I've had many discussions with my teenage children about society's current obsession with gender ideology. They are as baffled about it as most adults. For their entire lives they have felt marginalised and excluded due to restrictive prescription diets, debilitating gastrointestinal symptoms and associated anxiety. So, you'd be forgiven for assuming that they were passionate about recognition for all. Except that is exactly what they do indeed want, but in a less individual way. They are well-placed to understand the difference between acceptance and belonging, versus the current "ME, ME, ME!" craving for individual recognition. Real acceptance has nothing to do with labels, with foisting your beliefs, sexuality or preferences on others. It comes from doing away with labels and focussing on what really matters - personality and belonging.
The Noughties saw the rise of the individual to stratospheric levels. Born of the 1980s, the
Century of the Self was not, as Adam Curtis suggested, the twentieth century, but merely a product of it. Its parents were affluence and independence, but the coming of age of self-centred existence was without doubt the year 2000. Millenials who became parents had an entirely different focus from generations before, most had more time and money to lavish on their offspring, subscribed to the philosophy of indulgent pandering to their every whim with the justification that disposable income was to be disposed of. The long term ramifications of this went unnoticed at the time.
