I received the following e-mail last week:
I'm sending this email anonymously since, nowadays, being linked to even the mild views that I wish to get your opinion on is grounds for being tossed in the dustbin of "bigotry."
I've seen professional philosophers hint that they have these views, the ones I'm about to express, in places on your blog, but I'm hoping to get them conceretely addressed here.
I fear that the modern left has lost any sense of appropriate boundaries for moral concern and suffers from an obsession with identity recognition that's rapidly undoing the reasonable hierarchy of moral priorities that leftists once had. As this worry implies, I count myself, firmly, among the left. But I can't endorse the shrill, self-destructive ethos rapidly proliferating on this side of the political fence, which might well be an expression of the "Generation Wuss" mentality that you've gestured to at times.
Let me illustrate with an example. I recently read of a stranger's experience, in a Twitter thread that has since been deleted, with a transsexual friend. Having no malicious intent whatsoever, this former individual casually addressed a group of friends, of which the latter person was a part, with the word "guys." His transsexual friend (a woman) informed him sometime later that hearing the word "guys" "triggered" her, induced serious psychological distress, by way of a gender identity conflict that this word brought about. In recounting this story on the internet, the person with the transsexuxal friend stated that he wasn't interested in maintaining a relationship with this person, since he wasn't willing to "walk on eggshells" and self-police his language to accommodate what he perceived to be unreasonable fragility on the part of his transsexual friend. Unsurprisingly, the individual recounting this story was incessantly berated by victim-mongering identity politickers on Twitter, who suggested that he's an "evil bigot" with virtual unanimity.
The belief presumably animating such sickening moralizing strikes me as utterly perverse, where, by "belief", I mean the view that those who cause any offense to some vulnerable individual are morally required to take every step necessary to rectify the caused--and, in the future, avoid causing--offense. Is there no obligation on the part of "offended" persons to accept that not everything they hear will reflect the reality that they desire, and to develop some, dare I say, resilience in the face of this reality? And where will it end? Are we all to avoid speaking in public about the persons we find physically attractive, for fear that some self-aware, unattractive person will be psychologically traumatized by the experience? Though I've asked many people those questions, I'm yet to encounter a principled reason to care so deeply for the offense of "misgendering" transsexual people, while caring not at all for the exclusion that is part and parcel of recognizing that some are beautiful and others ugly. The "reasons" offered typically amount to nothing more than handwaving about how gender "matters more", as if identity politickers can, absent contradiction, merely put aside the social harm and isolation that follow from linguistic practices that establish aesthetic pecking orders, while frothing about "misgendering" and demanding radical revision of the features of language thought to be harmful to certain groups, because the latter "matters more." By that logic, it could be argued that we should dismiss (something, by the way, that I do not want to do) trans issues entirely, since trans folk constitute such a small minority of the population and, as such, the harm to them from misgendering is less serious than the harm to black people from racism. Clearly the former (the respose of identity politickers to my question about inclusion of the ugly) is to do with quality of harm while the latter (about racism) is to do with quantity, but the spirit of the notions is the same.
My correspondent gave permission to open this for general discussion. I agree with the main themes of this e-mail, though less so with the last, long paragraph, which I don't entirely understand. The hyper-sensitivity of coddled narcissists masquerading as moral righteousness is, indeed, tiresome, and it also does an injustice to those who actually suffer from PTSD who are entitled, including legally, to accommodation. But what do readers think?
