The Trap underneath Identity Politics

U nited Kingdom singer and influencer Oli London came out as “Korean” after having what he called “racial transition surgery.”

Commenting on it, Mary Harrington said that under-25s believe “editing their meat avatar” is an extension of human rights. “The core contest now,” she wrote, “is over what the accepted balance is between inner self-perception and the immutable, objective outer self.” And this is the heart of the problem:

Harrington tells us to expect “the political demands that flow from this digital refashioning of personhood to become more insistent and irresistible.”

That seems to be the direction things are heading. Maybe it is true already for 25-year-olds and under, but not yet for progressives at large. It is highly unlikely that either government on the Korean peninsula is going to give Oli London a passport or recognize his claim to the ornaments of their national identity. We’ve no word on whether it’s citizenship that interests London, or if it’s just K-Pop.

Western governments would have a hard time changing London’s nationality.

These identity claims are made instead at the influential institutions upstream from government — universities, corporations, and Instagram influencers, who have internalized the logic — or the litigation risk — that comes from our culture of self-created identities.

In a podcast I did with Andrew Sullivan, he asked me about the experience of “liquid modernity.” And I said that there was a kind of cruel trap in it. We are told that we can “be whatever we want to be” and we are told to make our own identities, hopefully advantageous ones. And yet, because there is this freedom to reject and ignore, the project of self-creation ends with subjects who know themselves subjectively. Invited to create meaning for ourselves, we find that nobody is obliged to recognize what we see in ourselves. Nor do we live up to our own self-image, at least not in a satisfying way.

This existential dread, I think, is what’s leaking out into our society and seeking expression and repair via identity politics. An endless array of kinks, genders, and novel sexual identities — otherkins, femcels, non-binary, and trans-Koreans — all seek some kind of validation.

For Oli London, being Korean literally is having a different skin tone, a different shape of eye. This would predictably lead to derisive comments from our leading progressives, who could dismiss this all as an expensive attempt at “appropriation.” But, crucially, London added something that makes this claim more credible to progressives. “I was actually born in the wrong body!” he said. London understands what’s been at work in identity politics. There is a desire for spiritual renewal, for being born again, at work.

The testimony of going from feeling misplaced, awkward, or somehow pent-up is transcended and overcome — at least temporarily — by coming out. And ritual is supposed to induce the paradoxical experience of being simultaneously liberated and recognized. The koan at the beating heart of modern culture is the insistent demand that you “be free to be who you are.”

Most leading progressives are now willing to believe that one can be affirmed in a true gender other than the sex they were born into, through force of will, the help of hormone therapies and surgeries, and the cooperative support of society. They accept the testimonies of people who claim different or entirely novel sexual identities, because the experience of desire or discomfort is held to be somehow internal, and so the public testimonies about private feelings should be trusted by default.

But progressives are still uncomfortable with the idea that national and ethnic identities can be claimed this way, even though they are in fact quite a bit more fluid than the sex-binary. No one can actually grow a different set of organs and reproductive system, but you can move in with another ethnic or national group and adopt their language, diet, prejudices, and even the gait and comportment.  For progressives, racial fraud is possible because the experience of being in a racial category is increasingly defined not as membership in a community or a lineage, but as the experience inflicted upon a person by racial antagonists. Being black can’t be how you feel in some entirely private way; it’s how white antipathies shape the existence of people whites have categorized as black. Strangely, this, too, becomes a deracinated vision of racial membership, with no content beyond oppression, exploitation, and the reactions these produce. Oli London couldn’t have been oppressed as a Korean, therefore London’s claim can still, for now, be judged fraudulent.

History and lived experience has been the primary ground on which TERFS — anti-trans feminists — usually take their argument against the erosion of all-female spaces. Men who claim to be women, who take the hormones, or get their nuts snapped off simply don’t have the experience of living as a woman.

So it turns out that, while there is an immense privilege given to self-assertion, and the claimed experience, it is still possible for progressives to contest someone’s chosen identity on the ground of history and experience, if not on biology or lineage. I think everyone senses that, in our current culture, this component of suffering experience is an important way of earning your right to call yourself what you claim to be. Rachel Dolezal invented all kinds of stories about being physically whipped and persecuted for being black, which she wasn’t.

And that may be why, suddenly, we’ve created a world where everyone is victimized. If people have an unmet desire for recognition, they can call attention to themselves by calling attention to their suffering. The thoughtless words, innocently ignorant slights, and verbal miscues of bystanders are reframed as a pervasive tyranny of micro-aggressions and mini-oppressions fraught with political meaning. This is the external crucible out of which identities are formed.

But as with so much else, I can’t help but see that the existential longing to become what you were meant to be, to somehow turn the sufferings you have endured into a transformative and liberating moment, is fundamentally religious. The experience of becoming what you were meant to be can only be a delusion in a materialist existence. It is the longing to discover Providence at work in one’s life, which is also the desire to discover a purpose that is given to you as a gift, but which has meaning and intelligibility in an objective universe. You find freedom in your predestined purpose precisely because the universe seems to open up to you when you discover it, fresh with new meaning, and deeper joys.

Identity politics the way we have them are the result of men and women who have been baptized into Christian longings, but who have been given only the intellectual and political tools of Whigs and Marxists for dealing with them. If political tyranny issues forth, it will only be an external reflection of the interior tyranny of lost souls, who are trying to get water to gush forth from a stone, even as they disclaim belief in the miraculous.