The trouble with virtue signalling
Sadiq Khan temporarily removed his pronouns from his social media profile. Is the era of performative virtue almost at an end?
Like many of the new clichés, ‘virtue signalling’ has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it neatly encapsulates a tendency - particularly common among politicians - to endorse ideas solely for publicity purposes. On the other hand, when we accuse our opponents of virtue signalling, are we not guilty of arrogantly claiming a kind of telepathic insight?
But how else can we account for the behaviour of Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, whose every gesture appears to be an advertisement of his own moral worth? During London’s New Year’s Eve firework display in 2021, Khan had lit the bridges over the Thames in the EU’s yellow and blue colouring as a protest against Brexit. Also during that year’s celebrations, drones took to the skies to form the raised fist of the Black Lives Matter movement. Khan may as well have ‘right side of history’ tattooed on his forehead.
This is why nobody was surprised when, a number of years ago, Khan added pronouns to his social media profile.
This is the very definition of virtue signalling, given that the declaration of pronouns is typically a display of allegiance to an ideological tribe. After all, it is unlikely that anyone was under the impression that Khan might be a ‘she’. Yet for all his posturing, a few days ago the ‘he/him’ pronouns magically disappeared.
One might have been tempted to assume that he never really believed in the cause of genderism at all, except that by yesterday the pronouns had returned. One of Khan’s spokespeople claimed that it had been a ‘technical error’, but many remain suspicious. What kind of ‘technical error’ deletes words at random from Twitter bios? A far more plausible explanation is that Khan was hoping that his pronoun removal would go unnoticed, but then the backlash forced him to revert.
We saw a similar drama play out last November when the Democratic politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez removed her pronouns from X. She later claimed that she did this ‘for reasons of space’, but this kind of excuse naturally invites our scepticism. At least Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportation, has removed his pronouns without reinstating them or trying to shift the blame.
One of the chief features of virtue signalling is that it is laughably easy to spot. Perhaps the most egregious example was the campaign which began after the Brexit referendum in which people were invited to show solidarity with ethnic minorities by wearing safety pins, usually on lapels or somewhere similarly prominent. This trend never caught on and was widely mocked at the time, even by those who supported the cause of anti-racism.
After Donald Trump’s victory a few months later, an attempt to resurrect the trend occurred in America, and the response was likewise contemptuous. Activist Christopher Keelty wrote a piece for The Huffington Post entitled ‘Dear white people, your safety pins are embarrassing’, and offered numerous other suggestions of how to be ‘a better ally’. Although himself white, Keelty could not see racial groups as anything other than homogenous monoliths of identical tendencies and collective responsibility. ‘Let me explain something, white people,’ he wrote, with all the certainty and dogmatism we have come to expect from identitarian homilists. ‘We just fucked up. Bad. We elected a racist demagogue who has promised to do serious harm to almost every person who isn’t a straight white male, and whose rhetoric has already stirred up hate crimes nationwide.’ That many ethnic minority individuals supported Trump and many white people opposed him seems to have escaped his notice.
So much for virtue signalling through the medium of safety pins. More recently, we’ve seen the appearance of rainbow lanyards and badges as a method of displaying one’s tolerance for sexual minorities. In 2018, the Evelina Children’s Hospital in London implemented the NHS ‘rainbow badge’ scheme, by which staff who wished to show their support for the ‘LGBT+’ patients could be more visible. By 2019, the scheme had been rolled out to sixty-one per cent of NHS trusts. Of course, very few of those who wore the badges will have done so out of a genuine faith in genderism. Rather than acting as a symbol of solidarity, it was more likely to be an apotropaic gesture to keep angry activists at bay.
Surely our default assumption must be that medical staff are not homophobic or prepared to discriminate on the basis of how one choses to identify? Why must activists insist on the unfounded generalised expectation that tolerance is an aberration rather than the norm? Why, for instance, did Google start adding notes to results for restaurants in late 2024 to specify whether they were ‘LGBTQ+ friendly’? It is difficult to imagine any business turning potential customers away on the basis of their sexual orientation, so the necessity for these details seems highly dubious. From a restaurateur’s point of view, the only discriminating factor is whether or not you can afford to pay for your grub.
We have grown so accustomed to virtue signalling from politicians that many of us now assume dishonesty as the default. One thinks of the shallowness of David Lammy, who had previously dismissed Donald Trump as a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath’, only to congratulate him warmly on his election last November. It’s not uncharitable to interpret such an extreme volte-face as proof of virtue signalling. The only other explanation is that Lammy has suddenly developed neo-Nazi sympathies, which I’m sure cannot be the case.
So perhaps the removal of pronouns from high-profile social media accounts is a sign that the culture war in its current form is almost at an end. The inchmeal demise of the woke movement seems to have spurred many of its former disciples to distance themselves from the absurd rituals of the past few years. There will be many former zealots who are now seeking a dignified withdrawal. These warriors have suddenly found themselves unhorsed, and are in need of a golden bridge.
Sadiq Khan, of course, will not give up so easily. Virtue signalling is seemingly hardwired into his DNA. In 2023, for instance, Khan had banned his staff from saying ‘ladies and gentlemen’. Perhaps he was concerned that human evolution might suddenly throw up a third sex, and that a reference to the binary of men and women would cause needless offence to the newcomers. Khan had also prevented civil servants from describing migrants as ‘illegal’, favouring instead the term ‘undocumented’, as though this euphemism would be sufficient to win over hearts and minds.
It is reassuring that such gestures now seem strangely antiquated. Consider the way in which Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, recently corrected a reporter who had used the term ‘undocumented immigrants’ at a press conference.
Such an interaction would have been unthinkable only a year ago. The woke movement, in other words, seems to be perishing as quickly as it was birthed. Let’s hope that the practice of virtue signalling dies along with it.
People should be made to keep these pronouns in their bio for the next ten years and removing them should be a criminal offence. It should also be the law that whenever they greet someone they have to state their pronouns. There's comedy gold in they them there hills.
Today's word is "apotropaic".
I had a jumper I was very fond of but because it has a rainbow round the neckline I put it in a charity shop recently as the only rainbows I’m happy with these days are the ones in the sky!