The Politics Outside Your Body

I was reading Gulliver's Travels again over the weekend. My life has changed a lot since the first time I read the book, enabling me to appreciate it better as a political satire. A lot of people may wonder at all the time Swift spends on details of his protagonist passing waste in the land of Lilliput, inspiring the crude humour of the Jack Black adaptation. This can be better appreciated by those who have spent a significant amount of time in a foreign culture in which one is suddenly confronted by different attitudes towards hygiene and the appropriate times and places for certain bodily functions. One may suddenly find one's own body grotesquely large in the imagination as things which one's native society has compartmentalised into cognitive non-existence are suddenly things that must be confronted on a regular basis. Likewise, the things which distinguish human from animal may differ from country to country and explorers from the 16th through the 18th century found themselves among civilisations that seemed to them closer to animals or in civilisations that regarded the explorers as closer to animals.

The political parties of Lilliput are a more obvious point of satire. The idea that a faction of Lilliputians are exiled to a neighbouring country because they believed in breaking eggs at the fatter end, the so called "Big-Endians", recall religious exiles like the Huguenots or the exiled Royalists after the English Civil Wars. From a distance, one wonders how such bitter differences can arise from such arbitrary details. But I've come to thinking that they're not so different from LGBTQ, specifically trans, issues in America now, particularly after two high profile killings, the transwoman who killed the Catholic school children and the man, Tyler Robinson, who shot Charlie Kirk. Robinson has been revealed to have been in a relationship with a transwoman.

A lot of people are talking about a new civil war in the U.S. but I was thinking it would be an odd sort of civil war. Thinking about the beginnings of the English or first American civil wars, I remember primarily reading about disputes regarding the rights of rulers and governed and then formations of militias, funding, pamphlets, etc. To-day's talk of civil war comes from lone gunmen acting without particular encouragement for the deed itself which is hotly debated in aftermath. There's so far no talk of taking territory by force on the left.

It does seem to me, though, very like a religious war. Religious groups do have lone fanatics who sometimes act unilaterally. I should preface by saying I fully support and believe in the rights of trans people to have their self-perceived identities respected. Though I think the fundamental philosophical difference here is between people who believe in the primacy of self-perception and people who believe in the primacy of society's perception of the individual. This could all boil down to whether you consider Satan the true protagonist of Paradise Lost, I suppose. Years ago, when I was first encountering the ideas around trans issues, I wondered why it mattered so much whether you believed trans people were born in the wrong body or trans people were people who decided to change gender at some point in their lives for one reason or another. I also didn't understand why both sorts of people couldn't exist simultaneously. I gradually read between the lines and realised it was because if it was an issue of fundamental, even genetic, identity, it was easier to argue against the kinds of social and institutional bullying trans-people are often subjected to. But this is essentially a matter of faith, which is a statement many trans-people may take issue with as much as a Protestant or Catholic might have in the 16th century. To them, it was a matter of truth versus delusion.

At issue in both cases is a system of morality. JK Rowling's horror at transwomen in public restrooms comes from a fundamental belief that if society can't dictate to individuals a certain set of boundaries of behaviour, then we are on a dangerous road. It's less about sex specifically than it is about the belief that social order follows from a certain flow of conditioned reality perception. And that's exactly like a religious war. Protestants could point to plenary indulgences as granting license for corrupt behaviour while Catholics might say denying such grace is a too severe and fundamentally non-Christian point of view. Catholics would point to the desecration of churches by Protestants as sacrilege that threatens the fabric of society while Protestants would argue that worshiping icons directly contradicts the prescribed set of rules delineated for society by the bible. It's a fundamentally different view of reality and the two sides each found the other as odious as trans rights individuals and conservatives in the U.S. find one another to-day.

I guess we can take some comfort in the fact that Catholics and Protestants haven't been killing each other very much lately.