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... except you don't have to mutilate your body. "Women" can now have penises, "men" can have vaginas, "fathers" can now bear children, one can be be of neither gender or some invented, idiosyncratic one. Yes, people are being encourged to mutilate themselves, but the real spirit of the phenomenon is the sheer plasticity of human nature, identity, and the body that it both assumes anthropologically and effects technologically. This plasticity does not reveal or unlock hidden essences, much less liberate them: it constructs the arbitrary out of the void. Jean Baudrillard was a prophet in all of this. Here are some quotes from his brilliant book The Transparency of Evil, published 31 years ago: The myth of sexual liberation is still alive and well under many forms in the real world, but at the level of the imaginary it is the transsexual myth, with its androgynous and hermaphroditic variants, that holds sway. After the orgy, then, a masked ball. After the demise of desire, a pell-mell diffusion of erotic simulacra in every guise, of transsexual kitsch in all its glory... Everyon seeks their look. since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one's own existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning one's self with being - or even with being seen. So it is not: I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I am an image - look! look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth... The triumph of the transsexual and of transvestitism casts a strange light, retrospectively, upon the sexual liberation espoused by an earlier generation. It now appears that this liberation - which, according to its own discourse, meant the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force - may actually have been no more than an intermediate phase on the way to the confusion of categories... |