Boggart Abroad

  Not all that many decades ago, certainly within the adult part of my lifetime, it was recognised that both learning and evolving as a person were lifelong processes. Life was a formative experience and if we were lucky and lived long our experiences equipped us to take on many roles as we moved from adolescence to old age. Shakespeare wrote something about that, I recall, from my long ago schooldays.

https://unherd.com/2023/01/how-we-created-a-self-hating-generation/

This is the ideological base underpinning the political objective of ‘queering’ society, and the article is dead right to say that the ‘queering’ of children is child abuse. It needs to be called out. Like many others, I wonder how this will play out, and I don’t have a crystal ball. It does occur to me, though, that without denying the pernicious nature of what is happening, there is a more benign potential outcome.
In my formative teenage years, in the early-to-mid 1970’s, a number of teen groups existed in my English town. There were skinheads, suedes, even a few residual rockers from the 1960’s. I was a frib. Fribs seem to have been a local phenomenon but we were part of a wider post-hippy federation, characterised by long hair, scruffy demeanour, flares and a collection of prog rock albums. It all seemed real enough. If you ran into the wrong gang at night, you could get beaten up. But the long hair and purple flares were part of teenage identity-forming. You belonged somewhere. It had the added benefit of a little rebellion, not conforming to what your parents expected, and it was guaranteed to give your granny a fit of the vapours.
 

The older generations disapproved, and for sure there was a harmful fringe, for example involving drug usage and extreme politics. But the vast majority of us turned out perfectly fine. We cut our hair and packed our LPs into the attic. I wouldn’t want to be my teenage self again, but I look back on those years with some fondness.
 

Fast forward 50 years. I know of a young teenager who recently announced to her family that she has a non-binary identity. I do wonder if a generation ago she might have been a goth, or two generations ago a hippie-chick. What is a teenager to do in the 2020’s? Every possible youth cult has been used up, your mum and dad go to rock concerts and the headline acts at Glastonbury are 80 years old. Teenagers have been offered a new framework with which to formulate their emerging identities, with the added benefits of non-conformance and upsetting your granny, so they grab hold of it.

Of course, the whole thing is damaging and should be resisted, and there is a broad and very dangerous fringe, with well-documented effects: breast-binding, bodily mutilation, regret, psychological damage and so on. But perhaps there is a chance that the queering movement has over-reached itself, that it is now so obviously divorced from reality, and the damage is becoming so apparent that there will be a correction. There’s also a chance that it’s more ephemeral than we think. I suspect that before too long, perhaps when the first teen romance flourishes, that young person will look back at their non-binary announcement with a cringe, and hope everyone forgets all about it. Like your Emerson, Lake and Palmer LPs.