Am I the only straight white male extant?

Have we now reached the point where identity politics really has gone mad?

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When enough people rally to the identitarian visions of their choice, and when enough of the remaining population becomes too afraid to engage them with honesty and reason, the democracy that maintains a space for both will collapse.
Timothy H Ives

A 12-year-old girl of my acquaintance has, over the last 18 months, declared she’s a lesbian, a demisexual and, if I’m remembering correctly, also a pansexual. While she hasn’t (yet) said she’s trans, she’s passionately opposed to transphobia. She has sternly argued for various pop singers and movie actors she’s deemed insufficiently respectful towards the trans community to be cancelled.    

She has only recently hit puberty. As far as I know, she is yet to have her first kiss. All of her crushes have thus far been on boys.   

This girl goes to a Catholic school and neither of her parents is particularly socially liberal. So, it doesn’t seem to be her family members or teachers who are encouraging this pre-pubescent experimentation with sexual identities. She spends a lot of time online, much of it watching TikTok videos, and she seems to have thereby absorbed a cultural narrative that’s now ambient throughout the Anglosphere.

I doubt she would be able to verbalise what that narrative is, but if she could she’d probably describe it thus: ‘Being a run-of-the-mill well-adjusted, heterosexual Caucasian is now low status. Being anything other than a basic bitch, well-adjusted, heterosexual Caucasian is now high status’.

The West’s identity crisis  
There’s no delicate way to put this, so I’ll just come out and say it – lots of people who have a tenuous claim on being members of a formerly or currently oppressed minority are desperate to get a piece of the oppressed minority action.

Let’s run down the list.

Race
As Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette and columnist for The Australian, recently noted (paywalled), Australia has many more Indigenous Australians than it used to. Indeed, according to the last Census, the number of Aboriginals increased by 25 per cent between 2016-2021.

At first glance, this may appear to be a positive development but not many Indigenous leaders see it that way. Lehmann quoted one Aboriginal Land Council CEO who observed, “We’ve now got a large proportion, if not a quarter of our population, (who) have chosen to self-identify rather than being born as Aboriginal to take up benefits of housing, scholarships, universities, employment opportunities and programs that are targeted for us to overcome our disadvantage.”   

Lehmann also quoted an Indigenous Australian professor, Victoria Grieve-Williams, whose research has revealed that what she calls “race shifters” tend to be “well educated and articulate”. I don’t find that surprising – in my experience, it's always middle-class and upper-middle-class types who are most inclined to make a big deal about having a great-great-great grandparent who was (possibly) Indigenous.        

If you don’t want to claim to be indigenous, you can always at least identify as a more exotic ethnicity than you appear to be. For instance, it’s not uncommon for white people with a, shall we say, rather distant connection to countries such as Scotland, Ireland, Greece or Italy to make a big show of how Scottish, Irish, Greek or Italian they are despite never having visited the ancestral homeland and being unable to speak the mother tongue. (Sadly, only a handful of countries are considered prestigious enough to claim a deep spiritual connection to. As I can personally attest, if you are of Welsh-English heritage you’re all out of luck.)  

And there’s always the option of full-blown race fraud. The most recent high-profile example of this is Nkechi Amare Diallo, better known as Rachel Dolezal, a one-time African-American activist who was revealed to have grown up in Montana and to be of German, Czech and Swedish extraction.

At this point, I’m tempted to go off on a tangent about the very different treatment of those who choose to identify as being of a different race compared to those who choose to identify as being of a different gender, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Gender and sexuality   
In simpler times, there was a widespread consensus that no more than five per cent of the population was same-sex attracted. Granted, significantly more than five per cent of the population have probably engaged in same-sex activity at some point. But unless you want to count prisoners, sailors and any woman who dallied with lesbianism while doing a humanities degree, it’s hard to argue more than 1 in 20 people are part of the LGBT community.  

Nonetheless, a significant proportion of the population under the age of 40 now identifies as being something other than heterosexual. Bill Maher has a great bit about this, where he shows that if present trends continue 100 per cent of the American population will be identifying as part of the LGBTQIA+ community by 2054. While less than five per cent of Silent Generationers, Baby Boomers and Gen Xers identified as LGBTQ, 10.5 per cent of Millennials and 20.8 per cent of Gen Zers do.

While the LGBT community – or at least the G and B parts of it – is associated with licentiousness in the public imagination, the young people are having far less sex than preceding generations did at their age. (On the rare occasions the ‘queer’ youth of today do get down to business, I suspect they are having boringly conventional heterosexual intercourse around 95 per cent of the time.)  

Of course, the elephant in the room here is the T part of the (always rather fractious) LGBT coalition. As far as the intersectional status hierarchy goes, nothing beats being trans. But as lionised as they are in most progressive circles, trans people still face real discrimination outside of progressive circles. So, how do you enjoy some of the upsides of being trans without having to bear any of the costs? One option is to declare that you are non-binary. (If anyone is impolitic enough to observe that you don’t seem that different to those who are binary, you can triumphantly declare, “Non-binary people don’t owe you androgyny!”)       

Mental illness
Substack superstar

Freddie deBoer

– who knows of what he speaks – has written about the romanticisation of mental illness far more elegantly and powerfully than I ever could. So, I’ll just observe that, especially among the young, being neurodivergent now appears to be as common as being queer. But as with nationalities, some mental illnesses are more fetishized than others. Lots of people have now decided they are on the autism spectrum and/or have ADHD; far fewer want to declare that they are paranoid schizophrenics.   

What to make of all this?
It doesn’t bother me what anybody identifies as if there are not harming anybody else. I have friends and family members who are non-white, or gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, or dealing with mental health challenges, or some combination thereof. (I don’t know any trans people, but that’s not due to me going out of my way to avoid them.)

But it’s disingenuous to pretend there’s nothing noteworthy about the massive upsurge in people wanting to identify with minority demographics.

In the space left, let us run through some possible causes of this phenomenon.

The progressive account: In the benighted past, people who were LGBT or neurodivergent had to mask it. Likewise, anybody who wasn’t part of the dominant ethnic group had to downplay or disguise their ethnicity.

My verdict: There’s something to this theory, but it seems a facile explanation. For instance, while I do not doubt that there were more gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people around than people realised back in the olden days, I find it hard to believe one-fifth of Gen Zers are now LGBT. (At least not LGBT in the old-school sense of, you know, actually getting it on with members of your own sex, or making a serious commitment to living as a member of the opposite sex.)

The conservative account: Western civilisation is now reaching the end stages of its inexorable decline. Societies that are unravelling typically go batshit crazy over issues around gender and sexuality, as even Camille Paglia – a lesbian! – has argued.

My verdict: I fear there is something in this explanation as well, as can be illustrated by comparing the world’s hyperpolarised hegemon with its increasingly assertive challenger. The Chinese Communist Party has 96 million members. I would be surprised to learn that a single one of them has done a DNA test in the desperate hope of discovering they have Tibetan or Uyghur heritage and are not boringly Han.

Likewise, I haven’t seen any reports of any prominent Chinese political, military or business leaders coming out as trans. If any of them did, I suspect they would get a somewhat different reception to the one received by US admiral – and one of USA Today’s 2022 Women of the Year – Rachel (previously Richard) Levine.

Obviously, there are gay and lesbian people in China. But comparatively few Chinese identify as part of the gay and lesbian community. This 2021 Ipsos survey found three per cent of Chinese surveyed said they were “only attracted to the same sex”. That’s only marginally higher than the the Turks (two per cent) and a third of the figure for Australians and Brits (nine per cent).   

Nature abhors a vacuum    
The only explanation I’ve thus far been able to devise for a massive increase in people aspiring to acquire an exotic identity is that the ones that used to be central to people’s sense of themselves are now either unavailable or unattractive.

Until about five minutes ago, people's identities were centred around being part of a tribe, village, family, clan, region, religion, guild or class. Once those identities disappeared or lost their appeal, people set about crafting new ones.   

But if you’ve got a better theory than that, let me know in the comments.