Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World (2023), is illuminating on many different levels. Starting from a need to understand why so many people have confused her with the woman she calls ‘Other Naomi’, Naomi Wolf, Klein explores numerous manifestations of ‘doubles’ in our contemporary culture, from online avatars to Israel-Palestine. But with one significant omission - the doubling (actually multiplication) of ‘gender identities’.
Klein identifies special factors that encourage doubling, and its unsettling mix of truth and lies, at this point in history - in particular our recent enforced isolation from social contact in the Covid lockdowns and our immersion in social media. Historically, she suggests, doubling has coincided with acute destabilisation, and is a warning of further danger ahead.
“When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied - a part of ourselves or our world we do not want to see - and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded. This applies to the individual but also to entire societies that are divided, doubled, polarised, or partitioned into various warring, seemingly unknowable camps. Societies like ours”
A Tale of Two Naomis
Confusion between the two Naomis became particularly puzzling for Klein when Wolf began flirting more and more with far right conspiracy culture. She realised that understanding the widening political gulf between her and her double might illuminate how the political right was able to recruit so many former progressives to its ranks.
One explanation of the confusion between Klein and Wolf was a typically modern one - someone on twitter apologised that he had maligned Klein for something Wolf had written. The platform, he explained, had autocompleted the wrong surname, and he had not checked before hitting post.
“It suddenly hit me: the confusion was now so frequent that Twitter’s algorithm was prompting it, helpfully filling in the mistake for its users, to save them precious time. This is how machine learning works - the algorithm imitates, learning from patterns…..Which also meant that anything I did to correct the record - or state my own position on what had become her pet topics - would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more.”
Klein is more interested, though, in understanding why Wolf was developing increasingly outlandish fact-free conspiracy theories, and what this might reveal about an increasingly strident “open warfare against objective reality.” Klein identifies a watershed moment as May 2019, when Wolf went on BBC radio to promote her book, Outrages.
During the programme the interviewer, Mathew Sweet, calmly informed Wolf that a central claim of her book, that gay men were still being executed for sodomy in late nineteenth century England, was wrong, and that it was based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of a nineteenth century legal term, ’death recorded’.
Klein notes that Wolf had not only misinterpreted the law,”She had perpetuated a dangerous fallacy linking gay men with pedophilia”. What Klein doesn’t mention is that although a corrected (2021) edition of Outrages cleared up the misunderstanding about ‘death recorded’, it continued to promote Wolf’s far more insidious linking of consensual gay relationships of adult men with the sexual abuse of children and animals.
Trying to make sense of where ‘Other Naomi’ went next, Klein suggests that Wolf became hooked on fame - fame based on being provocative, and stoked by social media incentive structures that value number of clicks more than respect for truth.
“Her actions are a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy, which have trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude, volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views? Did it trend? These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic, it generates in the ether.”
But why does the need for attention drive Wolf, and so many other social media influencers, towards the far right? Klein spent a lot of time listening to Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast, particularly when Naomi Wolf was a guest, trying to understand this. What she came to realise was that the far right in the US have successfully tapped into people’s fears, particularly about big tech, big Pharma, and surveillance, and proposed simple actions that ordinary people can take which seem to address those fears. It’s a strategy that bolsters neoliberalism, by centring on individuals, promoting selfishness rather than solidarity, and diverting attention from the need for collective action and structural change. And the progressive left, Klein suggests, too often responds not by bringing people together to act collectively to address issues of popular concern but by avoiding the issues: “Once an issue is touched by ‘them’, it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else. And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavishes with attention.”
The elephant in the room
There’s one huge issue of popular concern that is avoided in Doppelganger - the emergence of the gender industry and its manufacture of synthetic sex identities. This is an issue that is taken up, opportunistically and partially, by the political right. It’s one that I nevertheless imagined Klein might have covered, not only because it is a huge issue in its own right, but because it brings together, in one toxic mix, elements that she critiques in this and her earlier books - Big Pharma’s pursuit of profits rather than health, the eugenics of sterilisation without consent, the divisiveness of identity politics, the war on words and meaning, the narcissism of self-branding, and how creating a personal double can be a coping mechanism for when we feel we are not in control of our selves.
Media promotion of ‘gender identity’ persuades impressionable children that there is something wrong with their healthy bodies and that they should self harm - this, coupled with subsequent social contagion, creates the demand from which the gender industry profits. Modification, often followed by mutilation, of immature healthy bodies is one of the greatest medical scandals of our time. It’s not only the gender industry that profits. To mitigate the sterility that is one of the many harmful side effects of cross-sex hormones, the fertility industry freezes eggs and sperm, and then exploits surrogate mothers to give adults who have been sterilised the offspring that they feel entitled to. ‘Gender identity’ is coercive - it compels those who don’t accept it to validate it. And the corporations which profit from it have captured most political parties and government institutions in the global North, to promote the laws that they need to further a project which is aimed, ultimately, at creating doubles which would deconstruct our humanity as sexed beings (transhumanism).
Klein’s first book, No Logo (2000), was a powerful critique of the identity politics which was prevalent on US university campuses in the 1990s. She was clear that this served corporate interests - “Identity politics, as they were practiced in the 1990s, weren’t a threat, they were a gold mine.” She spelt out how greater diversity of identities spawned greater marketing opportunities for corporations. Identity proliferation, she noted, “made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies.”
Two decades later, and Klein suggests that the traps of identity politics have become more acute with the internet-fuelled pressure to cultivate our personal brands, to adopt a “neoliberalism of the body”, and to experience “self as idealised body.”. Yet she ignores the most extreme current manifestation of that pressure - on children to make choices from a spectrum of artificially constructed ‘genders’, and to take puberty blocking drugs followed by a lifetime cocktail of cross-sex hormones and/or surgery, in order to ‘affirm’ the chosen ‘gender’.
Instead, Klein repeats, at several points in Doppelganger, a distorted language that validates an identity politics based on denial of biological reality. Early on, she criticises Wolf’s first book for having excluded “transgender women” (ie men) from her analysis of how beauty ideals harmed women. Later, Klein criticises mothers who object to “all-gender bathrooms” in their children’s schools, and she opposes bans on “gender-affirming medical care” (a euphemism for interference with healthy bodily development, often embarked on to satisfy homophobic parents concerned that their child might grow up to be lesbian or gay). In one chapter, a reference to “cis men” ( ie men) is followed, four pages later, by a reference to “people who become pregnant” (ie pregnant women). She seems unaware that her use of this distorted language mirrors the doubling that is the sinister theme of the books and films about doppelgängers that filled her evenings during the pandemic lockdown - a theme where “eventually, the double replaces the original, through sheer energy and tenacity, while the original fades away or worse.”
The emergence of the gender industry is an issue that at one time ‘Other Naomi’ also might have been expected to address. In The Beauty Myth (1991), Wolf was clear that the growth in cosmetic surgery for women depended on body dissociation, and was motivated by profit seeking: “The current Surgical Age is impelled by easy profits …. The surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.”
Wolf understood that media propaganda to promote this body dissociation was a key element in the industry’s business model: “Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly….It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women’s magazines”
She noted, too, how cosmetic surgery linked with financial institutions to remove barriers to the ability to pay, and to promote the commodification of body parts on which market growth depends: “Cosmetic surgeons must create a patient pool where none biologically exists. So they take out full-page ads in the New York Times - showing a full-length image of a famous model in a swimsuit, accompanied by an offer of easy credit and low monthly terms,, as if a woman’s breasts were a set of consumer durables.”
If Wolf saw manufactured body dissociation to create profits for surgeons as a problem in the 1980s, with breast augmentation, then one might imagine she would see it is an even greater problem in the 2010s and 2020s, with ‘gender affirming’ removal of healthy breasts. Not so.
Wolf’s linking of consensual relations between gay men with child rape and bestiality reappeared in a 2020 interview with Reuters (hailed by Pink News in the UK). The main focus of that interview, though, was a claim that Britain was gripped by a moral panic over ‘transgender’ issues. Here, again, she distorted reality. “It’s always this mythology of a man dressed as a woman in ladies bathroom who’s going to rape a woman - which just doesn’t happen,” she insisted, adding that women were far more at risk from men (as if a man in a dress is not a man).
Not seeing
Naomi Wolf wrote eloquently in the early 1990s about the harms of cosmetic surgery, and Naomi Klein wrote just as eloquently against identity politics later that decade. Yet neither of them drew on their early critiques to expose the current mix of medical malpractice, corporate manipulation, and political capture that commodifies body parts to construct synthetic sex identities. Far from it.
Being a ‘trans ally’ has become a core element of Naomi Wolf’s identity, preventing her from criticising the medical abuses involved in the creation of synthetic sex identities. Naomi Klein still sees identity politics as a diversion, but makes an exception in the case of ‘gender’ identity. Corporate interests are just as involved in synthetic sex identities today as they were in the brand identities she critiqued at the turn of the century. Yet Klein, so passionate about the adverse consequences of young people in the 1990s feeling a need to buy a particular brand of trainers, ignores the pressures on them in the 2020s to dissociate from their sexed bodies and embark on hazardous medical interventions.
It’s a strange, but all too familiar, omission. Strange, because Klein is aware that doubling, in whatever form it might take for us personally, involves “not seeing” - including not seeing “synthetic selves” and “manufactured realities.”
“Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealised version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history - with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see - in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward us”.
Strange, too, because Klein is in no doubt that the consequences of not seeing are potentially catastrophic - “we are all trapped inside economic and social structures that encourage us to obsessively perfect our minuscule selves even as we know, if only on a sub-conscious level, that we are in the very last years when it might still be possible to avert an existential planetary crisis.”
What is it about the gender industry that Klein cannot bear to see?
I don’t sense that Klein really believes that men who say they are women actually are women. As far as I know, she doesn’t display her pronouns, in the way ‘trans allies’ are encouraged to express solidarity. Her use of ‘trans inclusive’ distorted language ticks the required boxes, but lacks conviction. I can only imagine that Klein’s failure to address the capitalist manufacture of ‘gender identity’ stems, ironically, from a need to protect her personal brand. She cannot, after all, afford to be cancelled by her core readers, many of whom, if not necessarily identifying as ‘trans’ themselves, will feel that being a ‘trans ally’ is a central component of their progressive identity. Klein will certainly be aware, too, that her job as a columnist with Guardian US would not survive her deviating from its editorial line on ‘trans issues’.
Klein cannot see the harms brought about by the gender industry, and the threats it poses to the future of our species. That she cannot see those harms and threats is testament to the success of that industry in embedding promotion of its interests within so many strands of ‘progressive’ opinion.