Is woke dead? Is it over? Has it “peaked”, run its course before we’ve even properly agreed on what this endlessly controversial but somehow never quite defined social justice movement actually was? Though American rightwingers have been hopefully pronouncing its last rites for a while now, until very recently rumours of its death seemed exaggerated in Britain.
Sure, some vegan restaurants have gone bust lately, but sadly so have plenty of other restaurants in the face of a cost of living crisis. And yes, oat milk sales are down. But is that because it has been toxified by political association, or because it has fallen out of favour with the wellness lobby, or just because it’s expensive? Even reports of a YouTube-fuelled anti-feminist backlash among some young men, or of young women lapping up the original (not very woke) Sex and the City series on Netflix didn’t feel like much of a tipping point. But then came the paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass’s landmark review on treating transgender children, which found that medical interventions have been underpinned by “remarkably weak evidence” and made clear treatment should be holistic, seeking a full understanding of everything going on in children’s lives.
