Simple question for you, what is woke?
To liberals woke equates with the advencement of and/or equality of people of color.
To the vast majority of conservatives–but not all–woke is a dogwhistle, hell, it’s probably a straight out whistle about the transgender ‘agenda.’
Although the media will probably never report how much influence all the transgender scaremongering had over the election–I imagine it had a material impact.
The entire transgeder issue is the ultimate in idenity politics failure.
Richard Holsworth
My personal definition of Woke recogniing “dominant culture oppression” – Google Search AI Overview
“dominant culture oppression”
…
“Dominant culture oppression” refers to a system where the beliefs, values, and practices of a society’s most powerful group are used to systematically disadvantage and marginalize individuals or groups that do not conform to those norms, essentially creating a power imbalance that leads to oppression against those considered “other” within the society; it’s when the dominant culture’s standards become the societal norm, inadvertently excluding and discriminating against minority groups.
Key points about dominant culture oppression:
Power dynamics:
The dominant culture holds the majority of power and influence, shaping social norms, institutions, and media narratives in a way that benefits their group and potentially disadvantages others.
Implicit bias:
Even unintentional biases within the dominant culture can perpetuate oppression through subtle actions and attitudes.
Examples:
This can manifest in systemic discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, religion, or other identity markers.
Impact on marginalized groups:
Individuals from marginalized groups may experience exclusion, prejudice, microaggressions, and barriers to opportunities due to the dominant culture’s norms.
Troy
This is missing the actual origin of the term:
It comes out of the Black experience: Woke is simply being aware that there is systemic and institutional racism in America.
Or rather, if you’re walking down the street, and you’re the wrong skin color, and you see a police cruiser down the other end, stay woke.
Soredemos
Identity politics is a secular religion. It’s the fervent belief that if we just make enough diversity hires (but diversity of aesthetics and sexuality, never of actual ideas), things will magically get better. Don’t talk about class, just hire more black gay women.
The right, being the right, has a very muddled understanding of any of this (inevitably they’ll start ranting about ‘post-modern cultural marxism’; a completely gibberish collection of terms mashed together that mean exactly nothing), but on this issue they’re directionally correct.
It’s not a dog whistle for just trans issues. Trans stuff just gets a lot of attention because it’s self-evidently the most absurd tip of the identity politics spear. Grown men sharing bathrooms with teenage girls was already legitimately eye-brow raising, and once we get to the phenomenon of mediocre male athletes ‘transitioning’ and curb-stomping actual women athletes is where it becomes utterly absurd (and this is a thing that keeps happening. Just because liberal media doesn’t deign to cover it doesn’t make it not real). Perverse, even, to see it being pushed on the ground of equity and fairness. Everyone instinctively knows that this isn’t fair, and is actually just stupid, but we’re gaslit that if we have any complaints about it, we’re the ones with a problem.
I know of no other dysphoria where the proposed solution is to just bend over to cater to all the demands of the person suffering from it. If someone has a body image problem and is severely anorexic, we don’t encourage them to keep not eating. The actual science is robust on the ‘wait and see’ approach to supposed gender dysphoria. Especially with children, people tend to eventually grow out of it. The ‘believe science!’ crowd finds the actual science politically unacceptable.
The right complains about all forms of real or perceived woke diversity pushing, not just trans. It’s one of their preferred explanations for the clear decline in the US military. The right being the right is incapable of the kind of deeper systemic critique of holistic failure that would actually provide answers, so they reduce it to ‘the army was forced to hire too many girls’.
Jan Wiklund
I would argue that it is a synonym of “prig”. According to wikipedia “a person who shows an inordinately zealous approach to matters of form and propriety”.
At least it is so it works.
Sumi
Camille Paglia offers as good a definition of woke as any I’ve seen: “Today’s liberalism has become grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian: it’s all about reducing individuals to a group identity, defining that group in permanent victim terms, and denying others their democratic right to challenge that group and its ideology.”
Anon
The transgender issue was a liberal football as much as conservative. If liberals had just swerved when conservatives threw trans-rights in front of the bus, it would not have stuck. Instead they embarked on a campaign to no less than redefine gender, and hence, upend popular human consciousness. Imagine what they might have accomplished had they devoted that energy to something similarly dogmatic, like say, market economics… they would have had similar success, but at least learned something.
The conservatives actually have wokeness right, though they don’t know it. ‘Woke’ was a Black American device, used in the spirit of resistance, which was coopted by both the “left” and the right, used by the latter to represent the Democrat propensity to engage in identity politics, and otherwise whinge about how bad they have it, while employed by the “left” for profit, leading to its corporatization and association with yoga pants and astrology. In its original usage it’s meant as a call to vigilance. “Stay woke.” Don’t fall asleep, things go bump in the night. Fitting, actually.
different clue
To suspicious-minded people, Woke is about performative virtue-signalling gestures in favor of equality of people of color rather than the actual pursuit of such actual equality in actuality. To such people, Woke is about moral superiority stuff-strutting, psychological extortion and humiliation rituals, etc. Woke is the kind of thing that corporations pay a lot of money to the Racial Sensitivity Awareness Training-Industrial Complex training companies to train their workforces in Racial Sensitivity Awareness . And White Fragility. And White Privilege. And so forth.
Matt Taibbi wrote as essay about this aspect of woke. It focused on White Fragility/White Awareness trainer and business-owner Robin DiAngelo. ( If I were ever to have found myself in one of her Training Sessions, I like to think I would have had the nerve to tell her: ” You’re not even White. You’re Italian. Who died and made you White?” Her meltdown would be delicious to behold.
( I read recently that you have lost respect for Taibbi. But maybe this is some of the good work he has done from before that happened.)
Anyway, here is the link.
https://www.racket.news/p/on-white-fragility
Perhaps that meaning of Woke deserves a new spelling. Perhaps we should spell it “Woek”.
“Woek” is to woke as groaf is to growth and jawbs are to jobs.
CB
I can’t speak to the states, being from Canada, but for me I think “woke” is just a proxy word for the entire culture war. Trans issues can certainly be a part of it but I’ve heard it bandied about in nearly every context.
Just a week or two ago some guy working at a store went around how parents don’t beat their kids anymore because “everything is so woke”. Definitely heard a lot of it around immigrants too – specifically tolerating like Diwali fireworks.
IMO it’s just a word that means “something progressive I don’t like”. That being said, I am not American and don’t wade into the cesspool of US political discourse too much, so my opinion may be blinkered.
Oakchair
A critical definition of woke on the left side would be the ruling class using increased representation of minorities in order to appear decent, but in actuality it’s a strategy to distract from their deficiencies and atrocious behavior.
Instead of arguing if the military should be going around committing war crimes society is now foaming about what gender is appropriate for soldiers.
Hollywood putting out the the same greed is good, aggressive narcissistic characters, and vapid story and themes, but replacing the white male protagonist with a black female.
Progress in this case is the same shit society only now women, gays and non-white’s can join the ruling class.
responseTwo
I don’t know what ‘woke’ means nor do I care. Terms like this are created by corporate news. Corporate news is sh*t meant to distract Americans from using common sense on their own.
Tc
I don’t think libetals and conservatives have different meanings for wokeness, they just like or dont like it.
It would be nice if either side could be specific and list the trans rights under discussion, one reason this debate infuriates so many. Wokeists seem to insist on every last thing Trans Rights Activists demand., no discussion permitted.
Then (besides the outright homophobes on the right, who conflate gay with trans partly because TRAs deliberately conflate us too) opposed to them are the live and let live folks who are getting sick of the never ending demands to indoctrinate youth with their gender ideology, police our speech with regard to any language seen as gendered, and generally insist that we go to greater and greater lengths to validate their carefully curated yet ultimately frivolous identities.
The triviality and frivolity are the big problems. On the left you have the cowards and the mindless who think, “just humor them, they are suffering, what’s the big deal.” or “This is such nonsense, Im not getting involved,, surely someone will put a stop to the nonsense soon”
Heres the issue:
Sex = gender = biology, nothing more, nothing less = immutable fact of life
Identity = your ideas about yourself
Gender identity = your ideas about yourself in relation to your IDEAS about sex/gender (aka stereotypes)
If you obsess about your identity, thats a sign of mental illness., and a a good way to become crazy if you werent already.
If your identity is based on your sex/gender you are mentally on shaky ground.
If your identity is based on the opposite sex/gender, you are mentally ill.
If you mutilate your genitals or disrupt your endocrine system over your identity, you are self destructive and mentally ill (including men abusing steroids, and women maiming faces with surgery)
You are free to believe your wrong or contradictory or frivolous ideas
You should be free to EXPRESS your masculinity or femininity as you see fit (clothes, make up, hair, name). That doesnt change your sex!
You do not get to redefine sex/gender for the rest of the world,. You do not get to control others’ perceptions of you, the fact that you seek to reflects your mental illness. The pronouns others use to describe you are not “yours” to determine.
We all have a right to freedom of speech (speech = expression). There is no right to have your identity validated by others. If people feel like validating you, that’s their right. If other people dont want to encourage your self destructive mental illness, they are perfectly within their rights.
If you are a biological male who wants the right to use the ladies room, it would no longer BE a ladies’ room if you atre there. So let’s have a debate about abolishing single sex spaces if that is your objective. Otherwise I suggest you send your imaginary identity to an imaginary ladies room while you take your dick to the gents’ toilet.
Tc
“Although the media will probably never report how much influence all the transgender scaremongering had over the election–I imagine it had a material impact.”.
It had no impact on my vote, Self destructive people are gonna self destruct (and destroy those around them. The Ts and Qs will happily bring down LGB rights in their frivolous martyrdom)
I simply refused to vote for any Democrat ever again because of their support for Palestinian genocide. I know very few people told pollsters that the genocide made a difference to their vote. Even so, at some level people must have noted the extraordinary lengths liberal politicians and voters have gone to sacrifice their alleged principals about genocide and war crimes in the name of lesser evils while at the same time insisting there can be no compromise on trans rights, thats the hill they are prepared to die on. As if they have any principals left! And yet I do think the trans agenda played a big part of alienating folks from the left, so ironically it may have been the hill they died on.
Notice how dishonest their tactics are, without exception Debating trans identified men in sports they assure you there are vanishingly few of them, so it just doesn’t even matter, youre a transphope, end of discussion. Or “there’s a study that says not all MtF athletes are inherently physicall advantaged in every sport. QED, youre a transphobe.”
And They think they have won, when in fact they have alienated not only the person they argue with but countless others who witnessed it.
Tc
tl;dr of my last post. Voters may not have cared enough about trans rights or genocide to sway their votes. But they must have noticed how useless and frivolous the Dems are.
The big eye opener for me since Oct 7 was not how useless the Dems are, which Ive known for 50 years, its how useless and vapid the american left is in general
Purple Library Guy
Identity politics and “woke” are not a bad thing, but to me they represent a (centrist) attempt to create equality without dealing with, or ideally acknowledging, the economic bases of inequality–by basically making everyone behave civilly to each other. This can’t really work, can’t really solve the problems in any serious way . . . and while, again, centrist liberals don’t acknowledge this, I think they feel it. So they have to do it harder, and when that doesn’t work, do it harder still. And this leads to some absurdity at times, and sometimes to unfair scapegoating and petty authoritarianism.
This seems to be a tendency with solutions that aren’t capable of solving the problems they claim to solve. So for instance neoliberal free-market ideology was supposed to be good for the economy, make a rising tide that would float all boats, and not only did the tide not rise, not only did it dump most of the boats, it wasn’t even good for the economy by conventional largely meaningless standards of “good economy”. So of course the solution was always that free markets weren’t being done hard enough.
Soon the US is going to have government devoted to solving society’s problems by scapegoating minorities, racial, sexual, maybe religious. And when it doesn’t work, it’s kind of creepy to think what they will do if that pattern holds.
I do think it’s a good idea to establish and push for the basic premise that people should be treated equally across all the usual human rights standards of kind of people–racial, gender, all the stuff. But to make that actually WORK, we need to reduce inequality generally, and keep in mind that racism is deeply intertwined with economic class warfare by the rich. To make the social wage of whiteness unimportant, we need decent ACTUAL wages, and societal benefits, for blacks and whites and everyone. Only when everyone can have a decent life that’s not too absurd does the motive to shove the crappiest, absurdest life onto someone else lose its force. And only when the people who want to “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half” get their money and power taken away, will they stop doing that shit.
mago
Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head . . .
Anyway, I first became of the Woke word maybe eight years ago and at first I thought it meant being aware of what’s happening in general.
Then I caught on that it has slippery politically correct connotations, and I was like, nope, I ain’t woke—not like that anyway.
All the trans thing became a rage after that, and although we were already saddled with the alphabet soup, consonants were added.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I grew up where men were men and sheep were sheep. (It’s an old sardonic western joke.)
My aspiration is to wake up free from toxic influences and conditioning. Ego fixations. Dualistic conceptual thinking. That kind of woke I could embrace.
bruce wilder
It has been nearly 35 years since I was anywhere near a University, which is to say, a ruling-class “school” as the ruling class likes to refer to such elite institutions. Even then some of the notions about race and identity and sexuality were emerging to stir the feckless students as they like to be stirred. I vaguely remember being pretentious about Derrida. I think we knew about Judith Butler though that was still relatively early in
hertheir career. (In case you need to ask, my pronouns are: I, me, mine)I remember an older friend, who had a prized collection of anti-war posters from students at the Harvard School of Design, made for anti-war protest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Naively, I asked something about the idealism of those protesters and he scoffed. They were deeply selfish and narcissistic and self-involved with few exceptions, in his view. He said more, which I suspect I couldn’t appreciate, not really knowing the detailed observations on which it was based. I kind of suppose that 21st century woke expresses the class consciousness of a generation that has grown up in an era in which and economic and social mobility is minimal and there is nostalgia for a time when liberal meant idealistic and good and there were opportunities to be morally brave in a cause of social progress. But, there is no social progress and nothing to be brave about. You can claim the pride of your class identity only by insulting and provoking the deplorables.
I wonder what students today make of the great gift of an actual genocide and the opportunity to be expelled or arrested. Not to mention the kind of hopeless economic precarity that follows from falling back on a gig as a Lyft driver only to be laid off and replaced by a robot car. It has to make arguing over how many genders can fit on the head of a pin pale in comparison.
Mark Pontin
Besides identity politics obviously being designed to distract and deflect from the fact of elites vacuuming up all the wealth of rest of society — as if the ‘hearts and minds’ part of anti-insurgency warfare (a la Vietnam-Malaya-Kenya) were brought back and applied in the homeland — there’s another aspect, too. Thorstein Veblen to the white telephone ….
LUXURY BELIEFS ARE STATUS SYMBOLS: Status Symbols and the Struggle for Distinction
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
Soredemos
@Purple Library Guy
I think this is far too generous a view of identity politics, that it’s fundamentally genuine. If you trace it back to its academic origins, perhaps (naive and stupid, but essentially honest). But its amplification into the political mainstream I suspect was very cynical and deliberate. It’s a great tool for disrupting ascent class unity. Note how this stuff took off after Occupy Wall Street, and was supercharged after the Sanders scares.
KT Chong
Transgenderism — its acceptance, normalization and especially conditioning among children and in schools — is a big part of wokeism. I would say it is the biggest reason why the Right hate woke so much… and why Elon Musk (who used to be a Democrat) became a right-winger. Let me make a particular point on why “transgederism” is problematic, and therefore so is wokeism.
Here is a simple thought exercise: if an underage person can make the life-important decision to make “transition”, then why can’t the kid also make the decision to get into a romantic or sexual relationship with a much older person?
That is a logical question to ask.
Yet, if you asked that question, you would NOT going to get a straight answer from woke people who support transgenderism. You were immediately labeled as a bigot and transphobe, and you got banned from every forums (except Twitter or X.com, thank goodness for Elon Musk.) Basically, you get cancelled and censored.
Another point that has been brought up by a lot of anti-woke YouTubers like ShoeOnHead:
A lot of “trans activists” are also activists of pedophile advocacy groups, (or, as they now want to be called, “MAPs” or Minor-Attracted People.) I am going to name some names here: Noah Berlatsky (journalist), Allyn Walker (social science professor and author), Jeremy Malcolm (author and Prostasia and MAP activist). In fact, pedophile advocacy seems to be their main crusade, and trans activism is something they have gotten into more recently. A whole lot of them has been accused and convicted of sex crimes with children, (i.e., Noah Berlatsky is a registered sex offender,) and a whole of them have maneuvered into positions that can influence culture and moderate cultural discourses, (positions like, authors, journalists, and college professors.)
Really, but why?
It seems obvious to me that those “activists” look at the trans movement as an opportunity and the gateway to pedophilia acceptance. If people accept that an underage person has the mental capacity and right to make decision to transition, then logically people will also have to accept that the same underage person has the capacity and right to get into a relationship with an adult or older person. That is logical consistency. Is there any reason why the former is okay but the later is not?
That is a question that has been on a lot of people’s mind, yet we are not allowed to ask that question or even talk about it.
KT Chong
I understand that “woke” started as something else completely different, but nowadays it is mainly associated with the left push for transgenderism.
KT Chong
Here is Asmongold, who at one time was the highest earner on YouTube, reacting to a Trump’s policy announcement video on transgenderism.
The video is over 30 minutes long. I would recommend watching the whole video, (especially if you support the trans issue, and you are clueless about how everyone else outside that bubble feel or think about this whole trans insanity.) His mains points that are most relevant to the topic here run from 5:00 to 15:30, (about 10 minutes.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XgAZEY13Gs&t=5m0s
Asmongold is a good communicator, and he clearly and succinctly lay out why normal people are put off by the trans issue. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people agree with him , (I certainly do.)
“I hate Trump, but I support this.”
Asmongold used to be fairly liberal, (i.e., he started out as a Bernie supporter;) but in the past four or five years, he has taken a hard right shift over the years — mainly due to the free speech and woke issues, (so have Joe Rogan and Bill Maher.) Free speech and woke are closely related because the woke police, activists and moderators are the ones on the left who are censoring speech to enforce/force social acceptance. The Right censors speech as well, but I can tell you that the woke police has been censoring people at a much greater scale and on a more personal level.
Jorge
You’re all wrong!
Wokeism is an after-effect of the overproduction of elites. We have both actual overproduction and a separate elite overpopulation problem: 1) mild overproduction everywhere, and 2) the extreme constriction of journalism jobs.
Because there are not enough elite jobs for the elite job-seekers, a shibboleth needed to be created that allows believers to spot non-believers and push out of the charmed circle, in this case the ability to hold an elite job. It is a form of guild activity.
The shibboleth is wokeism.
Purple Library Guy
Some of you, people talking about transgender”ism” and imagining that “woke” is an elite phenomenon, haven’t talked to anyone under 30 from a city in a while. The gender stuff is an organic cultural phenomenon whether old people and country religious people like it or not. The kids’ culture (of people now in their 20s) is deeply intertwined with issues of sexual, gender and romantic identity (along with, um, mental disorder identity–who’s on the autism or asperger’s spectrum, has social anxiety, OCD or whatever), and the importance of giving everyone their own equal spot and definition. They’re very anal about it, they want a term and definition for every conceivable mental and sexual state, and I think they’d be better off if they could relax about it all a bit more. It can be annoying how pedantic they get. And it’s all very young-person dramatic, of course.
But nonetheless, the upshot is that nobody is supposed to treat anyone like shit because of what they are. There’s nothing ethically wrong with this youth culture.
I do wonder just why the (middle to upper-middle class, urban to suburban) youth culture is like this. Suddenly there seems to be all this mental illness, all this autism, all this anxiety. And at the same time there seem to be a whole lot of trans kids, and while evidence is clear that this is not a new phenomenon, with examples in cultures around the world, it does seem to be much more widespread all of a sudden. And their culture is about dealing with all of this. But why this vastly increased incidence? Is it because of increased social pressures from a dysfunctional society? Is it because of all the microplastics and pesticide residues and who knows what all pollutants impacting everyone’s hormonal balance? Is it just more people choosing to go that way because they know it’s an option and it’s culturally accepted? All of these things?
I don’t know. But from an ethical perspective, ultimately it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if they’re in some or other sense “right” about what gender they “really” are. Who gives a shit? If you’ve got some girl and she’s in serious distress because she really, really wants to think of herself as a boy and for practical purposes be a boy, and she’ll be a lot happier if you just let her do that . . . then JUST FUCKING LET HER DO THAT. What even makes it your fucking business to judge what gender that person wants to be?
I’m speaking based on personal experience here–one of my kids is transgender and I have been in contact with him and various people he knows, and I have grandkids and pay attention to them. My transgender kid is now in his late 20s; the culture at his high school, the culture around him, is wrapped around establishing this new set of gender, orientation and so forth norms. Far as I can tell, it was the first generation where the kids’ actual cultural norm was it wasn’t cool to bash gays–not just in theory, but in real life, how people get treated in practice. When you get to my grandchildren, they don’t seem to be as interested in the whole thing . . . all the norms that my kid’s generation were working out in tons of detail and trying to establish and unwilling to shut up about, my grandkid’s generation mostly just assume as background.
Because my kid is trans, I’m not going to suffer ignorant bigots gladly on this. Just to be clear, it was obvious that this was a long thought through decision on my kid’s part and going with it made a significant, positive psychological difference. It wasn’t some whim, and as far as I can tell it rarely is. So if you want to foam about trans agendas, consider instead shutting the fuck up and then going and learning something. Maybe talk to a real young person or two.
Ian Welsh
I’m with PLG on this. People don’t make the decision to be trans lightly, I’ve known quite a few. Not even the kids. It isn’t brainwashing.
It also isn’t what “woke” is, or, at least, not what it was meant to be. It didn’t start as a right wing term.
someofparts
Also PLG, check out the vaccines. RFK Jr has interesting things to say about how the profiteering behind them is producing careless and excessive exposure of kids to who knows what. In fact, on the Duran Robert Barnes talked about a case where Pennsylvania is waging lawfare against an Amish farmer because Amish children do not have a host of problems our kids are saddled with, like autism or diabetes, because they are not being poisoned by their food and alleged medicine.
Anonymous
Ian,
Are you talking about people who transitioned after 25 or before? Very few people these days are concerned with what full adults do with their bodies, even if many of them don’t want them in sharing their daughter’s public bathrooms or athletic competitions, or flaunting their sexuality in public (just as they wouldn’t want CIS men and women to be overtly sexual in public).
If it’s under 25, then at least try to understand that adolescents don’t have fixed identities yet. It’s supposed to be a period of exploration and change.
It’s dangerous to assume that gender nonconformity during that period justifies medical intervention with lifelong health consequences and which stunts/steers that identity in a particular direction. There are instances of famous gay men who stated that they were grateful to have found their gay identity before the current trans phase, because now they would be pushed into being trans women rather than become masculine gay men.
You’re also completely ignoring the harmful effect against women of claiming that transwomen *are* women. Even if this was completely well intentioned (there are too many publicized cases of trans sexual predators nowadays to think that’s always the case), it’s still colonizing women’s identities and safe spaces. Transwomen are not women. Transmen are not men. They can take on certain gender markers but they’re not physically the same and they don’t have the same lived history as most men and women. They can accept that and still expect respect and dignity for their life paths, but they have no right to colonize somebody else’s identity and expect no pushback. The fact that the main thrust of trans rights is to colonize womenhood is akin to normalizing Zionist colonization and stealing of Palestinian land and identity. It’s frankly disgusting.
Anonymous
PLG,
Whenever people make a decision, they tend to validate and justify their past actions in light of the change. Nonetheless, there are now many cases of young women who no longer think they’re trans and regret the health consequences of transitioning too early.
Even if your trans child is completely happy with their decision, that’s one anecdote and not an unbiased statistically significant sampling. There are plenty of unhappy transition/detransition stories out there, do they not deserve my attention and sympathy? You’ve taken one path, so there’s no way to know that your child wouldn’t have been just as happy or happier if they choose to be a butch presenting lesbian or mannish presenting straight woman.
You and Ian, both old CIS men, are completely ignoring the harm of forcing transwomen onto womenhood. Why is it okay to force women to give up their identification as mothers and female athletes and sexual assault victims, and share their identity and space with people who have anatomical male bodies? Why does at most 1-2 percent of the population get to dictate the identity and rights for 50 percent of the population, and when that population pushes back they get called transphobic.
Just like linking the Zionist project with Judaism, linking transpeople with the current iteration of invasive, colonizing trans identity, is going to do real long term harm to the people it’s ostensibly protecting and advocating for.
KT Chong
Kids should NOT get to make the decision to change their gender. Kids should NOT get to make the decision to get a gender transition medication, surgery or treatment.
Just as kids should NOT get to make the decision if they want to “fall in love” or have sex with an older adult.
That is common sense.
And kids should NOT be exposed to any transgender ideology, just as kids should NOT be exposed to pedophilia or the “minor-attracted” ideology that is starting to make inroads in academics and journalism.
That is common sense.
You are NOT gonna be able to convince me otherwise. As Asmongold said: if you start talking about how it is okay for children to get puberty blocker and gender reassignment surgery, other people are just gonna look at you like someone who believes in flat Earth, (actually, it’s much worse,) and other people are going to dismiss and ignore everything else you say or believe, (like all other leftist ideas.) That is how transgenderism and woke hurt the Left. The Left should NOT pick transgenderism or woke to be the hill die on.
There are people out there who are actively and aggressively trying to brainwash/convince children into thinking they were born in the wrong bodies or with the wrong sex. Why would anyone do that? … well, for the same reason why Evangelists and Muslims keep bothering other people and trying to convert other people (especially children) to their cults. None of those people are rational, so you can’t explain their behaviors and beliefs.
That kind of people DOES exist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd9w5MKimiM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVJvsZRbBs
That woman is a “licensed family therapist” who have access to and can treat children. That man is a college professor who has no business in teaching young minds.
Not only do they exist, they are dangerous due to their positions and how they can influence other people.
BTW, I had laser eye surgery. I actually wanted to have it much earlier when I was a teenager, but I knew teenagers were not supposed to get eye surgery. When I turned 18, I went to see an eye surgery doctor. He told me that I had to wait until mid-20s (he recommended at least 25) because a person’s nearsightedness and astigmatism were still changing and getting worse at 18. My body including my eyes were not yet done developing at 18, so I had to wait until my vision stabilized. If I got an eyesight corrective surgery before then, the doctor said I could have serious and lifelong eye problems later in my life. So I waited.
So do not tell me that it is okay for a child whose body is still developing that it is okay for him/her to get puberty blocker, cut off his penis, get breast implants, and get a gender reassignment surgery. But that is what the trans cultists are telling people: “You have to let your kid convert early or they will develop a lifelong identity crisis!”
And do not tell me that it is “scaremongering”, or that Democrats has not leaned heavily into this whole transgender and woke lunacy, or that it was a right-wing propaganda and it was not real. That is just dishonest. That is gaslighting and straight-out lying to people who already know what’s going on.
In California, a bill in 2022 called SB 107 was passed by the state legislature and signed into law by Governor Garvin Newsom. It allows the state to terminate the custody of parents if their minor child seeks gender transition treatments and their parents object.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB107
After Biden backed out from the primary, when Kamala Harris made a speech to announce her campaign. I had not made up my mind yet. Then Kamala at the beginning of her speech: “My name is Kamala… and my pronounce is she/her…”
My personal reaction was, “WTF?!?” And that was when I decided, you know what… don’t bother.
We saw it with our own eyes. We heard it with our own ears. And Democrats and liberals are telling us to reject those evidences of our own eyes and years, to believe all their gaslighting and lies.
Ian Welsh
The effects of the moral panic about transgenderism are on full display in comments. I’ve said my piece in the past. It’s a topic that induces hysteria. People really hate when their identities are challenged and little is more clung to than gender identity.
It’s always “protect the kids” when people want to take rights away and interfere with other people’s business.
As for the actual topic, woke is only partially about transvestism, at least as it was originally formulated.
Anyway, enough from me. Continue.
Anonymous
Ian,
I see very little in the comments that could be constructed as moral panic, if you’re talking about the sexual degeneracy angle. Only KT Chong’s comments can be constructed as such, and he’s making a very good point that if young children are allowed to make irreversible changes to their bodies during a phase that society has traditionally considered protected, then it flows naturally that they’re also mature enough to decide their sexual partners, use drug and alcohol, and directly make financial contacts for themselves.
As for identity. Telling that a young woman who worked so hard all their life to excel at a sport and now have to compete against anatomical male bodies. Tell that to a battered woman who have to share her space in a shelter with anatomical male bodies. Tell that to an expectant mother who is now categorized as a birthing body. These identities have serious material consequences and it’s not fair to force those consequences on women just because a very small number of people decided that they’re born in the wrong body.
When woke first came into use, it seems to be about learning about the materialist class relations and real history of US/Canada. But nowadays it is entirely idpol mostly around transgender and a little bit around black/Latino(btw LatinX is mind-blowing idiotic, using a letter not used in Spanish to represent a whole class of predominately Spanish speakers)/immigrant populations. And I’ve lost count of how often Russians and Palestinians are anti-trans is used as argument for why they deserve X. Meanwhile, the Democrat mayors and presidents are building Cop Cities and caging kids at the border and sending munitions to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine and Palestine.
Whatever positive woke might have once had, it’s now fully deserve the negatives of hypocrisy and intrusions into private lives (and liberal humanitarian interventionist abroad) that conservatives associate with it.
Anonymous
I had a brain fart on the Spanish X thing. They do use X, but it’s pronounced differently and used very differently from English use of X. In any case, using LatinX to avoid gendering, when Spanish is a gendered romance language, is utterly moronic.
Purple Library Guy
You can tell it’s a moral panic when people are waxing eloquent about phenomena that pretty much don’t exist. “But what about when young children are getting surgery!!1!1” is a typical example–that shit doesn’t happen, so it’s not an issue. It’s just like all the bizarro-world examples of abortion scenarios anti-abortion people come up with to justify dangerous anti-abortion laws that kill people.
You can also tell it’s a moral panic when suddenly people are caring about shit they never cared about before. Like you get all these dudebros in a tizzy about girls’ sports, desperately afraid that somewhere, a trans kid may be having fun. Pretending to care about girls playing field hockey or whatever when they never gave the tiniest shit about girls playing sports in their lives until suddenly it was an opportunity to bully trans kids.
Like any other medical intervention, people have to talk to doctors and psychiatrists and stuff, and doctors have professional associations with standards and rules. Changing your clothes and asking people to call you something different is easy. Getting hormone therapy is harder and generally doesn’t happen to younger kids . . . except puberty blockers because duh, they’re supposed to BLOCK PUBERTY, which in turn is precisely to give people more time. Doing surgery really just doesn’t happen to young kids for a whole host of ethical and medical reasons. Lots and lots, probably most, trans people don’t do it at all. The notion that it is happening to kids is propaganda and anyone who imagines it is real probably thinks RFK Jr is someone worth paying the tiniest bit of attention to rather than a crazy idiot whose brain was literally eaten by a worm.
I’m sure there are people who have been harmed by transition. There are people who have been harmed by any medical intervention you can imagine–cancer treatment, laser eye surgery, whatever. But if you want to talk about the science, the overall studies are pretty clear–people seem to be for the most part better off. People want to cherry-pick shit about trans in particular because they want to bully trans.
And I notice the overall point behind all the ignorant people yacking on about trans issues is, they don’t want the person in question to be able to decide anything, and they don’t want them to be informed about anything. They want to do the deciding about someone else’s life, and they want to do it without having to actually know jack shit about the issues involved in that person’s life. They want to tell the trans kids what to do, without even bothering to get a clue. People like that can pretend to be benevolent and doing it for the children all they want, but they are in fact bullying assholes and they should shut the fuck up and leave kids alone.
Purple Library Guy
Oh, and about education: Educators teach people things. It’s their job. They spend a lot of time designing curricula. They get together to work on this shit, consult experts, get top people to write educational materials. They learn about the stuff so they can then teach it. When they start teaching kids about gay or trans issues, it’s because they’ve spent ten fucking years investigating the issues, figuring out what kids need to know, crafting materials, and integrating it with other things like their anti-bullying stuff.
And then a bunch of bozos start yammering about “trans agendas” like teachers, the people who volunteered to be underpaid and overworked and shit on just for the opportunity to do some good for children, are some kind of fucking conspiracy run by . . . some of the least powerful people in the world. And these bozos have no idea what’s actually in the curriculum, have spent zero time learning about the issues, are just jerking their knees because they either were already bigots or have zero critical thinking skills and became bigots by absorbing all the most evil bullshit they could find on social media. And then they want to be treated like their opinions deserve respect. Fuck.
Soredemos
@Purple Library Guy
You can say it never happens, but then https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/
It is happening, so I don’t know what to tell you.
Anonymous
PLG,
Of course the conservatives use trans for their own nefarious purposes, but that doesn’t mean the problems don’t exist.
Lots of girls play school sports and given the huge amount of time and money expended on training, traveling, and fees, I can assure you that lots of people care a lot about male bodies disrupting the existing system. With battered women and women’s prisons, it’s because feminists like JK Rowling do deeply care about the topic and didn’t want male bodies in women’s spaces. Children’s innocence and motherhood are things that most people naturally care deeply about, so negating them by talking about sexual identity to prepubescent kids and stop acknowledging women as mothers are going to provoke string reactions. Waiving all these concerns away, rather than trying to engage in a productive dialogue that addresses these concerns is why most people think Woke is a bad word.
Furthermore, saying trans men are men and transwomen are women simply so not reflect the material reality of the situation. Even a perfectly transitioned trans person do not have the biology and life history of a CIS person, and in majority of cases it’s just so obvious. Why can’t they be respected and cared for as they are, rather than wedge into pre-existing gender roles in a manner that is disruptive and painful for half the population?
If you’re sure that hormone therapy is so harmless and that the current protocol is beneficial in most cases, then please link to those studies. I admit that I don’t pay deep attention to this literature but my impression was that in the Swedish case they moved away from strong gender affirmative care based on their clinical results. That a lot of gender affirmative care has been done very sloppily where girls with general emotional issues are quickly pushed into this space rather than given wait and see care. Considering the life long costs and disruptions involved, the onus is on the people demanding early and intrusive gender affirmation regimes to show that they’re far more beneficial than harmful, compared to waiting until the individuals reach full adulthood. If you have that information, I suspect that will be much more persuasive than what you said so far. Swearing and ad hominems don’t strengthen your case.
Ella
Troy told you all where “woke” came from. Basically a shorthand for be awake and aware of how society screws you over, as euphemized by American black people.
Moral panic for real. I see it as usually a bigoted hysteria given a fake moral gloss. The very heart of internet commentary IMO.
mago
I always thought PLG was another long time blogger dude who worked in a Maryland university library—Jeff I think is him name.
Always enjoyed his site and insights.
Anyway, PLG with all his F’s could very well be that guy.
Let’s all come up for air and leave those pipelines alone.
Glau
Christ, am I the only trans person who reads this site? I could go to Newsmaxx and find a more friendly comment section.
I thought that the peeps here would be a bit smarter about being baited into punching down but I guess not.