Re: Gentrification

"Woke is bad not because it speaks to oppression, but because it speaks so softly." No, woke is bad because it promotes its own variety of oppression. You may sympathize with their intent to displace other forms of oppression, but I tend to see this as a horizontal move from one kind of gender-rigidity to another. Society already throws a bunch of essentialist identity bullshit at kids. Adding a new label for them may have some benefits. Labels can certainly have some stabilizing effects for some kids. But it can also be a mixed bag and I certainly don't want a world where sissy boys and tomboys get shunted into the trans box just for not fitting anywhere else. The false certainty that identity politics provides is not healthful for any child on the margins who finds themselves questioning. Am I letting the perfect be the enemy of the partially-good? I don't know. But when you look at the sheer number of autistic kids who have latched onto trans, you really should be more concerned about kids looking for simplistic answers in order to reconcile themselves with society's gender-rigid bullshit especially when it goes so far as to problematize their own bodies. " If the trans backlash wins, that sets youth liberation back decades." And who do you think caused the backlash against trans? And whether or not trans lines up with youth liberation or their sexual self-determination is what I'm saying we should do more to question. Should we also promote children going into the armed forces to pilot drones and kill people just because that lines up with some children's identities? Especially those who come from military families? In the name of self-determination? I think this is loaded with problems very much the way that "born in the 'wrong' body" is. "...look no further than evangelical Christians. They are ideologically erotophobic." Seriously? The conservatives may wear their erotophobia on their sleeves. This makes them both easier to identify and also easier to counteract. But the progressives have done more to problematize sex than anyone else in the past 50 years. If we're really going to play this "lesser of two evils" game, you're not making a strong case against preferring that evil which is most impotent. Considering how marginal BL politics are today, how much do we really gain by embracing one and how much do we really lose by rejecting both?