Help, I don't know if I'm woke or not!
A few days ago, someone asked me if I was woke. I got the impression that this was a question they had posed to a few different people, usually receiving answers either confirming or denying the respondent’s wokeness. To me, the obvious answer is ‘I’m woke about some things, but not about others’. I think the campaigns by The Times and other British newspapers against transgender people is pretty nasty and concerning, but I think that big companies putting LGBT flags everywhere (especially companies known to operate in countries where they definitely don’t put LGBT flags in their branding) is irritating. I think that attempts to be inclusive can be silly and counterproductive, but I’m not someone who cringes when I see ‘she/her’ in a Twitter bio. I think that attempts to restrict speech on university campuses have probably gone too far, but I also think that lots of the reaction against those speech restrictions is over the top and itself a threat to free speech - weirdly, many people who ostensibly support free speech at universities in the UK are also supportive of attempts to ‘defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down’, which often seems to involve silencing left-wing activists. The only consistent view I have on wokeness is that people (including me) talk about it far too much.
These seem like a totally coherent set of beliefs, and it strikes me that the concept of ‘wokeness’ is actually pretty incoherent. If your answer to ‘are you woke?’ is a simple yes or no, I don’t think you can have thought about what the question means very much, or you are a worryingly low entropy thinker (meaning it is particularly easy to predict your opinion on issue X simply by knowing your other opinions). There is good evidence that the concept of ‘wokeness’ is incoherent - one example that always makes me laugh is the Conservative MP Jake berry last year claiming that members of the civil service who opted to stay home during COVID rather than go into the office were ‘woke-ing from home’, something which as far as I can tell has no meaning whatsoever. I hope I’m not being ungenerous to Berry here, I genuinely cannot see any connection between working from home and the concept of wokeness as I understand it - is it that those who work from home tend to be more woke but that there is no causal connection? Is it that not going into the office is somehow inherently woke? Is there just something I’m missing here? I’m really not sure.
I think this is in part why the Conservative attacks on the woke in the UK have mostly fallen flat. For one thing, 56% of Britons say that they don’t know what ‘woke’ even means, with 29% saying they do know what it means. And of those 29%, only 37% consider being ‘woke’ to be a bad thing (compared to 26% who say that they think it’s a good thing). I’ve read a lot about being woke and written a small amount about it, and even I’m not sure what it means. Is supporting Black Lives Matter woke? I don’t have ‘he/him’ in my Twitter bio and probably won’t put it there any time soon - is that a sign I’m part of the anti-woke resistance? I still couldn’t tell you!
I think the emergence of wokeness as such a contentious issue among elites in the UK is partially a result of the declining salience of immigration - since we voted to leave the EU in 2016, the number of people saying that immigration is one of the most important issues has seen a huge decrease, and the salience of material issues like healthcare and tax/spend has increased accordingly (as has the importance of climate change). I’ve pointed out before that this decrease in the salience of immigration and other cultural issues is bad news for the Conservatives, and trying to play up the culture wars seems like a pretty obvious response to this electoral problem. But the problem is that most British people aren’t anti-woke, whereas a huge number of British people are opposed to immigration. I’m just not sure that playing up the culture wars is a winning hand for conservatives.
But there’s a weird thing here - huge numbers of articles talk excessively about being woke, blogs decrying wokeness seem to get loads of hits, British newspapers have become filled with articles about why this or that celebrity is too woke or not woke enough. I’m part of the problem - this blog post and another of mine (of 8 in total so far) have been about being ‘woke’, whereas I haven’t really ventured at all into talking about material issues. The reason for this strong focus on wokeness is, I think, that people who are very engaged with politics have a disproportionately strong interest in cultural and social issues that are not immigration or, in the UK, Brexit.
Take, for instance, transgender issues. They were a major theme during the last Labour conference, there are viral articles about transgender controversies (see: Kathleen Stock, JK Rowling, the Tavistock Clinic over the last few years) literally every week or so, and books about trans issues (‘Trans’ by Helen Joyce, ‘The Transgender Issue’ by Shon Faye, and so on) have become best-selling and widely discussed books. But most of the British public basically doesn’t care about transgender issues - YouGov polls people on what they consider to be the most important issue, and has done for a while. The only two issues relating to ‘wokeness’ even slightly that lots of people care about are Brexit and immigration. Almost nobody ever mentions transgender issues as among the most important - the same applies to ‘wokeness’, it applies to free speech on university campuses, etc.
When asked what they do think on transgender issues, the public are extremely ambivalent, almost to the point of being contradictory. They believe (by a margin of 50% to 27%) that people should be allowed to self-identify as a gender different to the one they were assigned at birth, but they’re opposed to making it easier to legally change gender. They support transgender women being able to use women’s toilets, but only if they have undergone surgery. They don’t think that transgender women ought to be able to participate in women’s sports. Overall, it’s a really mixed bag of responses.
My guess is that the transgender issue is pretty broadly representative of the debates about being woke in general - people take the ‘woke’ view on some things, and the ‘un-woke’ view on others. I know this is true of me, and it’s probably true of you too. It’s why I have so much trouble giving a yes or no answer when asked whether or not I’m woke, and it’s why I think the concept of ‘wokeness’ is so incoherent as to be almost meaningless. If you want to tell me whether I’m woke or not, that would be appreciated. But until then, I’m just going try and talk less about being woke and just think about specific issues individually.
Steelmanning "only post-ops allowed in the ladies' room" here. Self-identification is reversible and cannot be gate-kept. Yes, the large majority of males would find it ridiculous and humiliating to self-identify as a woman for some insincere reason; but then the *vast* majority of males are not transgender, so under a regime of self-identification, it is actually plausible that the tiny minority of cisgender males who are faking it could end up amounting to a fairly large proportion of the also tiny minority that is the overall population of self-identified transwomen.
(Note that in the specific case of women's prisons the overwhelmingly disproportionate maleness of offenders means that *this has probably already happened;* if I had to be quantitative, I would guess that probably *most* prisoners self-identifying as transwomen are faking it for better treatment. Ofc in practice this is admixed with a lot of general mental illness and bizarre behavior, they're not criminal masterminds, but they're sound-minded enough to know what damn gender they are and why they want to be in a womens' prison.)
Getting your dick and balls cut off and taking a bunch of estrogen, on the other hand, is not something a non-transwoman would ever do unless they were totally insane, which conveniently is something the doctors have to check for before they cut. Also conveniently, the surgery actually directly nullifies, at least in part, the physical ability to even perform one of the main crimes we're worried about here. So we can safely say that essentially nobody who gets the surgery is consciously faking their gender identity, it doesn't happen.
Thus:
* *Post-op* transwomen pose roughly the same risks as *average* males. Relative to biological females, yes their bodies are still stronger and their brains still *much* more predisposed to criminality and overt aggression, but there's no *special* reason to worry about them that wouldn't apply to any male.
* Contrarily, *self-identified* transwomen consist *in substantial portion* of men seeking to gain access to female spaces so as to gratify urges or compulsions, or to obtain preferential treatment. Therefore it is justified to treat them as a particularly dangerous population.
Okay, that's the steelman. I actually think it's an an extremely strong argument for prisons, where the gender disproportion in population is enormous, the benefits of moving from a mens' to a womens' prisons are enormous, and the population in question consists of people who are specifically *supposed* to have fewer rights. As far as I'm concerned, it's dispositive: biologically male prisoners must not be transferred to womens' prisons unless they can meet a relatively high and invasive standard of scrutiny, despite the harms this will cause legitimate transwomen.
But bathrooms are at the opposite end of the spectrum. Gender segregation in bathrooms is 99% taboo and 1% security measure. The door isn't actually guarded! If you want to follow someone into a bathroom and assault them, you might as well wear a dress or a T-shirt reading "I AM A CIS MALE RAPIST,", because the scenario is exactly identical after the first three seconds. Faking transwoman status in washrooms only assists in crimes that are so subtle that they're plausibly deniable, like leering at women in ways that are objectively discomforting but difficult to prove without looking like a transphobic Karen, or quietly rubbing one out in a stall to the sound of women peeing, or whatever. That shit is still terrible and I wish women didn't have to deal with it, but it's not obvious that it outweights the shit that transwomen have to deal with in mens' washrooms. Especially when we consider specifically liberal principles like "innocent until proven guilty" and "treat individuals individually, not as representatives of groups," which are much more operative here. So I still think the steelman probably fails, let folks use the bathroom they want unless there's individual, serious cause for suspicion.
And then in between you have womens' shelters, radical feminist "spaces", awards and scholarships meant to bring women into male-dominated fields, and so on. And honestly I have no idea where to come down on that beyond:
* It's complicated.
* It will require compromise and consensus-building, people will be arguing about it for a long time, and at no time will the equilibrium fully satisfy anybody.
* Simplistically denouncing those who differ about it as transphobes or patriarchal oppressors or after our children or whatever is ridiculous, it shouldn't work, and it *won't* work outside of hyperpartisan spaces.