There’s a window in life between coming of age and servicing a mortgage during which many make some time for social justice. The Iraq War stirred my lot. Previous generations were spoilt for choice. But it’s hard not to feel that we’ve reached a point where demand for causes outpaces supply.
This is an age in which a single mother on a social housing estate in Manchester can secure £1m of NHS funding for cutting edge gene therapy for an infant child. The military industrial complex and university campuses are in harmonious agreement over a land war in Europe. Both agree that the only public figure determined to end it is as villainous as the war’s belligerent. Student views on climate change are mostly indistinguishable from those of investment banks and private equity firms.
This has driven activism into the marshlands in search of discord with established norms. The assault on those relating to sex and gender extended all the way to the Supreme Court last week.
Draw a circle without a pair of compasses, and you won’t have drawn a circle. But we’ll know what you meant. The idea of a perfect circle survives a messier reality. And so it’s been with sex and gender, night and day, and even life and death (thanks to zombie movies and crack heads).
Under sufficient scrutiny, all meaning slides. Categories leak. In a search for something other than the machine to rage against, activists hit upon the soft underbelly of our civilisation: the fragile axioms that we struggle to justify.
The assault is faltering on a point of coherence, torn between dismantling the gender binary and demanding a chosen place within it. This, more than ideology, led the Supreme Court to defend a stable fiction over an unstable reality. But a more cerebral strategy might not fail indefinitely. Let’s hope those railing for a messier world have a formula for governing the complex truth that’s as functional as that which governs the simple fantasy.
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