For those who have kids at university - wokedom

[Teal99]

I have no kids, never went to uni - but where I work there are of young graduates who all seem to be totally on board with the trans woman is a woman concept, using pronouns and all manner of wokedom. They all seem like one group who all say the same things, think the same way....

Just for curiosity, if you have children at uni, or just graduated - are there people in this age group who think differently, even if they don't publicly express to their peers/friends that they don't agree with them? I think there must be some individual thought, which must be hard if they want to fit in/not be ostracised.

I think I just want a bit of hope that this period of madness will pass by and people will start to push back against a lot of wokedom. Or is the toothpaste too far out of the tube?

@StudentHelp

21, current student, here. I expressed views against the trans movement due to being a SA survivor and being worried about my safety in sex segregated spaces and I was threatened with being reported to the professional body i will be working for when I graduate.

I’ve had to move out of my university house and pay rent on 2 houses which is crippling me as we keep arguing over it and I don’t want to be kicked out of uni.

What you've described is discrimination based on wrong think. Your future livelihood and housing are impacted. I'm incredibly angry on your behalf.

Student help - who threatened to report you? Was it your house mates or someone more official? It's horrendous. Dephinium20 is right.

The way this is working is that ostracisation and loss of friendships is being used as a tool to enforce a particular set of beliefs. It's horrible how authoritarian and fixed so many young people are on this issue.

There was a radical feminist / gender critical group for students trying to get off the ground, and there are academics in a large number of fields. I might be able to let you know who has spoken up in a specific discipline as I have been keeping an eye on academia.

[quote RedtreesRedtrees]@apollo440 last time I commented against the accepted GC viewpoint I was amazed how many DMs I received from other Mumsnetters who also disagree with the GC perspective but are too fearful to post themselves. I guess it’s not just TRAs who are bullies 🤷‍♀️[/quote]
Ah, the good old "lurkers support me in email". First spotted in USENET.

Divoc2020
He is sharing a house with a transwoman next year (just the two of them, as it is a placement year).
I asked him if he was in a relationship with her and he replied, "No, of course not!"
When I asked why he'd added the "of course not" he stomped off.

This did make me laugh, probably inappropriately but I've been on the .

I feel you can take hope that the experience of house sharing will probably open his eyes to reality. You'll be lucky if he admits it though.

@FannyCann

Divoc2020 He is sharing a house with a transwoman next year (just the two of them, as it is a placement year). I asked him if he was in a relationship with her and he replied, "No, of course not!" When I asked why he'd added the "of course not" he stomped off.

This did make me laugh, probably inappropriately but I've been on the .

I feel you can take hope that the experience of house sharing will probably open his eyes to reality. You'll be lucky if he admits it though.

Out of interest what reality do you mean?

@queenofknives

I work with young people and my experience is that, generally speaking, the more middle class they are, the more likely they are to be woke. The ordinary working class young people I work with tend to think it's all nonsense. They also tend to be way more vulnerable in lots of ways. They will tell me about rapes and assaults happening in the mixed sex loos at their schools, and local TW who hit and bully women in the nightclubs they go to. Often the care-experienced young people will have many stories of male abuse and see TW as simply wanting to get access to vulnerable girls.

Having said that, they all tend to have a huge amount of compassion for anyone they see as genuinely dysphoric. But they know that people can't change sex.

It's the young people from middle class 'good' homes who have never really experienced "the system" or any kind of disadvantage who are the woke - and they can also tend to be bullies and thought-police. It really does seem to divide along class lines in my experience.

I've heard a variation on this from teachers. MC areas? Lots of ROGD. WC areas? Much less.

Haven't read the whole thread, but there do seem to be quite a few posters (a pattern?) whose dcs in their late teens or 20s are fully signed up to TWAW, but whose younger dcs in their earlier teens are not.

That's certainly the situation in my family - ds, 14, thinks it's all a load of bobbins and is firmly opposed to any ideology that tries to tell him that as a man he can't wear pink/be sensitive etc.

Whereas my late teens/early 20s dds are much more woke - my eldest more out of lack of knowledge than anything. When I started giving her examples of why I was GC, she wanted to see the evidence but was prepared to concede I might be right. dd2, though, actually bursts into tears if I even try to discuss it, she is so woke! So we don't discuss it.

I do wonder though, if the younger generation are less woke than those of university age? Maybe because when those now at uni were growing up, most of us parents had not realised the danger of the trans ideology so didn't discuss the issue with them before it was too late and they were fed wokeness at school, on social media, etc.

Certainly, with my youngest, I've made sure to talk to him about the issues with wokeness since he was 10 or younger, and as a result, he has no truck with it at all.

Maybe the fightback will start at home?

My DD, not long out of uni, was the one who told me what was going on about 5 years ago. I was completely clueless to what was going on. She opened my eyes and basically spelled out her version of JKR's kind position years before JKR knew it: all people should be free to dress as they like, love who they like, live work and be happy, without feeling they are wrong in themselves and have to alter their bodies to conform to some gender ideal. Feminine men and masculine women should not feel uncomfortable in their skin. But they are still men, and women. A man in glitter and make-up used the men's loo in the 1980's, what has changed?

I've watched The Old Grey Whistle Test recently. The Alice Cooper Band literally have women's clothes on, long curled hair and makeup.

I do wonder what this generation think they have discovered. They've been conned.

“I support unisex bathrooms as long as they are self contained cubicles attached to main corridors and men cannot enter and upskirt me or abuse me and get away with it under the guise of being a woman” and I was told I was lumping in trans people with criminals, that trans people have rights and I was disgusting.

That's ridiculous. Quite apart from anything else, do they think every male using a unisex toilet will be trans?

my dd was crying over piers Morgan saying he identifies as a penguin or something..

I'm sorry your DD was upset by Piers' trolling the woke but I did laugh at this

Someone on Twitter said that her two 20-something daughters had been sobbing about JKR's essay all morning. I mean...come on.

I'm sure there were others, but if it's the one which was much talked about that person is an MTF TRA. The same one that backed out ostentatiously of signing that Harper's letter because JK has also signed it.

Young people are growing less tolerant? That's horrific. How sad.

Yes, Skyliner. We should probably ask some searching questions about why that is.

my dd was crying over piers Morgan saying he identifies as a penguin or something..

I'm sorry your DD was upset by Piers' trolling the woke but I did laugh at this

Me too. He actually identified as a two-spirit penguin, not just any ol penguin. He is writing a book on wokedom and it's out in Oct. I am not a fan of his, but he writes very clearly and has a large reach. I think this is the start of the mainstream fight back.

He is an unlikely ally, ditto Rod Liddle.
As I keep telling dd, you cant put most people in "good" and "bad" boxes...

My DD is 23 finishing MA. This is the one thing we don't discuss because I can lose any friend but her.

She has trans friends (sweet gay boys who want to be girls) and thinks people shouldn't be mean to them, which they shouldn't.

However I am noticing she is starting to think outside the woke box, to accept you can disagree with people and still get on, that you have to be a bit tough and not too snowflakey. So I'm hopeful she will come to me and announce she still love JKR very soon!

I haven't read the full thread either. My 21 year old ds is totally gc. He claims it's a small minority who are twaw and that twitter is very much not the be all and all that some think; and not representative. He also thinks that people his age and younger are rebelling against the woke bollocks of those in their later 20s. (I paraphrase)

My 25 dd, who is autistic, is gc but hates confrontation and worries that most people her age are twaw; and so can't express her opinions.

Both went to university.

However, I'm worried that the younger generation, who will attend university in the next few years, will have been stonewalled at school etc and that debate and free speech will be banned at university. Which is disgusting, outrageous and the total opposite of what university is meant to be about.

@Manderleyagain

Other students threatened to report me but my subject (medical based!) seems to wholly support trans people and movement towards being inclusive of ‘their needs’ no matter what.

My older dd is at uni and is gender critical and we have lots of great discussions at home, she keeps her mouth shut amongst her peers though. 16 year old dd however is a lost cause, she won't discuss it at all but i know she considers us transphobic. I can only hope that she grows out of it.

Another thing that winds me up is the university made a huge fuss of adding black and brown stripes to their pride flag.

I’m not trying to be chronically offended on other people’s behalf but I really think a separate day/week/month should be allocated at the university to tackle racism instead of lumping it in with LGBT. I am a white woman so my opinion may be completely off and those affected may not mind but it left a bad taste in my mouth and unfortunately I don’t know anyone of an ethnic minority to ask as the representation is poor.

I consider racism to be a much more important and real issue than the trans movement and yet it always seems to come second to pride. I consider pride, on the whole, to be very important too but the issues are different, I believe.

Full wokery has not yet hit Australia, one of the times I am quite glad to be a bit “backward”. 21yo DS at Uni thinks it’s nonsense. 17yo DD seems to have more discussion about it at school but the idea that you can’t call someone just a man or woman would be laughed out of our house.

I am horrified to read the experience of the student being harassed 😐

When I was at uni it was bubbling under the surface, but thankfully decisions that were made were balanced and reasonable. For example, a third space toilet opened, with little fanfare, and not at the expense on reducing male or female loos. Now I expect it would be a huge deal, smashing other people's spaces along the way, but weirdly no one objected to it at all, people saw it as a good thing if others were then more comfortable.

Another thing that winds me up is the university made a huge fuss of adding black and brown stripes to their pride flag

It's clear piggy-backing on a fashionable cause. Using their cause and black people as a tool. Anti-racism campaigns are supposed to centre the voices of ethnic minorities and their experiences of racism, whatever their political views on other subjects. That includes people who are GC, people who are very conservative, and even people who are outright homophobic! Sticking brown and black stripes on the pride flag says, "we'll stand against racism for you if you're the right kind of black person who toes our party line".

unfortunately I don’t know anyone of an ethnic minority to ask as the representation is poor.

It doesn't surprise me that the representation is poor. With the flag thing, the people in change of the decision have shown they subconsciously think of the black community behind black lives matter as an amorphous blob, all with very similar, suitably LGBT accepting views. That attitude will bleed through elsewhere and make it an unattractive destination for prospective students from ethnic minority backgrounds.

My children, late twenties/early thirties, all went to state school followed by university. None of them believe in the woke trans women are real women philosophy. They are all down to earth and working in responsible jobs where their colleagues of the same age seem to be of similar belief. I do think that many young people, particularly from more sheltered backgrounds are very naive about gender politics and don’t seem to have a lot of real life experience.

I know a handful of recent graduates who think it's a load of nonsense.