Moving the hedges

Many years ago, I was attacked by an angry farmer and his son while walking across his land on a public right-of-way. I had not caused any damage and his anger seemed extreme and utterly disproportionate. After I had escaped, I spoke to our village policeman (who was also a long-distance walker) and he told me that the farmer was notorious. He accused every walker on his land of damaging his property. He locked up two walkers who were off-duty firefighters on the grounds that they were potential arsonists. He had disputes with all his neighbours, who he accused of the near-impossible activity of moving the boundary hedges. Although he did not use the term, the village policeman was describing a man with a paranoid personality disorder.

I have since encountered two or three more people with this disorder, and recognise common features including a belief in elaborate conspiracies against them, an extreme suspicion of others they meet, and hostility to what they regard as an invasion of their boundaries. Paranoid people see no point in debate or compromise because they regard their opponents as inherently malevolent. Instead, they believe in shouting down or otherwise silencing those with whom they disagree.

For some people with paranoid personality disorder, the invasion of boundaries may involve more than just hedges, and focuses on people who cross what they regard as inviolable boundaries of definition. One such definition is nationality. This became important from the Nineteenth Century onwards, with the creation of many new states which defined themselves as the home of a particular nation. Governments of these states usually sought to establish the boundary between those who were to be included as true members of the nation and those excluded. The definition of this boundary varied from country to country, but was usually based on language, religion or ‘blood’. This all proved a disaster for millions of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the nationhood boundary in what they had previously regarded as their own homeland. Even worse, they became the object of hatred from politicians with paranoid personalities who were able to mobilise populations against this supposed ‘enemy within’. This became particularly effective at times of war or economic collapse when it becomes easier to persuade people to adopt a paranoid way of thinking.

The consequences were organised humiliation, forced transfers of population and mass murder. This process began in Spain in the 16th Century, with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews. But it reached its apogee four hundred years later with the deaths of millions, forced transfers of populations and millions living as refugees. Many of the historic multi-national port cities of the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria, Istanbul and Salonika, were stripped of their diversity. By the middle of the 20th Century, most ‘nation-states’ in Europe had eradicated most of their national minorities. Even so, there remain people, often living near the borders, who nationalist politicians regard as having the wrong religion or language or appearance and which they seek to eradicate. In the recent past, Burma has driven out a million Rohingya people who have been denied citizenship. China is currently imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Uyghur people in the North-West of the country, and there are reports of children being separated from parents and forced sterilisation of women.

Younger populations today tend to be less nationalistic, and the new boundary that has attracted the attention of the paranoid is sexual identity. There are many conditions which result in a small proportion of the population having abnormal development of the sexual organs. Many of this group (such as those with Turner’s Syndrome) have no doubt about their gender identity. A rather larger group of people, whose sexual organs have developed in a conventional manner express concern about their gender, some of whom choose to use medicines and/or surgery to change their outward appearance to conform to what they regard as their true gender. There is nothing new about this phenomenon, and many human societies identity valued roles for men who choose to live as women or women who choose to live as men.

What is new, however, is the politicisation of transgender identities. There are three elements to this. In the first place, socially conservative people (particularly those with religious beliefs) view a change of sexual identity as a threat to the normal order of society, which some regard as divinely-inspired. The second element is the view of some feminists that men who choose to identify as women are encroaching on the special and distinctive status that distinguishes a woman from a man as well as on spaces that are traditionally reserved for women. The third element is a sympathy for transgender people because of the hostility they often encounter, the cruelty inflicted on them in various forms of ‘conversion therapy’, and the impact all this has on their mental health.

These differing views could probably be resolved by discussion and debate. But instead, the paranoid style of politics has come to dominate this new boundary of definition. Attempts are made to ban people with opposing views from speaking in public, while academics are hounded out of university for views that are deemed incorrect. In the USA, some states have passed absurd laws to ensure that people must use the toilets that are appropriate to their sex assigned at birth. Equally absurd are the two extremist definitions of gender, which mainly concern male-to-female gender transition. The first is that such people should always be defined as ‘male’, even though they identify as women, live as women, and have undergone hormone therapy and re-assignment surgery to resemble women. The second is that a man should be defined as female if they state that this is their wish, even though they continue to live as man, and have the body of a man.

At the heart of these absurd definitions is an intolerance of ambiguity. Sexual boundaries, like national frontiers, include people who do not fit within simple clear definitions. There are, and hopefully will always remain people who have multiple national allegiances, who belong to minority and diverse cultures, or who are uncertain about or wish to change their sexual identity. They will sadly remain targets for the paranoid people who seek to enforce simple definitions by inflicting suffering, but it is the responsibility of the rest of us to defend the true diversity of the human race.