The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.

‘Identity politics’, meanwhile, has become the place where social justice finds its caucuses. It atomizes society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring with them some added bonus.

In an age of shouting for attention on social media the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.

It suggests that you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm.

So here is another paradoxical, impossible demand. A person who chooses to be ridiculous without being ridiculed.

Is a fat white person equal to a skinny person of colour? Or are there different scales of oppression which everyone should know even if no one has explained the rules because the rules are made not by rational people but by mob stampedes.

We see oppression where it doesn’t exist and have no idea how to respond to it.

that the gay rights movement never said, ‘We’re here, we’re queer and as a result there is no such thing as biological sex.’ Or ‘We’re here, we’re queer and as a result we regard penises and vaginas as imposed social constructs.’ It made assertions about rights, but did not demand that the rest of society fundamentally alter its understanding of biology, say, in order to accommodate those rights. Such indeed are the assertions made by trans extremists today, and what is more troubling is that they have successfully persuaded a mentally malleable part of the broader population to agree with them.