Identity Without Politics

Not only is the Left, or at least the Labour Party, regressing to its prioritisation of subjective poverty of aspiration over objective economic inequality, but it is repeating essentially the same mistake by prioritising subjective gender identity over objective biological sex.

Meanwhile, the Right is replaying its world-historically catastrophic failure to distinguish between the scientific fact of evolution and the philosophical tautology of "the survival of the fittest", since the only way to spot the fittest is that they are the ones that survive.

The Right has never given up on that, even though it destroys everything that conservatives profess to wish to conserve, and that has now led it to fail to distinguish between the scientific fact of biological sex, and a concept of gender identity that collapses under analysis.

If you have a Y chromosome, then you are simply not a woman, and it makes no difference whatever that you say that you are, or that you think that you are, or that you feel that you are, or that you wish that you were. You are just not, and you never will be. Gender identity presents itself as scientific, but in fact it is as scientifically baseless as racial hierarchy. The Right has been here before.

And it is well and truly here again. On the last day of the Coalition, never mind as long ago as the last Labour Government, almost no one had ever heard of gender self-identification. But after six years of Conservative Government, only briefly interrupted by an arrangement with a Democratic Unionist Party that in best Irish fashion made no bones about its lack of interest in anything that the godless English might do on their own soil, then gender self-identification is the vigorously enforced policy of the entire public sector.

Has the corporate world gone that way in response, or has the party that it bankrolled conformed the State to what were already those paymasters' requirements? In the future, there will be doctoral theses on that. For now, though, note that all of this has been done without any legislative action; indeed, the Statute Law is still technically something else. There has been no parliamentary vote. Still less has the matter ever been discussed at a General Election. And yet it has happened. It is now a daily fact of life.