Identity Politics Gave Me A Voice, Before it Silenced Me
One of the most dangerous aspects of the Woke Cult.
When I first found identity politics, I felt I'd found my voice. It took years to realize that it had actually been a piece of duct tape over my mouth.
I used to be deep into Identity Politics, or idpol for short. It appealed to me in my 20s because it seemed to give me a voice -- finally I had labels for the things I was but didn't know how to express. Finally I could speak and talk about my experience as a fat person, as a bisexual person, as a genderqueer person1...and there were other people who would listen.
My experience suddenly mattered.
It's heady and intoxicating, this sudden acceptance into a group when you have felt on the sidelines your entire life. That sudden acceptance is what primes the pump for someone to fall to cult-like behaviors. It's easy to be one with a cult when they're the only people who have ever understood you.
I don't think idpol started there, to be fair. It probably started fairly benignly. Have humans not always striven to find answers for who and what we are? We have been coming up with labels since we've had language. It's nothing new.
It's a very human activity to categorize and label and know where things belong, to put things in their ordered boxes. At base there's nothing wrong with it. It’s making order out of chaos. It’s supporting an ordered mind.
I mean, you only need to look at our obsession with planners, bullet journalling, goal-setting and more2 to see that this need to categorize and label and put things in order is not going anywhere any time soon.
But as with everything, there are fail-states for this basic human need, and as with most of our fail-states, we are aggressively terrible about it.
Fail-states and Othering
The first fail-state of categorization is something we are all familiar with. It's the demonization of the Other, the stereotyping of people different from us, the prejudice we foster for those who think or act or look a way we find unacceptable.
Sometimes it's racism — a very basic form of this categorization fail-state, as humans are visual creatures and the first thing we notice about someone is their looks. They look different? AH, SCARY! Immediate classification as Other.
Other basic visual cues: age, weight, physical ability, gender, class. Sometimes these combine to form really weird, specific prejudices. We all have this tendency and we’ve all fallen prey to it at one point or another.
Other times it's ideology — oh, so you think differently from me? Other! Must shun! This one can actually combine with the visual, because very often people will adopt certain looks to align themselves with their chosen ideology.
People sometimes assume that because I dye my hair odd colours and have tattoos and piercings that I’m a leftist, or even part of the Woke crowd. It’s because those things have become signifiers of that in-group because so many members adopt those looks.
Other times, things become signifiers for ideology groups because people assume they are, or believe massive trolling campaigns to get them to believe they are. (See: Black Metal Band paraphernalia = Nazis!; the OK symbol meaning White Power; Pepe being a White Supremacist meme…huh, these are all about assuming people are Nazis. Weird.)
Another source of Othering is basic personal choices, though this is often a sub-branch of ideology. We believe some choices are Good and some are Bad (often because our ideology tells us so), and thus the people who make the Good choices are good people and the people who make the Bad choices are bad people (no matter if they are members of the same ideology or not).
We all do this, by the way. I'm not pointing out any one group as being solely guilty of this. This is a HUMAN experience. Unfortunately, so is ideology.
Identity Politics = Ideology Politics
Idpol is the other fail-state of categorization, and on top of being part of a broader ideology itself, it's a melding of Othering Based on Ideology and Othering Based on Visual Cues, with a nice little dash of Ingroup is Blessed, Outgroup is Evil.
Idpol is part of the Ideology of Wokeness, or Social Justice as it was called before, or Feminism before that. It posits that our identities — really, who we are3 — are important pieces of context to our points of view. It also says that certain identities are more oppressed than others, and thus within the context of Woke Discourse those identities deserve more mic time (to make up for all the oppression suffered at the hands of the Overculture).
It also says that each person is the arbiter of one’s own identity, and that no one can take that away from them.
At first with idpol, I could speak and my words mattered. I was part of several “oppressed” identities so I got more mic time. What I said was important.
As time went on, that changed. My oppressed identities were suddenly decided to be less oppressed, and thus less important. I had to be more and more careful with what I said. It was clear that my words mattered only so long as I stayed strictly on the Correct Path of Woke Ideology.
The second you waver from that path, your identity is stripped from you and you are given a new one.
“You are the arbiter of your identity” is a lie in Woke Discourse. It’s a lie told to get people to accept idpol, and then once they’re in it, they are kept in line by the threat of losing their identity and being given another if they ever step out of line.
When your identity is connected so strongly to acceptance to an in-group, this is a very powerful tool to control people.
If you have seen how Woke Ideology operates then you probably know what I’m talking about. It goes something like this:
"We need to listen to marginalized people and uplift their voices!"
**marginalized person says something that goes against the narrative**
"They're not REALLY marginalized! Their identity is a fraud! They're actually some other identity that we think is awful! GET THEM!"
(Cue that scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)
“Because it is my name, and I will not have another in my life”
This stripping of your identity and being given a new one repeats, until you don’t know who you are anymore or how you function.
At first your infractions will be minor, so the response will be minor — and you’ll know to keep in line next time. If you've been involved with idpol and felt like it finally gave you a voice, you're loathe to say anything against the narrative -- whatever it is that week -- because you know you will then have a target painted on your back, and expelled from your in-group.
You won’t be you anymore, and if you’re not you, who are you?
Well, they’ll tell you. Of course they’ll tell you. You’re all number of things now that you disagreed with them, or sought answers outside their list of Approved Sources.
A brief list of things I have been labeled as — identities I have been given — because I dared to speak against the narrative, or even worse, have a nuanced conversation about a thorny topic:
Nazi (they jump to this one a lot)
TERF (even though I’m non-binary)
racist (ok, fine, guilty, but only because everyone is, a little — see above points about categorization fail-states)
white supremacist (haha, nope)
right wing conspiracy theorist (actually more centrist these days)
rape apologist (still trying to figure this one out)
anti-vaxxer (current flavour of the month; apparently my having received something like 10 or 15 vaccines in my life makes me against them, who knew)
anti-science (because questioning things goes against the new religion of Scientism)
Republican / Conservative (never in my voting life)
But really, all these labels mean the same thing: Bad Person. Whatever label they choose this week will mean Bad Person. And while you might argue that some of the labels I’ve listed above do mean Bad Person, and you might be right, the difference is this:
to the Woke, we are all sinners in the hand of an angry, Intersectional God.
There is no redemption for any of us, and especially not once we have the Bad Person label. It doesn’t matter if the flavour of Bad Person you are is relatively mild or if it’s definitely terrible. You’re doomed.
Oh no, the Woke argue, there is redemption! They then point to their Approved Texts and the Right Way To Apologize, and if you follow those to the letter they assure you you’ll be redeemed.
It’s another lie, though. They’ll just be waiting for you to slip up again4 and make a bid for critical thinking. Then they can really come down on you — you’re a multiple-times-sinner! The worst kind.
Personally, I don’t like living in a world where people are irredeemable.
Leaving the Cult
Cults prey on those who have felt exiled their entire lives. It's why the Woke Cult was so attractive to me and continues to be so for people like me.
I was a useful idiot for the Woke for years, because I felt like I was finally in a group of people who got me and understood what I'd been through — largely because we shared similar identities, but also because it's common for them to really affirm your experiences when you're first joining. Love-bombing is also common, and a known tool in the cult toolbox.
Once I began to realize I’d been lied to about certain things, once I started questioning, once I started asking for nuance and thoughtfulness in the discussions, once I started listening to people on the other side of the aisle to understand their viewpoint, it didn’t take long for the cult to ex-communicate me. I lost a lot of friends. I’m still losing them.
It is intolerable to the cult that you look for outside sources. It’s intolerable that you concede that the Enemy might have a point. It’s intolerable that you change your opinion without their express approval first.
And it’s intolerable that you speak out against them or point out that their behaviour is cultish. That is the worst crime of all, and will get current cult-members in your comments like a pack of hyenas, ripping you to shreds and trying to strip you of your identities.
It took me 5 years to be okay with that — to stop caring that I was losing friends, that I was making them hate me with every post I made asking for nuance, or expressing a Wrong Opinion.
Five years of trying not to say too much of my actual thoughts, trying to be silent so I didn’t lose all my friends.
Because that’s another very human need — the need for other people. We are pack, or herd, animals. We need relationships. When it comes to humans, it’s all about that.
We will endure all sorts of abuses if it means we can still have friends. That’s why I cared for so long, even after I started to leave the cult. It’s why I continued to let them silence me.
Because idpol hadn’t just told me I could use my voice, it had also given me friends. Realizing it was actually duct tape over my mouth didn’t make ripping it off any easier.
The second I did, I would be cast out into the cold — a non-person, devoid of any Good identities, covered in Bad Person labels and left to rot.
Yes, I still consider myself genderqueer or genderfluid, while being bisexual. I may write more on this at another point in time; it’s probably too complicated to get into in a footnote. But when it comes to pronouns or how people refer to me, I don’t care. My gender is the least interesting thing about me.
Guilty.
Not “who we identify as” which is a bit of meaningless verbal garbage that actually delegitimizes the very identities we are trying to make meaningful. It’s I AM, not I identify as.
Actually, you don’t even have to slip up at this point. Simply apologizing tells them they were right and you’re irredeemable, and they’ll never trust you again.