In the area of sex and gender, women stand the farthest back and are the most gentrified, so they’re the lowest in the moral hierarchy, then gays, then trans. Is there a frontier beyond trans? I don’t see why there shouldn’t be. But we’ve been moving from large identity groups down the ladder to smaller and smaller identity groups, as well as crossing wider and wider ideological gulfs to being those groups into the mainstream of political and social centering. At some point that’s going to become a problem on a practical level.

It’s hard to run a perpetual revolution. You end up having to add more and more people to your list of enemies to be defeated while the available pool of righteous revolutionaries who can escape all those negative identifications gets smaller and smaller. First we deregulated gender roles in society. Then we deregulated gender roles in sex. Then we tried deregulating gender itself, and it’s still not quite clear how well that’s going to go.

For this last to happen, there’s a large pool of affected people that have to be OK with the dismantling of a fundamental aspect of the biological, psychological, and social structure of human life, for the benefit of a relatively small number of beneficiaries to whom those structures are a problem (presumably; the assumption is that if we accommodate them they will be happier and the negative effects on then will be removed, but that’s actually a theory, not a guarantee). That’s a much harder pitch to make than the earlier ones, but it’s being made with great strength. It basically came out of the gate, fully formed, out of nowhere, with Caitlyn Jenner only a handful of years ago, insisting that this was the new moral frontier, so get on board.

Some gays and some women seem to have realized that their own moral stock as the locus or frontier of moral significance has been slipping. They’re no longer atop the moral hierarchy. In fact their attempts to hang on to what they have and not surrender their status to the new moral stars is considered terribly bourgeois and backward. And if you’re not part of what’s ahead, then you’re part of what’s behind. To be progressive means to be far left, and that includes left of whatever was left ten years ago and is already explored territory.
So it’s hard to guess where things head from here. Does the revolution keep going? Is there anywhere viable to go? Or will things get stuck at this point for a long while? Or will this case prove to be a bridge too far and a bargain too few people are willing to make, something too big and important to surrender to reinvention, deregulation, and disruption, so that too many people resist it in the long run? I suppose we’re going to have to see what happens.

The problem is, conservatism and liberalism are based in personality, not facts. They’re a matter of trajectory, not position. So facts can change, territories can change, but the behaviors won’t. People can be conservative about feminism. They can even be conservative about gay rights. They will act just as conservatives a hundred years ago did, but over different things. And liberals are the same. The slope is slippery because the direction of movement isn’t determined by the terrain, it’s determined by the fundamental attitudes of the people walking it. Some portion of people will always be pushing the boundaries and trying to break out of whatever the current consensus is to the next frontier of exploration, regardless of the cost to what came before. Regardless of whatever the current or most recent consensus was.

There isn’t a point at which people stop pulling back or stop pushing forward. They just drift over what specific things, what assumptions and theories about life, the universe, and everything, are worth pushing or pulling about. The question of what is actually right or reasonable or true or really good is actually an almost completely irrelevant matter. The struggle will take place, regardless, everywhere, everywhen, every culture, every age. It is a conflict of approaches, over assumptions.
The only thing that really confines such processes are the ways in which actual living conditions and the consequences of our movement and action in actual life push back on us. But the ease and safety and wealth and technological isolation of modern life, including buffering from short-term consequences, keeps these things at a much greater distance than in previous ages.
This process is so difficult in part because our world is so complex that it’s very hard to actually sort out such tangled messes of cause and effect among so many people at such great distances. So much so that ordinary people can hardly even hope to have a sense of what causes what and how. The mechanisms of production are so obscured from us that we have no idea where things really come from or what they produce or what their cost is or why. And the results take so long to arrive and are so altered and affected and obscured by so many powerful forces and artifices and mechanisms and institutions that they can hardly be recognized. We are, as Marx said, alienated from the work of our own hands.

So I think modern humanity can be forgiven for being a little confused and mercurial and at war with itself. Or maybe forgiven isn’t the right word. Pitied, maybe. Understood, at least. Having our hands laid on a million different threads of data spread across an entire world hasn’t exactly elevated us to the level of gods, as we imagined. It has merely spread our limited mortal understanding so thin as to be ephemeral and adrift upon the vast winds of influences we can barely perceive, much less resist.