Woke Activists Use Transgenderism as Political Loyalty Test

Woke Canadian activists claimed moral superiority over Canadian truckers by chanting support for transgenderism, even though the issue was irrelevant in the mass protest against the suffocating coronavirus regulations, according to an article in Spiked.com.

“What we had here was the shrill, noisy reassertion of high-status opinion against the supposedly low-status demands of the truckers for more freedom and better working conditions,” said the February 21 article by Brendan O’Neill.  He continued:

This was the correct-thinking set staking its moral authority over the irritated truckers; the upper-middle-class guardians of approved ‘progressive’ thought pushing back against a pesky, old-fashioned, grassroots demand for liberty and respect …  – the elite counter-revolters were essentially saying that identity is now more important than class, that issues like trans rights now thoroughly trump workers’ rights, and that being ‘left-wing’ no longer means supporting the masses against the state, but rather is about reprimanding the masses for their supposed wrongthink and siding with the state against the people.

The transgender ideology says that each person’s male-or-female identity is not decided by their male-or-female body, but by their unmeasurable feelings of “gender identity.” The ideology also demands that government and society help each person impose their identified sex on other people. For example, the ideology says that judges should force womens’ swimming clubs to accept male competitors whenever the men say they are “transgender women.”

The role of transgenderism as a loyalty test for the establishment also appeared during the Ivy League swimming championship in mid-February, where many young female swimmers were required to pretend that a man — Lia Thomas — is actually a woman.

“At the meet, the announcer opens with a warning against ‘racist, homophobic, or transphobic discrimination,’” said an on-scene report from Common Sense with Bari Weiss. “The parents say their daughters know it’s wrong that Thomas is swimming against them but that they will not risk getting smeared with the label transphobe.”

Before the meet, the Ivy League pro-transgender officials suppressed objections from women swimmers. But they allowed pro-transgender displays at the weekend event, according to an ESPN report on February 19: “The controversy of the past two-plus months was muted throughout the four-day Ivy League championships. Harvard alum Schuyler Bailar, the first transgender swimmer to compete on a Division I men’s team, draped a transgender flag over a railing near the pool deck.”

The Ivy League is making support for transgenderism into a loyalty test for the people who want to join the elite, said Natasha Chart, a feminist who opposes the transgender ideology. She told Breitbart News:

They’re saying that “If you, young woman, want access to elite society, if you want access to professional sports and all the opportunities that come with that, the price is you change [clothes in a room] with the guy. We’re going to let a guy in your changing room, you’d better like it. You’d better smile, clap and you’d better cheer him on when we go in the pool.” … This is definitely a form of hazing.

In Canada, the supposedly anti-establishment woke protestors were merely enforcing the stigma rules set by the state and its establishment prime minister, Justin Trudeau, wrote O’Neill:

The woke have been at the forefront of depicting the truckers as scum, deserving of violent reprimand. Trudeau got in there early, updating McCarthyism by applying it to the ‘anti-woke’ rather than the anti-West. He tweeted that the Freedom Convoy was full of ‘anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia and transphobia’. Fake radicals, such as those ‘trans rights’ counter-protesters in Ottawa … conspired in this state demonisation of the truckers as unwoke.

The lesson is that “wokeness is not just a political irritation … No, it is a key component of the new class politics,” where elites use shame, stigma, and public insults to frighten ordinary people out of debates and voting, O’Neill said, adding:

It is a central ideological wedge between the new elites who justify their rule on the basis of both their managerial capacities and their moral correctness and the working classes who have tired of this patrician form of governance. Wokeness is the means through which the upper classes distinguish themselves from the throng and justify their domination of society and our lives, and, as Canada now shows, it is also the instigator of state violence against those who resist and bristle against this domination.

Wokeness is the disguise class authoritarianism wears in the 21st century, and anyone who cares for the rights, equality and liberty of working people needs to make a priority of defeating it.

O’Neill’s article is headlined, “The tyranny of high-status opinion.”

Numerous polls show the public — including liberal women — increasingly rejects the transgender ideology. The new opponents include many liberal-leaning, college-educated women and men who hated former President Donald Trump and voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Even pro-transgender advocates admit they have lost the public argument over sex-switching athletes.

Prodded by voters, federal GOP politicians are moving away from their tacit support for the establishment-backed transgender agenda.

“We will ban men from participating in women’s sports,” former President Donald Trump promised on January 29 during a Texas speech that mimicked a campaign rally.

He referred to the scandal of Lia Thomas, the man who is taking swimming records from women swimmers at the University of Pennsylvania: “So ridiculous. Did you see the man who was on the swimming team at a certain school that I know very well? The [women’s swimming] record was held for like 11 years. He beat it by 38 seconds.”