Identitarian does not mean what you think it means. In fact, it's basically the exact opposite. I also have no idea what you mean when you say it has no ability to change anything. Are you talking about identity politics? Politics that specifically aim to better the position of people in certain subgroups? Because there are many political movements that have been wildly successful in doing that, women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage, the LGBTQ movement. There's a lot of politics based on group identity that has been successful.
I don’t think these movements have been based on identity but rather the concept of lacking something. This group lacks X, thus we should seek to give them X. But X does not necessarily equal the identity.
What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.
>Identitarian does not mean what you think it means.
From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label.
>women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage
the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features.
Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window.
And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.
