Some musings on a damp Sunday about the identity politics phenomenon and the way it has become a major focus of the left – which these days is defined more by what its various factions are AGAINST than a broad consensus on what they are all FOR. And who does that benefit?
The most recent and polarising wing of identity politics is our pushy friend, gender identity. Its supporters claim it is the quintessence of progressivism while its detractors claim it is the greatest threat to what they hold dear – from women's sex-based rights and science, to conservative religious beliefs about the heteronormative nuclear family.
I get the sense that gender identity is a practical joker's version of "pass the parcel". As the glossy gift-wrappings are removed, the parcel will get smaller and smaller until what is revealed is a tiny box containing the message, "The joke's on you, suckers."
Why has so much of what passes for the left immersed itself in what must surely be seen as a neoliberal sponsored and promoted theory and praxis which is essentially accommodative, individualist and individualising, and based on the existence of a wholly subjective and thus empirically unverifiable, concept?
Who benefits from the reifying of a bespoke, individualist and individualising sense of a gendered identity, and privileging that over the category of biological sex, a material and collective reality which underpins the millennia-old and still extant oppression of women?
How progressive is the idea of an authentic self, conceptualised as an immutable gendered essence, which inhabits a mutable, inauthentic (ie wrongly sexed) body? (Or in the parlance of the weirdly alienated – flesh suit or meat sack.)
How progressive is it to ignore the fact that states which happily accommodate and promote individualist gender identity demands also serve economic and political interests which have proven themselves to be inimical to traditional forms of collectivism?
Who can take the following exchange seriously, except as a reason to get angry about transactivist airheads giving smug right-wingers an open goal?
TA: Trans women are women.
RW: Okay, so what is a woman?
TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman.
RW: What is it they are identifying with?
TA: A woman.
RW: But what is a woman?
TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman....
And so on, ad absurdum, until most of the progressive forces in our increasingly unstable world have disappeared up their own rear ends, or died of embarrassment.
How is it that otherwise intelligent and aware people are happy to stake their political and academic reputations on such a rickety framework of circular definitions, lazy conflations and stark contradictions?
It's a puzzle.
Well, no, it's not a puzzle at all. There's no doubt in my mind that the astonishingly rapid move from valid and reasonable demands for equality and dignity from people who suffer forms of psychological distress, to the current epidemic of narcissistic toy-tossing and anomie, has been stage managed, to some degree at least.
It also acts as a salve to the consciences of those liberals who either capitulated to, or colluded with the swingeing attacks on working class collectives and the cruel austerity measures that followed – especially those who picked up their middle-class credentials and sprinted for a place in the political and coordinator classes.
It allows lefties who were outflanked and outmanoeuvred by neoliberalism to feel there is something at least on which they can claim a win.
And of course it's an opportunity for closet misogynists to indulge in a bit of payback to feminists for actual or imagined slights.
Fact is, it's a mammoth con and the sooner that sodding parcel is finally unwrapped, the better.
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