There's nothing paradoxical going on here. When people are oppressed via categorization, it's only natural to embrace that categorization to reduce the stigma a

There's nothing paradoxical going on here. When people are oppressed via categorization, it's only natural to embrace that categorization to reduce the stigma and turn it into a source of social and/or political power. It seems to me that the left, idealistically speaking, is intent on removing forced categorization by others. You would be hard pressed find anyone who is trying to remove all individual distinctions, and if you did, that person would be an outlier. On the contrary, the left, again idealistically, seems to embrace differences, just not those that are imposed and used as a rationale for discrimination. In my experience, those who go on about "freedom" are usually the most intolerant of individual differences. How about that for irony?