24 June

People know my criticisms of social media. Not least that it provides a home and validity to the most bizarre and offensive fantasies, such as the belief you can not only ‘identify’ with having anatomical structures like ovaries and a uterus that you don’t have, but also the disease conditions of these body parts. Transgenderism (AND anti-transgenderism defending rigid gender ideas) are ‘identity politics’, appearing in the vacuum left by the collapse of social status hierarchies. Social status gives humans identity, and without it they make them up, and defend caricatures of old identities in opposition. There are always 2 fake teams, slugging it out. I’m not pro-trans or anti-trans, I’m on neither of those teams fighting for status. I’m describing how status games arise and work, including the apportioning of people into competing social teams. The belief that we have no statuses in society, that ‘the people’ are all equivalent and run democracies, is what leads to the explosion in identity status games. Social media replaces lost status hierarchies with its own, created by mass imitation.