No composite of fragments can contain, much less represent, all possible fragments

From A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves by Maria Popova.

It is a great curiosity to me that those who are obsessed with identity should also also be obsessed with intersectionality. The paradox is that identity assigns definitions of one's state regardless of one's own perceptions and intersectionality is an inherent recognition that identity is an aggregation of identities rather than a singular status.

The whole thing is worth reading for additional insights, but this seems to me to be pivotal.

Paradoxically, in our golden age of identity politics and trigger-ready outrage, this repression of our inner wildness and fracturing of our wholeness has taken on an inverted form, inclining toward a parody of itself. Where Walt Whitman once invited us to celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the wonder that comes from discovering one another’s multitudes afresh, we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments of others. (For instance, some of mine: woman, reader, immigrant, writer, queer, survivor of Communism.) Because no composite of fragments can contain, much less represent, all possible fragments, we end up drifting further and further from one another’s wholeness, abrading all sense of shared aspiration toward unbiased understanding. The censors of yore have been replaced by the “sensitivity readers” of today, fraying the fabric of freedom — of speech, even of thought — from opposite ends, but fraying it nonetheless. The safety of conformity to an old-guard mainstream has been supplanted by the safety of conformity to a new-order minority predicated on some fragment of identity, so that those within each new group (and sub-group, and sub-sub-group) are as harsh to judge and as fast to exclude “outsiders” (that is, those of unlike identity-fragments) from the conversation as the old mainstream once was in judging and excluding them. In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning — imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness.

It says, much more artfully, what I have long been claiming.

That cookie-cutter identities (race, religion, etc.) particularly when married to victimhood, are simply a means of coercion, it is an imposition of you onto me or me onto to you, of untested assumptions based on superficial attributes.

No person has a single identity. They have an infinity of identities which is what makes talking with strangers so interesting. What is their story? How did they get here? Why do they want to be here? etc. The person is not some two-dimensional statistical average. People are not cardboard identities, they are an amalgamation, an intersection, of near infinite habits, experiences, interpretations, estimates, choices, assumptions, desires, wishes, etc.

The wonder of people is in their rich uniqueness, not on some arbitrarily chosen attributes imposed upon them.