological* reasons:
https://neurotray.com/when-does-the-brain-stop-developing-or-fully-develop/#:~:text=The%20brain%20stops%20developing%20or%20fully%20develops%20around,they%20progressively%20%E2%80%9Cmanifest%E2%80%9D%20as%20our%20nervous%20system%20grows.
“The American pediatrician Jay Giedd has discovered that the human brain is under construction until the end of adolescence, although at this stage the neurons and nerve connections do not grow, but are “pruned” until the reasoning characteristic of age is reached adult.
“Giedd has carried out a rigorous study with more than 2,000 people between the ages of 3 and 25, which has allowed him to observe that at the end of childhood the brain experiences a “disproportionate” increase in neurons and nerve connections, which then go away reducing during adolescence.
“This neuronal “pruning”, which culminates in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, occurs first in the posterior area of the brain and finally in the frontal cortex, which is what controls reasoning, decision-making and emotional control.
The American pediatrician Jay Giedd has discovered that the human brain is under construction until the end of adolescence, although at this stage the neurons and nerve connections do not grow, but are “pruned” until the reasoning characteristic of age is reached adult.
“Giedd has carried out a rigorous study with more than 2,000 people between the ages of 3 and 25, which has allowed him to observe that at the end of childhood the brain experiences a “disproportionate” increase in neurons and nerve connections, which then go away reducing during adolescence.
“This neuronal “pruning”, which culminates in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, occurs first in the posterior area of the brain and finally in the frontal cortex, which is what controls reasoning, decision-making and emotional control. ”
“Follow the science” only applies when it justifies political agendas.
With all due respect, Felix, that’s a post hoc rationalization by the insurance industry. They haven’t offered “adult rates” under 25 years old for a century, before there was anything like “neuroscience.” If they were really following the “science,” the age-related bands would be 0-11, 12-26, 27-55, 56-72, and over 72 — for virtually all kinds of insurance.
We’re not going to get into the eighteenth-century property law thinking that actually lies behind insurance industry treatment of different age groups, any more than we’ll get into the thinking behind “credit scores” reflecting “claims experiences.”
The practice may predate the studies but the studies validate it.
Think of it as the equivalent of folk herbal medicine. 😉
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305266793_Herbal_Medicine_A_Comprehensive_Review
They are hardly the only institution that acknowledges/exploits the limited judgment of the young. Everything from peer pressure, teen pregnancy, risky behaviors, and military enrollment reflect the young’s “challenges” in long term thinking.
None of which is new.
What *is* new is we now know it isn’t an individual character flaw but actual hardwired biology at work. It probably even serves an evolutionary purpose: if the young understood the risks of childbirth and costs of child rearing the species would’ve gone extinct long ago. 😀
The newest member of the US Supreme Court doesn’t know what a woman is. Would she understand if she had women in her family?
She wouldn’t have been confirmed if she answered. It would be reason enough for one party or the other to reject her en masse, depending on the answer. So in typical post-Bork fashion, she refused to answer.
The world we live in.
Ideology über alles.
The trouble as I see it here about opinions, is not the opinions per se, but that the feeling that one’s opinions are somehow more valid than another person’s opinions.
Arguably it is an obvious truism that no one knows how another person feels, because feelings are emotions, and are therefore not facts. Saying that, the human condition is ruled by feelings, feeling of outrage over (insert X), and then rationalizing the position to justify said one’s opinion about outrage (insert Y).
IMNSHO, mind your own business.
If you’re a staunch conservative outraged over (insert X), or a avid liberal outraged over (insert Y), remember this: other people’s opinions are not your concern, and vice-versa, your opinions don’t matter to other people (rub along to get along).
If people want to transition (MtF or FtM), or have same sex relationships, or vote Trump, or vote Biden… it’s none of our business what they do. It’s hard enough to be responsible for our own actions without trying to control the actions of others.
So… remember do unto others what one would want to have done unto oneself, with the added caveat of be kind or: act with enlightened self-interest.
I of course, acknowledge the irony of posting my opinions about opinions.
No irony.
Not here.
It’s our watercooler after all.
The question to consider is what to do with the absolutists who take their opinions as if laws of nature beyond discussion. As the saying goes, “everybody has a right to their own opinion but not their own reality”. Even less to force it upon others. And when there’s actual data involved…
” Humans aren’t rational creatures, merely rationalizing ones”.
“Rationalizations are more important than sex.”
“Naaah, nothing’s more important than sex!”
“Really? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”
— The Big Chill
Good quote.
Heinlein at his best.
Indeed.
He knew people and he wrote people.
Not all writers meet both (or either) criteria.