Identity
If you think our conversation about it has been rubbed raw thus far, just hang on
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Quite honestly, I haven’t known what to write for a while. There’s the taking-a-drink-from-a-fire-hose nature of news cycle consumption since you-know-who became president. There’s the digging in of heels reaction on the part of nation-states such as Denmark, Canada, Mexico Panama, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to his pugnacious and transactional approach to international relations. There’s the warranted concern about teenagers who have worked with criminal hackers rewriting code at government agencies. There’s the establishment of a White House office on faith that’s going to be headed by a grifting charlatan (Paula White) posing as a Christian.
But it’s the question of identity, a matter that’s already been plenty rubbed raw, that is going to further polarize post-American society, if you can imagine that.
Some snapshots of how the process is already underway.
The Indiana Senate has passed a bill limiting DEI efforts at the state and in schools, while requiring public disclosure of classroom lessons dealing with diversity-adjacent topics.
Senate Bill 289 is now heading to the Indiana House after a fiery debate in the Senate that went on for hours on Thursday. At one point, Democrats tried to remove Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, who serves as Senate president, from presiding over the vote because of comments he made online during the debate.
Democrats roundly condemned the bill, which was a combination of two prior bills dealing with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) topics.
SB 289 follows in the path of Gov. Mike Braun's executive order, calling for an end to DEI efforts in Indiana state government.
It also takes aim at DEI efforts in schools, along with class lessons on topics like racism, sexism and other instances of discrimination past and present. Schools would not be banned from covering the topics, but they would have to post any curriculum dealing with them publicly.
The bill prevents any public money going to DEI consultants or promotion of DEI topics.
The bill also includes language that doesn't impact what anyone can do, but does define DEI as any effort to "manipulate or otherwise influence the composition of employees with reference to race, sex, color or ethnicity" that does not ensure "colorblind and race-neutral hiring" in federal anti-discrimination laws.
Check out this circular reasoning on the part of a legislator who obviously doesn’t care for the bill:
During one tense exchange, Sen. Rodney Pol Jr. (D-District 4) asked the bill's author, Sen. Gary Byrne (R-District 47), "Do you understand exactly why these initiatives were put in place?"
"Explain to me, if you would like, why DEI was put in place," Byrne said.
"I mean, you're the one that's trying to undo it," Pol said. "But do you understand why it was put in the first place?"
"Explain to me, I guess," Byrne repeated.
"Senator, I mean, you know, I think that's kind of the point is, if you don't understand why it was established, then you should probably not be undoing why it was established," Pol said.
Ah, the old you-don’t-get-it ploy. As if everyone understands that bigotry and oppression are rampant in our society, so therefore one doesn’t have to cite examples.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into Denver Public Schools for "discriminating against its female students" after the district converted a women's restroom into an all-gender facility, the office announced Tuesday.
The installation of the bathroom at East High School, with a student body of more than 2,000, now has an "exclusive restroom for male students and no restroom for female students on its second floor," according to the office.
“The alarming report that the Denver Public Schools District denied female students a restroom comparable with their male counterparts appears to directly violate the civil rights of the District’s female students,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement. “Let me be clear: it is a new day in America, and under President Trump, OCR will not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”
Again, there is an opposing viewpoint:
“It is unprecedented for the Office for Civil Rights to admittedly initiate its own investigation, into a single bathroom, as a result of local media coverage rather than in response to a filed complaint requesting their involvement,” Denver Public Schools said in a statement.
The district said the restroom was added as a result of a "student-led process" to serve "all students, including those who may feel uncomfortable in gender-specific facilities."
One’s reaction to that phrase “those who may feel uncomfortable in gender-specific facilities" probably depends to some degree on one’s age, but I daresay that there are some current female students who are not keen on the only formerly girls’ restroom on the third floor now being open to guys.
And let me here state for the record that it’s damn weird that anybody wouldn’t find the district’s statement damn weird.
And a Michigan State legislator has enlisted a surgeon’s scalpel in her effort to make a statement:
A Democratic Michigan state representative told protesters Wednesday that she underwent voluntary sterilization to avoid becoming pregnant during President Donald Trump's second term, a left-wing media outlet reported.
"Just under two weeks ago, I underwent surgery to ensure that I would never have to navigate a pregnancy in Donald Trump's America," Rep. Laurie Pohutsky told anti-Trump protesters gathered Wednesday outside the Michigan Capitol, according to a piece published by the Michigan Advance. "I refuse to let my body be treated as currency by an administration that only sees value in my ability to procreate."
Trump has maintained that abortion policy should be left to state legislatures, such as the Michigan House of Representatives. Pohutsky is a member of the Michigan House and served for two years as speaker pro tempore.
Pohutsky insisted that her surgery was important, telling protesters, "If you know people who are questioning how serious this is, I'm going to repeat myself: A sitting government official opted for voluntary sterilization because she was uncertain she would be able to access contraception in the future."
Oh, so you refuse to let your body be treated as currency, but you’re willing to turn it into a protest poster board in an irreversible act.
Then the report on this lets the cat out of the bag. Are you surprised to learn how she identifies herself?
Pohutsky, who has promoted herself as the first openly bisexual member of the Michigan House, on Thursday took to X to claim that "many men" are not happy with her decision.
The odd thing about the militant reaction on the Left to realizing most post-Americans are not on board with all this weird stuff is that it depends on the one hand on an assertion of fierce individuality, reserving the right to completely invent oneself, and on the other hand a dependence on solidarity with others who have invented themselves in similar ways.
I began an August 2023 post here at Precipice titled “Thoughts On When It Went Completely Off The Rails” with a quote from C.S. Lewis that addresses it thusly:
I have wanted to try and expel that quite un-Christian worship of the individual simply as such which is so rampant in modern thought side by side with our collectivism, for one error begets the opposite error and, far from neutralising, they aggravate each other.
— C.S. Lewis
If you’re a longtime reader / subscriber, you’re surely familiar with the posts I’ve written over the years in which I try to fathom the moment at which Western civilization abandon its centuries-old assumptions. If you’re new here, the following excerpt from that off-the-rails essay includes links to some of my previous inquiries:
Last August, my inquiry took the long view in a post entitled “Five Hundred Years of Abandoning Our Essence.” Two months earlier, I zeroed in on the year 1968 in the post “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift.” Last month, I examined the limits of the usefulness of a focus on the local as a remedy for our societal crisis in the essay entitled “Place.”
This topic has driven much of my book reading this year.
In the spring, I read Robert Nisbet’s Community and Power , originally published in 1953 under the title - which I greatly prefer - The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics and Order of Freedom, and revised in 1962. It’s often framed as a precursor to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Nisbet, in mid-century, was already seeing the state supplant the civic bonds, norms and institutions that had provided Americans with a sense of a common good.
I’m currently reading Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. It was written by a team of UC Berkeley sociologists and originally published in 1988. Subsequent editions came out in 1996 and 2008, each with a new preface crafted to reflect societal changes that had occurred in the interim. I think all the authors are still alive. I’d like to see what the preface to a 2023 edition would have to say. While there’s much that’s enduring about their 1988 observations about how the realms of work, marriage, citizenship and other aspects of American life have changed, the changes wrought by technology and an even more pronounced emphasis on the self in the last fifteen years have been at least as transformative as anything they cite in the work itself or any of the subsequent prefaces.
For covering that territory, I think a piece by Erik Hoel, at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective, that I came across just this morning does a thorough and bracing - indeed, horrifying - job. He. asserts, and convinces at least me, that 2012 was an inflection point in shaping the tenor of the present moment. Take some time to study the statistics he provides for such phenomena as teenage self-harm, US birth rates, dating patterns, pedestrian fatalities from cars, movie content, women’s mental health, and more.
What I see, in my personal face-to-face interactions as well as those on social media, is an ever more frantic attempt by us - be clear that I’m including myself in this - to distract ourselves from the cultural and spiritual vacuum we’ve created. It even extends to what those who see themselves as serious observers choose to preoccupy themselves with. News items about political inside baseball, certainly, but also attention to the who’s-up-who’s-down of the worlds of media moguls and institutional religion (what’s left of it) are presented as having some import beyond this afternoon, when in fact they have no stinking significance at all to anyone who sees what is really happening.
The terrible irony of our predicament is that even hints of a way to restore even the most rudimentary baseline of a common sense of humanity can’t get an airing, because nobody will take out his or her earbuds to pay it any heed.
But here we are in 2025, and present developments continue to wash over the transom.
Yes, the new administration came at this DEI thing with all the finesse of a crowbar-wielding bar brawler. But that’s because DEI was pushed on post-American society with a totalitarian heavy-handedness.
Something that’s concerned me of late is that the debate in its present form may lapse into a 1970s and 80s style argument about affirmative action.
What’s happened since that era is far more sinister. We’ve seen the downward spiral through “difficult conversations,” diversity circles, affinity groups and implicit-bias workshops. And now high school restrooms where a chick might have to hear a guy in the next stall dropping a deuce. The obvious common thread is an insistence that those who don’t readily embrace this stuff will be made to get their minds right.
It’s all so against the grain of the American character that mass resistance was inevitable, even though it has been mounted with Trumpist boneheadedness.
I often play the mental game of going back in time to, say, 1965, and trying to explain something like the Denver situation to an ordinary citizen. Often the 1965 citizen is my father. How would he even begin to digest what’s happened?
And let’s head off any racial-bigotry-was-indeed-rampant-in-1965-consider-the-march-to-Selma type argument. That was over a half-century ago. There is no systemic racial bigotry in 2025, and black post-Americans have the same range - “diversity,” if you’d like - of viewpoints on this matter as other demographic groups. Not to mention that race is a very different aspect of human identity from sexuality. No one decides to be of a particular color. Transgenederism? If that’s your bag, you chose to enlist a doctor in having your crotch carved up and getting a puberty-blocker prescription.
The worrisome thing about the present moment is that neither side is interested in thoroughly presented arguments. The Trumpists will approach it with their characteristic stomp-’em-into-the-dust style, and the non-binary genderqueers will huddle in solidarity with each other to commiserate, occasionally launching efforts like marches or legislation.
The notion of extending grace will become yet more quaint, because we are quickly losing sight of where grace comes from. I repeat, for the gazillionth time, we’re looking at how a society splinters in the absence of acknowledgement of a transcendent order.
We think identity is something we craft with our imaginations. It’s not. An almighty God came up with the shape, sound, smell and character of each type of creature in His universe. Did we learn nothing from Mary Shelly’s first novel, the one about the modern Prometheus?
DEI is getting eradicated, and in and of itself, that’s to be lauded. But the eradicators’ just-crawl-in-a-hole-you-perverts tone as they carry out their mission ensures that no persuasion takes place.
So the reckoning will occur with a more severe divine bluntness.