Underpinning all this hysterical, solipsistic bullshit is the abstract unreality of the internet, where we are all just insubstantial wraiths, voices on the wind, and truth is a nothing.

No wonder we are wracked with doubt and existential angst. No wonder we need labels: we have forgotten that our conscious identities are grounded in, and founded on, physical bodies inhabiting and interacting with the physical world. We need to get outside, feel the breeze on our skin, hear it rustling the leaves, go for a walk with some kind, calm, interested people.

At the moment, there is widespread confusion over what gender is, and what to make of Gender Envy (otherwise known as Gender Dysmorphia.)  Part of the problem comes from trying to lump all minority groups together, and assuming that, because all non-conformists stand in opposition to an exclusive majority, all must have the same aim. Anyone who is different is supposed to live in Carnivalesque harmony, in a happy favela outside the city walls. (Although God only knows who’s left inside. Surely to be wholly conformist would be very unusual indeed.)

You would expect this reading of society to be rejected by gender equality activists, because it surrenders to the majority’s lazy dismissal of difference, seeing every transgression as identical in meaning and value: the only thing that is important is that they are all “weird”. 

Not so: the internet has started a massive Scramble for Identity. There has been a frantic proliferation of defined minorities. Existing advocacy groups, founded on principles of inclusion and acceptance, have been swamped, attempting to support a vast range of new identities, even though some directly contradict others.

A good example of this is Stonewall, and the trouble it has representing the whole “LGBTQI+ Community.” The problem is that Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people (the “LGB” bit) are concerned with sexual preference, not changing gender. They are prohibited from loving who they want to, merely because they happen to be the same gender. They are often allied with feminists, who also experience discrimination simply because of the sexual group they were born into. 

In contrast, Trans people (the “T”), are not in the business of advocating for, and celebrating, their birth gender, (or making the most of it.) In fact, they reject and disdain it, believing they can become the opposite gender by force of will and a little surgery. This causes friction with the LGB advocates and feminists who feel trans people have an insultingly simplistic view of what it is to be a woman or man, without having any real sense of what it involves to live that life or have those experiences. They are imposing themselves, and their half-baked assumptions on their target gender, thus fatally confusing the whole issue of gender advocacy, and turning pretty nasty if anyone points that out. 

Meanwhile Intersex people (the “I”, I think), are a tiny minority caught in the middle of this civil war. They are either male or female by genotype, but their bodies present some sexual characteristics of both, so they appear to be of indeterminate sex. This is something they did not choose, which should make them closer to LGB people. However, they physically resemble Trans individuals and so may have experiences closer to theirs. Their cause seems to have been taken up and politicised almost by force by groups such as Stonewall. 

And everyone seems to hate their own allies, believing them to be smug, virtue-signalling, mansplaining, white-privileged liberals. But then, all groups define themselves by their own micro-exclusions.

So, different interest groups are as likely to have conflicting aims as agreements, although they are likely to sympathise with each other’s ill treatment and marginalisation. It is impossible to advocate for all simultaneously. It is like trying to run a fundamentalist organisation that advocates for Christian, Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists at the same time, or an Ulster lobby that claims to speak for both Republicans and Unionists.

Attempts to lump all minority groups together and represent them all at once, will fatally dissipate a campaigning group’s focus and power, causing friction and schism, fostering suspicion and resentment within the organisation, squandering energy and time on self-defeating internal conflict, alienating ourselves from the majority of ordinary people, fatally undermining our causes, and, ultimately, destroying our organisations from the inside, while our true opponents, the fascists, the alt-right, the neo-cons, the evangelical Christian conservatives, look on from their hilltop forts and laugh. 

In fact, these childish and nonsensical antics are so foolish and humiliating that you have to wonder if those promoting them are actually right-wing agent provocateurs trying (very effectively) to discredit the civil rights movements. Or are they just mischievous children? (or both?) 

We are a multifarious species. We must admit that we are all one community made up of many, many multifaceted individuals who share each aspect of themselves with many others.  We cannot be crammed into artificially divided and toxically bickering sub-communities. 

Where there is discrimination, we should create single issue bodies to tackle it, so that people who share a grievance can campaign for redress on that issue alone, while remaining accepted and supported members of the wider community.

No one can, or should, deny their biological sex. A trans woman is not the same as a biological woman, however you want to live or identify yourself; a trans man is not biologically male. The distinction is important. Identifying as the opposite gender to that encoded in your DNA is to betray your own body. And your body makes up a large part of who you are. It mediates the experiences that form your character, even more than your verbal declarations, through its hormonal, emotional and sentient biome. Other people recognise and react to you as a physical, emotional entity more than as a package of ideologies (at least in your real, off-line relationships.) So, to reject your own body seems likely to lead to an even greater crisis of identity.

Adherents believe you can be biologically male but “truly” female, ignoring all the operations of your biology on your psychology and experience of life and community, despite never having been treated as a woman or experiencing menstrual cycles or giving birth or lactating or being sexually threatened. This is self-fulfilment seen through the lens of consumerism. If you can shop like a woman, you can shop for womanhood. You can buy your own vagina.

The belief that such existential angst is caused by being the “wrong” gender and would be solved by transitioning, seems naïve, to me. I don’t imagine being female is any more fun than being male and it does not solve the puzzles of how and why we should live. I guess it could create obstacles that you can pre-occupy yourself with overcoming, which should pass the time, allowing you to avoid confronting the hopeless, pointlessness of existence. (Like anorexia.)

Biological gender is impossible to deny: if you have an X and a Y chromosome, you are male; if you have two X chromosomes you are female. Most of us reach some accommodation with this. However, through the vagaries and variations of biology, some human brains may be constructed to feel fundamentally at odds with their own gender. That might be just the way they are. It’s not a large proportion of the population. A 2011 survey by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, classified 1.4% of the UK population as being of “a gender minority group”, according to wiki. (I assume the percentage is now higher, but still a small minority.) 

Such a state must be an affliction, and its sufferers should be supported in their efforts to come to terms with it.

We do not need to redefine gender to do this. Within these broadest of categories, everyone should be free to live as they choose, as long as it doesn’t damage others. If a man wishes to live as a woman, even have a sex-change, be referred to as “she” that choice should be respected. We should be helping them to minimise the distress their gender is causing them.

If we aim for an inclusive society that accepts and celebrates the individual and their autonomy, rather than creating new genders, we should be reducing, not increasing, classifications and labelling. These are the impersonal tools of those who would limit and control us: governments, marketing agencies, the social media giants. And labels are the laziest form of identity-formation.

We should protect the indeterminate, the personal and the independent, accepting people just as themselves. 

Your biology dictates what you are, what you will become, and what experiences you will have. Gender, sexuality, puberty and all the icky-ness that goes with it, are not yours to command. They just happen to you, and you grow into the socially constructed aspects of it, as you encounter the world in the guise of a man or a woman, and as the world responds to you as such.

Trans men and women resist this process. Admittedly, they are driven by thoughts and feelings that may also be biologically determined, or they may be predisposed to developing certain sorts of thought patterns. The brain is an organ of biological processes, after all. 

However, the body (and brain) will continue to develop according to the plan laid down by its genes, whatever you may feel you want. If you have a Y chromosome you are fated to be biologically male, whether you like it or not. If you don’t, you are undeniably female. Nature seems to be under no obligation to make you happy or to resolve your inner conflicts. Inner conflicts are the condition of being human.

Of course, people with gender identity issues feel deeply distressed by this. They should be given immense amounts of sympathy and support. But this does not mean that they are conceiving of their problems with clarity, or that their solutions are the correct ones. Having anorexia, and then therapy, has taught me that urges, assumptions and beliefs I thought were fundamental truths, beyond rationality, unassailable to reason, can be tissues of falsehood. Acknowledging this can be deeply disturbing; it can seem completely counter-intuitive, yet over time you learn to accept that your rigidly held beliefs had trapped you in a limiting box. 

On the other hand, anorexia also showed me that you could accept the untruth and irrationality of a position or type of behaviour, and still compulsively pursue it. 

Human consciousness doesn’t seem to bother, at first, with its own origins. As toddlers, and then children, developing minds don’t marvel at their newness. They don’t look back with astonishment at how recently they were nothing but an inchoate fog of sensations. Instead they become gradually aware of themselves as they think about the world around them. 

Yet, from this starting assumption, we become self-aware. Then we are driven by the desire to firm up the governing identity, the need for eudemonia: self-fulfilment, self-development. 

Children, as they embark on this quest, are still relatively new to existence, and are discovering phenomena that are older than they are. This gives them the impression that the objective world is age-old and has a reliable permanence: popular music has always sounded like this; fashion has always looked like this. Our parents have always been this age; schools have always taught using these methods, pushed these agendas. (A student asked me, during the first lockdown, “did you have many lockdowns when you were young?” I said, “It’s totally new to me, too, kid.” He found this troubling: he wanted me to be experienced and thus to know what to do.) 

As children grow and become teenagers, then young adults, they still believe they are discovering eternal truths about the world. And, more importantly, about themselves. They feel they are uncovering their true, unchanging selves. 

In fact, brains are plastic and protean. They grow rapidly; thousands of neural pathways are being formed and reinforced all the time. So, everyone creates their own identity in the act of discovering it. They decide on which narratives of self they will live by. And this goes for the “cis- gendered” and the gender dysphoric. 

No one naturally embodies gender stereotypes. All consciously adopt them, so no one feels completely at ease, although some feel more ill-at-ease than others. 

Traditional gender constructs and aspirations can be terribly restrictive. Recognising this, we ought to be generally more flexible and accepting of each other with all our oddities intact. Instead, the belief in the immutable self encourages us to create a multiplicity of separate, rigid categories of gender, to cover all gradations and nuances of attitude, and preferences. If identity is predetermined and unchanging, we think, then we all must be fixed in our separate types. So, we define ourselves in their terms, and use the internet to collect a like-minded “community.” Once again, the internet fuels division not the promised “connectivity.”

And then, as we age, our brains begin to set like concrete. Thoughts become assumptions. Behaviours become habits. We’re stuck with whatever ham-fisted, naïve caricature we’ve created. 

There seems to have been a regression in attitudes to gender and race since the 1970s and 80s, when I was growing up. Then there was a lot of casual bigotry but bigots knew, in their heart of hearts, they were being bastards. Campaigners strove for tolerance and inclusion, believing everyone should have the right to profit from the advantages of the most advantaged. 

Now, far more has been done to protect the rights of minority groups, and we congratulate ourselves on our progressiveness and our moral superiority to our forebears, but we have become more segregated. Social Justice activists, by identifying more and more persecuted minorities, then campaigning against the imagined hostile majority as a group, are encouraging segregation and generalising about other people. Activists genuinely pride themselves on their bigotry because they see it as part of their moral courage and clear-sightedness. 

We are living in a more equal, yet more fractured society. Race, genders and sexual stereotypes are becoming supercharged and over-defined: hard-edged, crystalline and brittle. I’m sure this has been amplified by the consumer capitalist discourses of the internet. A plethora of different categories of identity are being disseminated by social media. They are prefabricated. Rather than living their best lives and seeing where this leads them, children are being told to pick one from the rack.

And these rigid identity categories look suspiciously like market research categories. And embodying an identity, living in the manner of that identity, seems to involve consuming, buying the products, using the apps, following the trends, joining the chats and campaigns, being profiled, targeted by bespoke adverts…

Those vulnerable to existential uncertainties seem more prone to gender dysphoria. My experience at a large secondary school is that gender identity anxiety seems most common among students who are on the Autism spectrum. (Still a very limited data set, I know. Mostly it is girls relinquishing the trappings of femininity: an easier step, in a residually patriarchal society, than boys having to adopt all these physically enhancing adjuncts.) After all, ASD people tend to have difficulties making connections with other people, and thus locating themselves securely within communities. My better-read colleagues tell me that this is borne out by the data. 

I have also noticed that, in less than a decade, the number of people with this condition has grown from virtually none to being a well-represented minority. Is this because people have finally plucked up the courage to come out? Is it because pollution has altered the hormonal balance of the amniotic bath in which foetuses develop in the womb? Is it because society is now suggesting this as a solution to their existential angst?

This last seems the most likely to me^[1]. Some people have trouble fitting in with a group identity. Their feeling of exclusion greatly unsettles and upsets them. Part of fitting in is aligning yourself with the sexual expectations of your community: adopting recognisable roles that send recognisable signals. This allows you to participate in the group’s sexual discourses: its talk and behaviour towards each other.  

Gender and sexuality signalling must be among the most obvious and unsubtle forms of non-verbal communication. (Sometimes you may have to reproduce with the most unaware dullards – i.e. men.) So, a most glaring aspect of alienation is likely to be gender alienation. 

Nowadays, though, people who feel this way are encouraged to see this gender dysphoria as the single cause of their issues. They are encouraged to channel their distress into a sort of gender envy, to believe that, if only they were the other gender, all their problems would be solved. When they are not, supporters tend to attribute the high levels of mental un-wellness, depression and suicide among trans people wholly to the discrimination they face. This seems unlikely. Other groups who experience discrimination do not show anywhere near the same levels of distress. GOV.UK’s Ethnicity Facts and Figures website (updated 2^nd March 2021) states that, in 2014, other than a higher number of white people saying that they had had suicidal thoughts or self harmed, “There were no other meaningful differences in the prevalence of suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide or self harm.” (ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk)

In fact, in a healthy society, no one should have to relinquish their gender because they don’t manage well its superficial social constructs. You should be able to own your gender and sexuality despite not presenting it in an orthodox manner. In our modern internet-mediated society, where all truth is merely appearance, social constructs of gender are un-natural enough, even when built upon biological foundations. (Those enormous, ultra-false eyelashes and slabs of fake nails!). Without such foundations, gender constructs degenerate into grotesque and degrading parodies. No one should feel compelled to enact them. 

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^[1] I am less convinced by the idea that society has finally become liberal enough to create safe spaces for trans people to come out. Homosexuality was taboo for centuries, yet persisted as a clandestine community throughout that time; gay people tended to know they were gay, but have realised they’d have to hide it. In contrast, the urge to transition has had a meteoric rise without being preceded by much of a sub-culture. 

Changing your gender seems such a fantastical solution to existential angst, likely to cause more than it ameliorates, for it demands rejecting your own body. But the body, including the physical, bio-chemical substance of the brain, is not a vessel of inert clay that merely contains the true, spiritual you. The body is the primary cause, and the most fundamental and dynamic part, of who you are: where and how you are located; how you are perceived and treated and how you respond to that; how you sense and mediate your world; how you think and how you develop.

To deny it is to enact the most profound betrayal of your own identity. To interfere with it by feeding it altering drugs and hormones, or through invasive surgery, is to brutalise and torture yourself in order to perform an artificial caricature of a gender you can never truly attain. And this must be the most profoundly alienating denial of your own identity of all.

Stonewall (Stonewall.org.uk) report that over 48% of Trans people in Britain have attempted suicide, and 84% have thought about it, while 55% have been diagnosed with depression at some time. (Although these figures are quite old: 2012 & 2014, and the sample sizes are small.) There is no doubt that the appalling discrimination, hatred and even violence trans people experience must be largely to blame for this. But it must be relevant that people looking for gender solutions to their problems are not in a happy place, and gender reassignment isn’t providing many with the fulfilment they seek.

Having said that, there are now a small number of girls, at my school, who have opted not to dress or act in a traditionally feminine way. They are keeping themselves aloof from the conversations about gender and sexuality, but they aren’t denying their womanhood. Largely, they seem to be left alone to do so, although they tend to be solitary and troubled souls. If the more extreme, pioneering trans activists have opened this space for them, then they have done a good thing, but at what cost to themselves?

Teenagers are new to gender roles and norms, and to the urgency of post-pubertal sexuality. It’s a profoundly difficult and complex business and it can become a dominant preoccupation. I thought of little else but girls, at this age; my 16-year-old daughter won’t leave the house until her make-up is perfect.

Self-presentation – conforming to the group’s look, proclaiming their interests and values – is a deeply important aspect of group identity with profound implications over the degree to which you will be accepted. Our 6^th formers, who do not wear uniforms, spend anxious hours making sure they don’t “look weird”, or even say anything weird. Lower school girls automatically roll up their uniform kilts, as they leave their houses in the morning, because anything longer than a mini-skirt is Social Death!

In western youth culture, fashion is distinctly gendered, and women’s fashion tends to be sexualised. Every season, a new body part must be exposed, or accentuated with make-up. At the moment, it is midriffs; a while ago it was bare legs and a hint of buttock peeping out of very short shorts. Cleavage makes perennial comebacks. 

Modern online culture exposes even pre-pubescent children to gender and sexuality. Its memes and marketing are highly gendered and thus polarising. Its world-weary humour and furious outcries, even its pornography: all reinforce stereotypes and expectations. Children are encouraged to “take sides” before they have any real sense of what is going on, or have become properly aware, and comfortable with who they are in either gender or sexual terms. If they find the choice difficult, they are encouraged to see themselves as having a problem, or at least as being different. 

Some teenagers are still finding it difficult to fit in. They might be too shy to carry off the fashion; they might be late developers; they might be bored by football or conversations about boys; they might be inept at picking up social cues and signals; they might not be attracted to members of the opposite sex; they might be plagued by strange thoughts. Yet they still long for inclusion and acceptance. This can lead to a profound sense of alienation and distress and, without the recognition of peers, deep crises of identity. 

However, help is at hand. If they don’t find it easy to conform to the gender norms of their social group, young people are now encouraged to see their problems as stemming from the fact that they are the “wrong” gender, as if gender was a free-floating spiritual truth, independent of, and more real than, the body and its DNA and hormones and just happening to settle in a male or female body at random. And the internet offers support. By connecting billions of people across continents, even small minorities can find enough allies to create an online ersatz community. The “wrongly gendered” has become a thing.