‘I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex.’ It sounds like the rambling of a madman or a drunk, but these words were uttered last week at the Charleston literary festival in East Sussex by Lady Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme Court. Personally, I would avoid doctors who lack this rudimentary knowledge of the human body. They might start asking me about the regularity of my menstrual cycle.
Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’
The ubiquity of wokeness has meant that we have grown accustomed to hearing these kinds of deranging remarks from figures of authority. This ideology was always imposed from the top down against the wishes of a subdued population. A recent study by More in Common found that progressive activists of the ‘woke’ kind comprise as little as between eight and ten per cent of the population, and yet their power is such that medical professionals will spout their hogwash.
It all sounds frivolous, until we consider the full extent of the havoc that this movement has wreaked over the past decade. Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’ and put on a pathway to irreversible harm. Women’s rights to single-sex services have been eroded in order to accommodate men who identify as female. Racial division has been heightened in the name of ‘anti-racism’. The principle of free speech has been all but jettisoned by the ruling class, with the UK police arresting over 12,000 people per year for offensive speech. Society has regressed in the name of ‘progress’.
For all that, woke appears to be dying. Of course, commentators have often made the mistake of declaring the ideology to be on its last legs, only to discover that it is a centipede with an indefinite surplus of limbs. Yet there have been too many seismic events that suggest the jig is very nearly up.
The Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means a biological reality that cannot be changed with a certificate. The findings of the Cass Review has led to the banning of puberty blockers for children. Major corporations are stripping away their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. LGB rights groups are rejecting the parasitical TQ+ that has hijacked and undermined their cause. The death rattles of woke are loud and sustained.
Woke activists will doubtless cling to their precious beliefs like barnacles to the keel of sinking ship. Already, we are seeing various companies and charities openly pledging to ignore the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, groups so captured by ideology that they are willing to break the law.
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has pledged to ‘decolonise’ its collections to warn visitors that some aspects might contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’. The NHS is still insisting that toddlers can be transgender.
The title of my new book – The End of Woke – is therefore more aspirational than prophetic. It is possible, of course, that woke will return in a different guise. After all, its practitioners accrued their power largely through shapeshifting and word games. When they called for ‘diversity’, they meant ideological homogeneity. When they called for ‘inclusion’, they meant exclusion of their opponents. When they created their cruel system of retribution known as ‘cancel culture’, they called it ‘accountability’.
Many liberal-minded people were gulled into endorsing these illiberal ideas, but the tricks have mostly been exposed. Debates that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now being held with some frequency. While the BBC has studiously referred to male rapists as ‘she’, and applied a rainbow gloss to the damage being wrought by gender ideology, at last we are hearing the likes of Helen Joyce – Director of Advocacy of campaign group Sex Matters – being platformed on Radio 4. The cries of ‘No Debate!’ from trans activist groups such as Stonewall are now fading.
With the woke in retreat, there is also the possibility that the vacuum may be filled by unsavoury elements on the right. In The End of Woke, I have made the case that the culture war has persisted for so long because it has been widely misapprehended as a conflict between left and right. In truth, there are identity-obsessed authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum. If my definition of ‘woke’ is accurate – a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means – there is no reason why this would not apply to white nationalists as much as it does to DEI zealots.
The woke movement was a catastrophe in every respect. We are now staggering through the debris of a culture war that most of us never sought. As we near the end of woke, we need to be vigilant against successive ideologies that will likewise attempt to curb our freedoms. We might not be able to anticipate how exactly the authoritarian instinct will next manifest, but that it will do so is an inevitability.
The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution by Andrew Doyle is available now (£25, Constable). You can buy it here
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