Thanks Mark. Your points are well taken, and prompt me to clarify the target of my opprobrium when I attack ‘identity politics’.

You rightly say that all of us possess a large set of attributes that, in combination, can be said to define our identity, and that this set is used both by marketers of products and political campaigners to achieve their ends (product sales and votes, respectively). In that sense, all politics can be said to be identity politics.

You also rightly point out that the ideologues and activists of identity politics assign a particular weight to a small number of such attributes (gender, race, religion etc) as especially defining of a person’s essence, either singly or in combination (I am thinking here of ‘intersectionality’).

The process of choosing these particularly important attributes and how they are categorized (e.g. Facebook’s 60-odd genders), together with determining which features mark someone as ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’, and therefore to be despised or venerated, is often mysterious but obviously inherently political.

Perhaps we can agree that identity politics in the latter sense is what we should censure.