Here's an interesting take. Gay writer Bruce Bawer in "The Great Consonant Shift" wants to know how come, all of a sudden around 2000, the gay-lesbian rights movement transformed into LGBT? See, according to Bawer, gay-lesbians and transgenders are about as different as different can be.
Being gay or lesbian or bisexual is about which sex one is attracted to. To be transgender is to claim that you’re a member of the opposite sex[.]
You see, to Bower it is perfectly natural and physical to have gay marriage, but to have trans rights and the right to transition is completely different.
Probably not. The whole game of modern politics is "rights." That how the educated ruling class justifies its power. It conducts its "over-under" politics by championing the "rights" of some marginalized group against the insufferable heedlessness or active opposition of the booboisie.
I say that some marginalized groups championed by the ruling class are genuinely marginalized; others are "fake," members of the ruling class playing oppression theater and acting the part of a marginalized group. I say that workers of the industrial revolution and the blacks of the Jim Crow era were genuine victims. Feminist women, gays, lesbians, transgenders, post-civil-rights blacks, etc., are fake victims.
Your mileage may vary.
Actually, my question is really: "why gay marriage?" That's because I believe that the purpose of marriage is the protection of women. Men are naturally sexual predators and need to be curbed, and marriage is one of the ways that human society puts the curb on men. But gays and lesbians? What's the point beyond, of course, the question of gubmint benefits.
Oh yeah, I get it. Humans are social animals, and the point of gay rights and gay marriage and the pejorative "homophobe" is to raise the social status of gays and lesbians. Because all the world's a stage for social status games.
Back in the day, before the narrative was changed to tell us that gays and lesbians had been discriminated against and marginalized since the dawn of time, you get Eveyln Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited which represents homosexual love as a kind of Oxbridge-upper-class exoticism: a stage that our hero goes through at Oxford with a troubled scion of the decaying aristocracy.
But Bawer inspired me to check up on the history of human marriage practices, starting of course with our pals the gorillas and the chimpanzees.
Chimpanzee marriage. Chimpanzees are territorial, and the males defend the food growing territory and form a male hierarchy: the higher up the hierarchy the more sexual opportunities with the females. See Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.
Gorilla marriage. Gorillas seem to live in bands officiated by a single silverback, and the females seem to attach to a silverback for safety reasons. Gorillas are not territorial like chimpanzees; they just move through the countryside in search of food but do not establish territory. They do not compete for food-growing territory.
Human hunter-gatherers. Scientists say that there is some polygyny -- multiple wives -- but mostly hunter-gatherers live by arranged marriage using "brideprice" or "brideservice," where brideprice is payment by the groom's family to the bride's family and brideservice is "labor performed by a prospective groom or newly-wed husband for the family of the bride."
Agricultural humans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the agricultural age men had as many wives as they could afford -- until the Catholic Church started asking high-status males the reason why. So high status men had lots of wives. But for low-status men it is clear to me that you were only allowed to get married if you could afford it. That was the whole point of doweries. A guy would only marry a girl if the bride's family coughed up enough of the ready money so he could keep the new family alive. Note that slaves didn't get married except in the Americas where more slaves meant more field labor. And note that domestic servants in all 19th century novels and 20th century TV serials about the good old days were, and remained, unmarried.
Industrial humans. The whole point of the industrial era is that it is the era of the Great Enrichment. The economy was no longer static, founded upon the food from food-growing land. Anyone could get married and hope for the best. Exit arranged marriage and enter romantic marriage, because the chances are that any young man and young woman could make it, because economic growth.
See, my line is that in the post-industrial era we have sexual freedom because we can afford it. Not because we are advanced and evolved and special. We can afford to have gays getting it on with multiple partners because AIDS vaccine. We can afford to have lesbians living together because we don't need a male around the house to do the plowing. We can afford to have childless couples because we don't need child labor on the farm any more.
And we can afford to have the scions of the educated elite running around getting into "activism" and gay rights and transgender rights and "1619 Projects" not just because of Adam Smith's old maxim about "a great deal of ruin in a nation" but because we can afford to have a lot of people running around doing stupid things. At least, we think we can.
Of course, I believe that modern politics is a domestication of the old warrior ethic. Just like chimpanzees, territorial human males had to defend their territory from other groups. The defenders were heroes and were rewarded with high status. But now we have brave road warriors competing for market share; we have brave startup entrepreneurs risking everything on a business idea; we have brave "activists" challenging the bigots and the oppressors and demanding their "rights." And we have a new feudalism as many people choose the low-risk neo-serfdom of work at a corporation.
The interesting question is what happens next. I think that modern "rights" politics and its domesticated "activist" warriors has gone about as far as it can go. I think that "liberation" especially in sexual matters is probably going to reverse itself, because I think that women instinctively hate the sexual free-for-all: they expect to be protected. I think that the big-government welfare state with its domesticated form of loot and plunder has gone about as far as it can go.
But I doubt if we will see the end of the "rights" activists in our lifetime. They are having too much fun. So the question really is: what comes after "trans"?
I suspect that in another twenty years we will be reading articles by transgender activists that are mortally offended by whatever it is that comes next on the gender front.
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