Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War

Attention, as well as being a commodity that can be monetised through digital platforms, is a psychological wage. We know this from when we are children: think of the heaven of basking in the glow of an attentive parent or teacher. To be recognised is to be told that you matter, that your life has worth and that you have a place in the world. There’s nothing unhealthy about that. But our media and politics leverage the psychological wages of attention in a way that is utterly corrosive and warping.

One in eight trans people report having been attacked while at work, and half of all trans and non-binary people report having to hide their identity from employers because they’re afraid of being discriminated against. Transgender people are at the sharp edge of material dispossession, while at the same time being used by the press and politicians as a means of distracting people away from economic issues. It’s a classic minority rule strategy of division. It’s not my intention to close down good-faith conversations. It’s important to talk openly about where we, as a society, establish the threshold for being legally and socially recognised as your chosen gender. But that discussion has been hijacked by a highly motivated ideological network to clamp down on the rights of transgender people. They don’t want to consider the idea that trans people, and transgender women in particular, are just as deserving of respect as they are.

As W. E. B. Du Bois pointed out, to only see yourself as a figure of ‘crime or ridicule’ is a form of oppression. While wealth inequalities grow ever wider, there has been – at least – some redistribution in the psychological wage of attention. But this can be manipulated. Though identity minorities are objects of fear and derision, presented as an enemy within for wanting to impose Minority Rule, they’re also given a degree of social prestige by being acknowledged as minorities. Recognised identity minorities like people of colour, some of those with disabilities or LGBTQ people get the consolation of attention. While this attention doesn’t necessarily convert into justice or systemic change, it does at least establish a sense of public importance. That’s not nothing in our information-saturated, discourse-obsessed attention economy.

But would imposing a blanket rule that trans women should be incarcerated in men’s prisons really make people safer? The first thing to point out is that we’re talking about small numbers of people. According to the latest available data, between 2021 and 2022, only six trans women were housed in female prisons. Between 2020 and 2022, there were no reported sexual assaults carried out by transgender women in women’s prisons. The same can’t be said for trans victims of sexual assault in men’s prisons – in 2019 alone, there were eleven such cases. Though gender critical campaigners, politicians and the media all focus on the risk posed by trans women in female prisons, the fact is that they’re far more likely to be victims of sexual assault in men’s facilities. Surely that matters as much as the safety of cisgender women inmates?

By presenting anti-racism as a threat to the white working class, two things happen. The first is that the experiences of white working-class people are weaponised. They are wielded as a tool against attempts to diagnose problems of racial inequality, and to delegitimise any proposed solutions. Acknowledge institutional racism? What about the white working class. Tackle discriminatory policing? What about the white working class. Address the legacies of colonialism and slavery in modern society? What about the white working class. This is not a real question, but a mechanism that cuts off a conversation about racial inequalities. It is a dance between mythical enemies that isn’t intended to advance the cause of working-class people, but to obstruct racial progress. The second and most devious effect of this weaponisation of white working-class identity is that it actively inhibits efforts to redistribute wealth to address the scourge of economic inequality. By selectively championing the white working class in order to attack people of colour, the working classes of all races lose out. Blaming an imaginary problem, and an imaginary enemy, creates space for politicians to wriggle off the hook.

Politics takes place within a competitive attention economy. So a news story about Sainsbury’s supporting Black History Month is folded into a war between ‘woke’ graduates versus ‘the white working class’, the demand for trans equality is framed as trans activists versus women, and anything to do with anti-black racism (whether it’s a protest about police violence, or statues of slavers) is BLM versus everybody else. Identity politics has come to describe the fight about how we see ourselves, rather than what kind of society we want to have.

Race has been used not to describe differences amongst humanity, but to enforce inequality amongst humanity.

You can look at any one of the crises surrounding us - whether it's the climate emergency, the genocide in Gaza or rising inequality - and just see a reason to give up the hope that human beings are capable of bettering ourselves as a species. But the odds have always been stacked against justice. You'd never have bet on the success of the abolitionists, or the suffrage movement, or the civil rights struggle, or the fight for abortion access. But courage and collective action are capable of wondrous things. We have an obligation to resist the temptation of passivity and despair, while also seeing the scale of the challenge around us clearly.