Transgender Tribalism

Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe, points to an atavism that haunts modern culture: our desire to be part of a cohesive group solving existential problems together, and the unhappiness of human beings who find themselves tribeless. It’s significant in this regard that many of the psychiatric complaints bedevilling Western society, that provide a pretext for its ramifying bureaucratic structures, are absent from less fortunate parts of the world. Suicide rates go down in war zones. PTSD diagnoses have soared in tandem with the taxpayer funding available to address them, but scarcely exist in places where people are integrated into a purposeful community, no matter the hardships they’re facing. Global civilisation and the postmodern politics of movement don’t nourish the tribal instincts that are passed on in our DNA, and that even nation-states once gave us an outlet for.

I thought of this recently while watching trans individuals testifying in Florida about Ron DeSantis’s moves against gender ideology in the classroom. It was an extraordinary display of fake emotion by people who are at the same time clearly in distress and have formed a tribe that purports to be endangered much like the Jews were in Nazi Germany. Melodrama is the bread and butter of adolescent rebellion, but an entire industry has been created to support this particular form of it, with NGOs and politicians getting on the bandwagon. Meanwhile, humanities academics make a living by forging abstract connections between transgender oppression and the other fake issues du jour, from the imminent climate apocalypse to the need to ‘decolonise’ museums. 

The desperation behind progressive attempts to force reality into forms it doesn’t go into is evident not just in the grotesque body modifications transgender people impose on themselves, but in the violence of their response to someone like Posie Parker. An Irish transgender activist who was recently invited to address our national parliament on International Womens’ Day tweeted “hahahahaha” at Parker’s shocked visage after she was attacked by activists armed with pizza sauce. Behind this cruel pantomime is perhaps the real pain of those who feel no sense of belonging or purpose in society. In response, they have generated a narrative that the liberal civilisation to which they owe their safety is their mortal enemy. If this is partly true it is only because leftist political causes come as a bundle, and they are in the absurd position of welcoming into their countries people whose religious ideology is much more violently intolerant of them than second-wave feminists like Parker are.

Mary Harrington wrote in Unherd this week about the ennui experienced by Taliban fighters since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, arguing that it disproves the theory that feminism is responsible for the ways contemporary civilisation is hostile to masculinity. Clearly, feminists had nothing to do with the Taliban’s victory over the American occupying forces, and therefore modern urban life is all they’re suffering from. She concedes however that office work as a civil servant, as opposed to the freewheeling life of a guerrilla fighter, does force men into feminine roles and relationship styles. Harrington singles out Bronze Age Pervert as an originator of the ‘longhouse’ trope to signify what feminism has done to men, and if this trope is inaccurate, it raises the question of whether his followers are a fake movement on the Right similar to transgenderism on the Left.

However, BAP is a Nietzchean trickster figure who demands no recognition from the mainstream, and his comic celebration of piracy as a way of life is not prescriptive for society at large. It’s more an anticipation of where civilisation is going as culture wars tear liberal democracies apart. He envisages a breakdown in which there will be scope for Taliban-esque bands of Western men to live a life of action like Homer’s Odysseus. How seriously he believes this is an open question, but there’s no doubt that he speaks to an authentic longing that many men experience. I noticed this among my conservative students in American universities years before he came to prominence. One of my smartest students, whose Facebook profile showed him in various bodybuilding poses, said he had been born in the wrong era and should have been rampaging across the steppe with the Mongol hordes. 

The genderists, by contrast, don’t characterise themselves in tribal terms. They appeal instead to the notion of rights, which has a relatively long history but came into its own in the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter galvanised his administration around human rights activism. Simon Reid-Henry has described how this concern dovetailed with the neoliberal reorientation of politics around transnational economic flows and a concomitant focus on the individual at the local level. It sidelined nation states which tended to operate both above the level of the individual and below the level of the universal human concerns that are the business of the NGOs to which governments began to delegate responsibility for such matters. It was an important factor in the atomisation that we experience as we turn from citizens into consumers.

One advantage of the human rights narrative was that it could attract bipartisan support. Republicans interpreted it at once as a justification for limiting government involvement in everyday life and as a pretext for foreign wars. Because they are both universal and antecedent to national politics, human rights are something that you can claim without having to prove yourself worthy of them. The subsequent process of rights inflation—whereby people assert everything from gay marriage to abortion on demand as a human right—now includes the insistence that children have a right to undergo sex change treatment in defiance of their parents’ wishes. The belief that no opposition to these rights should be given a hearing may be implicit in the original concept of basic human rights but is not entailed by the contingent legal rights we win through political activism.

This phoney rights discourse conceals trans people’s more authentic desire, which is for the sense of belonging that comes from facing adversity together. There are many positive ways in which civilised life attempts to recalibrate our primitive instincts, but it may be that the disparity between contemporary society and who we are at an atavistic level has become too extreme. It’s even arguable that BAPism is not so much a threat to the political order as a sublimation of the tribal instinct into the relatively harmless form of internet edgelordism. However, transgenderism is highly political and its militants are not sublimating anything in a healthy way.

By indulging militants who demand that we pay lip service to a false narrative we hollow out the institutions that have given the West its global dominance. These include not just the rule of law, but the scientific method that has allowed us to separate empirical realities from received mythologies. One such myth from early modernity was the idea that female genitalia were an involuted form of male genitalia and that if young women exercised too vigorously their genitals could pop out, turning them into men. You can see this as mirroring the fluidity of gender on the Elizabethan stage. The reality is, however, that sex is not fluid in this way, and Elizabethan genderbending was a theatrical affair dictated by the puritan ideology that forbade women to work as actors. 

It seems we’ve come full circle and are now trying to use science to make our bodies as malleable as our identities. Unfortunately, sexual dimorphism transcends our tribal antipathies and our technological prowess alike. It is the most fundamental difference in human affairs, one whose roots go deeper into our evolutionary past than even the instinct to form tribes. When I was a student there was a debate underway about whether class or gender was a more intractable form of difference, to which the answer given by trendy leftist professors was that class was more intractable. This was in the early days of the gender movement, and it prepared the ground for the protean identity politics of today. Although class differences remain part of our politics, as the Trump and Brexit years have shown, the persistence of biological sexual difference has only been occluded by the cultural constructivist dogmas flowing from universities into the wider world. This difference reasserts itself every time a transwoman rapes someone in a women’s prison, or miraculously transforms from a mediocrity into a champion athlete. One wonders if the extremely rare occurrence of a mass shooting by a biological woman in Nashville recently was a crazed attempt to disprove this truth.