A few weeks ago, while attending the launch of a university press literary anthology, I crossed paths with a person who ‘identifies as non-binary’. She was a contributor and one of the authors invited to get up and do a reading. She was dressed and made up to look as androgynous as possible. The MC for the morning, while introducing her, referred to her as ‘they’. She seemed a friendly person, but while in her company all I could think about were the decisions I made (and almost made) when I was twenty years old. Few people are as dumb as a smart undergraduate. I seriously considered, for example, getting a tattoo of the Pantera lyric “Myself influence I”. Thankfully I never went through with it.
I mention this anecdote because I believe we are entering a period where things painted as political are not political at all.
Although I’m a ‘live and let live’ sort of person, I draw the line at what has been broadly defined as ‘identity politics’ when it conflicts with definable, demonstrable reality. I respect a person’s right to identify as non-binary and refer to themselves as ‘they’ or ‘ze’ or whatever, provided they don’t try to make me participate in their delusion. And if a man wants to carve up his genitals, fashion them into a rough facsimile of a vagina, and call himself a woman, I won’t discriminate against him. But I will never agree that he is a woman.
Or take the matter of race. If someone with pale skin and red hair wants to identify as Aboriginal, I have no problem with that. And if he can swindle the government into giving him a handout based on his ‘indigenous heritage’, good luck to him. But if someone says, “Is he Aboriginal?” I will answer in the negative. Because it is not true. Putting a drop of blood into a bucket of water does not make it a bucket of blood.
The literary world, more than any other part of society, has been swept up in this anti-realist nonsense. Peruse the guidelines for any fiction market – even one that otherwise has no pretensions – and you will find the editor encouraging submissions from ‘QUILTBAG+ writers’ and ‘under-represented minorities’. This makes no sense whatsoever, since an editor would have no way of discriminating against such authors unless they chose to identify themselves. In fact, one of fiction’s greatest assets has always been anonymity, allowing minority or oppressed voices to be heard in spite of prejudice. Adding specific calls for such things in submission guidelines is the worst kind of virtue signalling.
Identity politics is a bizarre intersection between the Salem witch trials, the snobbery of 17th Century French etiquette, and modern-day political correctness. The endgame of this surreal and ultimately unsustainable behaviour is embodied in the June 2018 edition of Australian literary journal Meanjin. Editor of that issue, Jonathan Green, decided to ride a high-profile slacktivist wave and crossed out the ‘anjin’ part of the magazine’s masthead, so it read #MeToo. No doubt it seemed a creative masterstroke in Green’s mind, but when it was released into the wild it received an outraged backlash from Meanjin’s readers. Why? Because, according to one of Green’s Twitter followers, “Given the destruction of land, cultures and language is fundamentally tied to violence against Aboriginal women... it feels weird to see Meanjin crossed out in this way.” Poor old ‘Goody Green’ had been identified as a witch, you see, and had no recourse but to confess to his crime and publicly flagellate in the hope he wouldn’t be marched to the progressivist gallows. I can’t imagine going through life worrying about who I might offend next and then scrambling to atone for it when I did. I’d rather be dead.
The heartening thing is that the identity politics crowd can warp perceptions of reality, but not reality itself. When this anti-realist fad burns out, reality will remain, unchanged. In twenty years, I suspect the ‘non-binary’ girl will look back on her behaviour with the same sort of mild mortification I do now when recalling how close I came to getting that stupid tattoo.