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Woke Tales: Airline Dropping 'Ladies and Gentlemen' Announcements, Citing 'Inclusion'

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 12, 2021 10:55 AM

The Woke crowd never rests. They are engaged in round-the-clock efforts to seize more and more control over our society, via a combination of bullying and governmental regulation. They count on scared silence from opponents, ruthlessly enforced through aggressive demonization tactics against anyone who speaks out – no matter how mainstream the objection may be. The radical few are strong-arming society in ways large and small. This has been a problem on college campuses for quite some time, and the worst excesses have been exported throughout American life. What happens in academic doesn't stay in academia. Not anymore. 

For two examples, read these recent developments out of MIT and the University of Michigan, respectively: 

On August 12, a colleague and I wrote an op-ed in Newsweek in which we argued that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as it currently is implemented on campus “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment” and “treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.” We proposed instead “an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.” We noted that this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants.  Shortly thereafter, my detractors developed a new strategy to try to isolate me and intimidate everyone else into silence: They argued on Twitter that I should not be invited to give science seminars at other universities and coordinated replacement speakers. This is an effective and increasingly common way to ratchet up the cost of dissenting because disseminating new work to colleagues is an important part of the scientific endeavor.  Sure enough, this strategy was employed when I was chosen to give the Carlson Lecture at MIT — a major honor in my field. It is an annual public talk given to a large audience and my topic was “climate and the potential for life on other planets.” On September 22, a new Twitter mob, composed of a group of MIT students, postdocs, and recent alumni, demanded that I be uninvited.  It worked. And quickly.  On September 30 the department chair at MIT called to tell me that they would be cancelling the Carlson lecture this year in order to avoid controversy. 

What was Sheng's transgression? He screened the 1965 version of Shakespeare's Othello in class as part of a lesson about how the play was adapted for the opera. This version stars Laurence Olivier, a white actor, who wore blackface to portray the protagonist Othello, a Moor...It's not clear whether Sheng, who was born and raised in China, understood blackface's specifically American legacy, and why such a portrayal is considered offensive. But he swiftly apologized for screening this version of the film. "I thought (that) in most cases, the casting principle was based on the music quality of the singers," Sheng told The Michigan Daily. "Of course, time (sic) has changed, and I made a mistake in showing this film. It was insensitive of me, and I am very sorry." His apology ought to have been more than sufficient, but his students were not appeased. Indeed, they reacted as if they had been traumatized by the experience...Other students signed an open letter calling on Sheng to be removed from his teaching position for failing to "create a safe environment." ...A significant number of Sheng's students, former students, and colleagues have denounced him as a racist. And the administration is taking the matter seriously: The music department released a statement saying that "Sheng's actions do not align with our School's commitment to anti-racist action, diversity, equity and inclusion." The university's Office of Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX has received a complaint about the incident.

"Sheng has stepped down from teaching the class for the time being. He has apologized profusely for making his students feel wronged, though many have loudly rejected his apology," writes Robby Soave. Sheng "received a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship in 2001, and has twice been a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in music. His undergraduate students should certainly count themselves lucky to be able to learn from him. Instead, they are demanding the university fire him for rendering the classroom an unsafe space." And so it goes. Meanwhile, here's what the government of California is up to. Forget the massive homelessness problem, the crime sprees, the unaffordability of housing, the out-flow of residents, etc. They've got their eyes on the prize: 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Saturday a bill requiring large retailers to provide gender-neutral toy sections, per the Los Angeles Times. California is the first state to adopt such a law. LGBTQ advocates have pointed out that marketing methods using pink and blue hues "pressure children to conform to gender stereotypes," AP notes...The law states that retail stores with 500 or more workers must sell toys and child care products (excluding clothes) in a gender-neutral section that's "labeled at the discretion of the retailer ... regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys."  Companies that fail to comply with the new law could face a civil penalty of $250 for a first violation and $500 for any subsequent violations.

There is nothing they won't regulate or try to control – and the more woke and signaling the action, the better, especially because such endeavors serve as self-congratulatory and self-righteous distractions from the many real problems plaguing the state. Meanwhile, across the pond, we have this madness: 


What percentage of British Airways passengers are cisgender? 98-99 percent? And what percentage of trans people would actually be offended by being referred to as a lady or gentleman, based on their own preferences? I'd wager very few. Institutions are making decisions to ban inoffensive words and phrases, and to alter the plain meaning of words, due to the ever-changing whims and demands of a remote fringe of activists. It's crazy. As I've written before, we can be kind to people and do our best to accommodate people's identities without engaging in mass erasure of concepts like womanhood, and without taking a hatchet to our language. But as long as these tactics keep working, the fringe will keep exploiting fear and weakness – and they'll keep "winning." Are we willing to cede our society and culture to a relative handful of broken-brain weirdos like this? 

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I'll leave you with this:


...About which I had more to say here: