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Some time ago, I posted about how it feels like wokeism is getting less popular. I didn't have much to back it up, except some observations about a popular techie watering hole called HackerNews, so the whole exercise left me with more questions than answers.
Well, today I chanced upon "The Great Awokening Is Winding Down" by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist from Columbia University that focuses on "how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests." (With that broad a scope of inquiry, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a fellow mottizen). Al-Gharbi puts together a compelling story: there are fewer woke-related cancellation events, fewer research papers are published related to woke ideology, newspapers are writing less often about race/racism/racists, and companies--including media companies--are not only pushing back more strongly against the demands of social justice warriors, but also closing their purses and defunding both internal DEI departments as well as financial pledges they made to the bankrupt ideals of equity just a few years ago.
While this type of news warms my heart, most of the evidence al-Gharbi provides is composed of disparate op-ed columns from American newspapers. Throughout the last ten years, there have always been dissenting voices that managed, somehow, to walk the thin line between criticizing woke ideology and not falling victim to it. So I don't see why al-Gharbi puts any trust in these pieces, even one as monumental as the Times' recent response to GLAAD.
That said, al-Gharbi's analysis provides some value when he describes the recent behavior of companies and when he provides some numbers to back up his claims. The numbers he shares seem to confirm that the public is losing both interest and tolerance for wokeish puritanism. But the numbers themselves are so remote as to heavily dilute their meaning. For example, there is the fall in the frequency of terms like "race", "racists", and "racism" in papers like NYT, LAT, WSJ, and WP. Or the falling number of scholarly articles about identity-based biases. Al-Gharbi chooses to interpret these as evidence for this theory, but doesn't take into account other factors that could be responsible for this behavior. Like, maybe papers are using fewer words like "racists", and instead using some new fangled euphemism (like homeless -> unhoused)? Or perhaps, in the scholarly article case, these topics have moved to other forums, like described in Scott's recent "Links for February" post:
The arguments that convince me the most are when al-Gharbi talks about the changes in company behavior. These are hard, reality-based events that are orchestrated by smooth talking servants of the Invisible Hand (praise thy golden touch!). You can't argue with a company that not only doesn't pander to internal activist pressure, but goes onto punish them by expelling them from its belly. This mirrors my own experience working in the corporate world where more and more people roll their eyes at DEI-sponsored programming, finding convenient excuses to skip out. Even leadership's support, once crisp and vocal, has died down in volume to a DEI-themed zoom background or a quick few words mechanically tacked on somewhere.
Emotionally, the most salient point and the one I hang my hopes on is how Gen-Z seems to be rebelling against the enforced work puritanism. It's probably my nostalgia, but as a child of the 90s, I can't help but see in this behavior the reflection of my childhood. You had gory movies like Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. You had gory games, probably led by id titles like Doom and Quake--titles which introduced hundreds of thousands of people to online deathmatching. You had dirty grunge, whose raw scream was quickly adapted and made into Billboard Top 100 records. But you also had plenty of metal and industrial sub-genres spin off and avoid total commercialization. Let's not forget the two movies that closed out the decade, both quite clear in their anti-puritanical message: Fight Club and The Matrix.
While later on all of this was sublimated into the cheery smiles and pastel colors of the aughts, if today's teenagers feel a similar sort of anger and distrust of righty and lefty moralists, I can rest easy--the world will not end, at least not for another decade or two.
It may, in fact, be true that we are in a temporary lull as it pertains to concrete and public exercises of woke power. However, I think the great lesson of post-2014 wokeness is that its most enduring victories - the ones that create lasting changes to the legal and cultural infrastructure - are achieved directly after, or in the months following, specific events which get maximally weaponized into a coordinated outrage machine.
Before Michael Brown, the “cops are killing innocent black men for no reason” narrative was just not on the radar of most people; afterward, suddenly this narrative was everywhere, and activists were working every day to locate examples to turn viral, in order to maximize the salience of the narrative and to solidify as many concrete gains - and put as much money into the pockets of activists - as possible. Thousands of new jobs and tentacles of the NGO-industrial complex were generated in that roughly two-year-period - even while support for BLM began steadily declining among white Americans not too long after the initial 2014 spike.
Then, just as that level of support had finally dropped below a certain threshold, and most people had stopped thinking or caring about that narrative, George Floyd happened, and suddenly the outrage machine went right back into full gear and ratcheted everything one step further. The activist class had spent the intervening years quietly laying the scaffolding behind the scenes, waiting for the right viral event to light the fuse that would allow them to spring into coordinated action. Even as most Americans now start to lose interest in the narrative and things start to get pared back slightly from the new 2020 peak, the overall baseline level of power accrued to the activist class still vastly exceeds the old pre-2020 baseline, which was itself vastly larger than the previous pre-2014 baseline.
So, my question to the public who are belatedly starting to rethink things and to push back on the extremes which they themselves were willing to tolerate in the immediate aftermath of that viral event is as follows: Will you have the moral courage and willpower and hard-heartedness the next time a George Floyd level event happens, to say, “I don’t give a fuck”? When the news shows you some incident with horrible optics and constructs an expansive and emotionally-manipulative narrative around it, will you stand firm and reject fundamental elements of that narrative? Will you say, “it’s completely fine that this happened, and we should change nothing about our society to prevent it from happening again”? Or, like the previous times, will you say, “I understand why you’re angry and I agree things need to change, but do you have to be quite so extreme about your response?” If all you can muster is the latter, then you’re allowing another ratchet of the dial one more step to the left and they’re going to claim as much more power as they can before you start to lose interest again.
There is talk on the Dissident Right - I was actually exposed to it initially by James Lindsay, who is himself only a lukewarm member of the DR - that the activist class is quietly laying the groundwork for a “Drag Floyd” or “Trans Floyd”; in other words, the increasingly aggressive pushing of things like Drag Queen Story Hour into as many Red enclaves as possible is a tactic designed to eventually provoke one or more violent responses which can be virally weaponized. Eventually somebody will get radicalized enough to take violent action against one of these drag queens, or one of these doctors who performs sex changes on minors, and that will be just what the outrage machine needed to light the spark. Will the parts of the public who matter be able to hold firm and say, “Well yeah, what did you think was going to happen? Sorry, we’re not interested in another ratchet”? I predict that they will not. That would require much more conviction and unity/clarity of purpose than the Anglosphere public is willing and able to muster. No, we’ll get another massive coordinated action, another permanent power grab, and it’ll take a few years for people to start forgetting about that narrative, during which a new baseline will have been established, from which we will never retreat.
I think the "Trans Floyd" event is the recent murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender woman, in the UK, allegedly by two 15-year-olds who were placed in custody thereafter. It appears to not be a hate crime - just a dispute gone wrong - but the trans activists are pushing the narrative that this is the result of transphobia like crazy, and especially the "protect trans kids" narrative too. I think it's too early to tell what the lasting public reaction to this will be.
A lot of this hysteria also appears to have latched itself onto JK Rowling. I haven't seen anything in isolation, it always is attempted to be tied to her.
I wonder how much JK Rowling is hated just because she's hated. Like the Kardashians are famous for being famous, it seems to me that Rowling is hated because other people hate her, and not because she's actually done anything particularly objectionable. You ask people to provide specific details for why they hate her and they either can't, or they make a tenuous reach to connect her with something transphobic, or they just plain make up completely false facts.
Narcissism of small differences? Trans rights are negligible in the grand scheme of things and Rowling's already fully on board with identarianism except for that; it makes sense that the person who resists slightly would be hated the most.
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Rowling is hated because she is a transphobe. She could have bent the knee but she didn't. She chose a different team. No one was hating Rowling before the trans stuff. Before that, at best she was being mocked a bit for being a hamfisted fuddy duddy about retconning all of the characters in her books as being either gay or black. At worst she got involved in UK politics criticizing Corbyn and co for not being anti-Brexit enough.
This changed when she was obviously tangled with TERF stuff. First by liking a tweet that referred to trans women in a derogatory manner, which a PR person of hers lied about and said it was 'liked' through an accidental slip of the finger. And then later when she got involved with the Maya Forstater thing. Maya being a person who made very explicit transphobic comments including the statement that men can not change into women. Rowling stood up for this person explicitly.
Imagine a different scenario, where Rowling accidentally likes a tweet about race and IQ research that says blacks score lower than whites. Oops. What an accident. Why would she even be reading that? Anyways, a year later she, out of the blue, stands up for Noah Carl and talks about how ridiculous it was that he was fired. That doesn't mean she is a racist. Right? She just likes academic freedom stuff. Later she writes a lengthy blog post about the reality of evolution in humans. She doesn't say anything explicitly, she just says that we are all different and that this is great. But that the differences are real and immutable. OK. She then starts tweeting about the excesses of the black rights movement and how the movement is promoting conditions that make white people unsafe. She then writes a novel about a black serial killer... lol
Now, at which point do you think the real Rowling would call the 'different scenario Rowling' a racist? I'm pretty sure it would happen as soon as the support for Noah Carl came out. And she would never look back or bother reading a blog post about some racist 'explaining their views'.
So much of what pisses me off about these conversations is that I'm betting your description of her behavior is fairly accurate to a degree. The sticking point for me is the completely-bought framing that any of this qualifies as 'transphobia'; at least in a way that I could give weight to the term, as opppsed to simply granting and swallowing the activist line.
It seems obvious to me that if you dig deep enough, immutable differences between the sexes will reveal themselves. This does not automatically entail that trans people don't deserve respect or the same same basic protections and amenities as any other citizen. To my understanding, this is Rowling's position. And if there's a moat around her stance, its on what would have previously been largely agreed-upon, practical notions like "putting penises in womens' prisons and shelters is a bad idea". Compassion and universalism does occasionally need to reconcile itself with the hard limits of bad actors and material reality.
If the word 'transphobic' encapuslates even this, then it's a dead word to me. I register it as a hostile entity everywhere it comes up.
Now, I'll admit that I actually don't know much about who Rowling allegedly platformed or buddied up with. Perhaps they were truly terrible and a shade too red even for me. But if their statements and conversations are less "Delete trans people" and more "Your neovagina - bluntly - is incapable of fooling anybody", then I'm so over it.
Given that I recently copped a permanent sub ban and a weeklong site-wide admin ban for daring to make a three-sentence tepid defense of JK against activists (not trans people with any specificity) - charged with transphobia and 'promoting hate' - I think my disdain for this word has been freshly renewed, and replanted a few feet deeper towards core of my being.
Rowling is a feminist. I.e. someone who wants to preserve and extend female privileges. This puts her at odds with people who want to extend those privileges to a subset of biological men. "Transphobe" is just the label the latter group uses for anyone opposed to that project. It's that simple.
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This single paragraph makes a point that I, as someone who was as left-wing as they come in the older days, wish I could thrust in the face of every single social justice commissar I argued and spoke with before changing societal pressures meant that even this mild objection was forced into the same category as thoughtless anti-semitism and racial chauvinism.
Being banned for your (self-reported, so who knows) anodyne defence of a position held by a broad swathe of society has not made you more likely to support trans people. You have not seen the "error" of your ways and decided to go give a trans person money - your attitudes were strengthened and your beliefs hardened. This is exactly what a lot of thoughtful people said would happen and other people are saying is happening right now - but societal discourse has been so polluted that even bringing this point up is seen as a wholehearted defence of Hitler, the kind of thoughtcrime that will get you removed from polite society.
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I think "transphobe" is a hugely overloaded term that communicates almost nothing of value. The only thing you know for certain when someone invokes it is that they are referring to something negative, and something to do with trans people. That's all the information it conveys. It's frequently used to describe everything from the tiniest, object-level objections to certain trans positions (don't put biological males convicted of rape in biological women's prisons) to extreme, hateful rhetoric that genuinely wants to see trans people genocided (and not the "soft" form of genocide that entails detransition; actual murder).
It reminds one of calling Martin Luther King Jr. a criminal.
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I don't disagree. What I disagree with is the selective rejection of otherizing language. Where we want to have our cake and eat it to.
'Transphobe' was always an otherizing dehumanizing term. And as soon as it's applied to oneself it becomes obvious. What is less obvious is that the deconstruction of 'transphobe' applies to all the other terms as well. Racism, homophobia, misogyny or any other group defining otherizing language. The point of these words is not to accurately describe, the point is to otherize and dehumanize anyone who is not sufficiently demonstrating themselves to be a member of the ingroup.
I can't join a pity party for people like Rowling who have excessively enjoyed the luxury of being able to dehumanize their opponents instead of actually making an effort in understanding and discussing things with them. This is her world. She does not bother with reading blogs detailing the finer points of the position of some racist or misogynist in their own words. She allows herself the convenience of dehumanizing them as members of the outgroup. She doesn't weigh herself down with the effort of understanding them as human beings. No, she just otherizes them. That's the game being played and she sees no issue with it so long as she is the playmaker.
Well, now Rowling dun goofed and found herself enemies that are doing the same thing to her. They are not bothering with her blog, or mealy mouthed excuses. They are just recognizing her as the enemy. And they are not wrong. Rowling is against trans women having the same rights as women. Why should a trans person accept that? Why should the boundaries of acceptability for trans emancipation be tied to the sensibilities of some author?
This is a battle in the culture war. Rowling picked a side. She is a transphobe.
I'm curious, what do you think of the term homophobe? I know the comparison between trans and gay people have all sorts of problems but as far as pathologizing critics as inherently irrational it does seem to be the same tactic. I've always kind of found the tactic pretty frustrating despite mostly disagreeing with those called homophobes and mostly agreeing with those called transphobes.
so many word games are played just in the monikers groups go by these days and I always find the tactic infantile. Naming your group what amounts to the "good guys" and the opposing group what amounts to "insane bad guys" really should get you looked at like someone who is deeply unserious about the topic and has no interest in good faith.
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Fair enough argument, and I suspected this was the lean of your post. And Rowling is in many ways a victim of the kind of culture she herself enabled.
I wish there was a way for her to get her comeuppance without making life more irritating for everybody else. Le sigh.
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I've noticed something similar to you as well. As hanikrummihundursvin said, the reason JK Rowling is hated is because, by the definition of the term as used by the people who most use the term, she is a transphobe. It just happens to be that the definition of the term encapsulates entirely reasonable and non-hateful, kind, non-bigoted opinions and behaviors regarding trans people. It's the same sort of phenomenon as the redefining of "racism" and "sexism" to encapsulate similarly reasonable, non-hateful, non-bigoted opinions and behaviors. These terms seem to have continued to hold onto the negative connotations through the redefining, which was the apparent goal of the people doing the redefining, and it remains to be seen how well that will go for the defining of "transphobia."
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