on 'woke' as being a symptom of the decline of the left (and trans rights)

there are a number of issues that horsemouth (as a stone coward) avoids.

the first is the kerfuffle over trans rights.

gender re-assignment surgery (technology) enables something new in society at the levels of gender/ sex to emerge. this is profound because it is at the basis of how our identities have been constructed by society and how we construct ourselves. this is inevitably going to cause disruption (but only really at the level of the changes required by black liberation, gay liberation etc. within the new left (and indeed within the old left) and within society as a whole. 

horsemouth thinks the left (as a whole) is in decline but that this is not because of an excess of 'woke' but because of wider structural factors (changes in work, changes in patterns of accumulation, and, well, history). 'woke' is in a long tradition of terms (PC, politically correctness and before that 'right on') used by those strange 'friends of the left' who claim to have the left's interests at heart but upon closer examination turn out to be filthy liberals/ enemies of social justice etc. . 

but also used by people on the left navigating the minefield of received opinion on the left.

it is a familiar argument, it can be found in orwell where he complains the left are bicyclists, teetotalers, vegetarians and advocates of free love rather than people who share exactly the same opinions as the average working man. 

horsemouth thinks the greater problem is that there is a fundamental generational disagreement about how change happens (who makes that change and how they make it happen). 

like he said he tends to keep schtum for fear of being yelled at. horsemouth may not see 'infinite kindness' as a solution to this but he would probably approve of a strategy of careful politeness. 

horsemouth was challenged on his belief that this was progress.

these changes both bring in the new but they also resuscitates the old. in the pre T+ days 'butch' and 'drag' used to get accused of negatively reinforcing existing gender roles - it's not like there were halcyon days before controversy. but the proliferation of pronouns indicates (in part) that people wish to try living as something beyond the pre-existing gender division. what was metaphor and performance in the 70ies, 80ies (from er. boy george to amanda lear to skin) has become literalised in the flesh. yes it 'enables some to live a less miserable and more fulfilling life' (as horsemouth's interlocutor says) which is to be welcomed, but yes 'women bear.. the brunt of the tyranny which is gender.' 

sexual liberation/ gender equality is an incomplete project and gender reassignment destabilises the terms in which it was conducted and there's no easy way out of this it's just going to have to be lived through (or er. avoided which is mostly what horsemouth does). 

horsemouth subscribes to the notion of progress in that we could together create a wonderful libertarian communist world of sexual liberation/ gender equality but most of the time he thinks changes in society are just changes in discourse that benefit some and harm others but ultimately make us who we are and wish to be. 

out of loyalty to his LGBT+ friends and his principles of live and let live horsemouth must say that society should enable people to live as they want to live. 

but well done (horsemouth says to his interlocutor) for standing up to the orthodoxy that it's all easy and without contradictions. ok everyone may now rain fire on the poor mule's head...

ok horsemouth has finished writing this (and meanwhile the sun has gone in - there's a metaphor there). 

it is the 25th anniversary of the release of the box by orbital. multiple friends of horsemouth worked on the video, he knew paul orbital well enough to stop and say hello. indeed horsemouth played on lush 3-1 by orbital and later on he played on a track on the solo project of their sound man (mickey mann) - a track called crow road. (he has since lost touch with both of them). 

yesterday a zoom call with john clarkson (who is doing well thank you for asking) and a coffee and a walk around with andrew minty (ditto). 

today. more reading and a walk around probably. horsemouth either has a cold or coronavirus. he suspects he'd feel much worse if it was coronavirus.