It’s time we woke up

When I fret about the modern forms of “identity politics” that dominated the past decade, people who spend more time in the real world and less immersed in journalism, politics and social media tell me not to worry.

It’s just a fad, they reassure me. Eventually, we’ll treat marginalised groups in a kinder, fairer way. We’ll also find an equilibrium that avoids everyone else being subjected to angry rhetoric and aggressive advocacy.

In particular, the craze for treating gender as a matter of choice, completely independent of biological sex, will pass. And the demonisation of men as overly privileged potential rapists will cease.

I do hope they are right.

I have two pre-school boys who will be entering their teenage years by 2030. I don’t want them to have to navigate all the awkwardness and confusion of puberty with the added complication that every clumsy interaction with the opposite sex could be interpreted as assault.

I don’t want them to be taught that they’re toxic because they’re male. And I don’t want them to have to cope with a world in which basic categories by which we understand things are dissolved or relegated to a function of personal preference.

Will the next ten years see us get over our current obsession with identity or are things likely to get worse?

The signs are not hopeful. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in western democracies, we were already living in some of the most diverse and tolerant societies that humanity had ever known. Many longstanding struggles for acceptance, focused on race, sex and sexuality, seemed to have achieved success.

Just as we became increasingly blind to these categories in our treatment of others, rather than dying down, demands from their most politicised activists intensified. We conceded that their campaigns for fairness were justified, but then seemed powerless to check outlandish claims for special treatment.

Writers who have wrestled with the modern obsession with personal and political identity have different analyses of why this way of thinking developed. The US political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, sees it as a distortion of the liberal tradition of universal recognition, with demands focusing on a person’s membership of certain groups, rather than their rights as an individual. The journalist Douglas Murray emphasises a Marxist project to break down distinctions on which western democracies are based, in order to replace them with something else entirely.

Whichever view you prefer, we know that obscure jargon and ideas escaped from the fringes of academia and changed our societies with alarming speed. And we haven’t even begun to discuss or understand whether these changes will be beneficial or damaging. Some of the differences seem relatively benign and some are potentially very serious, but increasingly they intrude on people’s everyday lives, whether they like it or not.

The pub I frequent in Belfast no longer has ladies’ toilets, to take one trivial example. Next to the gents, women must make do with a “gender-neutral bathroom” which was once reserved exclusively for their use.

More importantly, our political debate has been shaped profoundly by identity concerns. The last Conservative government consulted on reform to gender recognition laws, favouring a model that gave each individual an absolute right to choose his or her own gender, without meeting tests, medical or otherwise. Choice alone would determine whether someone should be treated as male, female or one of a bewildering range of neologisms that describe something “in between”.

These reforms are less likely to form part of the new government’s programme, but the fact that Tory ministers advocated such radical policies shows how pervasive the notion has become that the “woke” agenda is justified and necessary.

The number of people, prominent or otherwise, whose careers have been destroyed because they disputed these new orthodoxies, or were insufficiently familiar with the language they demand, has accelerated. In politics, academia and almost every other walk of life, those who hold different views or can’t keep up with identity politics’ terminology have been subject to campaigns that have cost them their jobs.

Many of these campaigns were prosecuted first on social media, where fringe identity politics have become mainstream. We’re only beginning to study how new technology is changing the way we think, but, the trend for earnest young people to announce their preferred pronouns online, for example, hardly suggests it discourages an unhealthy preoccupation with personal recognition.

It’s tempting to talk about “identity politics” and “wokeness” as if they formed a coherent view of the world, but actually they’re riven with problems and contradictions.

They put an individual’s subjective experience on a pedestal and insist they are exactly who they say they are, but at the same time, they rely upon defining exclusive groups that cannot be joined or understood from the outside. They encourage a sense of victimhood and trigger competition between competing grievances.

Feminists believe that gender roles have been imposed by a powerful patriarchy, while some trans campaigners claim that boys who play with dolls may actually be girls, meaning they require powerful doses of drugs and surgery.

Reading round these subjects, you quickly fall down rabbit-holes of the densest, most nonsensical political jargon — yet we seem unable, for the time being, to pull ourselves out of this madness. But there is hope. While identity politics are pervasive on social media, they still seem strange and silly to many people in the real world.

Perhaps some of the excesses of woke culture really will be tempered by the common-sense pragmatism of those who don’t spend too much time on Twitter. Otherwise, faddish ideas about identity will continue to shape our politics and law, with consequences that will almost certainly create a more divided, unhappier society.