I love this substack, thanks for the insightful writing!
These days I work for an economic development nonprofit, but I spent the naughts in a social science PhD program at a top public university; at the time, I had my sights on an academic career.
At the time, it was obvious that acquiring serious fluency in postmodern, and critical theory discourses was an absolute necessity for competing in the academic job market. My politics were left-of-center, so I was pre-adapted, and acquire that fluency I certainly did.
Here's my take on the whole Pomo/Critical Theory ball of wax: by the late 60s, the Marxian left had very much soured on the idea of the proletariat as the foot soldiers of the revolution; it's fair to say that the feeling was mutual.
By that time, it had become abundantly clear what an appalling shit-show Soviet communism was, and even the French Marxists were having a crisis of faith. University radicals seeking to keep the faith, but uncomfortable with mass death in the pursuit of human liberation, needed a way out. They were certainly aware that most western workers despised them and their bottomless contempt for the societies that gave these academic radicals cushy jobs and elite status, so the workers had to go.
Being themselves widely despised in mainstream society, the radicals of the academy naturally sympathized with despised minorities. Thus, identity-based prejudices were seen as the path forward, and marginalized identity groups (racial, ethnic, and gender/sexual, to name a few) were chosen as a substitute for the proles. With the jettisoning of class as the primary lense for understanding oppression, factories as the primary battlefields, and workers as the shock troops, a new framework was required. That new framework was language, culture, power, and identity. With this shift, the old Marxian notion of 'the workers must seize control of the means of production' became 'the oppressed groups must seize control of the means of discursive production.'
The white race became the new bourgeoisie, and the search for unearned privilege was substituted for the old Marxian habit of denouncing all things bourgeois. And, of course, just as the proletariat needed a vanguard, so, too, do the oppressed groups. Capitalism and hierarchy are still very bad, so at least some things never change!
If you want to understand the new left, and just how badly these ideas can potentially play out, read Orwell. Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984 are good places to either begin, or refresh one's memory.
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply here EB!! Thanks so much!
I’ll ponder more about what you’ve said, but at the moment I just want to throw this one thought out there:
Seems to me that however it occurred or evolved, the Western “left’s” obsession with identity issues has certainly resulted in benefits to the ruling elite.
First, it’s a replacement for those pesky economic issues that the old socialists (or even the old trade unionists, or the old New Deal style Democrats) were always harping upon. Money? You don’t need something as trite as a good wage or education! You need not to be microaggressed. You need not to be offended and triggered. You need to see some sell-out member of your identity group in an important job. Then we can all celebrate, although you and your family are no better off than before.
Second, it divides people into little groups, which are all encouraged to think narrowly about their own interests instead of the interests of the wider working class.
If people are all splintered in their little interest groups, immersed in a culture of oppression that focuses on grievances and what group X or Y has “done” to my group today, none of us are going to get anywhere.
Exhibit A that this is an effective strategy: about 70 percent of Americans want some form of health care for all, such as other nations have, and there’s about zero percent chance any of our elected leaders will work for that goal, even in the midst of a pandemic that’s killed nearly a million of us.
We’re all divided, and thus we’re easily conquered. The ruling class will put someone from an identity group in some kind of prominent role, and we’re supposed to view that as progress and be satisfied with it and ignore the fact that people are being more and more economically squeezed while robber-barons like Bezos or Musk have literally more money than they could ever spend if they tried. To add insult to injury, we’re supposed to view the tiny percentages of money they give to philanthropy as something praiseworthy.
The notion that hundreds of millions of working people could come together, based on their shared economic interests, and vote for their own candidates is about as likely as the idea that we could sprout wings and fly to the moon.
You're spot on as far as the downside to focusing on identity at the expense of economic issues. The more that path was followed, the more impossible it became to turn back.
In '86 I dropped out of college, from there I spent the next decade working in various lefty cooperatives. There was a lot of energy devoted to creating worker collectives and other non-hierarchical organizational structures in these coops, all of which inevitably failed to scale up to any meaningful size. Funny how persistent the need for hierarchy is in organizing complex tasks involving large groups of people!
I had an old-school, anarcho-syndicalist take on things at that time, and some of my friends were old-school labor radicals. Nonetheless, I also drifted increasingly towards the cultural left; at that time, it was primarily the hippies and punk rockers, but radical queer elements became more and more prominent.
I was one of fewer and fewer people who primarily used a class lense; the folks coming out of the university in the 90s increasingly held Pomo/Critical Theory views. The further we all followed the cultural revolutionary program laid out by the 60s new left, the more impossible it became to communicate with ordinary people outside of our little left-wing enclaves; the mutual contempt was very real and palpable.
Late 90s I went back to school, finished my BA, and went onto a PhD in anthropology. By that time, Pomo / Critical Theory very much dominated left-wing discourse. The new formulation was that oppressive cultural-linguistic categories created and sustained oppression, so dismantling the categories would end oppression. It was generally assumed that the cooperative movement represented a basic model for how the actual economy would be organized. It was never quite explained how exactly this would all be enacted when the revolution arrived. However, making language and culture the source of all evil relieved the revolutionaries of the burden of actually explaining how they'd avoid the messes of Maoism and Stalinism.
The shift to identity, language, and culture definitely helps to shift attention from the same socio-economic contradictions manifest in every communist society: all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Among today's revolutionaries, the trick to maintaining one's cushy, bourgeois existence is to be busily engaged in rooting out heretics. As long as one is sufficiently earnest and active in that pursuit, pulling down a six-figure salary doesn't seem to matter. It's a neat trick for a movement obsessed with inequality, I'll grant that!
Re worker collectives not scaling up. Yes. I have wondered whether human groups the size of hunter-gatherer bands are workable as collectives, but there's something about bigger groups that demands more specialization and outsourcing -- at a certain point, not everyone can be included to achieve consensus on every decision, and one has to leave certain decisions to others and trust that the others are acting for the good of the group. And of course, once you do that, in any group there are some people who will take advantage of that situation to pursue their self-interest...until over time, a few people accrue power, the mass of people get angry enough, and bang, there's another revolution. Larger societies seem both inevitable, and inevitably unstable in the long-term unless we find some way to rein them in?
Re "The further we all followed the cultural revolutionary program laid out by the 60s new left, the more impossible it became to communicate with ordinary people outside of our little left-wing enclaves; the mutual contempt was very real and palpable."
Yes the 60s new left. That did represent a shift when "the kids of the middle class" (kids back then, anyway) decided to rebel and dabble in what they thought were left politics, which until then had been the project more of the working class, focused on concerns like unionization and fair wages. "The college kids" wanted an end to the Vietnam War for obvious reasons, and in any case, kids tend to learn farther left than their elders -- and perhaps it was inevitable that as those 60s new left college kids aged, they became the educated political class claiming to speak for "regular folks" whose concerns gradually got less and less attention.
The more we focused on identity and social issues (sexy! fun to talk about at parties! useful for virtue-signaling how liberal you are) and less on economic issues (boring! not fun to talk about at all, especially if you're a college-educated person who has a decent job), the majority of working Americans were simply shut out of politics. No one is listening to their needs. No one is advocating for their concerns. And not too surprisingly, their economic conditions get worse and worse, and the ruling class ignores that at its peril.
"Among today's revolutionaries, the trick to maintaining one's cushy, bourgeois existence is to be busily engaged in rooting out heretics." And it's easy, it's cheap -- although to be fair, I think a lot of people participate out of fear. They're aware of how limiting and authoritarian our discourse has become, and they just go along with it. A few people do relish it, though, seemingly without realizing that they could easily be the next to be considered heretics.
I think the original point of your article is absolutely vital today. Sadly, a lot of folks today are more interested in the certitude provided by simple good vs. evil binaries than the doubt and complexity produced by intellectual humility. What's particularly ironic is the left's commitment to both post-modernism and radical Marxian schemes. If anything, the notion that reality is so complex as to render all meta-narratives suspect should counsel caution and genuine skepticism (especially around the meta-narrative that everything is always about power and oppression). Why aren't more post-modernists Burkean conservatives? That's what I'd like to know! I've been following John McWhorter lately, I tend to agree with his diagnosis: Woke politics have become a secular religion, and it's not worth arguing with glassy-eyed true believers. We're better off organizing people who've rejected the Manichaean politics of Qanon and the woke.
Yes -- I've heard the same from McWhorter, and his points are convincing that we're not going to convince any adherents to this new Woke religion, because they believe what they believe and it's not amenable to discussion or arguments. OTOH -- how did these ideas catch on so quickly and why are so many people fervent about them? It seems like people who are so easily swayed to a belief system could come back to a more reality-based way of looking at the world. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.
We probably are better off starting with the people who aren't part of any "true believer" world view -- but more and more, it seems like most people are in their true believer camps. I think at some point we're going to have to reach those people, or at least some of them.
Part of my goal is to be really visible -- and encouraging other people to be really visible -- in showing how it's possible to talk about things rationally and really listening to others and trying to understand their concerns and beliefs.
I’m probably going to sound like a dumb dumb talking to a PhD in anthropology, but I’m working my way through Wright’s Nonzero and I find his hypothesis about the inevitability of certain social structures arising as cooperative groups size up to be compelling.
You'd be surprised at how much intellectual nonsense is celebrated by PhD's, so I wouldn't worry about that if I were you! If we think about these things in everyday terms, it's clear why this happens: who'd want to organize something as simple as a movie outing among 100 people if we had to all converse among one another to reach total consensus? Given that, is it any wonder we default to hierarchy when the decisions are complex, time is short, talent and expertise are unevenly distributed, and the groups are large? What's fascinating is how many educated people believe that we could dispense with all hierarchy if only the sheeple would awaken.
Their 'philanthropy' tends to warp the recipients and turn them into mouthpieces for whatever social agenda the donors seek as conditions are set for the continued flow of money to the organization such as promotion of particular policies regardless if they have any real connection to the task at hand. I agree that the super wealthy have benefitted greatly from the atomization of society and I'm pretty sure they actively promote it.
Exactly. The donors are king and they set the agenda. And yes, I think they promote the atomization of society -- or at least do absolutely nothing to counter it. The rabble might start asking for things that matter.
Matt Yglesias (Slow Boring) wrote a post that I can't remember the name of. His point was that he wasn't a fan of the "cancel culture" discourse. He said it's pretty reasonable for a company to fire someone for saying racist things and holding racist beliefs. The problem isn't the "cancelling," the problem is that we've move the goalpost on what being racist means. Most of us wouldn't want to work with a klansman or a white nationalist. It's probably a good thing that we have social taboos against that sort of stuff. Yglesias' problem is that people have begun calling fairly mundane beliefs racist: like the idea (once common in liberal circles) that standardized test gaps represent actual gaps in learning between races.
I think that's part of the problem here. Progressives have broadened the definition of racist/racism beyond all reason, and now a lot of others feel like the chair has been pulled out from under them.
I think that's what's going on here pro-CRT (CRT used with like ten asterisks here) people have decided all opposition is racist and therefore doesn't need to be addressed.
Yes. There’s some really old research (and I tried to look it up one time on PubMed but couldn’t find it) from the early 20th century, back when most kids eventually had their tonsils taken out when infected.
The researchers showed a bunch of experienced doctors a bunch of photographs of tonsils. They asked the doctors to sort the tonsils into piles, according to whether the tonsils had to come out or not. There was a lot of agreement. About a third of them, the “worst” tonsils, had to come out.
Then they took the remaining two thirds of photos, the “good” tonsils, and asked another set of experienced doctors to sort the tonsils into piles according to whether they had to come out or not.
The doctors chose again, about a third of the tonsils.
So… you can see where something similar might happen to racism or sexism or any other socially undesirable thing. We get rid of a lot of it — the bad stuff — but people are used to coming across a certain amount of racism and wanting to root it out.
It morphs very gradually but over time it starts to get really ridiculous.
And yes— if historically the “progressives” believe racism doesn’t get a pass, that’s fine if you’re talking about the KKK’s beliefs, but it doesn’t work as well if you’re talking about the clueless “microaggression” of someone who meant zero harm or offense.
Intentions _do_ in fact matter. Even dogs know that, and they behave accordingly.
Akiyama, I got so much offline feedback about my comments to Heather's post that I've created a post expanding on it, and I hope it will generate some conversation. It's open to everyone. https://bprice.substack.com/p/trans-is-something-we-made-up
Thank you, Akiyama! <3 We all need to speak the truth, as best we perceive it, as accurately and compassionately as we can. Thanks for stopping by and for taking the time to let me know.
I love this substack, thanks for the insightful writing!
These days I work for an economic development nonprofit, but I spent the naughts in a social science PhD program at a top public university; at the time, I had my sights on an academic career.
At the time, it was obvious that acquiring serious fluency in postmodern, and critical theory discourses was an absolute necessity for competing in the academic job market. My politics were left-of-center, so I was pre-adapted, and acquire that fluency I certainly did.
Here's my take on the whole Pomo/Critical Theory ball of wax: by the late 60s, the Marxian left had very much soured on the idea of the proletariat as the foot soldiers of the revolution; it's fair to say that the feeling was mutual.
By that time, it had become abundantly clear what an appalling shit-show Soviet communism was, and even the French Marxists were having a crisis of faith. University radicals seeking to keep the faith, but uncomfortable with mass death in the pursuit of human liberation, needed a way out. They were certainly aware that most western workers despised them and their bottomless contempt for the societies that gave these academic radicals cushy jobs and elite status, so the workers had to go.
Being themselves widely despised in mainstream society, the radicals of the academy naturally sympathized with despised minorities. Thus, identity-based prejudices were seen as the path forward, and marginalized identity groups (racial, ethnic, and gender/sexual, to name a few) were chosen as a substitute for the proles. With the jettisoning of class as the primary lense for understanding oppression, factories as the primary battlefields, and workers as the shock troops, a new framework was required. That new framework was language, culture, power, and identity. With this shift, the old Marxian notion of 'the workers must seize control of the means of production' became 'the oppressed groups must seize control of the means of discursive production.'
The white race became the new bourgeoisie, and the search for unearned privilege was substituted for the old Marxian habit of denouncing all things bourgeois. And, of course, just as the proletariat needed a vanguard, so, too, do the oppressed groups. Capitalism and hierarchy are still very bad, so at least some things never change!
If you want to understand the new left, and just how badly these ideas can potentially play out, read Orwell. Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984 are good places to either begin, or refresh one's memory.
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply here EB!! Thanks so much!
I’ll ponder more about what you’ve said, but at the moment I just want to throw this one thought out there:
Seems to me that however it occurred or evolved, the Western “left’s” obsession with identity issues has certainly resulted in benefits to the ruling elite.
First, it’s a replacement for those pesky economic issues that the old socialists (or even the old trade unionists, or the old New Deal style Democrats) were always harping upon. Money? You don’t need something as trite as a good wage or education! You need not to be microaggressed. You need not to be offended and triggered. You need to see some sell-out member of your identity group in an important job. Then we can all celebrate, although you and your family are no better off than before.
Second, it divides people into little groups, which are all encouraged to think narrowly about their own interests instead of the interests of the wider working class.
If people are all splintered in their little interest groups, immersed in a culture of oppression that focuses on grievances and what group X or Y has “done” to my group today, none of us are going to get anywhere.
Exhibit A that this is an effective strategy: about 70 percent of Americans want some form of health care for all, such as other nations have, and there’s about zero percent chance any of our elected leaders will work for that goal, even in the midst of a pandemic that’s killed nearly a million of us.
We’re all divided, and thus we’re easily conquered. The ruling class will put someone from an identity group in some kind of prominent role, and we’re supposed to view that as progress and be satisfied with it and ignore the fact that people are being more and more economically squeezed while robber-barons like Bezos or Musk have literally more money than they could ever spend if they tried. To add insult to injury, we’re supposed to view the tiny percentages of money they give to philanthropy as something praiseworthy.
The notion that hundreds of millions of working people could come together, based on their shared economic interests, and vote for their own candidates is about as likely as the idea that we could sprout wings and fly to the moon.
You're spot on as far as the downside to focusing on identity at the expense of economic issues. The more that path was followed, the more impossible it became to turn back.
In '86 I dropped out of college, from there I spent the next decade working in various lefty cooperatives. There was a lot of energy devoted to creating worker collectives and other non-hierarchical organizational structures in these coops, all of which inevitably failed to scale up to any meaningful size. Funny how persistent the need for hierarchy is in organizing complex tasks involving large groups of people!
I had an old-school, anarcho-syndicalist take on things at that time, and some of my friends were old-school labor radicals. Nonetheless, I also drifted increasingly towards the cultural left; at that time, it was primarily the hippies and punk rockers, but radical queer elements became more and more prominent.
I was one of fewer and fewer people who primarily used a class lense; the folks coming out of the university in the 90s increasingly held Pomo/Critical Theory views. The further we all followed the cultural revolutionary program laid out by the 60s new left, the more impossible it became to communicate with ordinary people outside of our little left-wing enclaves; the mutual contempt was very real and palpable.
Late 90s I went back to school, finished my BA, and went onto a PhD in anthropology. By that time, Pomo / Critical Theory very much dominated left-wing discourse. The new formulation was that oppressive cultural-linguistic categories created and sustained oppression, so dismantling the categories would end oppression. It was generally assumed that the cooperative movement represented a basic model for how the actual economy would be organized. It was never quite explained how exactly this would all be enacted when the revolution arrived. However, making language and culture the source of all evil relieved the revolutionaries of the burden of actually explaining how they'd avoid the messes of Maoism and Stalinism.
The shift to identity, language, and culture definitely helps to shift attention from the same socio-economic contradictions manifest in every communist society: all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Among today's revolutionaries, the trick to maintaining one's cushy, bourgeois existence is to be busily engaged in rooting out heretics. As long as one is sufficiently earnest and active in that pursuit, pulling down a six-figure salary doesn't seem to matter. It's a neat trick for a movement obsessed with inequality, I'll grant that!
There's so much good stuff here!
Re worker collectives not scaling up. Yes. I have wondered whether human groups the size of hunter-gatherer bands are workable as collectives, but there's something about bigger groups that demands more specialization and outsourcing -- at a certain point, not everyone can be included to achieve consensus on every decision, and one has to leave certain decisions to others and trust that the others are acting for the good of the group. And of course, once you do that, in any group there are some people who will take advantage of that situation to pursue their self-interest...until over time, a few people accrue power, the mass of people get angry enough, and bang, there's another revolution. Larger societies seem both inevitable, and inevitably unstable in the long-term unless we find some way to rein them in?
Re "The further we all followed the cultural revolutionary program laid out by the 60s new left, the more impossible it became to communicate with ordinary people outside of our little left-wing enclaves; the mutual contempt was very real and palpable."
Yes the 60s new left. That did represent a shift when "the kids of the middle class" (kids back then, anyway) decided to rebel and dabble in what they thought were left politics, which until then had been the project more of the working class, focused on concerns like unionization and fair wages. "The college kids" wanted an end to the Vietnam War for obvious reasons, and in any case, kids tend to learn farther left than their elders -- and perhaps it was inevitable that as those 60s new left college kids aged, they became the educated political class claiming to speak for "regular folks" whose concerns gradually got less and less attention.
The more we focused on identity and social issues (sexy! fun to talk about at parties! useful for virtue-signaling how liberal you are) and less on economic issues (boring! not fun to talk about at all, especially if you're a college-educated person who has a decent job), the majority of working Americans were simply shut out of politics. No one is listening to their needs. No one is advocating for their concerns. And not too surprisingly, their economic conditions get worse and worse, and the ruling class ignores that at its peril.
"Among today's revolutionaries, the trick to maintaining one's cushy, bourgeois existence is to be busily engaged in rooting out heretics." And it's easy, it's cheap -- although to be fair, I think a lot of people participate out of fear. They're aware of how limiting and authoritarian our discourse has become, and they just go along with it. A few people do relish it, though, seemingly without realizing that they could easily be the next to be considered heretics.
I think the original point of your article is absolutely vital today. Sadly, a lot of folks today are more interested in the certitude provided by simple good vs. evil binaries than the doubt and complexity produced by intellectual humility. What's particularly ironic is the left's commitment to both post-modernism and radical Marxian schemes. If anything, the notion that reality is so complex as to render all meta-narratives suspect should counsel caution and genuine skepticism (especially around the meta-narrative that everything is always about power and oppression). Why aren't more post-modernists Burkean conservatives? That's what I'd like to know! I've been following John McWhorter lately, I tend to agree with his diagnosis: Woke politics have become a secular religion, and it's not worth arguing with glassy-eyed true believers. We're better off organizing people who've rejected the Manichaean politics of Qanon and the woke.
Yes -- I've heard the same from McWhorter, and his points are convincing that we're not going to convince any adherents to this new Woke religion, because they believe what they believe and it's not amenable to discussion or arguments. OTOH -- how did these ideas catch on so quickly and why are so many people fervent about them? It seems like people who are so easily swayed to a belief system could come back to a more reality-based way of looking at the world. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.
We probably are better off starting with the people who aren't part of any "true believer" world view -- but more and more, it seems like most people are in their true believer camps. I think at some point we're going to have to reach those people, or at least some of them.
Part of my goal is to be really visible -- and encouraging other people to be really visible -- in showing how it's possible to talk about things rationally and really listening to others and trying to understand their concerns and beliefs.
I’m probably going to sound like a dumb dumb talking to a PhD in anthropology, but I’m working my way through Wright’s Nonzero and I find his hypothesis about the inevitability of certain social structures arising as cooperative groups size up to be compelling.
You'd be surprised at how much intellectual nonsense is celebrated by PhD's, so I wouldn't worry about that if I were you! If we think about these things in everyday terms, it's clear why this happens: who'd want to organize something as simple as a movie outing among 100 people if we had to all converse among one another to reach total consensus? Given that, is it any wonder we default to hierarchy when the decisions are complex, time is short, talent and expertise are unevenly distributed, and the groups are large? What's fascinating is how many educated people believe that we could dispense with all hierarchy if only the sheeple would awaken.
Their 'philanthropy' tends to warp the recipients and turn them into mouthpieces for whatever social agenda the donors seek as conditions are set for the continued flow of money to the organization such as promotion of particular policies regardless if they have any real connection to the task at hand. I agree that the super wealthy have benefitted greatly from the atomization of society and I'm pretty sure they actively promote it.
Exactly. The donors are king and they set the agenda. And yes, I think they promote the atomization of society -- or at least do absolutely nothing to counter it. The rabble might start asking for things that matter.
PS I’ve never read Homage to Catalonia but will add it to my long list! Thank you!
Matt Yglesias (Slow Boring) wrote a post that I can't remember the name of. His point was that he wasn't a fan of the "cancel culture" discourse. He said it's pretty reasonable for a company to fire someone for saying racist things and holding racist beliefs. The problem isn't the "cancelling," the problem is that we've move the goalpost on what being racist means. Most of us wouldn't want to work with a klansman or a white nationalist. It's probably a good thing that we have social taboos against that sort of stuff. Yglesias' problem is that people have begun calling fairly mundane beliefs racist: like the idea (once common in liberal circles) that standardized test gaps represent actual gaps in learning between races.
I think that's part of the problem here. Progressives have broadened the definition of racist/racism beyond all reason, and now a lot of others feel like the chair has been pulled out from under them.
I think that's what's going on here pro-CRT (CRT used with like ten asterisks here) people have decided all opposition is racist and therefore doesn't need to be addressed.
Yes. There’s some really old research (and I tried to look it up one time on PubMed but couldn’t find it) from the early 20th century, back when most kids eventually had their tonsils taken out when infected.
The researchers showed a bunch of experienced doctors a bunch of photographs of tonsils. They asked the doctors to sort the tonsils into piles, according to whether the tonsils had to come out or not. There was a lot of agreement. About a third of them, the “worst” tonsils, had to come out.
Then they took the remaining two thirds of photos, the “good” tonsils, and asked another set of experienced doctors to sort the tonsils into piles according to whether they had to come out or not.
The doctors chose again, about a third of the tonsils.
So… you can see where something similar might happen to racism or sexism or any other socially undesirable thing. We get rid of a lot of it — the bad stuff — but people are used to coming across a certain amount of racism and wanting to root it out.
It morphs very gradually but over time it starts to get really ridiculous.
And yes— if historically the “progressives” believe racism doesn’t get a pass, that’s fine if you’re talking about the KKK’s beliefs, but it doesn’t work as well if you’re talking about the clueless “microaggression” of someone who meant zero harm or offense.
Intentions _do_ in fact matter. Even dogs know that, and they behave accordingly.
Your comments on this post on Heather Heying's Substack were great, thank you!
https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/childrentransitioning
(I couldn't post my thanks there, because I'm not a paid subscriber)
Akiyama, I got so much offline feedback about my comments to Heather's post that I've created a post expanding on it, and I hope it will generate some conversation. It's open to everyone. https://bprice.substack.com/p/trans-is-something-we-made-up
Thank you, Akiyama! <3 We all need to speak the truth, as best we perceive it, as accurately and compassionately as we can. Thanks for stopping by and for taking the time to let me know.