Can one believe in equality without subscribing to feminism? With a recent poll showing that only seven per cent of Brits identify themselves as feminists, one could say that either 93 per cent of the population is sexist, or that feminism has lost touch with reality.

This ideology forms part of what is being labelled as the “regressive left”, comprised of feminists, social justice warriors and self-proclaimed liberals who have abandoned liberal principles by tolerating and defending non-liberal ideologies.

People are beginning to realise that this populist politics is not really about equality, but merely disguises itself as such through a grievance culture communicated via popular media.

What is truly at the heart of this movement is Marxist rhetoric, as it implies a shared experience of reality among minority groups, which seems factually inept given their distinct differences.

This means that being a member of a minority group entails some inherent shared oppression that each of these groups is experiencing all the time, which, in turn promotes groupthink and devalues individual thought free from the chains of Marxism.

We’ve muddied the waters between men and women all the while making everything a gendered issue

In addition, it advances the idea that one is incapable of understanding the facts of a case, or of having human empathy and compassion if one is not part of the group that is affected.

Is identity politics something we should be pursuing? When you replace rational thought with groupthink coupled with a sense of moral righteousness, the inevitable outcome is ideological consensus, and vilifying those who dare to oppose the narrative.

This kind of reasoning encapsulates grievance culture, which seems to make increasingly hysterical claims for ever more perceived, tiny infractions.

They’ve recently turned to ‘micro-aggressions’ where a person doesn’t even know that they’re being discriminatory and is therefore required to speak in a submissive, apologetic manner to maintain group membership.

There comes a point in deliberation when the degree of absurdity reaches such insurmountable levels that one simply cannot take the other party seriously.

When one applies an ideological lens to every situation they encounter, it follows that the end result is distinct from the reality of the situation. If this is the assumed correct stance, then any other interpretation of a situation would be like comparing apples and oranges.

The truth is that feminism has already won in the West. Women have equal pay, equal rights, and equality of opportunity (if not more), yet this victory for humanity seems to escape feminists in their quest for offence taking.

This also has social implications, as the media, academia and to a large extent ordinary people are not able to express any reservations they may have about certain issues as they would immediately pay a heavy social price from which they may not recover.

For example, we’re perfectly happy to complain about gender representation when there aren’t enough women in any particular subject field for arbitrary quotas, but we don’t make the same complaint when it’s the other way around.

If such ideas do not stand up to the most basic scrutiny, how have they become policy?

Every so often we are told how women are ‘held back’ from STEM subjects and that we need to encourage them to get into these fields, but the fact that women dominate completely in veterinary science, biology and health-related fields doesn’t seem to faze them. This is a sort of soft-bigotry of low expectations, where we disregard individual choice on the basis that “we know how you should run your life better than you do”.

Instead of accepting and respecting the agency of people to act of their own volition, we pursue a delusional vision of gender parity and in our attempts, we’ve muddied the waters between men and women all the while making everything a gendered issue.

For this reason, we inevitably place equality of outcome over equality of opportunity, and have denigrated individual agency with this unreasonable attitude of groupthink.

Anyone who opposes this is part of the system that is “holding women back” and is therefore eligible for slander and ridicule. This begs the question, if you were put off from entering a course because of some off-hand comments, then how determined were you in the first place?

Undermining our merit-based system can only be exacerbated by this false victim narrative which rather ironically promotes discrimination in the form of affirmative action.

Moreover, falsely and continuously portraying half the population on earth as an oppressed class does not only demean women’s convictions, but also trivialises serious issues that actually deserve empathy and support.

If we are not able to speak candidly about these issues, how are we to ever overcome them?

While the regressive left is busy language policing and complaining about non-issues, they seem to have conveniently averted their eyes away from the ideology that wants them extinguished, to put it mildly.

We need to lift this barrier of unreasonable protection from so-called minorities if we are to ever have an honest conversation about a sustainable way forward.

Christopher Attard is a university student furthering his studies in psychology.