On Liberty

Why the modern LGBT movement is anything but truly left wing

The “genderqueer”, the “non-binary”, the “demi sexual” are the consumers of the busy counterfeiters of LGBT lives who promise “authenticity” to the lost, the bored and the ambitious. But these are mere footnotes to the encyclopaedia of lies the LGBT industry sells and tells. You imagine you’re immune to this fraud, but this human pyramid scheme of unreality can distort the vision of even the most careful observer. This is why “be kind” means “shut up”. It’s why “educate yourself” means “repeat my ignorance”. It’s why “authentic” means a tired, off-the-shelf identity. All words are abused and degraded by this engine of unreality.

You think this movement is “left wing” or “Marxist”, but it is the opposite. Left wing movements aren’t traditionally the recipients of corporate largesse from Starbucks or Oreos. They don’t generally commodify humans into “sex workers”. They don’t start crowd funders for private surgery. This movement may look and sound left wing but that is another inversion of the truth, another deception. This is a slick, well marketed and above all right-wing consumer rights movement. This is a movement of the market. This is an extreme libertarian force.   

The mainstream LGBT movement of this moment is a libertarian horror show with no philosophy any more serious than “the customer is always right”. It relies on consumers rejecting any intercession and appointing them the sole and lonely narrator of what is and is not “authentic”. That “authenticity” as communicated by the consumer functions as the sole fixed moral point from which all else flows. Any attempt to question or undermine the consumer choice is denounced in ferocious and quasi-religious terms as “conversion therapy”, “invalidating” or one hundred other market-tested slurs, each precisely calibrated to be easily repeated and difficult to recover from. This is a movement that is only happy with five star customer reviews, all others are punished.

It doesn’t matter if that consumer is a child, or a scheming heterosexual craving the social credit of difference by calling themselves “queer”, or an effeminate (mostly gay of course) natal male chased out of his category male and taught to call himself “nonbinary”. There is no greater god in the modern movement than unquestioned consumer choice. A generation used to an infinitely customised Amazon experience of life transpose these behaviours from their materialist world to their internal life. Only one voice matters, their own, and if it must echo round an empty cave where only they know the truth then so be it. To hell with consequences, to hell with the common good and to hell with other people.

“Other people” as a category has never been a strong suit for the libertarian. Classic libertarians pose propositions such as ““If I want to take heroin why should the state intervene”, they have always been complete in their failure of imagination or concern for how their choices might cascade uncontrollably away from them into the lives of others. Our modern LGBT libertarians do much the same, they make a choice and that alone is enough for the LGBT movement. To make such choices is the holiest of all modern sacraments.

No one likes a loser it would seems. So this slick, modern brand of LGBT libertarianism has nothing much to say to people who make or are affected by bad choices. Like the libertarian who was free not to insure her house, the LGBT corporate behemoths have nothing to say when it catches fire. Detrantitioners. Gay people excluded from activism by those with dubious claims to “queer” identity (whatever that is). Lesbians who no longer have spaces of their own. Lost, confused youth who no longer feel confident enough to name what they are as “male” or “female” because these categories have been traduced by LGBT salesman who insult the beauty and complexity of the categories by reimagining them as the stereotypical mass marketed plastic toys - “action man” and Barbie. Notice how there it is again on the shelves of those toy stores, the market and its products.  

This is a libertarianism so vulgar and unthinking it verges on the borders of social anarchy. The “queer theory” it is based on can only digest and destroy concepts, it cannot build anything. It cannot cope with human nuance, human failure, human fallibility or human discussion. It has nothing to say but “no debate” to anyone who won’t embrace its phoney utopia. It is a two-dimensional parody of a thing as obvious as any stage prop. It is a mockery of a revolution with its corporate sponsors and it certainly is not left wing.