Senator Elizabeth Warren has been telegraphing her 2020 intentions for some time now, and this has meant her doing more than merely pounding the table over equity-based compensation plans. Her brand of populism is no longer just a bloodless appeal to economic interests. It’s about identity, too.

In a revealing interview with New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister, Warren demonstrated what she thinks her voters are after: identity politics.

In Traister’s telling, Warren was “shocked into a new relationship with feminism” by the 2016 campaign. But she has chosen to broadcast her feminist bona fides not by championing herself and her issues set as a model for societal progress. Instead, she cast herself as a victim who has repeatedly encountered sexist discrimination. From the voters of Massachusetts, who Warren’s friends told her were constitutionally bigoted against female candidates, to “racist shticks” Donald Trump performs when criticizing her, Warren sought to broadcast authentic victimization. After all, as Traister wrote, the senator has for two years “stoked and fed off grassroots rage, especially that of resistance women.” She can’t very well do that from the outside of the struggle.

But identity in today’s Democratic political landscape is multifarious and intersectional. A woman’s hardships are unknowable to anyone who is not a woman, but this paradigm also applies to ethnic minorities and the LGBT community, and so on. This brings us to the DNA test.

Donald Trump did not force Elizabeth Warren to demonstrate with as much scientific accuracy as she could the family lore surrounding her Native American ancestry. Her party did. Or, at least, they would have. Republican voters have fully internalized the stories she told involving her immediate family’s discrimination as a result of her mixed extraction, but the nation’s Democrats may not be similarly up to date on the matter. The Democratic primary electorate may not take kindly to the notion that the blond-haired, blue-eyed, alabaster-skinned Warren was, as Fordham Law Review described her in 1997, Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.” So, the senator set out to prove her claims, and it was a disaster.

On Monday, Warren trumpeted what she insisted was “strong evidence” that she was of Native American stock, but that evidence was far from compelling. It revealed that the closest relative with such heritage was perhaps six or even ten generations removed, making her anywhere from 1/32nd (3 percent) to 1/1,024th (or 0.1 percent) Native American. As National Review’s David French noted, this could make Warren even less Native American than the average U.S. citizen of European heritage. “She’s a relatively normal White American,” French wrote.

But identity politics is much more about politics than identity, and it would not do to have a progressive icon like Warren sacrificed on grounds as petty as consistency. Rather than question the senator’s embellished background, the press went to work touting the test results as evidence that her detractors were myopic and unenlightened.

“A DNA analysis done on Sen. Elizabeth Warren provides strong evidence she has Native American heritage, a claim her critics have long mocked,” the Associated Press insisted. “Republicans found ways to keep mocking her,” the Boston Globe observed, “cherry picking from her DNA test results.” The Daily Beast dialed Warren’s victimization up further still. “In releasing the results of a DNA analysis, Elizabeth Warren sought to negate the frequent attacks on her claimed heritage,” the website insisted. “But for Trump and his allies, it seems, no evidence will ever prove sufficient.” We are apparently about to readopt the “one-drop” standard of determining racial identity, and all in the name of progress.

For some of the most devoted practitioners of identity politics, the identity part of the equation is optional. A woman with a divergent political outlook is a “gender traitor.” It isn’t “progress” if the first African-American Senator from South Carolina “votes against the interest and aspirations” of those who share “the pigmentation that he has.” A person transitioning from one gender to another is engaged in “gender confirmation,” but to normalize an individual who identifies as a race distinct from that of their birth “enacts violence and perpetuates harm.” And now, apparently, even the Cherokee Nation is not sufficiently educated as to who they should count among their tribe.

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA debacle exemplifies the capricious way in which identity’s devotees enforce its maxims. To give Warren a pass because she has the right kind of politics invites the charge of intellectual dishonesty. But to rigidly enforce the notion that genetic identity confers certain immutable traits is to embrace racial determinism. The cult of identity is a trap. The only winning move is not to play.

An earlier version of this item identified 1/32 as 0.3 percent.