Andrew Sullivan: People are Far More Diverse than Colors

Andrew Sullivan identifies one of the main problems with Wokeness in his article, "The Minorities Within Minorities: And how they can help us revive liberal democracy." This excerpt is from Sullivan's excellent independent Substack column, The Weekly Dish:

I see much of the woke left as deeply threatening to some of my core identities: their hostility to religious freedom, their redefinition of my sexual orientation into a gender preference, their instant judgment of a person by the color of their skin or their maleness. . . . Once you see everything through the prism of crude identity, and reduce everyone to socially constructed molecules in racial hierarchies of various kinds, this is the kind of analysis you get. But what these left and right-tribalists obscure or cannot see is we’re talking about a spectrum of countless, unique human beings here, with individual identities and views formed by a cascade of different life experiences and backgrounds. Things are far, far more complicated and interesting than these crude ideologies can explain.

After publishing the above I spotted Andrew Sullivan's tweet summarizing his article:

Minorities add complexity to America but America adds complexity to them in return. That's why many Americans of countless complicated identities voted this year as individuals and as unhyphenated citizens.

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Anarchists = BLM Minus Black People

From the Los Angeles Times article, "Portland’s anarchists say they support racial justice. Black activists want nothing to do with them":

The election of Biden has only antagonized the anarchists — and exposed their differences with the Black activists they claim to support.

Black activists and community leaders, who generally view the defeat of Trump as an opportunity for change within the system, said the anarchists are hijacking the movement and undermining the push for racial justice by continuing to commit violence.

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Better Than Nature – Puberty Blockers

A tweet by James Lindsay of New Discourses:

I struggle to understand the willingness of prepubescent teenagers to take hormone blockers in light of the high physical and emotional risks (other than social contagion and need to please one's social network). What follows is an excerpt from Irreversible Damage, by Abigail Shrier:

“So first of all, the studies show that when a kid is put on puberty blockers, almost 100 percent will go on to do cross-sex hormones.” This is true, though the reasons are not entirely clear. One possibility is that a young person would only go on puberty blockers in the first place if she was reasonably certain of wanting to lead a transgender life. Another is that, after years of socially identifying as a person of the opposite sex, the social costs of taking it all back are quite steep. It’s hard to change your mind about something you’ve been insisting on for so long— even if you might wish you could.

But it was the next thing she learned that sent Katherine [the mother of a teenager] spinning. “When you’ve stopped puberty with puberty blockers and go straight to cross-sex hormones, you absolutely guarantee that you will be infertile.” When the gender clinicians pushed Katherine to start her preteen child on hormone blockers, they were proposing that she put Maddie on a path toward infertility. Her faith in the gender therapists fell apart.

Katherine could not understand how psychologists would encourage this, how doctors would allow it, or why medical professional standards would permit parents to consent to eliminating such a vital human capacity on behalf of their minor children. And yet, right in front of her, schools were encouraging it, parents were going along with it, the media was celebrating it, and everyone was acting as if this were perfectly kosher.

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