Thread by @shaunjlawson

THREAD: Identity. What does it mean to you?

I'm British, English, European... yet as my boss/agent put it the other day, "you're more Uruguayan than British now".

Which is true - even though being British will always be in my blood. And I'll always support the England team.

I'm also a (very) liberal Jew, roughly agnostic about God but certainly believe in *something* (specifically: the power and beauty of the universe), a Norwich City and Heart of Midlothian supporter. When one of them are down, the other are usually up, and vice versa.

But, as has been pointed out to me plenty of times before, I'm much more of a football fan than a club fan. Country means much more than either club to me; and I just don't do tribalism. Never have, never will.

Groupthink terrifies the hell out of me.

I'm a teacher, editor, occasional writer (on both politics and football), a social democrat with leanings towards both liberalism and socialism - and my politics are informed heavily by humanism (but not in a dogmatic Dawkins-style way), utilitarianism and second wave feminism.

I'm also a straight man. Curiously enough, I've rarely focused on that part of my identity much - certainly not as much as any of the others I've mentioned here.

I'm straight, so I'm straight. I'm a man, so I'm a man. That's all there is to it really.

But if there's two things being on this planet for over 43 years have taught me:

1. There is often far more in common between people than might seem to be the case.

2. However, we are also all individuals. We are all products of the unique forces which make us and shape us.

We're all contradictory too. Human beings, to some extent or another, will always be hypocrites - and the reason for that is that life is complicated.

We all make trade-offs and compromises every day. We're always changing all the time.

We are never exactly the same person at the end of a year than we were at the beginning. But in politics, for some reason, those whose minds are open and whose views change as the evidence does likewise are usually chastised: "Traitor! Sell-out! Disgrace!" And on here, much worse

That's despite the reality that in life, we're always changing all the time. Which is probably why so many marriages fail: more power to the elbows of anyone in a happy, fulfilled long term relationship, but people change. And life expectancy is double what it once was.

Over the last decade or so, identity has, for whatever reason, come to dominate politics much more than before. Probably it's because the world is changing so fast, leading to much insecurity of all kinds; probably it's because society has been atomised, individualised.

So people naturally look for in-groups they have things in common with... but at the same time, thank goodness, awareness of injustice and discrimination, particularly racial and sexual, is that much greater too.

Especially online, it's discussed more and more. As it should be.

What happened to poor George Floyd DID change the world. Utterly.

Yet that level of racist hatred, brutalisation, dehumanisation, still goes on all over the world all the time.

The whole issue remains as urgent and compelling as ever. No Justice, No Peace.

#BlackLivesMatter

Yet also over the last decade, there's been a backlash: which played an enormous role in delivering Brexit and Trump.

A backlash against 'political correctness', a backlash against 'social justice warriors', a backlash against 'woke culture'.

Now true: plenty of those who've been part of that backlash are indeed racist and/or bigoted. But not all of them.

Many are simply scared at the pace of change all around them - and that shouldn't be riciculed. Fear of change is incredibly common among most people.

And there are also others. Perfectly principled, decent folk, whose alarm has grown more and more at real or de facto removals of freedom of speech and expression; at being dictated on what to say, how to think.

The great @CathyYoung63 - brilliant precisely because she's fair, rational, objective and completely principled in everything she says: I've never come across a writer of more integrity - has been reporting some of the crazier stuff going on on university campuses for years now.

Reporting on things which impact on personal freedom, legal freedom, innocent until proven guilty, and on the absolute, illiberal, authoritarian beyond belief disaster which is cancel culture.

You do not achieve progress by trying to destroy those who disagree with you.

Which goes as much for the Labour right as anyone else given their never-ending attempts to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters based on smears and lies.

But it also goes for the left. On here especially, the left often looks to others like a mob. Which wants mob rule.

And that couldn't be more off-putting, more alienating, more divisive. As I've mentioned many many times before: ever wondered why no Tory ever says "sod off and join the Labour Party?"

At university, I often found that Tories were far more willing to engage openly than lefties.

Perhaps that's because of The Great Political Game which Tories excel at: specifically, being polite, courteous. while seeking to screw you over in policy at any given point.

Exhibit A, The House of Commons, where it's not allowed to call the Prime Minister a liar. 🙄🙄🙄

Where an entire session is wasted by a cynical beyond belief bunch of clowns who, at a time the country was in huge crisis, all pretended they were magical after-it-had-happened lipreading experts... when the Leader of the Opposition had never said what they all accused him of.

Lord knows, MPs on both sides of the House behave like a pack of hyenas much of the time - so the problem of the mob and groupthink is hardly just a problem of the left.

Yet because we live under a capitalist system, which some people do very well out of, the left can't afford to be divisive.

Effective leaders have to speak softly but carry a big stick. Such leaders therefore run a million miles from identity politics and most wedge issues.

Remarkably, Black Lives Matter probably *lost* the Democrats votes last year. It certainly did in plenty of parts of the US.

To be sure, Labour's anti-semitism 'crisis' (however much it was wildly exaggerated) cost Labour loads of votes in 2019 too.

Palestine, too, is a wedge issue... even though it matters a heck of a lot. When the left shouts about Palestine, even with justice very much on its side, it very plainly scares many British Jews: who live in perpetual fear of someday needing refuge in the only Jewish state.

And then, at last, we come to the latest wedge issue. Which somehow trumps even Israel/Palestine in the impact it's having online... and maybe, before too much longer, offline too.

If an activist goes doorstopping and goes on about either 'neoliberalism' or 'Palestine', they're going to get an awful lot of blank, bewildered looks.

If an activist goes on about 'cis' and 'TERFs' and 'transphobes', they're going to get both blank looks... and hostility.

If you call men born as men and women born as women 'cis', the vast majority of them will not have the first clue what you're on about. If you then explain it to them, you're likely to encounter a response of complete bemusement; even, hilarity.

It is an absolute irrelevance to most people.

If you then double down and use 'inclusive language' like 'menstruators' or 'pregnant people' or, God save us all, 'bodies with vaginas', you're going to make a lot of people very, very, VERY angry.

That might not be your intention. You might think you're somehow educating them. Yet what you're actually doing is first, patronising them (bad enough)... and second, you're removing their identities from them. Erasing it. Eliminating it.

HOW DARE ANYONE do such a thing?

Imagine if it was decided that Black people should no longer regard themselves as Black, any other ethnic minority should no longer regard themselves as such either... but just as members of the human race.

Why not? It'd be completely 'inclusive', wouldn't it?

No. It'd be absolutely disgusting and beyond offensive.

Yet that very thing is being done to women right now - in the name of - you couldn't make it up - 'inclusiveness'.

It's happening all over the place. To many, women apparently no longer exist as a sex class at all.

Meanwhile, I'll tell you how I feel when someone calls me 'cis'.

I feel offended; I think to myself 'get the hell out of my personal space and my life'; and I feel above all that my identity is being denied and/or redefined by others who know absolutely nothing about me.

Yet that's what's going on here too. It's being done to the vast majority of the world population! (Certainly in theory, if not yet in reality).

Well. Remember the backlash against 'political correctness'? Just watch what happens when more and more people realise what's going on

The backlash would very likely destroy issues around social justice for many many years.

All those who care about these issues - as do I - are gonna end up looking not just like a cult, but like a bunch of religious fundamentalists: complete with pitchforks and witch hunters.

You might care about gender issues. Very little of the electorate does - but it's gonna be beyond horrified if self-ID goes through and it realises that men can simply self-declare as women and access all the women's only spaces which exist to protect women.

And the backlash against, fear of, even hatred of trans people which would result would be a tragedy. An absolute disaster. The Law of Unintended Consequences gone berserk.

You're not helping trans people when you smear, slander, divide and cancel. You're HARMING THEM.

The online left obsessing with Palestine didn't help Palestinians at all. It didn't help Britons either, given it played its part in the Tories gaining a huge majority.

And the reason for that is THE WAY it obsessed with it, not the cause itself.

You have to speak softly and reasonably. You have to seek consensus. You cannot just denounce those who disagree.

And on this latest issue, you cannot, under any circumstances, try and remove people's identities and realities from them. If you do so, you'll deserve to lose.

It's very sad. Of course trans rights matter; they matter a heck of a lot. But women's rights matter a heck of a lot too.

And all you've succeeded in is dividing one against the other; a quite mad position to end up in.

Giving greater rights to a tiny minority of the population while forcibly removing them from half of the population? Are you insane?

But that's what dogma and ideology can result in. Most of the electorate will run a mile - because you cannot dictate to them how to think or live

The great irony of identity politics is: identities matter hugely. To everyone.

Yet all too often, all these politics seem to do isn't unite, or educate, or even help those we're all trying to help... but divide and label and pigeonhole instead.

Human beings are not people you can just put in some little box in the name of 'inclusion'. We're much, much more than that.

And when men are putting women in such a box - not listening to them, hectoring and denouncing them - it's even worse still.

Take a step back. Think. Reflect. Stop this madness.

And above all: show some bloody respect, for goodness' sake.

Again, I'll leave you with a video. From someone decades and decades ahead of their time on absolutely everything.

When you redefine language for your own convenience, you invariably end up doing much more harm than good.

Take it away, George...