Guardian dissection of how woke went wrong. Close but no banana

God, this is so true.

Not only is the media at fault. Our government is also at this. From my MP re amendments to the Sex and the Data (Use and Access Bill):

'The purpose of this Bill is to establish a statutory footing for digital verification services, enabling the use of trusted digital identities, where people can digitally present their information. New Clause 21 would have required public bodies to record sex data as biological sex, where such data is collected.

The proposed amendment was voted down on in the House of Commons on 7 May. A motion disagreeing with this was passed in the House of Lords but then rejected in a subsequent House of Commons vote.

The government has accepted the recent Supreme Court judgement but wants to take time to ensure it is worked through carefully and sensitively, considering the specific and particular requirements of public authorities.'

I fail to see why anyone would record anything but biological sex as it is the only sort of sex there is. A dreadful safeguarding issue with this Bill re children as wll as allowing self-ID by the back door. But MPs don't/won't see it.

Got around to reading the article. I reckon it's 95% good still right?

I liked quite a bit of this article simply because it helped me articulate quite how irritated I am by being lectured by privileged people on how progressive politics should work. I speak as a white, middle class professional who has always seen themselves as progressive, but the hectoring and self-righteousness from a smallish number of people with the right 'suite of beliefs' has gradually alienated ME and I can only therefore imagine how irritating it is for people who started off feeling more marginalised than I did.

I rolled my eyes thoroughly for example at a recent local Pride movement which created a new 'trans-centred, Pro-Palestinian' pride. While I sympathise with those who find the current Pride too corporate for example, with some sponsorship from dubious organisations, why bring in Palestine? Why is anti-corporate necessarily linked to 'trans-centring' the event when big corporations historically have been driving trans-positive initiatives? How can people work out how to be progressively ideologically 'pure' or be told off?

And when you have constructed an identity based on such beliefs and advertised them publicly then you have a lot to lose

Worse than that - when you have supported the mutilation of your children in the pursuance of this ideology, there really is no going back.

Yes, it is faith based. When you lose your faith or become disillusioned you end up questioning everything and people resist the inecurity that comes with that.
And when you have constructed an identity based on such beliefs and advertised them publicly then you have a lot to lose.

Many of us here have been through that in recent years, as we saw how the Labour party and the Left, in general, treated women who understood the reality of sex and wanted to protect women's sex based rights. Once you've seen, you cannot unsee...and you begin to question every single article of faith you previous held.

Outlandish movements and ideas utilise existing groups as Trojan horses and sneak in on their goodwill and on the public's desire to be 'progressive' and 'on the right side of history'.

People like to imagine that history runs in a straight line, culminating at 'equality' and general 'all round loveliness'...but it doesn't. It's a substitute religious belief for secular society - hence no real logic or analysis , only faith.

There’s still the implication that these people were ahead of the curve in some way. Not that they were just wrong. Oh and, um, sorry.

As a previous poster said, GH's article on Cologne NYE made me disregard whatever she has to say. On anything.

The media lecturing from people who often, frankly, seem quite shallow, has done them no favours.

And I think you are right about the over-reach. Much of it simply seems unfair on the face of it. Men competing in women's sports, giving someone a job (denying someone else a job) because or his or her race.

The tarring of people as backward for making what are clearly reasonable points. Climate change suffered from this, people asking about how certain things would actually work (say, electric cars and mining issues) was seen as a declaration that they hated nature.

Gosh, so Gabby worded the sentence in a way that made it look like there is far more support for changing sex on documents than there really is?

how incredibly ironic

It's not quite that bad, Molluscs: in the 2023 survey the article refers to, 24% agreed with changing birth certificates, 50% disagreed, and 26% were undecided.

These days, he [Robert Wintermute] argues that perhaps there shouldn’t even be a right to legally change sex on birth certificates and passports. Perhaps you consider this view extreme enough to justify his attempted cancellation, but it is one shared by a startling 50% of the British public,

startling eh? I come at it from the other side Gabby. 50% of the population thinks you should be able to LARP as a member of the opposite sex on official documents? Crikey

...an exuberant crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters yanked this statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth near Bristol harbour and rolled it triumphantly into the water....
Then they went home and enjoyed themselves, watching porn showing trafficked and degraded women and to this day have no idea what fucking hypocrites they are!

It wasn't even " hard won".

I'd love a public enqiiryninto why it wss so EASY for do many public instititions and political parties to be so captured, so quickly, by a batzhit ideology.

Yes agree with all of that. To be told that anyone questioning an intact male rapist being sent to a women’s prison is a bigot is off the scale bonkers

They (wokeists) shot themselves in the foot with "it's hate if I perceive it as hate".
If you abandon the standard of a reasonable person's interpretation of events and allow a particular individual to be simultaneously accuser and judge, you set up that person to be resented, along with anyone who supports them.
If you apply this principle to a whole group of people, based on identity, you create wariness and resentment even where there was no prior prejudice against the group. If there was prejudice, it makes it worse.

The bit she is missing is that if someone comes from a position of ‘I have some questions about this’, the options are -

No-one answers and they remain unsure
No-one answers and they realize that this is because there are no answers (this is part of my peaking story)
Someone answers in support of TQ+ and it is utter nonsense
Someone answers in support of GC and it makes perfect sense

The whole point of TQ+ ideology, and woke more generally, is that it does not makes sense unless you have a very particular kind of ultra be-kind brain, combined with an irrational desire to see kindness enforced by authoritarianism, and no sense that freedom of speech or belief matters, or that different people can both be reasonable whilst holding different views. The moment someone asks questions they are on a one way path to anti-woke, anti-TQ+

I finally steeled myself to read the article. This sentence stood out for me:

“There’s a group of people who come from a position of ‘I have some questions about this’, but everyone shouts at them, and they become radicalised the other way.”

This is exactly how I have gone over the Trans Women are Women issue. I now feel little sympathy with them; I am more inclined to make the assumption that they are as likely to perverts looking for sexual gratification than as men who are deeply unhappy with their bodies.

Perhaps Layla Moran can contact her telepathically.

I’m sure Hinsliff would disagree with me on trans “rights” but I thought the analysis of the article was pretty spot on. Patronizing self-righteousness and refusal to have respectful debate is killing the left.

Thing is, changing that will have different results for different topics. I do agree that listening to and empowering people will help tackle climate change (though we’re probably too late). Whereas the same approach will finally put this trans bs to bed since it is fundamentally illogical, offensive and misogynistic.

I think Gaby knows this too, and that’s why she refers to hard-won accesses of trans people, rather than hard-won rights.

100%. I do not support racism, even if it is anti-white racism designed to right historic wrongs. I support much more action on climate change, but Greta and JSO make me want to buy a car with a massive engine and leave it on idle as much as I can.

Perhaps someone should contact her on BlueSky and tell her of this analysis...

Woke is the compelling of a certain and fixed set of beliefs onto the proles. It is authoritarian. The driver is that those pushing this feel themselves morally superior to the proles and hold them in contempt. The best the proles can hope for is to be tolerated if they keep their mouths shut except to say "you're absolutely right".

Unsurprisingly, the way this plays out is that the moral superior tend to be in a higher class than the proles. Even more unsurprisingly, as time passes the proles really begin to hate this game.

It wouldn't be so bad if the certain and fixed set of beliefs made sense but some of them don't and also can be actively harmful.

"His polling shows that Progressive Activists overestimate by a factor of two to three how much others agree with their core beliefs, from abolishing the monarchy to letting children change gender."

This is a massive, massive blindspot, and it almost makes me think that a chip has been inserted into people's brains.

There is a logical left wing argument to explain why the monarchy should be abolished.

On the other hand 'letting children change gender' means not 'letting children be gender non-conforming' but 're-enforcing social expectations of how males and females should behave, and only allowing children to operate within those boundaries, to the extent of encouraging irreversible and sterilising medical treatment if they don't conform'.