Prof Stock in The Times today

Probably

I didn't see any nit picking. I saw a lot of admiration for the article and respect for the writer, and a small number of sincere questioning comments. Didn't see any nit-picking, though. Did I miss something?

That's not what Stock is saying. She's saying there's something wrong with HR departments.

My extensive reading of spy stories tells me that spooks always have a few spare identities for professional purposes, so a varied range of pronouns would seem fitting.

Quite. 🙄

What a brilliant, well written coherent article.

Love Prof Stock.

She stood up and out early on. As a result she got kicked out of her job at the uni, and ‘cancelled’ by hundreds if not thousands of utterly moronic people, who were incapable of critical and logical thinking.

Fab article.

Racism is real, sexism is real, homophobia is real, etc. However the neat, geometric analytic model of intersecting oppressions is crass. Reality doesn’t work like that.

For example, it takes binaries female/male, black/white, poor/rich, etc and starts to apply maths to it to create hierarchies. Just like 2x2=4.

So white x male = double oppressor points.
Black x gay = double oppressed points.

Belle Hooks (I’m not going to entertain her nonsense of avoiding capital letters to avoid their oppressing the lower case ones) talked about these kinds of nodes where a person can oppress someone according to sex in one situation but oppress them in another situation according to race. It’s hard to get to the bottom of, but she had a dynamic model, rather than the static, geometric one.

The problem is, most things aren’t binary are they? Sex really is the only binary.

People who identify as ‘Black’ might have a white parent, for example.

Some things can be concealed, for example someone might be a closeted homosexual, so no one could know enough to oppress them for their sexual orientation.

That’s the problem with ‘woke’ it is too neat an idea, which doesn’t actually map onto reality.

But it’s regressive to throw out all discourse associated with non-normative identities/sexualities, or frame them all as categorically useless/empty. Their foundations are gay rights and women’s rights, and intersectional feminism.

I'm not sure about this. I think framing sexual orientation or race as identities is where it all started to go wrong. Being a woman, or Asian, or homosexual or disabled or a child is what you are, not who you are.
You can say for example that being British and having Irish roots is part of your identity, but "identity" in the way it's used for special identities falls into a different category. Whatever your reasons for adopting an identity, it's something that isn't you. It's who you are not what you are. We already accepted identities in the first sense - but in the second sense we have moved away from reality and objectivity. And then the identity politics label (identity in the second sense) got slapped onto real axes of oppression. It's a bit like the forced teaming of LGB with T.

So gay rights, women's rights and intersectional feminism meetings and discussions were probably where this started, but I think adopted identities are a different animal altogether. Now, I'm not a philosopher or a gender studies graduate or anything so I hope I've been able to make myself understood here.

100% agreement from me, MariedeGournay.

Racism is real, not made up, for one thing.
And it's the footballers who take the decision, reviewed at the start of every season, to take the knee. It isn't a corporate gesture that's forced on them. It's a personal matter for a lot of them - run-ins with the police as youngsters and having friends who have been badly treated - these are part of their lives.
The women take the knee too - initially it was "anti-LGBT (wince) discrimination". That was of course also a very personal matter as most of them have been victims of homophobia as well as sexism. It's something that they want to do and feel very strongly about. More recently, taking the knee has become a protest against "all forms of discrimination", which is a bit woolly but I think they wanted to include racism and sexism as well as homophobia. I wish the women would wake up about the T, but I can't fault either the men or women footballers for making this gesture, political or not.

Edited for clarity

And we have a very very sensible CEO

I think for my workplace the peak was the fuss over the Wembley arch and the back track of the FA , that was brought up in an all staff meeting and staff suggested we should be as neutral as possible too with lots of general agreeing.

Let's destroy a brilliant article with nit picking, designed to dilute the message

I agree with her point that it’ll all disappear as quickly as it appeared in workplaces.
anecdotally we have gone from celebrating every day of whatever however obscure on the staff intranet to a more corporate looking one with just work themed related items promoted and that has been in the last couple of months.
also I agree pronounces are disappearing on emails. I haven’t seen one in the wild for a while now and I always notice.

For those considering Stock's use of "Woke", I find a definition that has reasonable utility would be "intersectional Marxist praxis", i.e. taking the class struggle of Marxism and applying it to the various categories of identity politics.

@MarieDeGournay

I too worry about criticising racism et al in the same breath as gender ID, but overall I worry that Woke IDPol is inherently divisive, and the "class struggle" requires the adherents to be in conflict in order to benefit their class.

We would be better working together for equality, not equity.

MI5 gave Suzie Green of Mermaids an ‘outstanding contribution to LBGT+ life’ award. Suggests to me they are part of the problem.

I'm concerned about the Aga-phobia on display here, it troubles me

It's a great article but I agree with the concerns about the analogies.

I'd also like to preserve the progress we have made in race, sex and sexual orientation discrimination. The extremism of TRAs will prompt a backlash (yes I still want to protect our kids and women's rights) and I don't want that backlash to push us back to the times of no EDI. (They'll probably blame the women again)

Part of my critical faculties go Ouch when the word 'woke' is used, though at least Dr Stock offers a definition.

I'm with you on this, it's usually used as a lazy catch-all and is to be avoided. I don't think a lot of the things people class as 'woke' are bad or eye-rolly.... anyway that won't let me not enjoy the rest of it!

I love the idea of stone roses fans being a protected group. They’d all be middle age men now and exactly the group in 2024 that no one wants to protect!😁

There as an attempt to make goths a protected sub group after a horrible murder but nothing came of that ( rightfully imo)

I do think there is a parallel to be drawn in the way these social justice movements can cynically exploit the goodwill of those who follow them - - Stonewall gained enormous power from trans rights and the BLM founders got rich from it.

I imagine the majority of people agree with the general ideas that trans people shouldn't be assaulted on the street or discriminated against in the job market, and that black people's safety is important. The issue is when these movements gain too much ideological power at the expense of telling the truth and making meaningful changes. When trans rights / BLM becomes your moneyspinner, it's no longer in your interest to solve the issue you're claiming to solve. This vapid, superficial adherence to doctrine helps nobody but harms everybody.

…and we won’t get to the answers by deriding and dismissing whole, quite different movements. Which I think she comes close to doing in this article, but I appreciate it’s a shorty.

@MarieDeGournay I couldn’t agree more. I think Stock has said some important and brave things about women in a culture where trans rights discourses have become increasingly problematic and contradictory.

I get that she’s bringing in BLM because she’s talking about the wider issue of “identity politics”, some of which have become increasingly restrictive, exclusionary and divisive.

But it’s regressive to throw out all discourse associated with non-normative identities/sexualities, or frame them all as categorically useless/empty. Their foundations are gay rights and women’s rights, and intersectional feminism.

While today’s identity politics needs challenging because it’s become more about re-drawing boundaries (sometimes illogically, like saying men can say they are women) instead of opening them out (and saying e.g. it’s fine for men to wear dresses, so what), we’d kick ourselves if discourses regressed back to the point of being told, for example, women are only fit for child rearing because of their biology. We’d do well to remember that feminists once argued women didn’t have to be limited to their biological function, and that today’s discourses have grown out of that. Sure it’s gone wrong, but why and how is an important question!

'Of course I love thee, Doctor Stock..' sorry I can't find four suitable rhymes to complete that, BUT

Part of my critical faculties go Ouch when the word 'woke' is used, though at least Dr Stock offers a definition. It ranks somewhere alongside 'eye-roll' in the list of overused and predictable words in this area of discussion.

And I'm not sure about bringing in Black Lives Matter or footballers 'taking the knee' into a critique of the excesses of gender politics. Opposing racism, even in ways that might be identified as 'woke', is very a different thing altogether from campaigning against beliefs that are WORIAD in ways that are definintely 'woke'.

The actual BLM organisation has its issues, and some of the wokerati undoubtedly embraced it to excess, but the movement itself grew out of what I believe was a genuine revulsion at the sight of the brutal, casual and prolonged murder of a Black man by 'law enforcers' that just happened to be recorded and broadcast around the world, unlike most murders.
Footballers 'taking the knee' eventually became an imposed virtue-signal, and at the time it bothered me that they were not 'taking the knee' week after week for all the women murdered within earshot of their stadia. However, I believe it started out as a genuine if clunky expression of that wave of revulsion against racist killings that spread across the world. That wave broke, and died away, and as far as I know no un-woke footballers were driven out of their jobs.

I'm not sure that BLM and taking the knee belong in the same league with ideological capture of major institutions, the tribunals, the police harassment, the nonsensical legislation, and the threats of, as well as actual violence that gender extremism has wrought on this side of the Atlantic.

So while I fully expect all the Doc Stock supporters to be on their feet in the stands, pointing at me, from relegation places of the Vanarama National League, and mockingly chanting 'Who are you? Who are you?', I assert that I think this great article - does she ever write anything that isn't Premier League?[smile]@would have been better if it hadn't introduced race politics into a critique of gender politics. There are crossovers, but they are very different.

I still love thee Doctor Stock, honest, and I'm going away to hide under a table now...

Interesting that she mentions MI6 are proudly displaying their pronouns. I've been thinking for a while now that MI5 should really be investigating how this ideology has infested the UK - it's a massive gap in safeguarding and security and is detrimental to the majority of the population - but they don't seem to have noticed!

"I wish that self-ID hadn’t been brought in in two important countries "

At least I can now quote articles from the Times in online discussions of the issue at my favourite weekly (DIE ZEIT, Germany) . Reports in the Mail and other GC publications were roundly removed until very recently.
They seem to have relaxed their rules (or the monitors of the comment section have been given some rules).