Have “trans” people never considered the possibility that those of us content to self-identify simply as people might not give the tiniest and most solitary fuck about their sex or their gender or the contents of their underwear or their preferences when it comes to exploring the contents of other consenting adults’ underwear?
That’s how society works. That’s how we avoid mayhem. By all giving the absolute minimum of fucks about the proclivities and peccadilloes of anybody other than those with whom we have some kind of relationship – and hardly ever then. Not giving a fuck about every detail of others’ anxieties and confusions is adaptive. It benefits survival.
We all have them. We are all riddled with anxieties and ambivalences and confusions and inadequacies and fears and more fears. We learn to cope with them or we seek refuge in substances or we seek help or we kill ourselves. And we develop a tolerance of others doing likewise in our vicinity so long as their substance misuse doesn’t directly affect us and so long as they don’t land on or near us when they jump off a tall building.
What we don’t do. What people have never even attempted whilst retaining some vestige of what we choose to regard as sanity, is to expect and demand specific constitutional and legal protection for every aspect of our psyche and our physical being.
Society simply could not function were we all to insist on “self-identifying” ourselves into ever smaller and more narrowly, rigidly defined categories and demanding the same ‘rights’ as accrue to every other category of whatever size. Society cannot function where every category of people at every level regards itself as beleaguered and entitled to protection from every other category.
Democratic society cannot exist where there is no pooling of personal sovereignty. It cannot function where there is no willingness to compromise some part of ourselves for the sake of creating a functioning democratic society.
A need to find personal affirmation in the antipathy of others is every bit a disorder of the human psyche as the need to find targets for pointless antipathy. Society is sane and liveable only to the extent that each of us declines both to look for people to hate and people to be hated by.
Society is sane and liveable only to the extent that we all decline to give a fuck.
Peter A Bell 
Amen!
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Seconding Duncan!
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I love this article.
Although I am a LD councillor in Devon I am a supporter of Scottish independence.
May I use some of your text in a speech to LD Spring Conference on the trans issue?
Sent from my iPhone
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I’d be honoured.
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Hi Peter, unlike yourself I consider the current SNP to be unelectable largely because it refuses to learn from history. As a normal gay young man in the 1970’s i well remember the destruction of the Gay Lib movement from within by the wooly brained politicians and an entryist incursion of PIE (peadophile info exchange)
Why the current SNP Leadership is openly encouraging the transgender zealots and providing them with a destructive platform is easily explained.
Just like PIE’s infiltration in the 70’s Our current first minister is deliberatly using a vulnerable minority to secure the enfeeblement of the Indy dream and the end of the SNP.
You may find this opinion to be paranoid fantasy but having lived through the death of a movement by entryist means looking at the current situation I see clearly history repeating itself given that yesterday Out for Indy broadcast a nasty simplification by Christina McKelvie about her determination to push GRA whatever the cost post may election. This showed me that not only do a section of parliamentarians have a warped sense of entitlement to the general publics votes but that they are trying to hold the indy public hostage to their scams. Nicola is a Fraud.
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I get what you say, as will most others, but also, we really do have no choice but to vote SNP in May, at least for the Constituency vote.
There simply is no alternative.
We might, and that’s a big might, have a option for the List vote, (no, not the Greens, as there are just as hopeless) depending if there was a credible pro Independence alternative, and we are yet to be convinced there will be one. There could well be, however.
But what is very clear, is that some within SNP have been taking full advantage of this zero choice for who to vote for in May. And we see an unfortunate consequence as a result.
It is one thing for a small group to try get their own strange agenda put into effect, it is quite another, that the leadership is allowing it to happen.
And it threatens Independence in a big way.
Who’s to say, come May, just enough voters will simply not bother voting, or that some who were going to vote SNP are put off by this crazy Self Recognition stuff, along with the Salmond Saga?
We mustn’t let that happen, but with less than 3 months to go, and all this turmoil, we face that risk.
It is essential for Scotland’s sake, someone in SNP takes control of this. By which I mean, someone who can properly deal with these crazies, and push for Independence.
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Wisdom.
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( Everybody’s ootae step bar oor Jock ) These WokistsGRA reformers have their brains wired up wrong & want us to conform to their way of thinking . I pull my trousers on one leg at a time and zip up the front I dont pull my trousers on and zip up the side . Men are men and Women are Women with our own ways of dealing with life , this nonsense GRA was rejected by Westminster I wonder why .
Great piece of writing Peter ( nail hammer heid ).
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Peter. New to your blog. So, this is is the best most human and most balanced treatment of what I call neurotic diversity, I have ever read. This hyper narcissism of small differences has become such a third rail issue in the workplace or the woke-place as its rapidly becoming. Sending this round former colleagues as I took the package rather than drink the kool aid! Like most on here I am progressive and open minded but these people don’t want your tolerance they want your affirmation for every micro identity they can dream up.
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I like the term “neurotic diversity”. The bit about “affirmation for every micro identity they can dream up” may be overstating, but for powerful effect. And even if it could be called exaggeration now, how long might that remain the case. The trend towards the ‘micro’ is very evident. If there is easy power to be acquired by the hyper-division of categories then there will always be people ready to compromise their intellect in pursuit of that power.
I don’t think that’s the greatest worry, though. I suspect the backlash against this trend may be rather severe. I fear that this backlash – this over-correction – may hit genuine minorities quite badly. Because there will be easy power to be had riding on the bigots’ bandwagon.
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