The interesting thing about the class element is that increased university access due to New Labour policy (and the degree-ification of things like nursing, policing and social work) means old definitions of class aren’t as useful and it’s now a pretty messy division.
You can see this in who is on what I am (semi jokingly!) going to call Team Posie and The Domesticated Zombies and Team Jane and The Head Girls (or TeamDomZom and TeamHeadGirls for short).
Calling Team Jane and the Head Girls the ‘academics’ ‘socialists’ ‘left wing’ or ‘middle class’ GC feminists doesn’t really work, because there are plenty of academics, socialists, middle class and left wing women on Team Posie and the Domesticated Zombies too.
Loads of us who would seem like a natural fit for TeamHeadGirls are TeamDomZom all the way.
Not because we are too stupid to understand the theory, not because we haven’t been to university, not because we’re rightwingers or racists or whatever stupid shit that gets thrown at us.
But because we see the academic and political theory for what it is, which is ideas, concepts, some highfalutin thought experiments that mostly started with a bunch of Dead European Philosophers.
Interesting theories to think about, sure, especially in relation to arts criticism, but often utterly useless in real world scenarios.
I love a bit of PoMo in the Fine Arts, me, but I can see that in Social Work, in Healthcare, in Construction, in Industry, in Primary and Secondary Education PoMo is not just useless, it’s destructive.
Even lots of the second wave Feminist Theory is utterly useless in the real world and perhaps the academic theory always was a bit useless, compared the activism of the period? The bits of theory that did have material value have been cannibalised for implementation (eg Female Separatism is not practical at all times for all women but it’s a really important element of DV shelters and Rape Crisis devices) nonetheless, loads of it is just thought experiments. Perhaps important thought experiments of the time but not necessary to read now.
Implementing interesting academic theories Willy-Nilly in the real world is Roads to Hell Paved with Good Intentions situation.
TeamDomZom are the people who understand this, some of whom are themselves distinguished academics.
TeamHeadGirl are the people who aren’t willing or able to accept that their pet academic or political theories might not be the solution to real world problems.
Some of them are from working class families and have slogged their guts out to get a fancy university education. They might not have a pot to piss in terms of savings or home ownership but they’ve invested a lot of time and money in their education. They could be single mums on benefits or be working day jobs that they could’ve got without wasting a single day, let alone accruing thirty grand plus of student debt.
Admitting that they worked their arses off for something that might actually just be smoke and mirrors is going to be almost as hard for them as it is for the mums of transitioned kiddies to admit that actually, if they’d not gone all in as SJW Hero Mummy their kids might have avoided becoming medical patients for life.
And if you can’t face up to the knowledge that you’ve invested an awful lot of yourself in something that wasn’t really worthwhile, what better way to avoid that reckoning than to go forth and insist that everyone else recognise How Very Important your Thing is, and demand loads of other people also do your Thing with you as their guiding expert?
There are loads of extremely clever, highly educated women (some Professors) who are absolutely able to say, ‘I love this niche intellectual thing I studied but I realise it doesn’t actually do shit, ideas aren’t action’ and that puts them on TeamDomZom, even if they’ve never had a heterosexual relationship or wiped another person’s arse in their lives.
EDI is the same sorts of academic ideas and theories that TeamHeadGirl have bought into being imposed onto normies by people who either learned them first hand at uni or secondhand via their uni educated children or having been ‘trained’ in them by external workplace schemes like Stonewall.
EDI interventions don’t actually work very well, in fact, sometimes they backfire spectacularly (as seen in the workplaces that become more racially divided after a Robin D’Angelo style antiracism training session) but there are enough TeamHeadGirl types about that they will not give up on the theories and keep trying to implement them in slightly different ways.
The only difference between TeamHeadGirl and The GeneralEDIBorg is that TeamHeadGirl have just about managed to cling on to enough Second Wave Feminist Theory that they haven’t bought into Queer Theory.
The rest of us have kept the bits of Second Wave Theory that have proved useful to women in the real world and jettisoned the bonkers bits (some of which gets pretty close to transhumanism!)
Same with Lesbian and Gay rights, sensible gays have kept the useful bits of Queer Theory (normalisation of homosexuality leading to same sex marriage) and jettisoned the bonkers bits (a relentless drive to try and normalise stuff that is not-normal because it’s actually harmful to society, especially children). The sensible gays are now decried as ‘homonormative’ and ‘rightwing’, just as the sensible feminists are now described as ‘bio essentialists’ and ‘rightwing’ and the black people who promote a MLK route towards race equality and reject CRT style ‘equity’ are called ‘Uncle Toms’ and ‘rightwing’
Being ’Progressive’ is useless if it progresses humanity off a cliff edge.
Most people instinctively understand this, unless they’ve either completely bought into a theory or have had a theory enforced on them in such a way that they are prevented from thinking it all the way through to the end (eg by being shouted down and/or punished if they ask inconvenient questions, or by witnessing punishment enacted on others, see that teenage boy who was kicked out of school for questioning his teacher’s assertions re: 100 genders)
At work, people are dissuaded from thinking through a bullshit EDI theory by fear of job loss.
To put this back on topic, both Peter and Winston lost their jobs because they wouldn’t nod along with the fashionable theories of the day, enforced by the twittermob.
Posie didn’t have a job to lose (you can’t get fired from being a mother!) which is partly why the mob has to resort to violence to stop her speaking.
Being an actual woman is an additional red rag to the Gender Branch of the EDI mob.