I was heading off to sleep and feeling pretty chilled. Then I got a call from an old friend who is allowing themselves to get exercised over all the “Trans” debate mess. And I was wondering what to write about, when it has been a largely uneventful day.
I can’t write about that subject. It is too loaded. There’s way too much terminology. Nobody makes sense anymore. Everybody is being unutterably horrible, often based on semantics.
It made me think about what we are allowed to say in public. Public sector workers in particular but all of us are needing to guard language closer and closer because acceptable use is moving faster than generations can shift with it. We used to just know that the outdated options would die out when our grandparents did. It would no longer be groovy to take exception to something. It wouldn’t be well wicked, or dope. We wouldn’t celebrate by dabbing. But now we can be brutally punished for being behind the times. When I was a kid there were so many words we thoughtlessly used. If you couldn’t catch a ball you might be called a spastic. If you went against the consensus you might be called a great big hairy gayer. Some people my age have tried to move with the times and understand how these usages can be hurtful to people within the brackets that are used as insults, but there are many people who have become almost comedically entrenched in doing it because they always have – “Why can’t I use language I’ve always used? I don’t mean any harm by it.”
The internet has forced us to move quicker than we are used to in terms of culture and usage and micro aggressions and status quo. Much quicker. We have to be nimble to keep up. Culture is a new muscle that we need to have to be able to keep abreast of current affairs. If we don’t flex our culture and strengthen it we get left behind.
Lots of my old friends have chosen to make themselves redundant by entrenching in all their comfortable soft nasty prejudices. The ones I see who are really tanking their own relevance are usually doing it around the trans thing. “Yeah but I mean, come on what about … ?” They’re focusing on single instances in sports, or where we go to shit, or prisons. From thence they vociferously and passionately prove to me that they should no longer have a voice in any cultural debate because they’re stuck in how the world was when they were young… or at least how it was in their perception. Make X Great Again.
I’m tired though and have to get up tomorrow. It’s a minefield. Don’t be a cunt.
Bedtime.
AlBarclay 