Before Straight and Gay: The discreet, disorienting passions of the Victorian era
To a certain extent I certainly find the current&#x2F;modern fixation with classifying gender and orientation odd. It&#x27;s not entirely clear to me why it&#x27;s important that I know somebody is a &quot;queer sapiosexual&quot; or whatever else. But there are clearly a lot of people who think such things are very important.<p>And of course what seems a tendency towards needlessly complicated overly-expository self-labeling encompasses a lot more than gender these days. It feels like there&#x27;s a subtext to a lot of it which sort of suggests that ideas can only be heard and understood clearly by those who own the appropriate labels (including gender), and so people seek to have expansive identities that give them the social bona fides necessary to have their opinions, thoughts, and ideas treated with respect and presumed relevance.<p>In other eras perhaps these social credentials came from wealth or class or other &quot;accomplishments.&quot; But the modern world seems to have let an obsession with the the variously unfair, arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory nature of these previous credentials become the basis for inventing new ones based around constructed identities, since such constructs are available to all.<p>In a way we can see this in how protest movements are labeled - it used to be that they were labeled by their goals or the problems they were trying to solve, like the &quot;Civil Rights Movement&quot; or the &quot;Conservation Movement.&quot; But now we label things by their identity. Rather than conservation movement, at some point we ended up with &quot;conservationists&quot; and &quot;environmentalists,&quot; which have given way to things like the &quot;Women&#x27;s March,&quot; &quot;Scientist&#x27;s March,&quot; etc, which seem to imply that identity necessarily indicates viewpoint - just by knowing what category&#x2F;identity is marching I should know what it is trying to say.<p>As a lazy human being I find this not an all-together pleasing development, mostly because it seems to go along with a bit of all-or-nothingism, particularly for &quot;allies,&quot; who, absent the appropriate labels, may only accept or not accept the broad determinations of those who own the operative label at  risk of being excluded&#x2F;denounced.<p>Anyway, I enjoyed the piece. Always enjoy reading about Victorian stuff.