The plot of every classic dystopian novel is basically the same: The government has become too powerful, too controlling, and citizens are punished not just for wrongspeak but wrongthink. It’s a nightmare plot device in literature, but truth is stranger than fiction. Now, this type of dystopia appears to be playing out in one of the most powerful countries in the Western world: the United Kingdom.
A story unfolding in the U.K. reveals the latest bizarre turn in the so-called social justice movement and the ramifications facing those who are deemed insufficiently “tolerant” by their new woke overlords. It involves the recently trounced Labour Party, a group of folks who really ought to be considering how to expand their voter base but are instead choosing to close their ranks and enforce woke purity tests.
Over at National Review, we learn:
Fewer British people still identify with the Labour Party these days, and the party’s decision to thin its ranks further is only self-defeating, but it signals a dangerous turn in a culture increasingly obsessed with policing speech, especially as it pertains to transgender issues.
What we’re seeing Labour doing is a harbinger for what may soon happen to others who don’t embrace every bit of woke dogma in British society in the future. In a chilling series of events just last year, a British woman lost an employment tribunal after being fired merely for stating she doesn’t believe it’s possible to change one’s gender.
The BBC reported:
Ms Forstater was “absolutist” in her view, he concluded in a 26-page judgement.
“It is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment,” he continued. “The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”
Now, holding “subversive” views, aka believing in fixed, binary biological sex, means a U.K. judge may deem you unworthy of democratic society, and one of the country’s largest political parties may cast you out.
Just a decade ago, the idea that the question of “what makes a woman” or “what makes a man” would be tearing cultures apart and setting off purges in a supposedly free country such as the U.K. would have been laughable. The thought that how one answers these questions could actually determine if you can keep your job or belong to a political party would have belonged solely in a George Orwell novel. Now, it’s real life.
The truly frightening part? It’s clear this could only be the tip of the iceberg.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four and a freelance writer. She is an editor at Ricochet.com, a columnist at the Forward, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
