Yesterday I wrote about the latest progressive campaign to “redefine masculinity.” The label is too constricting and old-fashioned, we’re told, and so it must be changed to accommodate those who don’t fit it. This is the Left’s approach to everything. They want to expand all definitions and all labels into oblivion in the hopes that nobody will be left out, excluded, or made to feel like an “other.” This effort, of course, extends beyond concepts like masculinity and femininity to encompasses even manhood and womanhood themselves. Everything is fluid now. Nothing means anything.
But there is a big problem here, aside from the fact that the whole thing is insane. The other problem is this: in this effort to “embrace diversity,” we have actually killed it. By getting rid of labels, we have taken away a person’s ability to fall outside of the label. By pretending that differences aren’t different, we have erased the thing we are supposed to be accepting. You cannot have a difference unless there is a standard, a definition, by which that difference can be recognized as a difference. And you cannot have diversity unless you have differences. The more we redefine things, the more obsolete and irrelevant diversity becomes.
In the dark old ages, there were masculine men and feminine men and men who fell in between. Masculinity was recognized as the standard, the norm, but not every man was as masculine as the next. And some men were naturally more feminine than others. A man was free to be a different sort of man because he was free to be a man. Diversity could exist within manhood because the word “manhood” was meaningful and objective.
Now we accommodate the different men by pretending they are not different. Then we are told to celebrate their differences. But how? We cannot celebrate a difference if we don’t recognize it as such. And there cannot be a difference unless there is some solid thing for the difference to deviate from. We say it is bad for a person to feel like an “other,” but there cannot be diversity without “others.” That is the whole point of diversity.
In a similar way, if a boy has girlish interests and tendencies, we will now declare that he must really be a woman inside. This is not only scientifically incoherent but it defeats what I thought was supposed to be the point. For years the Left insisted that it’s OK for boys to be feminine. Then they began insisting that feminine boys are girls. How can a boy be feminine if his femininity makes him a girl? And how can a boy even say that he “doesn’t feel like a boy” if there aren’t any particular tendencies, attributes, and characteristics associated with boyhood anymore?
There are a hundred other examples of this kind of thing. The Left wants to melt us all down into one homogeneous, label-less, gender-less glob, and yet it will still cite “diversity” as its chief aim. But diversity is precisely the thing that becomes impossible when we are all the same. They are killing the thing they say they want. Which gives rise to a certain suspicion: maybe diversity is not actually what they want, and never was.