Is "Gender Critical Woke" a Real Thing?

Abhishek Saha and James Esses

Photo by Evelyn Clement on Unsplash

My friend, the mathematician and defender of academic freedom and free speech more broadly, Abhishek Saha, defined what he meant by “GC woke” today,

Abhishek was then immediately buried under a deluge of people entirely missing his point in utterly predictable ways.

1. People asserting (correctly) that Critical Social Justice based trans activism is ‘woke’ and implying (incorrectly) that opposition to it therefore cannot be.

This is clearly false. More than one group of people can be authoritarian language policers who seem to believe they can change the way people think by prohibiting either legally or socially (via a cancel culture) some forms of speech and mandating others at the same time and there frequently are many such groups. Is there a subset of people calling themselves gender critical who are doing this? Absolutely. Principled gender critical feminists have been addressing this problem among them for some time.

2. People asserting that Abhishek must be saying this because he supports the authoritarian trans activist language policers or was, at least, complacent and silent on the problem presented by them.

Again, false. Abhishek has been addressing this problem and other variations of woke committedly for at least the two years he’s been asking me to attend events and speak to it. This claim is easily falsified by a look at his X timeline. The “You object to this form of authoritarianism/language policing, therefore, you must support the opposing form of authoritarianism/language policing” fallacy is generally perpetrated by people who find it hard to comprehend that anyone can object consistently to authoritarianism/language policing.

3. People claiming that it cannot be considered language policing if you are trying to make people use language correctly/say things that are true.

This is false even on the surface. ‘Policing’ is a neutral term for the enforcement of rules and applies whether we consider those rules to be legitimate or not. We might say that arresting people for gender critical tweets is “bad” policing and arresting them for a violent assault is “good” policing but they are still both policing. People who want to defend the policing of language need to make a case for it being “good policing”, not that it is not policing. Defenders of free speech believe that all policing of language used to express ideas and beliefs is illegitimate and ‘bad policing’ even when it is language used to express ideas that we believe not to be true and to be detrimental to society.

4. People asserting that Abhishek cannot understand how bad and harmful the ideas are if he does not approve of trying to police the words used to express them.

Again, this is false. It confuses premise and methodology. That is, it assumes that if somebody shares your premise - theories on gender identity are being imposed on people and are doing them harm, especially children - they will also share your preferred methodology for addressing that problem - in this case, trying to police out of existence language used to express a gender identity at odds with biological sex.

Defenders of freedom of speech don’t think this is a good method for two reasons. Firstly, we oppose anybody trying to get rid of ideas by policing language because the power to do this is always held whichever political, religious or otherwise ideological group has legal and social power at any time. This produces a ‘might makes right’ approach to knowledge where the dominant moral orthodoxy gets to decide what may be believed and said and dissenters from that orthodoxy are penalised. People only think this is a good idea when the dominant moral orthodoxy is their own and quite see the problem with it when it is not. This is not only a problem on the level of principles of individual liberty, but also a problem strategically. Long-term thinking requires recognising that your own tribe probably won’t be in a position of social dominance forever, thinking about what freedoms you would wish to have in a society in which a tribe you disagree with has that position of power and defending those freedoms for everybody.

Secondly, defenders of free speech don’t think trying to get rid of ideas by policing the language used to express them out of existence is a good idea because it does not work. We think the only way to get rid of bad ideas is by showing them to be bad and defeating them with better ones. When people try to shut down bad ideas by repressing the expression of them, we cannot get at them and so we cannot defeat them. As Abhishek says debate is shut down. The ideas, however, are not. If anybody doubts this, consider whether the attempts of the authoritarian trans movement to penalise the expression of gender critical ideas and make everybody use their language to affirm trans identity was effective? It wasn’t, was it? It resulted in the growth of the gender critical movement and gender critical spaces, campaign groups and networks, a greater awareness of and sympathy for gender critical ideas and their advocates and a public shift away from support for trans activism.

The assumption that if people really understood how serious a problem was, they’d agree with your methods for addressing it comes from a place of blinkered certainty that fails to recognise that other people can genuinely think your methods are wrong. If one appreciates that other people really can think that, it becomes clear that nobody would ever say, “I wasn’t in favour of your method of addressing the problem because I don’t think it works, but now you’ve explained how serious the problem is, I agree that we should all use the method of addressing it that I believe not to work.”

But is Abhishek correct to say that “an obsession with language-policing, prioritising definitional claims over understanding, constant virtue-signaling—where moral posturing replaces nuance, and the shutting down of debate in favour of rigid orthodoxy making shared perspective impossible” can be classified as woke? Yes, I would say so. Wokeness or the Critical Social Justice movement absolutely depends on the postmodern concept of knowledge being a construct of power that functions via language to create dominant discourses which then become the way people think and determines what they accept as true. The original postmodernists wanted to deconstruct this endlessly while the ‘woke’ who succeeded them have focused on achieving social justice by using that system to establish their own social dominance and have their own views established as knowledge via the policing of language and imposing legal or social penalties (cancel culture) on dissenters. The concepts of the “woke right” and the “GC woke” are coherent and reasonable when used to describe those who understand knowledge, power and language in this way and try to impose their own views on everybody in this way.

Is Abhishek correct to say that James Esses was manifesting this way of thinking?

James certainly seems to fulfil the first of these conditions here. He does seem to believe that we can control how people think and what they accept as true by controlling speech. Liberals, as mentioned, would typically disagree here and think this gives language an almost magical property to change social reality. We tend to be (qualified) logocentrists who think that language is generally used straightforwardly to refer to things and concepts that exist in society in opposition to the postmodernists (particularly Derrida) who believed that it is language that constructs reality. Therefore, I would be sceptical that attempts to get rid of the word ‘trans’ can be effective in getting rid of the concept of trans. Rather, I think that the word ‘trans’ could only be removed from our shared lexicon if the concept of trans ceases to be accepted as legitimate by society and thus used by it. The process would need to happen organically via discussion and debate resulting in a widespread disbelief in the concept, not attempts at social engineering that removed the word via social policing of it. Those who wish the concept of trans to die would therefore do better not to try to ban the use of words to describe it, because this would impede the process by which it could die as well as being authoritarian and denying people freedom of belief and speech.

Is James being authoritarian, though? Does he fulfil the second criteria of seeking to use state or social power (cancel culture) to police the use of the word and enact penalties on those who fail to comply? That would depend on who James is referring to when he says “we” and how he intends to get them to comply with his proposition. If “we” refers to other gender critical activists and he is simply advocating that people who don’t believe in gender identity don’t use language that indicates it to be a real thing, and other gender criticals remain free to consider this proposition and decide for themselves whether that could be an effective strategy or whether it would be better to use the word to address the concept on its own terms in argument, nothing at all authoritarian is happening. A proposition has been presented to an activist group for its consideration and nobody is being coerced into accepting it or penalised for not doing so. If, on the other hand, ‘we’ refers to everybody in society - to ‘eradicate the entire thing’ would seem to require wider cooperation than one activist group - and James also elsewhere advocates enacting legal or social penalties on those who do not comply or intends to do so, we are in authoritarian territory. The label of “GC woke” would then apply. I sincerely hope this is not the case and will assume it not to be. That would be disappointing.

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I, personally, do not wish to eradicate the word or the concept of ‘trans’ and will continue to refer to trans-identified people as ‘trans’ and respect those who hold liberal principles and work with those who oppose the authoritarian trans activists who claim to represent them. I, as a liberal, will continue to uphold the principle, “Let people believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedom.’ Consequently, I will continue to support principled gender critical feminists in protecting women’s spaces and sports for reasons of safety and fairness and evidence-based researchers and clinicians in the field of gender medicine in protecting children from ideologically biased and harmful medical interventions, gender non-conforming people whether they consider themselves trans(gender/sexual/vestite) or not to speak and present as they please and everybody who upholds the principles of freedom of belief, speech and expression consistently.