BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There is a madness peculiar to the over-educated, chronically online progressive—a psychosis of over-correction, not always malice, though the post-Widdicombe-Kirk strain is real and includes those capable of more than mere cruelty. It is the fever of a machine built to measure injustice, running so hot it melts its own circuitry.
Thankfully, we are hearing its death rattle. But death rattles can be undignified, and pockets remain—university towns, Twitter-addled London boroughs, humanities faculties, underfunded Labour fiefdoms—where the disease still festers.
We are post-peak woke. The curve has flattened. Common sense antibodies are spreading. Yet the convalescent ward still brims with people insisting two plus two equals seven, furious you refuse to agree.
Nowhere has this brain fever metastasised more grotesquely than in the queer community—a tragic irony, given they were once freedom’s vanguard. They stood for the simple principle: love and live as you are. But that spirit has curdled into policing. Those who fought against being told how to live now tell others how to desire, how to identify, how to perform politics in the bedroom. The mission to liberate became a mission to regulate. Rebels became gatekeepers, handing out guilt and shame instead of freedom.
Consider the gay man told, with full moral authority, that his homosexuality is transphobia because he does not desire a trans woman. This is not progress. It is the reanimation of homophobia’s oldest trope: he just hasn’t met the right woman. The audacity staggers. It reduces his biologically grounded orientation to a mere preference, a political affiliation overridable for social cohesion. It demands he perform attraction as allyship, turning his bedroom into a therapy ward for others’ validation. When vocal trans activists insist a lack of desire is violence, they inherit the old bigots’ most controlling instincts—dictating, in adulthood, who may shag whom and on what ideological terms. This absurdity is now widely recognised, even by many trans people. But in disturbed pockets, gay men still guilt-trip themselves into doubting their own desires—as if coming out twice weren’t already twice the weight.
Second madness: the deification of lived experience. In this orthodoxy, testimony becomes not evidence but verdict. To question an identity claim is epistemic violence. To ask for data, corroboration, or coherence is to be accused of gatekeeping or erasure. So, we now have a culture where an obviously white, upper-middle-class woman can declare herself ‘transracial’ and demand the same deference as a person of colour, and the response is not scepticism but fear of being called a bigot. We are told to believe all women, then all trans women, then all non-binary people, then anyone who claims any identity whatsoever, until belief itself is emptied of content. The result: a mountain of contradictory testimonies, all equally sacred, none falsifiable, and the only thing left to believe is that you are the oppressor for noticing.
This is not solidarity. It is spineless surrender—the abandonment of shared reality for each speaker’s sovereign truth. And it harms those it pretends to protect: women whose real cases drown in performative ‘believe all’ claims; minorities whose genuine struggles are trivialised by the same rush to credit self-diagnosis as gospel. In this madness, identity outranks argument; trauma outranks logic; feeling outranks fact. And the moment you point this out, you are ‘punching down.’
Underpinning both absurdities is the structural rot of pop-intersectionality—flattened, charitably, from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s useful legal tool into a rigid caste system. The more marginalised identities, the higher moral authority. A hierarchy inherently unstable: always someone more oppressed, always someone who can out-victim you. So, the arms race begins.
To prove good gay, deny your orientation for a trans woman. To prove good survivor, amplify every dubious claim. To prove good progressive, abandon evidence, logic, comfort. SUBMIT TO THE LOUDEST VOICE.
This is not liberation. Liberation was stopping hypocrites, like the cassock-lifting priest, from dictating how we shag. This madness is letting the activist dictate how we feel. Post-peak means we finally notice the activist has no clothes.
So where does that leave us, in this fortunate but not yet recovered moment?
Rebuilding sanity from first principles. Restore the erotic to the irrational. You need no reason to reject attraction. ‘No’ is a complete sentence, requiring no dissertation on systemic oppression. If we believe in bodily autonomy, it must include the autonomy to reject.
Reclaim boundaries as virtue, not viciousness. Excluding the toxic is hygiene, not violence. We need not befriend everyone, nor understand everyone. We need to protect our peace, and the cultural permission to do so without being labelled racist or fascist.
Embrace intersectionality as complexity, not currency. Privilege’s purpose is not silencing; it is knowing when to listen and when to speak. Identity does not confer infallibility. A trans woman can be wrong; a gay man can be right. An argument’s validity rests on logic, not speaker identity.
The world did not go mad from inclusion. It went mad from mistaking inclusion for the eradication of difference. Pure intersectionality would teach us that we are all situated differently, that one experience is not another’s, and that is precisely the point. We need not merge identities, sleep together to prove respect, nor amplify every testimony to prove virtue. What we need is the guts to say: I see you, I respect your humanity, but I am not yours to command. That is the wisdom too many lost. That is the sanity we are, blessedly, little by little, recovering.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Dear Townies and Conservatism (2024).