Universities currently flirt with what appears to be racial segregation, although they say race only exists as a cultural construct: they have safe spaces and separate dorms for People of Color, Indians, and so on. “The horror of segregation; we fought so hard against this. We have betrayed liberalism,” cry the conservative liberals. In the next breath, they tell us that we must defend separate bathrooms for men and women and fight against compelled speech in the realm of pronouns; they are hypocrites, and they will lose.
Conservative liberals conceded the principle long ago, they think segregation and discrimination are wrong. “Oh, but that was race not sex—entirely different!” But is it? You think racial segregation is the worst thing ever because you grew up in an environment where everybody told you that; and your children grew up in an environment that told them that gender segregation is, like, totally Hitler or whatever. This is the only difference.
The arguments against sex segregation are the same as those against race segregation. “Women have to queue to use the bathroom for ages. Men zip in and out! Deeply ingrained unfair outcomes based on an arbitrary difference. Irrational and cruel!” As with all egalitarian propositions that seek to overrule fundamental differences, all that can be done is hobble the vital people; soon, both sexes will wait in gigantic queues for the same bathroom—and they will do so because, on current trajectories, all bathrooms will be integrated by the end of the decade.
As with all perverse systems, when bathrooms are fully integrated, unexpected disadvantages will emerge: men will start to piss outside venues against walls or in bushes—nature’s inequalities will out. “Like, we didn’t used to have a problem with guys doing this. It’s like white supremacy or some shit. Arrest those bros!” Enter the police to shut down public urination, a problem that has been artificially created and must be remedied with quasi-totalitarian measures.
I once saw a clever progressive interviewer ask a self-proclaimed classical liberal about compelled speech: “You say you don’t want the government to compel you to use certain pronouns, but should the government compel you to serve a black man in your shop?” The so-called classical liberal went into panic mode because true classical liberalism defends property rights. The correct classical liberal response is: “It’s my shop—just as my mouth is my mouth—if I don’t want someone in my shop then they have to get out. To own property means I can dispose of it as I wish, if I can’t do that I don’t own it.” However, the man had already granted in his own mind that the government could compel on an “anti-racist” basis—only “evil” people would think otherwise; so he just spluttered incoherently.
What was racial segregation? It was an organically evolved institution to deal with differences in race, just as separate bathrooms for men and women constitute an organic institution to deal with sex differences. Liberalism undermined it because liberalism asserts that all humans are rational calculators of equal capacity—if this assumption is granted, it follows that segregation must be an unjust institution. Atomisation occurs when these organic institutions are destroyed. The left sees the problem, but assumes that it is due to residual “discrimination” and institutes an inorganic form of coordination—“positive discrimination”—as a supposed stopgap. All they achieve is a parody of organic functional coordination, a parody that harms people.
In the USSR, this was what communism did; it could not abolish incentives—incentives produce labour—so the communists instituted mass propaganda and coercion: “I’m doing it for the Five-Year Plan, the Motherland, and the Party!” This encouragement works to an extent, but it is not as good as a person who works for themselves, their family, and their religion. In the same way, the “re-segregation” we see in progressive liberal countries is not real segregation—as the conservative liberals claim—it is a parody of functional organic coordination.