‘Who are you?’ yelled an aggro teen with nothing better to do as I passed him and his mates in the dark a couple of weeks ago. Had anyone else been around, I doubt he’d have had the balls, but these tough-talking testosterone factories outnumbered me three to one. I ignored the provocation, just kept walking, and they followed until the lonely unlit road met one with streetlights.

As for who I am, I know we’re not our bodies. Sensing my father’s presence three hours after his death was no grief-induced hallucination. And if I’m not my body, it must be other. Which means relating to it and all the microbes it hosts. And relationships take trust. So I don’t need Big Tech or Big Pharma or the corporate state to mediate. (Or not without reams of research.)

And so I keep recycling certain themes: the manufacturing of a pandemic and the fever pitch of panic it took to rewire society and our brains; the escalation of a transgender identity crisis; the threat of AI. Call it a bee in my bonnet (the odds of which keep shrinking as we poison bees to the brink of extinction), but these themes fit larger patterns of alienation from nature, technological colonisation of our bodies, and divisiveness. Vaxxed/unvaxxed, inclusive/transphobic, progressive/backward – or educated/ignorant, caring/hateful, democratic/fascistic. Exit online culture and these crude binaries, as artificial as the smarts ascribed to AI, lose their algorithmic hold on our minds, or what remains of them.

As religious faith worldwide has waned in the wake of the Enlightenment, so has the will to delay gratification. Progress, unofficial god of the West, bestows ever more, ever faster, promising consumer bliss, training our brains to lap up easy answers, and dumbing down critical public discourse. Take a typical, topical editorial in The Saturday Paper last month, after some family-friendly drag events got cancelled due to far-right threats of violence:

This facile rhetoric is too easy to critique (and an account of how PC culture is killing joy could fill a thesis). But some of it sounds indistinguishable from marketing spin. Ditto the hype from a doctor who, citing trans suicide stats, writes that stress reduction thanks to gender-affirming surgeries ‘could make them among the most effective mental health interventions in existence’. Indeed, given a history spanning trepanning, lobotomies and, lately, deep brain stimulation via surgical implants. Yet reduction of psychospiritual issues to a quick physical fix advances the happy capitalist fantasy that ‘[we] can decide who [we] are’ without limits. For evidence that we can’t, try asking a few detransitioners, whose backtracking gets them treated as traitors or footballs in the debate.

Late in 2021, I stumbled on some bloggers who hadn’t succumbed to Covid hysteria despite sociopolitical pressure, and whose painstaking research chimed with mine. I’d found a loose community speaking nuanced language; oases of sanity in the face of crazy collective developments and rabidly polarised debate. But hey, who am I? Just an observer of the fact that pairs of opposites share common axes.

So, what scares the left silly about the rise of the far right? Why aren’t progressives more frightened of mass human extinction via AI, fire, flood, drought and/or plague? Is it because those jab dodgers who want to rain on the trans parade prefer guns to safety, warfare to welfare, black suns to rainbows, doomsday prepping to doona therapy, survivalism to high-tech salvation, conspiracy theories to trusting the science, and self-control to individual freedom of expression even when that means mandatory medical treatments…? Oops, that reminds me: the far right advocates genocide, so they must be crushed.

Or read the screed on furthest-right Amerika.org for an intriguing critique of the left. If the context is batshit, the content sounds no less rational than the equation of drag with happiness. Go down that ult-right rabbit hole to get lost in a Valhalla-sized warren riddled with links that illuminate the white supremacist psyche. Creepy but instructive. Is censorship the real enemy?

Writing on radicalisation, legal academic Sarah Krasnostein notes some high-risk factors: ideological grievances, unprocessed childhood traumas, low education and poverty. Well, duh. And as boundaries between far-right and conspiracist groups break down, our diverse nation must confront the growing diversification of extremist ideology. In 2021, ASIO boss Mike Burgess said: ‘Extreme right-wing propaganda used COVID to portray governments as oppressors, and globalisation, multiculturalism and democracy as flawed and failing.’ (Cue canned laughter.) And Krasnostein also quotes a confused sociologist, Josh Roose:

Well, LOL, that’s me. But seriously, monetising higher ed has lowered the bar, hence the PhD boom. Citing psychoanalyst Erich Fromm on Nazism, Krasnostein points to ‘authoritarianism (which offers a sense of order in exchange for submission to the infantilising control of a parentified leader or all-powerful idea), destructiveness (the annihilation of that which cannot be controlled) and conformity (loyalty to group norms above critical thought)’. As if the sort of critical thought taught in our hallowed hollowed unis were immune to the mechanism of projection.

In a 2021 Guardian op-ed on anti-trans politics, philosopher Judith Butler wrote: ‘Through a spate of inconsistent and hyperbolic claims, [anti-gender advocates] concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship.’ Their examples include the banning of LGBTQI folk from public spaces, and at the time that op-ed ran, some of my friends and I were banned from public spaces where the double-vaxxed were free to spread Covid provided they had proof of both jabs on their phone. Meanwhile, we heard what sounded a lot like hate speech from beloved left leaders: Dan Andrews, Jacinda Ardern, Justin Trudeau and co. Authoritarians thrive at both ends of the ideological spectrum.

Over the last half a century, I’ve managed to survive rejection, psychosis and exclusion; been suicidal, homeless, poor, bullied, ganged up on, harassed and abused (even if the dominant discourse keeps calling me guilty and privileged). But that’s not why I want to stand with the trans community and most (if not all) despised minority groups. And yet I do. Even if recent ‘emergency measures’ have demonstrated that, in the event of a new ‘pandemic’, many of them would consign me and my kind to rotting in lockdown indefinitely while virtuously trashing their immune systems under the corporate banner of protection. So who does that make me? A dying breed: a product of listening to my body, not abandoning it to ‘experts’.