What do Unconscious Bias and Diversity Training have in common with wokeness and the current 'Trans Takeover'?

or... How's that sense of entitlement working out for you?

Over the course of last weekend it was hard to miss all the headlines describing the Trans Starbucks employee at a franchise at the Ferry terminal in Southampton in the United Kingdom, who was filmed first beligerantly ranting at a middle-aged female customer and later assaulting the gentleman who made the video and attempting to seize his personal iPhone device. If you did miss it, you can watch it here:

The recording starts with the customer responding to the imposing nature of a woke and self-described trans, but clearly genetically male, starbucks employee who has come around the counter in order to use his easily 6ft physical presence to stand over the shorter and older customer.

“You’re rude.” The customer, 55 year old Ms Vanessa Thomas, can be heard to say. “Don’t you ever call me transphobic. Ever,” She continues.

“You’re calling me a man. You’re being transphobic, Karen!” the clearly male and much taller Starbucks employee yells back. “Get out!”

‘Karen’, a term imported from the United States of America, has entered the common vernacular as a derogatory term used to describe a middle-aged white woman percieved as being loud, racist, boorish or self-entitled.

Which is ironic, given the self-entitled nature of the male Starbucks employee’s verbal, and later physical, attacks. Various mainstream media outlets have covered the altercation, often playing into the woke obsession by avoiding all use of terms like he and she and doing more to make it seem like the middle-aged white woman caused the fracas by ‘apparently saying something transphobic’. I believe nothing could be further from the truth.

Behind the Story

In an interview reported by LBC, Ms Thomas describes the incident.

She had ordered her beverage. However, when she pulled out several British Pound cash notes which remain legal tender everywhere in the United Kingdom, the tall, imposing and genetically male self-described trans person who had not been involved in serving Ms Thomas came around the counter and told her she would have to pay by card. Ms Thomas tried to speak to the genetically female woman that can be seen behind the counter, at which point our imposingly tall male interjected again regarding using the card machine.

“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the lady behind the counter,” Ms Thomas responded - which was apparently all the imposingly tall and rude male needed to hear to become ‘triggered’. His rant began with yelling at Ms Thomas that the woman behind the counter ‘doesn’t identify as a lady’.

The rest, as they say, is video history.

Equity and Equitable Hiring Policies

So at this Starbucks franchise at least it seems that a pro-trans hiring policy is in operation. A white employer would be vilified for a hiring policy that saw them employing significantly or solely people whose appearance or self-description was similar to his- or herself, but what is effectively reverse discrimination wherein a coloured or trans employer operates in the same manner is applauded these days as affirmative action and equitable. The concept of equity is itself an issue because it asks us to accept a situation wherein certain groups in society are allowed to make up for past descrimination through the application of current discrimination. Current discrimination that is often foisted against people who are far removed from those that may have perpetrated the historic discrimination. In effect, equity, like critical race theory, does little more than amplify division, hate, discrimination and racism by introducing it to a new group of victims and restarting the cycle. Equity in these circumstances is something Professor Peter Boghossian describes as:

“Employment where the best candidate is not judged based on merit or ability, but rather on the basis of some characteristic like sex, sexual orientation or race alone.”

The Culture of Entitlement

In conversation with Josh Guetzkow, Danny and others in my local research group, Josh proposed the following rules as defining the attitudes of acolytes of the culture of entitlement created by wokeness:

1. You must be careful what you say around me so you don’t offend me;

2. You have to give me a trigger warning in case something you are about to say might cause me stress;

3. You must provide me with a safe space to be with other people who are like me;

4. You have to ask me what my pronouns are and use those pronouns when referring to me in conversation, even with other people;

5. You have to tell me what your pronouns are so you create an inclusive environment (which feeds back all the way back to rule 1);

… and just generally be adherent to most of the things that have contributed to the snowflake generation.

The sad thing is that while we are all busy either kowtowing to members of the culture of entitlement like our trans Starbucks employee, or generally being offended at each other and feeling ‘liberated’ while demanding restitution, no one thinks about much else. Woke culture, including the current trans thing being rammed down our throats with sexualised books and secret trans grooming in primary and high schools and disturbing perverts running drag queen story hours, operate to divide and conquer; keeping people unsettled and actively engaged in fighting each other. It also means that they always have a fresh and ready group of victims to blame…

How’s that sense of entitlement working out for you?

Just like:

1. The male trans-influencer Dylan Mulvaney, whose sponsorship from and bizarre and strangely mystifying TikTok adverts for Bud Light resulted in Anheuser-Busch losing more than $5billion from their share value and saw the marketing VP whose idea had been to hire Mulvaney politely shoved out the door on a ‘leave of absence’;

2. The male trans-model Munroe Bergdorf who was hired and fired by global brand L’Oreal after Bergdorf had engaged in a hypocritical racist rant against white people at a rally in virginia. Bergdorf used the mainstream media and name-calling to apply pressure on L’Oreal and as a result was briefly re-hired. But that didn’t last long;

3. The male trans-prisoner Isla Bryson (born Adam Graham) who, after demanding ‘women’s rights’ and to be placed in a woman’s jail, was found guilty of raping two women and therefore, as someone who was only acting as a woman, was deemed to be a safety risk for real female prisoners and moved out to the male prison he should have always been in;

4. The serial sex offender and stalker of teenage girls Andrew Burns who believed that nothing more than donning a dress, growing his hair out and appropriating the name Tiffany Scott meant he was entitled to demand to be housed in a women’s prison. That didn’t work out the way he had hoped; and

5. The black female trans-employee who presented as a male middle-manager at Netflix who was accused of and sacked for leaking commercially sensitive information regarding viewership and profits and who, in response, tried to organise a walk-out of all trans staff and allies to cripple operations at the media company. This individual sought to make her sacking about racism and transphobia when her dismissal was something that would, and should, happen to anyone who violates a position of trust by leaking trade secrets.

The situation for the male trans Starbucks employee worked out about as well as he deserved. It was revealed on Monday that the otherwise sickeningly woke Starbucks had required their franchisee sack him.

While we might like to hope that the world is starting to see through the divisive guises of wokeness (equity, diversity, alphabet soupism, and the calls to ‘be an ally’) that are really being used to divide us and inflict new racism and discrimination onto the next generation, sadly many employers and educators persist in propagating this nonsense. In spite of the fact that a 2022 UK Government report described the diversity training used to indoctrinate employees and students in the woke agenda - also known as Unconscious Bias Training (UBT) - as an unproven, check-box exercise with potential for back-firing effects that led people to walk on egg-shells around women and minorities. The report’s authors describe that rather than increasing the number of women and minorities in managerial positions, a review they identified of over 830 companies in the United States of America actually showed the use of this diversity training had actually decreased it. Another key finding has been that diversity and UBT has been seen to engender a ‘sense of entitlement’ in those from black and ethnic minority groups that attend the training, which leads them to see all white people, and especially those in positions of seniority, as evil, racist, and needing to make redress for perceived historic issues of racism and ‘unfairness’. This sense of entitelement has seen BAME people demand millions of dollars in reparations from strangers of today for wrongs visited upon their ancestors sometimes three or four generations ago and even in another place. We can see an example in this recent incident in a Target store in Ohio, USA where an angry and physically confrontational woman demanded Target allow her to steal almost $1,000 in groceries ‘as reparations’ for past acts that presumably occured to her ancestors before the store, or brand, ever existed (video).

We need to get along with others and that can sometimes be challenging. If we could all learn that lesson about every cultural and ethnic group, and sooner, we could more easily make the point that nobody needs middle aged white people running diversity and UBT training sessions at our local workplace or university campus - which does little more than perpetuate a harmful and self-destructive cycle.

In closing…

The Story Box on Youtube gives some prescient advice to all people who decide to identify as trans.

“If you are a trans individual and you are working in hospitality and are triggered by this whole misgendering thing…

… You shouldn’t be working in hospitality!”