Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
"I'm gay/a woman/black" - "No identities matter, only identify as human!"
"I'm a police officer!" - "That's an important identity! I identify as my job too!"
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Your confusion is evident.
If someone is gay, that defines a part of who they are as a person, though unlike your career, or your hobbies, or what you're interested in, they didn't choose it. How big of a part varies with the individual (it's probably better that one characteristic not be absolutely everything you define yourself by). But if someone decides that being gay, having that identity, is synonymous with a bad characteristic - traditionally some sort of lack of morality or similar nonsense - it's perfectly understandable that gay people will take that as an affront to them as people. It is an affront to them.
I'm not decrying the existence of identities, per se, or even suggesting that they're inherently bad things. Without a gay identity there would never have been a gay community. Without a black identity there would never have been black culture. The issue with identity politics is that it sees people primarily as members of those groups with group characteristics, rather than individuals with various individual characteristics. Then, entire groups are treated differently from one another - principles aren't applied consistently across groups. Some people are given a relaxed or enhanced application of a particular principle owing to their skin colour or gender or religion or whatever. Your perspective on police violence against blacks is very important if you're black, but if you're white, it's less so because it's the product of privilege. Equal rights for women are vitally important in the developed world to the point where people march in the streets for birth control funding, but we'll demonstrate no such outrage in respect of the Middle East prosecuting rape victims for fear of cultural insensitivity or Islamophobia. Treating identity as the most important variable seems to lead people down this path almost inexorably.
I'm not ascribing either of those positions to you, by the way - just trying to give you examples of the particular misuse of identity that we're complaining about. Before the inevitable "what's wrong with marching in the streets for birth control" post, I'm also not saying there is anything wrong with that. My issue is the moral confusion evident in peoples' differential application of basic, fundamental principles. On this view, if I'm for X and you're against it, the first thing I need to check in evaluating your view isn't what your rationale is, it's what group you belong to. That has the benefit of being much easier than engaging disagreement on its merits.
This comes, at least in part, from peoples' principles basically being dead dogmas at this point - if you don't understand the fundamental goals that led us to support gay marriage and civil rights and so forth because you never have to rationally defend them to anyone (and no, accusing opponents of misogyny or the like doesn't count as "defense"), you can't apply them consistently either, because you're not taking them seriously enough. Hence me having to take three ####ing pages to explain why the pro-choice position on abortion rights isn't somehow inherently tied to women's gender identity. Which entire discussion was then dismissed by the usual suspects as unimportant "distraction" and "semantics". No wonder the train's off the rails.
So, yeah, it was a huge straw man and an obvious false equivalence on your part. Given how much this ground has seen on here it's sort of baffling that you still aren't crystal clear on what the problem we're complaining about is. It's hard not to wonder if you're deliberately avoiding it, which just goes back to motivated reasoning. I guess this is how people get to the assumption that the people they're arguing with must be just dishonest, because it seems the most likely explanation after you've explained something in several thousand words and they still completely miss the point. I think that in fact you're honest, that this was honest confusion on your part and you seem like a good guy, but it's really obnoxious to have someone completely distort your views and then call you a hypocrite. Especially when it seems like clarifying those views for the tenth time is just going to fall on deaf ears.