The leftist identitarian insistence that white heterosexual masculinity is an identity, its eagerness to impose this identity on people who reject such identities, and its habit of using its own peculiar justificatory logic to strip involuntary members of this identity group of all rights to protest the imposition of identity on the basis of the protesters’s identity is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It is a serious offense to impose an unwanted identity on another person. “No, you are not who you claim you are; you are what I say you are.”

It is an even more serious offense to draw ad hominem conclusions based on imposition of categorization. “Because you belong to this category, you are not able to do or know what you claim you can do or know.”

Refusing to hear a person’s appeal to having an identity and its implications imposed upon them on the basis of that identity and its implications leaves a person with no reasonable recourse. “You would protest being identified as a member of this category, because it is in your interest to evade that identification!”

And then, finally, when the implication of the imposed identity is being treated with disrespect — beyond the disrespect of being aggressively subjected to imposition of an unwanted identity and its implications despite protests — the situation encourages political group identity formation.

Identitarianism breeds counter-identitarianism. Who knows “who started it”? Who even gives a shit? I see it all as one incredibly toxic, cynical, circular and retrogressive political worldview: Identitarianism.

I am deeply disgusted hearing my former allies on the left succumbing to this base nonsense. It seems normal only because it has become so common. And the more common it becomes the more necessary and unavoidable it seems.

There is only one moral response: liberalism.

*

Every individual has a right — a human-given right — to be an individual. No individual gets to decide for another who or what they are.

Wherever groups deny individuals their rights of individuality — including their right to choose the groups with whom they ally and identify — liberals must stand together to defend individuality.

*

Any person who dares tell me that Liberalism is not my true identity, and that my true identity is why they’ve decided it is has lost rights to my respect.