Are LGBTQ Activists Just Nasty People?

A true story of woke Trans activism in my workplace

As if we needed further proof, I now have a firsthand workplace anecdote to share. What I am about to relate is factual save for some identifying features which I have changed for the sake of everyone’s anonymity.

In order to ensure a healthy ‘S’ quotient on its annual ESG score, the large publicly listed company where I work has embarked upon an enthusiastic celebration of all things Pride. I must note at the outset that, to my employer’s credit, this LGBTQIA+ drive has not been as unhinged and zealous as we’ve seen in other organisations and our activity thus far has taken the form of cheerful lip service as opposed to fanatical haranguing. Even so, it is intensifying.

To this end we have recently been running an internal engagement campaign called My Truth.

My Truth profiles employees who have a ‘unique’ story to share, with the intention of celebrating diversity. We’ve heard from staff with physical or mental disabilities, staff who’ve faced serious illness, staff with indigenous heritage, and so on. We’ve also heard from members of the LGBTQ ‘community’.

Again, to my employer’s credit, My Truth is not fundamentally woke – anyone can contribute a story, and to give my HR colleagues their due, I do not believe this engagement campaign was created with malign intentions. Indeed, this is one of the most pernicious aspects of ESG – it ensnares well-meaning people and, like all Marxist dialectic, preys upon the inherent goodness of people to achieve its nefarious ends.

Furthermore, I’ve had the impression that none of our participants thus far have used the platform to advance a political agenda of the sort that we’ve seen decimate the stock prices of major brands like Bud Light and Target in the last three months. I would say we’ve had some mild activism creep in on the subjects of First Nations peoples and Gay Pride, but for the most part, our contributors have kept things professional.

Oversharing? Yes. But off the deep end of woke activism like we’re seeing in the US and UK? No, not yet at least – remembering of course that Australia, for all it’s urban progressivism, is still a relatively conservative place, and always five to ten years behind America in terms of radical cultural change.

Where the trouble has arisen is not with the My Truth participants themselves, but with their ‘allies’ – other staff members who’ve read the story and then added their two cents. Here’s what recently happened:

Naturally for Pride Month our My Truth story was LGBTQ-focused. But it wasn’t just any old Pride story, we had managed to locate within our ranks the holy grail of the rainbow franchise – yes, we had ourselves a Trans person.

Logan is a biological male who has been on a journey of self-discovery etc. You know the rest and I won’t go into it as it has no bearing on my story, and to make clear my position on Trans people: I don’t much care how they choose to identify and live, provided they’re not forcing the ideology on me or anyone else (especially children). I don’t agree with it and think it is a serious form of mental illness that should be treated the same way we treat things like anorexia, and not ‘affirmed’ as is currently in vogue.

But up to and including the point of Logan telling his story in a work setting, I suppose I am okay with it. In my perfect world such a thing would not be permitted (in the same way we wouldn’t permit someone to recount details of their sex life on a work platform… well, not yet anyway) and Logan would be informed that his identity is his business, but the company will not afford him a platform to normalise transgenderism. But no one gets to live in their perfect world and polite society demands a certain modicum of tolerance.

My previously stated position on the Trans issue still holds: that it is the final frontier in the assault on our society’s ability to reason; a maleficent form of Orwellian doublethink that threatens our very civilisation – but only when normalised and preached dogmatically via the cultural hegemons.

Logan’s story was not dogmatic. In fact, it was somewhat self-deprecating, and I think that is the kind of weirdness most of us can tolerate*.

But what happened next was frenetically dogmatic.

Once live, the story immediately received an effusive torrent of praise – our trendy urban liberal workforce clamoured to demonstrate how enlightened and progressive they were, and Logan had his fifteen minutes of fame and adulation.

But that’s not the dogmatic part – that’s just blue-pilled liberals reciting the pre-programmed mantra.

One staff member had more to say.

You see Logan was, at the time of publication, still pre-transition, and had not yet legally adopted his new name, Florence, either in the context of the State of Victoria, or our internal HR system. But this was of little relevance to Nadia, a friend and colleague of Logan’s, who jumped onto the comment thread and accused the publishers of the story (myself and an HR colleague – essentially the company itself) of ‘deadnaming’ Florence.

For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature, to ‘deadname’ a Trans person is to use the name they were known by prior to becoming their new, authentic self, and is tantamount to using the N-word in terms of woke demerit points.

Nadia expressed her deep disappointment and outrage at our lack of sensitivity and said that this oversight was typical of cis-normative culture.

Nadia went on to scold us for our obtuseness by pointing out that simply double-checking this matter with Logan prior to publication could have averted the situation and the potential damage that deadnaming can do to the individual.

Essentially, Nadia was calling us transphobes.

Let’s forget for one moment the fact that at the time of publishing Logan was still known as Logan and that the change to Florence was imminent, but not yet official. Let’s also forget that the story was written by Logan himself (not me or the HR person). And let’s forget that the final copy was checked with Logan and signed off by him before publication.

Let’s pretend none of that was fact and simply ask: Who and where the hell does Nadia think she is? The complete departure from any semblance of professional decorum is what stands out the most for me here.

In what other situation would it be permissible (not only from a common professional courtesy perspective, but indeed a contractual compliance perspective) to mouth off in such a snarky and combative manner on a company thread visible to all employees? The correct forum for such a complaint is always offline.

To make matters worse, when my HR colleague confronted Nadia about this offline, Nadia doubled down and told her to change the wording of the story anyway – this despite having been informed that the story was written and signed off for publication by Logan himself.

It didn’t matter. Logan/Florence didn’t matter. What mattered to Nadia was that we were penitent; that we bent the knee and acknowledged our incorrectness – our sin.

What we are witnessing here is the abandonment of commonly recognised social mores and age-old terms of engagement in favour of a religious stratification of discourse whereby certain topics, as defined by the high priests of wokesim, are immune from any form of communal constraint.

Nadia knows this and, like all foot soldiers of the woke cult, she knows she can leverage this incredible power to bully noncompliant outsiders.

Put simply, Nadia is a nasty person.

Not that it bears repeating to an audience such as mine, but these people do not act in good faith; they do not seek justice or kindness; they are not interested in peace, love, and unity.

These people are interested only in the acquisition of power – pure, unadulterated authority.

They employ disingenuous victim narratives, logical fallacies, motte-and-bailey defenses, and crude Kafka traps to manipulate their opponents any which way they need to in pursuit of their objective – the acquisition of power.

Moreover, this anecdote demonstrates the perpetual leftward shunting of the Overton window that these Marxist foot soldiers of the machine engage in. Any ground ceded by us is swiftly replaced by new demands – the more you concede the harder they push. As one of my colleagues said to me, “It’s not enough that we’re progressive enough to publish this in the first place… It’s never enough.”

It is a tale we’ve all heard before and anyone who has studied Marxism in even a rudimentary format will recognise Nadia’s tactics here, and I tell this story only to drive home the point, and state that what I had until now only observed via the internet in places like California and Seattle has now reached all the way Down Under and impacted me personally – not simply on the street, but in the execution of my daily employment, a place that until very recently, people had the reasonable expectation of being safe from vicious political invective. Indeed, such an activistic attack in a more progressive company could well have resulted in a very undesirable outcome for me.

This creeping cancer left unchecked will consume everything eventually, and we cannot tackle it head on in our workplaces for fear of punitive action. Changing the culture at large is a battle we are all engaged in, each in our own way, and it will be a long fight whose outcome is far from certain.

When I first encountered Logan’s story I was inclined toward tolerance* – there is still enough of the classical liberal left in me to elicit such a response. But in the wake of Nadia’s acerbic outburst, I have not seen any corrective or de-escalatory response from Logan, or Florence as he is now known. He took the time to respond magnanimously to many of the comments on the thread but has left this one to speak for itself.

And it is this passive endorsement that makes me think twice about my tolerance threshold for transgenderism, and question Logan’s motivations in all this, and ask myself if, perhaps, they are all just sick, nasty people.

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­­­­­­­­* As we spiral into the oblivion of woke Neo-Marxism, it behooves we of the resistance to think carefully about the concept of ‘tolerance’ and perhaps re-evaluate previous thresholds of acceptance in the face of this rising tide of degeneracy. But in doing so we must avoid the folly of becoming authoritarians in our own right, for as I have previously discussed, “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you” (Friedrich Nietzsche).

After all, trannies have been around since forever, right? Culturally, they’ve always been part of the tapestry, and even growing up in a small, conservative city at the ends of the earth, I was exposed (not literally!) to folk who quite clearly identified as the opposite sex. It was kookie, interesting and even kind of fun when brought to life via film and TV, and I remember somewhat enjoying movies like Priscilla Queen of the Dessert in the nineties.

Was I simply failing to see the first warning signs of societal decay? Perhaps. But I am (or was) essentially a classical liberal at heart. I never wanted to adopt a fanatically puritanical approach to life, but I feel I am now being backed into this position. I always believed and would like to believe still that there is room for oddity in our society – let people be themselves so long as they don’t hurt anyone… And for a long time, that’s the way our society dealt with its fringe elements. Yes, there was discrimination, but I would argue less discrimination than there is now in 2023 after all our years of so-called progress on the issue. This of course raises the question that is central to my entire thesis on wokeness: is it really about creating tolerance and inclusivity, or are there great forces working to divide us?