Stefanos Kasselakis, 35, caused a stir recently when he was elected as leader of Syriza, becoming Greece’s first openly gay political leader. He has since caused further shockwaves, telling Alpha TV in recent days that he and his American partner, Tyler McBeth, plan to have sons via surrogacy. “As a society,” Kasselakis said, “we need to provide complete equality.” This encapsulates, in one sentence, the whole post-industrial transformation of the Left. Once a movement that sought to redress a critical imbalance of power between social classes — labour and capital — it has become a movement led by capital, to extend the reach of markets ever further into human bodies and relationships in the name of “equality”. Kasselakis’s phrasing reveals the bait-and-switch. The real obstacle to his having children with McBeth is not “society” but biology: they are both men. Two men can’t have babies. But Kasselakis implies that this irreducible feature of his and McBeth’s biology is in the gift of “society” to solve — and, by extension, that the fact “society” is not doing so demonstrates the continued existence of prejudices that must be combatted. With this sleight-of-language, normal physiology becomes a social justice issue, and something to which the Left may legitimately demand policy remedies.