Am I The Traitor?

“actually trans issues are universal and valuable to the working class and anyone turned off by them is an unreachable class traitor”

- a real Twatter post, directed, I believe, at your friendly local class traitor, i.e. me. Punc and caps per the thumb-typing original.

I do believe the gender craze may have passed its prime. Hope so, anyway. Probably the next social contagion will be even nuttier, but at least it will be a change. Perhaps we will be asked to postulate inner “stature” as opposed to physical “height”. Short people are tall people!

But this stuff is too easy to make fun of – fish in a barrel. What interests me is a more general question, nicely encapsulated by my interlocutor, quoted above. It is, you might say, the question of “litmus tests.”

I freely admit that I have a few. Israel, for example. Anybody who’s got a good word to say about that outfit – or even an exculpatory word – that’s somebody I can’t imagine having anything to do with. I would have to assume that his thought-world and moral sensibility, and mine, were so different that we might as well belong to different species. What would we even talk about? Fly-fishing, perhaps, or something of that kind. But politically, as comrades? I suppose it’s possible. But I can’t imagine it. Failure of imagination, perhaps.

For my interlocutor – let’s call him Trans-Sylvanus – “trans issues”, whatever that phrase denotes, are the kind of litmus test that “Israel issues” are for me. Now of course I think he’s wrong and I’m right. But that goes without saying, so let’s leave it to one side. Are there any differences between our litmus tests which an undecided, parti-non-pris, objective observer might discern – a space alien, perhaps? A rational, sympathetic, benign space alien? I think I could list a few.

1) My dislike of Israel doesn’t involve any metaphysics. That is, it’s founded on readily obtained, common-day historical information. No hypotheses need fingo-ing. I won’t ask anybody to believe in hidden variables or occult essences.

2) It’s widely shared. Very few people, anywhere in the world, have any use for Israel, apart from a very narrow group of boosters in a few metropolitan centres in the US and Western Europe. But as a matter of fact, the same could be said for gender-boosters: recent, narrow, globally rare (and rare even in the US); belonging exclusively to an easily-identified and very squirrelly social formation, namely the professional-managerial caste. Oh, and some airheads in Hollywood.

3) Whom does my test exclude? Absolutely without exception, it’s people who, as far as my experience extends, are also completely hopeless on every other topic as well. That is, they’re racialists, or tribalists, which amounts to the same thing; or they believe nutty counterfactuals about history, often based on a shallow reading of the Bible – in translation; or they’re cruel, bloodthirsty nihilists without any moral sense at all; or they’re cynical, paid-off shills who will say whatever their employer tells them to say.

This, to repeat, is based on experience, not dogma.

But Trans-Sylvanus is much more exclusionary. And he is so a priori. He wants to shut out anybody who doesn’t believe a very specific and, frankly, rather implausible theory. No matter whether they’re tenant organizers, or anti-imperialists, or labor activists, or police-abolitionists, or Communists, or anything else that’s good; if they’re not down with “trans issues”, according to Trans-Sylvanus, they’re class traitors.

Because, I think, at the end of the day, Trans-Sylvanus is simply… a Euro-American liberal. Which is to say, a purist, and a thought-policer, and a gatekeeper. Even, in his own abstract and ineffectual way, a colonialist. From his Sitz im Leben in the parochial hothouse of pomo “western” and “progressive” ideation, he takes it upon himself to decide who in all the wide world is and isn’t kosher.

If I do say so myself, I’m considerably more modest. If ole Trans wants to join my anti-Israel, pro-Iranian, pro-Russian band of brothers, he’s quite welcome. He can wear his “trans issues” button to our meetings. I’ll roll my eyes, and so will the Persians and Russians – both very expressive peoples – but we won’t kick him out. We may think he’s rather silly, but we won’t call him a class traitor.

But I don’t think he’ll return the compliment.