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I live in the post communist part of the EU and I'm very happy that wokeness and the culture war haven't arrived here yet. Everybody here still follows good faithed common sense, which is a refreshing change from the UK and Germany (both of which I have spent time in), where it is a topic of conversation. Yet not at the cost of LGBT rights, which are legally in step with the West.
Genuine question which I promise I am asking in good faith: what do you think "wokeness" is?
Oh sure! In the UK it was stuff like the use (and expectation) of pronouns. Or institutions taking steps to be 'LGBT-friendly' and making sure they tell you about it. Sometimes it felt almost forced and I just got tired of it as a topic.
I too want these people to feel comfortable, but as long as the legislation is there and people try to be friendly (just like they would be to anyone else), the rest just feels like an overreaction to me.Honestly I think the vast majority of people on the left would agree with most of what you said. A lot of the corporate rainbow flag waving is pretty performative and cringe.
The whole pronoun thing is pretty simple really, just don't say "he" to someone who says "I'm a she". That's really all there is to it. 99% of the the time you can tell whether someone is a he or a she. Sometimes it's not obvious, or you might get it wrong. As long as the other person can say "hey I'm a he actually" and you respond with "Oh my bad bro", then you are all good.
I know there are some people out there who try to make the pronoun thing into some huge deal but that's really all it is. I know plenty of trans people and non-binary people and they're all chill, they just don't want to be called by the wrong thing. And honestly, neither do I!
Exactly. I think the most natural way to deal with this is on a person-by-person basis (just like with any other issue of identity), where you just ask if your unsure (which I've also done before), just like with anything else. No need for an institutional framework around it.
Congratulations, you are now considered woke.
Lmao
I’ve never met anyone who introduced themselves with pronouns, only the first name. In which country is it a common thing?
I did meet a few people where I couldn't guess what gender they were, but they introduced themselves along with their pronouns (which was helpful). Sometimes I was in groups where the gender-obvious introduced themselves with their pronouns too though which felt excessive
I think people do that sometimes in order to make the one trans or androgenous person not feel like "the odd one out" bc they're the only one who has the give their pronouns.
So I get why people do it but I agree it can be a bit awkward. I don't do it myself but I don't have any problem with people who do.
Exactly. Yeah that's how I understood it as well
Having observed the culture war in the US for a while, my take is that the problem here is not wokeness per se, that is just as simple as cam_i_am stated. The problem with the culture war is that the conservatives pick a fight over every little step towards progressive legistator. They'll fight tooth and nail so that LGBT+ people do NOT have place in society. And these people, while being a minority, still add up to a significant part of the population, maybe around 10-15%.
And at that part, the woke people have no choice but to fight back, IF they want to have a place in society.
I have no idea about where in the "post communist part of the EU" you could be. But if you're in Hungary or Poland, there is no culture war, because the suppression is absolute.
Hmm that's true, I suppose constant sabotage of LGBT legislation would explain why the movement would be so vocal.
It doesn't really explain the UK though because I don't think there's too much opposition to queerness in society there, even among conservatives. It's possible that culture war rhetoric was imported from the US space as a political tool, because when I lived there previously in 2017, saying pronouns was not a thing yet.
Otherwise I live in the Czech Republic where although people have quite an egalitarian attitude towards sexuality (so the laws are quite relaxed) the culture itself is still relatively conservative. It just really isn't a topic here though
Im living in post communist part too... or not so post communist it seem lately. The culture war is here, the old commies call themselves right wing nationalist christians, and rebuilding the commie system, saying everybody who is not with them is enemy, commie, and liberal homosexual, pedophile...
Eastern Germany?
Hungary
Oh I see. I imagine that there it must have been brought in artificially by Orbán to use as a strawman though, rather than developing somewhat organically from the bottom up as it has in Western countries, right? Like, when you meet people irl they never say their pronouns, right?