A few days ago, I posted the following Tweet in response to Taylor Silverman, a female skateboarder who has been speaking out about the unfair advantages that transwomen have when competing in female sports.
The stakes are high for speaking out against gender ideology or any aspect of wokeism. People have received death threats, had their personal information doxxed, or lost their jobs. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people (especially parents) to take that sort of risk with their lives. Protecting their family is always going to come first.
But what happens when people are in lower-risk situations? Do they speak out when with their friends or family? What is there to lose?
Recently, I streamed Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? with a mix of about 15 secular conservatives and classical liberals. As people trickled into the Zoom lobby for the streaming, I was thrilled to hear people joking about the ridiculousness of introducing yourself with pronouns and constantly screaming your oppression points to the world. I still live in a very woke city where making these kinds of statements could put you at serious risk, so it was a nice change of scenery.
After everyone settled in, we went around and introduced ourselves. The jokes about woke progressives continued until it was the turn of a transman who introduced himself with his prefered pronouns. The mood drastically changed after this. The jokes stopped, the conversations stopped, and an unspoken anxiety began to sink in.
While watching the documentary, we stopped every 30 minutes to split off into breakout rooms and discuss the film in smaller groups. In my three breakout rooms, I spoke to 12 different people (the transman was not in any of my groups). We joked about how silly the movie was and all agreed that a woman is defined as an adult human female. The anxiety was gone. We spoke our minds and engaged in some tough discussions.
Once the movie was over, we went back into the main lobby for a moderated full group conversation. The anxiety returned and with it came universal self-censorship. No one was willing to bring up what we had discussed in our breakout rooms.
The transman took control of the conversation. He shared that he believed self-identity is the only way to truly know if someone is a man or a woman due to his own experience with always seeing himself as a man. The students on the call nodded along in agreement. They looked to him to approve of their thoughts and would apologize if they said something he disagreed with. They also began using the leftist terminology they were mocking earlier like gender identity and cisgender.
I was frustrated. Why was no one saying what they really felt? They were willing to be open in the breakout rooms, but as soon as a transperson was present, they were afraid to speak. It was supposed to be a space for open conversation and discourse, but it felt like every other conversation I had in university with a room full of leftists.
We were in the majority. 93% of us were on the same page with the definition of a woman, yet one person disagreeing caused us all to censor ourselves (myself included).
Why didn’t I speak up then? Why did I feel betrayed by my fellow rational thinkers when I couldn’t even gather the courage to say what I had confidently stated in smaller groups?
We, the silent majority, have conditioned ourselves to believe that other people’s feelings are more important than speaking our minds, so we remain silent. As soon as one person who might be offended walks into the room, the conversation stops entirely. We tiptoe around the issue instead of saying what we know is right.
We created the situation we are in today.
We seek approval (validation) to speak our minds and then make excuses when we have the opportunity. We wait for someone else to speak up first instead of taking the chance ourselves. We blame others for our cowardice while wondering why the situation isn’t changing.
If we can’t speak up when we are allowed to speak freely, how can we say big tech censorship is causing our problems?
If we hold ourselves back when facing minor inconveniences, how can we blame our quietness on bigger threats like doxxing?
If we are only vocal when we are in our echo chambers and safe spaces or when we are anonymous on Twitter, how can we condemn the woke TikTokers with anime profile pictures for doing the same?
We need to stop being hypocrites and practice what we preach. If we want to change these conversations on a large scale, we begin with talking to the people around us. We don’t have to change the entire world at once. We can leave that to the Taylor Silvermans and JK Rowlings. If we can overcome that fearful voice in our head and start with small conversations, we can create a ripple effect that will turn the silent majority into the empowered majority.
At least that’s my plan.
The threat to current and future employment is real when entering frank, open discussions on topics within the "woke" genre. Most workplaces now have DEI content as part of their mandatory training for all employees. Cultivating local, offline conversation is needed as demonstrative of how it looks to have truly open, civil, and principled discourse.
Just watched your interview with Buck Angel. It is so difficult to speak out against the wokeism cult! Interesting reflections.