It’s 2023 and I just watched a spot on a well known breakfast time tv show about inclusive hairdressing, the woman is running a salon that caters specifically to the needs of trans and other persons from the rather vague groups involved in self identification. I wondered if by creating this principle that person was themselves, by implication, being prejudicial.
If there is a high street hairdresser that refused to cut the hair of persons from these minorities I might have thought this was a valid idea, since, as a paying customer with a head of hair, they should be entitled to purchase a haircut without further problem, and likely they would get exactly what they asked for, because that’s how it works. I am not seeing the issue here, that’s the point that baffles me. Since seeing this I have also listened to a radio article on inclusive golf, so there must be golf courses that actively ban or at least act to discourage minority psychosexual groups yes? I’m not aware of any, but then I’m no expert on golf clubs.
By creating a group or a movement, one that actively attempts to recruit into it persons from a narrow demographic, and to exclude persons from a wider demographic, under the logic that they (the wider group) must already have available to them a multitude of services, is the formation of this group itself a prejudice? would it not be better, if exclusions do actually exist, to give ones time and effort over to changing the pre-existing prejudices, rather than trying to fight a prejudice with another prejudice, treating the scourge of exclusion with more exclusion?
I’m not sure the attempt and the motivations behind such endeavours is squeaky clean either, or driven by morals, or concern for the perceived issue. It strikes me that there is quite a lucrative bandwagon to jump on here, an opportunity presents itself to make some coin on the back of these movements by creating a solution to a problem that maybe doesn’t actually exist, and these problems just keep multiplying as new ones seem to be identified on a daily basis, like a fashion that we then turn into an obsession. It feels true that these days that if you’re not angry about something that isn’t real, then you’re not socially real.
You must not get me wrong, I am not without sympathy for those persons excluded from the norms of society by any means, and there are many, it’s just that it’s too easy to try to solve problems in a capitalist society by creating a revenue stream, maybe we are all so conditioned that we can’t think of any other way forward. We have had recently a person climbing Mt Snowdon with a domestic appliance strapped to his back, this former soldier is a sufferer of mental health issues, and I get that this goal he has given himself provides the purpose, and the validity, that he once had as a soldier, it makes him part of something. But… is this, the act, a form of helping anyone in any real way other than abstractly? He does the thing, people feel compelled to support that thing financially, ergo the result is mooted as good and nobody is allowed to argue.
What I would ask is the same thing that Doug Stanhope asks, “are your friends that callous that they would not part with their excess for that cause just because it was worthwhile, or do they need you to have to suffer to validate it?” Peter Singer suggests that if you have the means to help you just should, not to participate in the persuasion of others to help by performing an act for them because even you yourself must suspect your motive is self promotion. Instead just help, I find this idea much more compelling. Just climb the mountain with the fridge on your back for the attention and admit that that was the purpose in the first place.
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