Wake the Fuck Up and get Woke

Hello! Welcome. Welcome to Britain. Please don’t be woke. Because it might offend someone.

I hate that term woke. It’s guilty of duplicity because it has a pair of meanings and nobody ever clarifies which version they mean when they use it. You can listen to somebody who says “Woke is bad, mkay?” and what they could mean is a) I will not accept anything that’s right, such as respecting people’s right to identify as a different gender or whatever, or they could mean b) they don’t like the excessive political correctness which has influenced our art. Such as banning blacking up regardless of context and personally I don’t blame them for disliking the banning of that if it’s done in the right context. From my perspective, respect human beings, whatever, whoever, wherever they come from and don’t fuck with art. Because a person’s ability to portray the part of a ridiculous character is very powerful, and in a good way.

I mention the trans example specifically here because I managed to get into a disagreement on Twitter. Relating, in fact, to the great Eddie Izzard. Of course I don’t know him, and when I say respect in the above paragraph, I mean give people the baseline, of course you can’t respect people you don’t know.

Perhaps wrongly from an English perspective I said that gender was mostly psychological rather than biological. In truth it’s both. But I was amazed at the number of people running around like crazy women, and they are mostly women, saying how it does harm people. They started talking about how allowing people to identify as the opposite gender means that rapists will get into women’s prisons, how they’ll beat women at sports events (oh dear) and it’s just so sad. Hopefully someone like Izzard has an enormous support network, God knows he must have some strength, but there are so many people out there that don’t.

I want to say I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but any kind of issue humans have with other humans for no good reason bugs me. I believe so strongly in equality it puts a fire in my belly. Once one woman noted that she wasn’t going to respect what was Eddie’s sexual fetish I had to pull myself away. You cannot win with these people and it isn’t because they’re right.

Showing respect to human beings is just a fundamental piece of what makes a good person. I can’t work out if they just dislike people who are different because they are arse holes or if they’ve actually sat down to analyse why it is and maybe they find it threatening.

I think threatening makes sense, which is also a fear. There was a lot of talk about how transitioned male to females have no right to be in the exclusive spaces of non-transitioned females. I can I can kind of see it might make some feel awkward, possibly, and through no fault of their own. It doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me but I can try to understand. But then where does that leave the transitioned? Presumably uncomfortable using spaces specifically for their original gender? Uncomfortable I suppose. And that’s not right either. We don’t have a society equipped to deal with this because it’s been hidden for too long. Society said no. Well society can wake the fuck up and get woke.

I’ve been reading a pretty good book about being gay as recommended by my therapist. He says it’s good for the gays. Well, possibly not in those words. But it just half reminded me of how down on gay people society was in the 80s. The Sun outright saying that gay people would be better off dead. The law…section or article 28 or whatever the hell it was, meaning teachers at schools were unable to even acknowledge gay people which meant that even homophobic bullying couldn’t be addressed because the government were ignorant and they still are. That law, society, human beings’ ignorance has a lot to answer for. I was never even told about gay people. I suppose I could blame my parents a little, somebody should have mentioned it, but then there were so many people using it as a term of abuse nobody would have wanted to stand up and say “I’m gay, shut the fuck up”. I know I didn’t. For a long time I thought I was the only one in the world and that is so unfair on anyone else in that situation. It’s exclusive. And after a lot of time thinking about whether I’m being overly sensitive about people using the term gay as an insult these days, or to describe something that’s broken? I’ve decided that I’m not.

You hear people on the news. They talk about having a debate about the trans issues, or people having differing views which should be respected. We don’t. We do need to work out a way to cater to trans people in society better so that who does a piss where isn’t an issue, but there isn’t a debate. People are telling society that they identify as a different gender and that’s all that needs to be said. Accepted. Many people couldn’t accept gay people at one stage, and sadly that’s still the case across the board of society, but to those I say educate yourself, or go fuck yourself because human beings cannot forever be educating the ignorant and some people need to be able to bite back. It’s education itself that’s failed you and that’s why it’s so wrong that parents who don’t accept gay people have any kind of a say in whether their children are educated about it. Parents who don’t accept gay people are a tragedy and it’s so damaging if their child turns out to be gay. What are they going to do? Reject their child? It happens.

Politics. I’m so ignorant about it. But we have people like Bravermen or however her name’s spelt saying that schools shouldn’t be teaching LGTB keywords. Why the fuck not. We have that woman. Fifty. Coffee. She doesn’t believe in same sex marriage. She said it was because she believes in the traditional family values. Sure, believe in them, but you’re also excluding others which don’t threaten those family values from being able to get married if we were to not have gay marriage.

I can be small minded when it comes to people who just don’t seem to get things that I consider fundamental to being a decent human being. But it’s for my own self-preservation. I’ll come out with “Go fuck yourself” because I know I’ll never win with some people.

I’m sorry humanity is not better.