The Collapse Of The Identity-Politics Paradigm

     It’s happening as we speak, and I have a feeling it won’t take long to come apart completely.

     The Left’s insistence on identity politics is the core of its approach to political organization and activism. Broadly speaking it follows this procedure:

     1. Focus on a group designation. It can be racial, ethnic, gender, religious, occupational, or what-have-you.
     2. If that group can sustain a claim of oppression status:
          2.1 Proclaim the Left its proper political alignment;
          2.2 Promise to “uphold its interests;”
          2.3 Strive to organize it, community-organizer fashion, for political activism;
          2.4 Employ it electorally and at demonstrations against enemies of the Left.
          2.5 Invalidate, slander, or otherwise destroy vocal deviants (i.e., conservatives) within the group.
     3. If not:
          3.1 Attempt to fabricate incidents that would support a claim of oppression status;
          3.2 Return to step 2 above.

     As you can see, in the identity-politics paradigm, the individual is regarded as unreal. Only the group affiliation matters, and that affiliation is taken to determine everything, most emphatically including one’s “oppression status” and one’s political stances.

     So it’s natural that the Left would see Blaire White, a conservative and quite eloquent transwoman getting to be very well known from her YouTube channel, as one who must be given the Step 2.5 treatment...and it appears she’s getting it:

     Someone such as Blaire, or my friend Amy Tapie, another conservative transwoman, represents a potentially fatal challenge to the Left’s “business model,” and becomes a target for destruction by any means expedient. Here are a few words from Miss Tapie, from a note she sent me not long ago:

     [Blaire] and I, I know, go against the grain of many of our sisters and brothers by taking political stances on the Right. But, just because I believe that LGBT people in general should by right possess freedom to be who we are, and that trans people in particular ought to be treated in the same manner as any other person of the gender we present ourselves as, does that necessarily mean that I have to swallow the entire Leftist agenda, hook, line, and sinker? I think not. Yet far too many trans people would have it so...and therein lies the potential for tyranny as ugly as any that might be imposed on us in the most heavily theocratic state in the land.

     (Note also in this connection the frenzied efforts to silence or destroy “Dangerous Faggot” Milo Yiannopoulos. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.)

     Not something you expected to see from your conservative Catholic Curmudgeon Emeritus, eh? Well, though I continue to think that most persons who claim to have been born into a body of the wrong sex would benefit more from counseling and emotional support than from hormones and surgery, recently I’ve come to believe that there are exceptions, possibly a significant number thereof. Some of the exceptions are quite exceptional people. That stands to reason: the social pushback many such persons experience against their decisions to transition implies that they needed to be strong to persist and prevail.

     The “trans” community might be quite small by comparison to a racial or ethnic category, but as long as its members accept full responsibility for the consequences of their decisions and actions, they deserve our respect – and our protection from those who would destroy them as unacceptable divergences from the Left’s identity-politics scheme.

     We are, after all, individualists.