From Substack
Any regime of political discourse that subordinates the merit of an argument to the identity of the person advocating it is inherently unhealthy.
At first glance, this discussion with famed lesbian writer and popular podcast host Katie Herzog may seem relevant only to a limited audience. Our focus is on the increasingly expansive and amorphous definition of "LGBT identity" and how it is now wielded, and weaponized, in political discourse. As two people whose lives and identities have been shaped from our earliest childhood memories by the experience of being gay in a society which, particularly back then, was hostile and discriminatory in all sectors legal, cultural and psychological we share our perspective on how this movement and the understanding of LGBT identity has so radically changed in recent years.
But I would like to invite readers to consider that this issue, far from being a niche discussion, has broad, even universal, relevance to how our political discourse is being conducted. In particular, how various claimed marginalized identities are understood is playing a significant role in shaping the rules of political debates generally: determining which factors are assigned undue weight when decreeing how various people are and are not allowed to express themselves, and the often-baseless criteria that are used to determine which arguments bear the most validity and who is considered to have the upper hand in critical political debates (evaluative criteria based on everything except the substance of one's ideas).
At first glance, this discussion with famed lesbian writer and popular podcast host Katie Herzog may seem relevant only to a limited audience. Our focus is on the increasingly expansive and amorphous definition of "LGBT identity" and how it is now wielded, and weaponized, in political discourse.
The most recent event prompting mine and Katie's decision to have this discussion is an outbreak of censorship and deplatforming demands aimed at the writers who are thriving most and have built the largest readerships on Substack. I recently reported on the growing hostility within corporate media outlets toward the fact that journalists and writers on independent platforms like this one and Patreon are able to earn a healthy living and build their own independent (and often quite-large) audience by reporting and analyzing free of the cumbersome corporate discourse constraints that plague them something that they and their collapsing industry are struggling to achieve for reasons they ought to spend more time examining.
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