TRIGGERnometry - March 22, 2024


The Prophecies of Titania McGrath - Andrew Doyle


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

154.71053

Word count

1,207

Sentence count

68

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of Titania McGrath's acclaimed book Woke! A Guide to Social Justice. Five years on, and I cannot decide whether I find it funny or depressing that so many of the ideas in that book ended up becoming reality.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This month is the fifth anniversary of the publication of Titania McGrath's acclaimed book
00:00:05.100 Woke! A Guide to Social Justice. I created this intersectional activist and slam poet
00:00:11.280 in order to satirise the new intolerant and authoritarian identity-obsessed religion
00:00:16.780 and its stranglehold on society. Having seen so many posh and entitled activists
00:00:22.080 berating working-class straight white people for their privilege,
00:00:26.060 I could think of no more appropriate reaction than mockery. 0.82
00:00:29.220 Even Harry Windsor was at it, and he's an actual prince.
00:00:33.100 Five years on, and I cannot decide whether I find it funny or depressing
00:00:36.360 that so many of Titania's ideas in that book ended up becoming reality.
00:00:41.640 Nothing that Titania was ever able to suggest
00:00:44.140 has not eventually been outdone by real-life activists.
00:00:47.540 It's as though they were reading her book for inspiration.
00:00:49.740 For instance, in a chapter from Woke,
00:00:52.220 entitled Towards an Intersectional Socialist Utopia,
00:00:55.520 Titania makes the following observation.
00:00:58.440 Capitalism, after all, is a singularly male phenomenon. 0.96
00:01:02.000 The ultimate symbol of capitalism, the skyscraper, 1.00
00:01:05.040 is nothing more than a giant cock on the horizon, fucking the heavens. 0.99
00:01:09.620 Sixteen months after the book was published, this article appeared in The Guardian. 1.00
00:01:13.580 Upward thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky.
00:01:17.240 Do cities have to be so sexist?
00:01:20.220 What about this passage from a chapter in Woke called White Death?
00:01:24.260 Here Titania calls out Helen Keller for her white privilege. 0.71
00:01:28.300 Consider, if you will, the example of white American author Helen Keller, 1880-1968.
00:01:34.040 Even though she was left deaf and blind following an illness as a baby,
00:01:37.880 she still managed to study for a degree, write 12 books and travel the world to give lectures.
00:01:43.260 This kind of privilege is staggering.
00:01:45.280 Now compare that with an article that appeared in Time magazine over a year later,
00:01:50.000 in which the author writes,
00:01:51.720 However, to some black disability rights activists like Anita Cameron,
00:01:55.600 Helen Keller is not radical at all.
00:01:58.000 Just another, despite disabilities, privileged white person.
00:02:02.340 And yet another example of history telling the story of privileged white Americans.
00:02:07.400 And how about this tweet from October 2019,
00:02:10.120 in which Titania had some advice for dog owners. 0.81
00:02:13.480 Dog owners, stop saying good boy and good girl to your pets.
00:02:17.860 This kind of gendered language is normalising the myth of canine sexual dimorphism 0.99
00:02:22.540 and delegitimises the lived experience of trans dogs.
00:02:26.680 And the subsequent outrage ensured that the tweet went viral.
00:02:30.220 And just a couple of months ago, a leading pet talent agency in the UK called Urban Paws
00:02:35.740 was asking owners whether they're cats or dogs identified as gender neutral or non-binary.
00:02:42.320 After the backlash, the company claimed it was a mistake.
00:02:45.220 But the specific addition of a gender identity category on an application,
00:02:49.520 it's hardly the equivalent of a typo.
00:02:51.800 And what about this article from the website of Vet Help Direct?
00:02:55.200 Which pronoun? Do pets have a gender identity?
00:02:59.300 And then, of course, we've got PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,
00:03:02.980 the world's leading animal rights organisation,
00:03:05.540 which posted the following call to arms on Twitter to end speciesism.
00:03:10.720 Evolve your language and learn how we've been taught to think of other animals.
00:03:14.540 they're not an it and should never be talked about like objects. It's about time that somebody took
00:03:20.960 a stand for non-binary pigeons. And this is by no means the only example of Titania's ideas 0.74
00:03:25.920 being enacted by woke activists. Here's my top 10 examples of when her absurd demands became reality. 0.92
00:03:33.620 On 22nd December 2018, Titania tweeted,
00:03:36.760 We should remove biological sex from birth certificates altogether to prevent any more 1.00
00:03:41.220 mistakes from being made. And on 17th December 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine concurred.
00:03:48.500 Sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility and they can be harmful for
00:03:53.860 intersex and transgender people. And on the 1st of October 2019, Titania tweeted this. White parents,
00:04:01.420 if you really want to prove that you're not racist, you should send your teenage daughters 1.00
00:04:05.280 on unaccompanied walking holidays in the tribal regions of North Pakistan. On the 12th of October,
00:04:11.060 2019, Forbes magazine wrote, why Pakistan should be on every solo female traveller's bucket list.
00:04:18.780 On the 15th of October 2018, Titania suggested that Winston Churchill was worse than the Nazis.
00:04:24.440 She wrote, during the Second World War, these two Nazis went head to head. Can we really be sure
00:04:29.480 the better man won? And on the 11th of February 2021, Churchill College at Cambridge University
00:04:36.100 agreed. Churchill College panel claims wartime PM was a white supremacist leading an empire
00:04:42.280 worse than the Nazis. On the 19th of September 2018 Titania criticized Julie Andrews aka Mary
00:04:49.840 Poppins for chimney soot blackface and on the 28th of January 2019 the New York Times wrote an
00:04:56.920 article Mary Poppins and a nanny's shameful flirting with blackface. On 29th April 2019
00:05:03.720 Titania pointed out that scientists have yet to discover the difference between men and women. 0.99
00:05:08.120 She wrote, if scientists are so clever, how come they haven't found a way to tell the difference
00:05:13.180 between human, males and females? And on the 24th of March, 2022, USA Today published this.
00:05:21.000 Scientists agree there is no sufficient way to clearly define what makes someone a woman. 0.98
00:05:25.960 And with billions of women on the planet, there is much variation. On the 22nd of January, 1.00
00:05:30.480 2019, Titania called for the Oscars to prioritise diversity. She wrote, I've decided to award new
00:05:37.080 intersectional Oscars to ensure diversity triumphs over merit. Categories to include
00:05:42.360 most feminist picture, most woke screenplay, least predatory male, gayest sound editing, 0.78
00:05:50.100 fattest supporting Filipino and bravest vegan in a trans black role. On the 12th of June 2020, 0.98
00:05:57.000 the Academy concurred, Oscars announced new diversity and inclusion plans.
00:06:02.980 On the 30th of January 2019, Titania accused Laurence Olivier of a hate crime for his
00:06:08.860 performance as Othello. On the 9th of October 2021, the University of Michigan agreed,
00:06:15.540 renowned professor counseled for showing legend Laurence Olivier in blackface in 1965 film
00:06:21.580 Othello. On the 2nd of May 2020, Titania criticised the NHS for appropriating the LGBTQ rainbow flag.
00:06:30.220 The great tragedy of this pandemic is that children throughout the UK have been indoctrinated
00:06:34.780 into appropriating the LGBTQIA plus flag. Never mind the virus, we need a vaccine for bigotry.
00:06:40.940 And on the 6th of May 2020, Forbes magazine wrote, should the LGBT community call out
00:06:48.160 appropriation of rainbow flag for NHS. On the 6th of June 2019, Titania demanded an option on social
00:06:56.020 media to mute white males. And on the 14th of July 2020, Instagram concurred. They came up with
00:07:04.580 a mute white people sticker. On 12th September 2019, Titania argued that scientists cannot
00:07:11.220 possibly know whether ancient skeletons are male or female. She wrote, so-called scientists are now
00:07:16.580 claiming that these skeletons are male based on analysis of their protein. Protein is a
00:07:21.380 transphobic construct. Next they'll be telling us they can work out their pronouns by measuring 0.87
00:07:26.020 femurs. And on the 18th of July 2022 gender activists concurred. Gender activists push 0.99
00:07:33.080 to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as male or female. This video is available
00:07:40.420 as an article on my substack. This and other articles will be available there first so make
00:07:45.760 sure to head on over there and subscribe now.