Woke friends

When I'm worried about a friend falling down an ideological pipeline that encourages them to develop negative views toward marginalised minority groups, I usually start by asking them to define what Woke means.

It is important to establish a baseline of meaning in order to enable future communication. For example, they could be using 'Woke' as a pejorative neologism that holds the same meaning as the older term 'Political Correctness' that served a similar purpose during the 90's and the first decade of the millennium. If they are using it in this way, I would ask them which marginalised minority groups they hold negative views about and what their desires for how those groups should be treated would be.

Sometimes the process of being asked to explain their views causes them to become quite aggressive and unpleasant. I observe similar behaviour with my 6 year old nephew when he is asked to explain why he was rude to his sister or why other people should also be allowed to have birthdays as well. This aggressive guilty-conscience defensiveness is normally a strong sign that I am unlikely to find a common ground with this person without significant work, but as with my nephew, most reasonable people are able to find a way toward a grounded stance that is compassionate and respectful once they are able to step beyond their initial hostility.

I hope your friend receives a pleasing answer to that question one day.

I can’t believe people are still defending woke as ‘being a decent person’ when it’s so very far from that. You can be progressive, liberal, left, wonderful and caring - all without being ‘woke’. As someone said earlier, woke is authoritarianism. It’s thinking you in all of human history have the ‘right and true’ opinions and anyone who veers from them even slightly deserves to have their lives destroyed.

No genuine liberal would want people to be ‘cancelled’ for any reason. For ‘misgendering’ or ‘microaggressions’ to put you beyond all redemption.

I’m fucking sick of people misrepresenting ‘woke’. It’s a cult. When arch-misogynist and patroniser of black people James O’Brien is proud to call himself ‘woke’ that says it all.

I don’t agree with policing other people’s language, we all get to choose the words we use ourselves but we don’t get to decide what
other people can and can’t say.

I’m (and probably 90% of FWR posters) am impervious to shaming attempts via forced teaming after 6 years plus of it.

Plus plenty of reasons to oppose Progressive Authoritarianism beyond the Women’s Rights aspect.

I didn't say anything about anybody supporting a racist killing, I was just giving examples of events that can start deep and sometimes revealing conversations.

Thank you clarifying, I understand now.
I think that there is a bit of tendency in this conversation to group people into "terfs" (classed by some as bigots driven by hate) and "handmaidens" (classed by some as idiots who fall over themselves to be seen as good people while not caring about women). I feel like this really hinders nuanced discussion of the issue and makes an arrival at a solution much less likely.

I think this illustrates the point I am making.

It is better for women's rights to be specific in what you actually mean, lest your declaration of being anti-woke is taken to be something you did not intend, given that it can mean many things.

Back on topic and the handful of people who started avoiding me in 2017/2018 (when I first went terfy) have all come back into my life having realised 2018 Me did have a point after all and no, I’m not cryptofashy and never was.
Some have even actively sought me out as a sort of safe person to verbalise their own emerging views to.

So who knows, maybe if we keep old friendships on a back burner rather than burn them down completely there will be something salvageable in future.

But Anti Woke genuinely can be someone like Andrew Tate or someone like Andrew Doyle, both oppose Wokeness but it doesn’t mean they are part of the same group/movement or have anything else in common.

A Right Wing/Conservative Authoritarian opposes the Left part of Left Wing/Progressive Authoritarianism.

A Left Wing Liberal/Libertarian opposes the Authoritarian part of Left Wing/Progressive Authoritarianism.

It’s a similar sort of oppositional overlap as here:

It depends on the friend tbh.

Some we are the type of people who can agree to disagree and just avoid the topic at hand or others where we are prepared to have constructive discussions without mud slinging.

For a minority though I have cut them off when they take the view that it's their job to "educate" me by throwing sound bites and baseless "evidence" and refuse to listen to my position in turn.

In general I would say life would be poorer if I cut off everyone from myself who didn't agree with me on any given (important) topic. So no, I'm not going to lose a friendship because someone votes conservative or believes TWAW as long as they respect my right to alternative stance and aren't pushing their views onto me.

Yup. If enough people persist in using 'infer' to mean imply, that meaning will find its way into dictionaries. But the meaning of some words can't be allow to wander. 'Woman' and 'female' for instance.

Not sure what your point is - OED’s definition doesn’t seem to be at odds with any of the posts on this thread, as it describes both previous and more recent usage?

Anyway, ‘literally’ literally got a second dictionary definition because people started using the word in a different way to how it was used originally.

Dictionaries just track language as it’s used, (but obvs with a bit of a time lag).

The battle over the word ‘Woman’ is precisely because no one actually uses ‘Woman’ to mean ‘Man who proclaims a womanly gender identity’ without the qualifier ‘trans’ in front of it.

Thanks for prompting me to look it up as the OED has given me another useful term to describe Woke Activists, ‘Doctrinaire’.

I didn't say anything about anybody supporting a racist killing, I was just giving examples of events that can start deep and sometimes revealing conversations.

Edited to add that I agree about the slipperiness of the word 'woke', which reminds me of 'PC gone mad' which also used to mean anything and everything, depending. It's not a word I find useful, for that reason.

This what I have been getting at. People use it to mean so many things that it is meaningless. "Anti-woke" could mean GC person or Andrew Tate!

Perhaps you should consider that as an educated woman and a good person that if her views are opposed to yours that she isn't the one who needs her eyes opening.

That's half the point. What woke means all depends on who you ask. To some, for example, it's effectively a slur, an attempt to paint a group in an unfavourable light. This is what the Mail does, for instance. Other words have suffered the same fate: liberal, hippie, even. But to many, woke represents a 'parcel of beliefs'. Most of that parcel used to be things like anti-racism which all decent folk could get behind. But in recent years, woke has been dominated by identity politics, pursued by interest groups that are anything but communitaire., the GI movement being the cherry on the top. My DS said to me the other day that he'd always regarded me as one of the most woke people he knew (until lately! 😀). He didn't mean that as an insult. But ATEOTD, it's laziness to take on board a whole 'parcel of beliefs'. Issues need judging on their merits.

Do you have ANY clue what 'woke' means?

Look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Progressive Authoritarianism has already tried to convince companies that the protective characteristic of pregnancy and maternity should be redefined to include men and not mention women or mothers at all:

www.thetimes.com/uk/article/dont-call-mothers-she-in-advice-on-maternity-stonewall-urges-oxford-qr59gwb8b

www.thetimes.com/uk/article/environment-agency-mother-and-father-gendered-stonewall-rg8x8wxkl

I suspect Progressive Authoritarianism really likes a woke sandwich tho, big business loves a bit of Rainbow Washing (or it did, it’s possible that Rainbow Washing is out now because Anti-Islamophobia/Palestine has taken over the top spot on the Woke Totem Pole.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/marks-and-spencer-lgbt-sandwich-charity-reaction-twitter-a8897631.html

If you pay attention to what Woke is (rather than dismissing it as ‘Nebulous’)
it becomes much easier to recognise actual Human Rights issues in amongst the stuff identifying as Human Rights issues.

Pregnancy and Maternity rights are necessary because maternal and neonate death rates are higher without it. Renaming it Gender neutral parenting leave would brush that stark fact under the carpet, which in turn would make it easier to justify ditching it/watering it down.

It’s not as if women can be forced out of work and into the home when the home won’t exist without two incomes to pay for it.

So left/progressive authoritarianism is potentially more dangerous to maternity rights than right/conservative authoritarianism right now.

He is desperate to 'be kind' and to be seen doing the right thing. This creates a paradox when you explain how what he's been taught is being kind isn't necessarily being kind.

This conflict point between thinking and unthinking creates a problem.

If you think and realise what you are saying is at odd with what you are taught by your social circle or established authority, you find yourself on the wrong side of this with social impact on you social status.

When Owen Jones talked about the 'wrong side of history' this is actually what he was talking about when assuming he had a social power greater than the opposition. It's about 'with us or against us' propaganda (This dynamic is a known technique).

Unfortunately propaganda has its limitations, and we have passed the tipping point.

There is a firm game of divide and conquer going on. There is the middle class and the works class against the elite class which hold the balance if power in a democracy. If you divide this you allow the elite through to dominate through authoritarianism.

You think it's Progressive Authoritarianism. Some think it is fancy sandwich fillings and others think it is things like maternity leave.

It’s not nebulous, it’s Progressive Authoritarianism, which is what I said to you originally.

Everyone’s rights are likely to be destroyed by authoritarianism, left or right.

I talk about the importance of female only spaces, he then retorts how would you police this? I explain that you couldn't but at the heart of its language, policy etc is being pushed for it to be allowed so we legally can't even challenge it. I explain the type of TW who is spearheading this, the entitled aggressive, highly likely AGP, he just gets defensive. He then asks about midgendering a woman who looks butch, whilst it has happened, it's more probable that much more men have attempted to invade female only spaces. Then because I can't give him numbers, he won't accept it. I try and talk to him about the woman experience and the real risk that goes with that, he's slowly getting to understand this but it's an uphill battle. The other day he stated he wanted to go to a drag show, we ended up having a disagreement because I said no, explaining how I really wouldn't want to go to a show like that which would likely favour the TQ angle whilst taking the piss out of women. There's so much more, some terrible really, which I'm finding harder to overlook.

This is a major issue I'm having with my DH at the moment. He says he understands my side, is 'on my side', yet gets angry when I talk about the issues. I find it confusing. In one breath he says he supports me but in another he says he cares about a minority group. We end up going around in circles. It does worry more. It makes me question why he defends it so much.

Slowly but surely.

My friends are probably best described as 'be kind'.

You drop in conversation the things that hit hardest. Sport. Safeguarding changing rooms. And work from there.

My friends include one who now has a trans identifying son and a BBC employee.

They quietly think it's bollocks in their own way even if they are still on board to a degree. You know they know.

And from there it unravels.

They know my situation. They know I'm not a dick.

I’d like it if the whole of society didn’t get burned to the ground in the process, personally.

I don't think raging against a big nebulous thing called woke is way to stop society being burned to the ground.

Woke is Intersectionalism, Critical Race Theory, the Oppressed Stack, EDI, Transgenderism, IDPOL, Queer Theory, Applied PostModernism, Fat Acceptance, (self diagnosed) Disability Rights et al

Many people lump basic rights for women in with this list which I am assuming you don't want to get rid off along with the above? There are people that believe that things like maternity leave are woke nonsense so in my opinion it is much safer for women to be clear in our language.

Yes.

Woke is Intersectionalism, Critical Race Theory, the Oppressed Stack, EDI, Transgenderism, IDPOL, Queer Theory, Applied PostModernism, Fat Acceptance, (self diagnosed) Disability Rights et al.

And yes, some sub groups of Feminists are definitely woke, however they are the ones who say anyone on Mumsnet is a cisheteronormative terf oppressor.

It’s all the same in that the proponents of it use HR training vehicles and cancel culture to prevent normies saying what they actually think, even when that thing is something that everyone agreed with about 5 years ago, eg ‘Men can’t get pregnant’.

Perhaps the OG ‘woke’ referred to being genuinely pro civil rights for all (or
maybe it was coined by a Black Supremicist, I don’t know, do you?) but it’s been appropriated by corporations, the tech industry, academia and millions of angry teenagers who want to feel superior to their parents and it’s the latter that we are pushing back against, not anti segregationists who were politically active decades before some of us were born.

Anyway, the whole thing will sort itself out eventually because many of the Oppressive Stack categories hold clashing positions (see the recent Footballers with Religious Beliefs refuse to wear promotional LGBTQIA2S++ clothing/accessories debacle.

I’d like it if the whole of society didn’t get burned to the ground in the process, personally.

Sometimes you can be tootling along nicely in a friendship until an issue is brought into sharp focus by some contemporary event - a racist killing, an attack on a hotel housing migrants, a war somewhere in the world, a colleague's pronouns.

I know what you mean @MarieDeGournay but the OP has not said what it is yet. I also don't think that differing opinions on whether or not you should use a colleagues preferred pronouns is really on parr with supporting a racist killing. Do you really feel the same way about them?