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

[Taytoface]

Long read in the guardian today, reflecting on the reasons why there has been backlash to trans rights, climate and racial activism.

Lots of interesting stuff in there, but some shocking blind spots. At no point does the journalist recognize that in contrast to previous civil rights movements, TRAs want extra rights, such as the right to change officially recorded information on documents such as passports. She thinks opposing this is shocking. Call me an old bigot, but the purpose of a passport is to help others confirm your identity, not as a tool for self validation.

Also, no recognition that the harm to children has been downplayed, or the obvious unfairness of males competing against women. I could go on, but you all know the drill.

Oh, and some insight into changing tactics from Stonewall

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/10/how-does-woke-start-winning-again

First bit of introspection I have seen. Also the start of calling out how having middle class blue haired wankers, spouting gender studies bollocks just doesn't appeal to anyone. Who knew?

Yes some missed points (Gaby Hinsliff has always been a fence-sitter on sex/gender IIRC, though started writing about it more than a decade ago and is very familiar with the debate).

But an interesting article - great to reference Luke Tryl's excellent work and Robert Wintemute. It's in the Guardian and reads like it's deliberately resisting the temptation to say "JSO are terrible idiots" in favour of letting the reader do some thinking.

She still doesn’t get it

A campaign for self-ID initially enjoying cross-party support had somehow ended not just in defeat but in reverse, with trans people losing hard-won access (at least on the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s interpretation of the ruling) to everything from grassroots sport to public toilets.

that hard won access as she calls it was illegal!! They lost because the law was being broken whereas hinscliff makes it sound it was becatse women were just being big meanies

That fact is being glossed over again and again. Mainstream media outlets like the BBC (and even some who are supposedly onside for women) have a lot to answer for in not presenting this accurately for what it was.

James Marriott in the Times also has a comment about woke and the role social media plays in bringing it down:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/b8351e47-77db-4515-bb2f-a287e56d2f86?shareToken=d18c5fd626a6e4deb0d32b20823f4f47

Hard-won access?

They infiltrated the corridors of power and then got everything they asked for, that actual women had fought hard for.

It looked pretty fucking easy to me. So easy that no-one even saw it happening.

Hard won?!!! Do FO. Stolen or appropriated ‘rights’ actually represents the truth. No emphasis about the actual consequences for women of being battered by men in sports or having a dick and balls swinging away in their changing rooms.

And how did they steal these ‘rights’? They were enabled by terminally leftwing woke bureaucrats, politicians and media (namely themselves). Some nerve in that article.

I admit I've only skimmed that article, mainly to see if Hinsliff acknowledges any part played by her own comments about the Cologne attacks. Yes it was a long time ago but I never felt the same about the Guardian again after her reference to young women and their expensive smartphones. But it looks as if that would have taken introspection too far for her own comfort.

That’s a much more sensible & balanced take if The Guardian really want to understand what went wrong ( if of course you regard as women having actual rights as ‘wrong’)

The problem is that The Guardian doesn't want to talk about what actually went wrong. They're just putting out feelers to work out how they can shift their position into something more palatable with it attracting as little attention as possible.

I am deliberately commenting before reading the article but I will read it afterwards.

I think the whole issue is overreach.
Not just the trans issue which is clearly demanding a suspension of reality but also with racial and climate issues, both of which I support.

The police taking the knee, people celebrating vandalism of historical statues they don’t agree with , police again donning pride colours, vandalising works of art to protest climate change, taking over stations for Palestine, blocking roads for just stop oil.

All these things achieve the opposite of what was intended.

Plus as a pp posters mentions, blue haired privileged twenty-something london centric twats lecturing the rest of us is guaranteed to set teeth on edge.

Also the constant pushing of the “message” in much loved telly shows has pissed of huge sections of society who want to enjoy their programme of choice without propaganda to educate us out of “wrong think”.

That is a cynical, but quite plausible take on this. Flying kites, as it were…

I think “The Pool” was no more fairly soon after so I don’t think the article is available but this gives you an idea of how Gaby Hinsliff thought the self ID debate was going at the time. The most enraging line is the title of my thread. Also Hinsliff isn’t a particularly young woman.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3391208-it-may-be-a-while-before-older-women-stop-feeling-erased?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

The analysis of the SC ruling is annoying and incorrect.

"with trans people losing hard-won access (at least on the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s interpretation of the ruling) to everything from grassroots sport to public toilets."

The SC ruling affirmed that it is unlawful to discriminate against people who have the PC of gender reassignment, so they should not be excluded from public toilets or sport. They can also make a case that sex segregation is discriminatory (as women have done). The SC were not taking a stand on 'woke'. They were just confirming the law.

Nobody can claim to be the opposite sex within the definitions of equality law, because that would render the PC of sex meaningless. The problem here is not the law, but the fact that it is impossible to change sex.

However, the section on Robert Wintemute is interesting. It's just not clear whether anything is learned from it.

I think the fundamental problem with 'woke' is that it often looks an awful lot like regressive people protecting their privilege.

"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'.

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.

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

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.

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.

Perhaps Layla Moran can contact her telepathically.

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.

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+

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.

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

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.

...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!