Valid until July 2020

Arielle Scarcella has had enough.

Millennial lesbian vlogger Arielle Scarcella caused a stir last Friday when she announced that she no longer feels a part of the contemporary LGBTQIAA+ movement, the latest evolution of the gay rights movement that stands for ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Allies and others.’

My first introduction to Scarcella was via one of Magdalen Berns’s early videos, in which Magdalen took issue with some bit of trans dogma Scarcella was pushing. It’s been heartening to see her changing her mind since then.

Scarcella, who vlogs about women, sexuality and culture and has over 600,000 YouTube followers, denounced the ridiculously “woke” rainbow coalition movement as “a safe haven for the mentally unstable”, stating that she has been “more cancelled, tortured, tormented, harassed” by what is supposedly her own community than by any other group.

Mary Harrington gets to the core point in explaining why Scarcella has had enough.

The growing desertion of the movement formerly known as LGBT by actual lesbian, gay and bisexual people reflects a core issue raised by its current trajectory, namely the political paralysis that results from an attempt to practice inclusivity in the absence of limits.

Exactly. I keep pointing this out. “Inclusive” and “exclusionary” are bad stupid buzzwords because no politics can be “inclusive” of everyone and everything – politics is all about excluding some things, which entails also excluding people who want to include those things or who represent those things.

Forming a group in order to campaign for that group’s political interests necessarily means defining what that group is, which in turn means defining what it is not. That is, political agency requires a degree of self-definition that is necessarily exclusionary. But as other groups are added, willy-nilly, in the interests of inclusivity, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the nature of their common political interests.

That + at the end of LGBTQIAA? That’s the door to chaos.

But the growing reluctance to impose limits, and willingness to include even heterosexual people (who sneak in under ‘queer’ or ‘ally’) in the rainbow coalition, renders the political programme ever more diffuse. What, from a political point of view, can lesbian women unite in solidarity with asexuals to campaign for, apart from a general feel-good assertion that ‘we are all valid’?

Not even a feel-good assertion, for me, because it’s such gibberish.

But validation has little meaningful substance as a political programme; in effect it takes away political agency. For if ‘validation’ is the core political demand, those pursuing this kind of identity-based programme ultimately hand power to the authority they claim to challenge, granting the state the ability to confer or withhold personhood itself.

And they turn themselves into something like a library card or a bus pass. No thanks.

6 Responses to “Valid until July 2020”