I do not like Rod Liddle, and I think he comes at the issue from a different perspective (sexist men need to know who the woman are to be sure of their own position).
But I also think he hits the nail on the head for the right-wing - the snooty dismissal of identity politics and the left eating itself hides something actually serious which the right has caused and promotes which threatens women.
And sexists like Rod need to know who their women are.
Good old fashioned sexism is much easier to fight, we know how to do that; the ideology of (trans) gender which means all boundaries are collapsed is not.
This has taken me to a reflection on where the boundary collapsing scholarship on gender comes from. Feminists have, I think, used the idea of gendered hierarchies to lay structural hierarchies bare and how gendered ideas underpinned society. I do not know enough about queer scholarship, so I wonder if the boundary collapsing comes from there (again, with good intentions - same sex relationships should be no problem to society). What about endocrinology - that is, not postmodernism, but science?
The language of postmodernism has given us the means to interpret texts and social interactions in nuanced ways. I believe that much was lost with the eclipsing of woman’s studies by gender studies, but I do think understanding masculinities and intersectionality is a benefit, if de-politicising. After all, the way in which we analyse where the power lies and how it works comes from that, to a point.
And theories do not in themselves make an ideology. That needs the actions and beliefs of people. What about the endocrinologists who suggest pre-pubertal hormones as best practice; and the surgeons who perfected their techniques on intersex people and transferred their skills to those with gender dysphoria?
Identity politics is a cheap shot and an easy target for the right, but this is not about how people identify (most people on here do not care), it is about how far resources are developed and promotes to validate that identity. And women’s spaces, women’s descriptors, women’s physical appearance being seen as a resource.
To understand why women’s spaces, women’s descriptors, women’s appearances are seen as fair game, then we need the tools of gendered analysis to explain the historical and current power dynamics, hierarchies and ideals about women (as oppose to and related to men) which have come through postmodernism and are being enacted in science, medicine, the media and politics.
Understanding how and why this has happened is not as urgent as raising awareness that it has happened and arguing against it. But I guess I am trying to unpick and challenge the idea that this mess is a result of identity politics and the left eating itself. There is a much longer history of women’s health being thrown under the bus for pharmaceutical profits and women’s rights being ignored for male benefit than the rise of identity politics.