LGBTIQ in Perspective, Part 1: Liberalism in Demission

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It is a grievous intellectual error to try and subsume LGBTIQ under the aegis of any particular political idea – still less presume it owes its peculiar origin to it; all appearances aside, liberalism doesn’t fully suit it either.

This is not because the most successful political idea of modernity should be exculpated on the grounds of its virginal innocence. Rather, it is because LGBTIQ is something too simple and at the same time too profound, to be identified with a purely political idea; moreover, it is logically impossible to do such a thing.

Namely, political idea can influence, or in any way establish itself in the political reality, only on assumption of its historical genesis, which in turn presupposes circumstances that cannot be entirely conceptualized, and those represent such complicated knot of causes and effects, that no one will ever be able to untie it so as to say that someone is hundred percent liberal, because no one is hundred percent free to identify with a pure idea, Hegel notwithstanding.

On the other hand, in respect to LGBTIQ, it appears that things there get astonishingly simple and tidy: in the first place, one cannot be more or less LGBTIQ; also, one can be either for it or against it; finally, everywhere some LGBTIQ policy is being implemented, this has to be done in the same way, according to the same franchise, no matter how different historical circumstances of various societies are, and it has to be accepted by the public to the same degree. In this respect it renders every society it imbibes – to a degree it actually imbibes it – quite identical to all others. Historical process at work in the inception, genesis and spread of political idea seems to be suspended here. Contrary to liberal factuality which is always relative to- and, to a large extent, informed by the history of a given society, LGBTIQ ideological matrix appears to be absolute and immutable in all forms of its application to reality.

Nevertheless, it is also obvious that, although liberalism and LGBTIQ are not, and cannot be, identical, there is a peculiar affinity which we’ll try to depict in the following passages, while bearing in mind the fundamental incongruence just outlined above.

One example extracted from the batch of independent media outlets, considered to be “axis of resistance” against “woke madness”, holding sway on “Western world”, will serve as an example and guideline in our discussion.

“Triggernometry”, a podcast hosted by two British comedians, is a popular and reasonably influential outlet in the Anglophone media space, and is increasingly held to be one of the major points of resistance towards “woke madness”. However, when one is struck with the byline chosen to grace the thumbnail to their interview with Irish journalist Helen Joyce, which reads:”They are trying to sterilize gay kids” – ‘they’ meaning proponents of exploding transgender identity politics, impartial observer has to wonder, whether both interviewers and interviewee were themselves struck over their heads with the wet mop.

Helen Joyce is a campaigner against transgender identity politics, packing a public image I find peculiar for UK and its neighboring isle: a middle aged woman, speaking in well rehearsed posh English – still, as I believe, a mark of class distinction in some quarters – yet peppered with chosen cusswords such as: “fuck”, “tits”, “shit”, etc. This makes her, at least for an outside observer such as me, fairly exemplary of someone attempting to unite not really reconcilable opposites. Well, as it happens, in this particular case appearances are not deceiving.

The main topic of “Triggernometry” discussion about invasive transgender politics can be reduced to one point: the letter T in the LGBTIQ acronym is dangerous and not entirely acceptable, insofar it tends to violate the act of individual choice; moreover, the sole raison d etre of society is to make the individual and individual choices safe. The letter T tends to violate this, hence the discussion on the danger it, supposedly, poses.

As we shall see, precisely this simple premise outlines the measure to which liberalism accommodates LGBTIQ and nihilism out of which it originates, in which it remains and into which it returns: for liberals of the kind we’re observing here, any principle of discerning good and evil above the act of individual choice is, at best, secondary. At worst – and I believe the worst is the case here – it doesn’t exist at all.

When I say that the individual choice, regardless of the actual content of that choice, is the unquestionable and supreme moral principle, I mean that it is being understood to be a sacrosanct act. If it were the case that its value is being measured against any kind of actual content chosen, the matter would be different. But this is not the case.

When someone, like Joyce and her hosts, starts feeling the uncomfortable itch caused by the LGBTIQ only when its proponents start, quote: “sterilizing gay kids”, without even for a moment pausing to consider how absurd in and of itself that statement is, then that someone has, realistically speaking, slipped over both the edge of liberalism as well as off the edge of sanity itself.

What meaning sterility can have for those who, whether by nature, nurture, choice or by all three of those, reject the potentially fertile intercourse with opposite sex?

Well, apparently, if it is their choice to be fertile and sterile at the same time, it does. This in itself is also the main argument for accepting the same-sex marriage.

Namely, the sole reason to justify same-sex marriage is the freedom of choice without any regard to its content, because same-sex marriage is obvious, blatant and crystalline transparent absurdity, packaged for consumption with the card that says: “Don’t open – Absurdity inside!”

Sterilizing adolescent homosexuals is nothing but drawing the consequent conclusion from the absurd premises; premises that were accepted long before the letter T of LGBTIQ acronym came in the public focus, and both Joyce and her hosts accept them without question.

If the choice of the autonomous individual is taken as an unquestionable value, regardless of the fact that the content of the choice is a blatant impossibility – i.e. a fertile same-sex marriage – then we are dealing with the first part of the LGBTIQ acronym; as far as I can see, there is no modern political idea, liberalism included, that could fully assimilate something like this, without at some point dissolving into nothingness.

Yet Helen Joyce and hosts of “Triggernometry” apparently think that liberal idea can suffer absurdity precisely until the moment when nothingness will take a bite off their respective asses. Then, I presume, they will say:”Enough! That’s too liberal. We can have a bit, but not too much absurdity.” That moment for them was encounter with the first letter of the second half of the LGBTIQ acronym.

However, it is peculiar to absurdity that it doesn’t recognize limits. If one is supporting same-sex marriage and fighting to preserve the fertility of homosexuals, while at the same time trying to limit the freedom of choice of the transgender individuals to be what they are not or not to be what they are is meaningless, because it considers one absurdity to be essentially different from another absurdity.

If we are to call this ‘liberalism’, then it is a liberalism which even liberals see as mortal danger and it is, as it seems to me, rather a process of the dissolution of liberalism in liberal manner; hence it is easy to assume that desultory activity of the LGBTIQ idea is coming from the essence of liberal political idea itself. However, I am not sure this is entirely the case. 

Liberalism, as an idea, possesses a degree of potential to identify with LGBTIQ, greater than the one possessed by any other modern political idea. However, as modernity is already in the past, we can’t really know what we are dealing with, while using residual modern categories; yet identifying LGBTIQ with liberalism means doing precisely that.

Similarly to the notions of “right” and “left”, liberalism is not an intuitively discernable phenomenon any more.

Hence, today the sticking of definitive political labels to something is futile and self-deluding labor.

For the sake of the present discussion, let us name the political theory and practice the most suited to accommodate LGBTIQ principle: “Liberalism in demission”. There are two fundamental demands that constitute the essence of this political idea: the first is sanctity of the individual choice; the second is providing the safety and security to implement the consequences of the choice in the political community.

When liberalism in demission is being discussed today, regardless of what label one pins to it, the second of its essential characteristics nearly always gets overlooked.

A good number of people clearly see how principle of the free individual choice has eroded the confines of reality, because they still can understand that some things chosen are absurd. What they don’t see, however, is just how essential the security of the individual choice is in contemporary Western societies.

This has one essential consequence: one is unable to see that the freedom of individual choice, no matter is it absurd or not, is followed by coercion to enforce the consequences of that choice, no matter are they absurd or not. This was well exemplified in the context of Covid19 crisis, where, at least in Europe and Commonwealth countries, the more liberal the society was, the more coercive were the measures.  

LGBTIQ issues intensify the security aspect of the liberalism in demission to an absurd extent, for one simple reason: the consequences of the LGBTIQ choices are in themselves absurd; if they are to become social reality, they have to be recognized or perish. If one feels so inclined as not to recognize them for some reason, then one must be coerced to actively recognize them, nevertheless. More than any other modern ideology, liberalism has a foundation in mutual recognition of the members of political community; insofar the freedom of individual choice is the essential political principle, its recognition by other individuals is the essential political duty.

You cannot have one without the other.

As liberalism in demission supports the LGBTIQ proposition, albeit in not so many words, that the freedom of individual to choose who or what it is, is absolute, then it obviously follows that liberals in demission have absolute duty to recognize this choice.

Freedom of LGBTIQ individual, in order to bear fruit – i.e. to be politically and socially real freedom – has to be recognized and this necessarily brings consequences such as complete deconstruction of the very elements of language into oblivion. If one is to affirm same-sex marriage, one is also obliged at some point to renounce words like “mother” and “father”; if one is to grant a free choice of pronouns, one is also obliged to forget about reality upon which the pronouns are based.

Attempts to save such trifles as language, while remaining a liberal in demission, are futile, because this is the politics based entirely upon negative freedom: accepting the language as it is, is essentially a choice of accepting what is given, i.e. a choice that is determined by its content, and not by itself.

This, however, is an anathema.

At what moment precisely does liberalism cross the boundaries of political idea and enter into demission, remaining only as the provisional beast of burden for meta-political principle such as LGBTIQ system?

It occurs when liberals attempt to establish the content of the choice in the act of choice itself, i.e. magically transform the negative into positive.

We are talking about, supposedly natural, principle according to which every individual choice is good, if it doesn’t violate individual choice of another. Good is constituted as something completely negative – the act is good insofar it renders the actor indifferent to other actor. For example, if I believe that sawing off my leg is good, then, if I don’t harm or inconvenience anybody by actually sawing it off, it is, at least, good enough choice to be respected by others. Thus, indifference becomes the cardinal virtue of political community, because only indifference can justify free choice while disregarding what is actually being chosen.

This is the moment when liberalism slips into demission; for, as we can see on example of the inner schism of LGBTIQ acronym, there is no such thing as one negative freedom letting the other negative freedom to just mind its own business.

Helen Joyce and her hosts would apparently whish for their choices to be tolerated, no matter what they actually chose. But this is impossible: if transgender woman by choice chooses to be identical to actual woman, there must be no difference between them and all the qualities and social mores and institutions meant for women – including access to woman restrooms – have to be granted. Joyce et al chose not to accept this, ergo: they actually are violating the freedom of transgender people.

Liberalism in demission is the end of liberalism as political theory and practice, because it resolves its implications into absurdity. Perhaps this could happen to any political idea. However, one has to concede that absurdity became political mainstream through liberalism.

Liberalism in demission provided absurdity with the quite special kind of political existence; depending on various stages of its explication, it is being progressively accepted, almost without exception, as something completely normal, without any outside coercion. In that sense, the principle of the freedom of individual choice has not been violated. The choice of absurdity in the contemporary political constellation is being enacted while maximally respecting free will of those assenting to it. The fact that one could be – and usually is – deluded by relentless propaganda doesn’t change anything in that respect. There is no outside influence that can stop one’s mind from seeing that A and not-A cannot exist in the same sense, at the same time. Yet, each letter of LGBTIQ proposes precisely that, and the proposal gets accepted on the mass scale.

I really find it hard to believe that Helen Joyce considers herself coerced into absurdity; moreover, she is obviously wholeheartedly and willingly advocating for the right of homosexuals to be fertile in their sterile relationships; she apparently feels the pressure only when other’s right to absurdity begins invading the confines she has put around her own absurd choices.

The trouble with negative freedom is that it knows no limits; trouble with those who enjoy their negative freedom is that they are all, each and every one, unlimited in their aspirations: my freedom is already limited by your freedom insofar you are not me.

Political order in which Joyce and her hosts exist is a community in name only; their labor to rewind the society back to its “factory settings” is just an attempt to make it their own again. Yet they can accomplish this only under the condition they also manage to exclude their opponents from it.

In the midst of the permanent inner schism of the various groups under the LGBTIQ umbrella, the more radical side is always right; the whole acronym, from left to right, represents the process of drawing the radical conclusion, step by step. Hence, the justice is, in the LGBTIQ context, unequivocally on the side of TIQ against LGB. For example, if transgender individuals demand an equal access to “woman spaces”, i.e. equality with natural women, they are, in the context of liberalism in demission, completely right; of course, if one would just take one step out of the LGBTIQ system, there would be other possibilities. But neither Joyce, nor “Triggernometry” hosts seem capable of doing that.

If we are to judge by the available “critical” voices such as “Triggernometry”, people in UK for the most part cannot think outside the categories of liberal utopia, which is presently going into demission. This utopia necessarily includes LGBTIQ as a whole and there is no chance that one can, somehow, escape its inner dialectics. As far as I’m concerned, both Joyce and her hosts deserve what they got, and what they’ll get in the future, and I strongly believe it will be far crazier and far worse than someone sterilizing kids “oriented” towards a priori sterile intercourse. This is because the liberalism in demission, they cling to so desperately, is not a form of political order, but rather the process of erosion of what in modern age was liberal order; it is such, not because its liberal, but because the hybris of its proponents disposed it to get imbibed with nihilism of a principle of the quite different kind.

There’s no political cure for nihilism, because the choice of depersonalization is a personal choice.

The peculiarity of the totalitarian potential in the midst of contemporary democracies lies in the fact that the actualization of this potential relies on free choice, far more than it was the case with totalitarianisms of 20^th Century; the coercion involved, at least initially, is, when put in historical perspective, almost negligible.

If we are to sum up the reasons why people of today renounce reality it would be this: the act of embracing the absurdity bears the promise of giving each one opportunity to be one’s “best I”, only and only if, one renounces insisting that A and not-A cannot exist in the same sense at the same time. Someone enjoying one’s freedom to be one’s best I starts to rebel only when one comes into conflict with someone else’s best I. In my view that’s really not a rebellion, but a futile attempt at having a drink and not picking up the tab.

When the political ideal encounters its own inner contradiction, i.e. when the snake bites its own tail, this means that it cannot be considered as a way of conducting real politics, where contradictions are normal occurrence, anymore. It can be either rejected or turned into fetish. The second option is, more or less, what liberalism in demission is.

In the following we’ll attempt to locate the proper context of the LGBTIQ principle and its relation, not only to politics, but also to basic, and quite surprising, shift in anthropology it seems to be producing – a rediscovery of soul as the proper subject of individual human being.  

Branko Malić

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