Glad that ombudsman Arjen Fortuin had looked into it. The first time the term ‘woke’ in NRC was on September 28, 2017, and then it was still described as “slang for ‘socially conscious'”. We are now almost six years and many discussions further, and the concept is as good as worn out: only hardened opponents still know exactly what they are protesting against, and the supporters are divided among themselves. In six years the umbrella term has collapsed in the Netherlands. At most you can throw such a broken plu in the gutter very angry.
There was an evening in Brussels last week about gender-inclusive, -neutral, -sensitive, -aware language, and no, the word image is not getting any better. I led the evening, proposing to avoid the term ‘woke’ like the plague, and to speak as precisely as possible. That met with no resistance. Nice, Flemish-speaking people there in Brussels: as a Dutchman, I got the feeling that their timidity had something to do with the guest-at-the-table syndrome in that mainly French-speaking city.
Someone gave a talk, it was a trans woman, her name is Selm Merel Wesselaers, and she did it very well, by the way.
She said, “I’m a lazy trans.” I had to laugh at her. A woman simply stood there, putting her own thoughts and body goods into perspective. I thought that was intimate, because putting yourself in perspective in a room is unusual. Almost always, gender-conscious people, who list their preferred pronouns (them/their), speak as if the Stasi were hot on their heels. In Belgium, by the way, that is the politician Bart De Wever of the New Flemish Alliance, who wants to make a spearhead of his anti-woke policy.
So there are always enemies who listen in, but this Selm Merel called herself lazy because she had switched from them/them as a pronoun to her/their, and also because she felt that she still spoke too low, but after those speech therapy lessons it only once sat down. I liked that woman immediately, there was someone who had taken off her armor. Later she said that she had doubted for a long time whether she was worthy to count herself among the women, and that doubt was also sympathetic to me. Yet cut the knot: no longer them cut their knot, but she cut hers.
That’s not really how it should be: activists have to be fierce, a ‘vanguard’, to put it revolutionary, their whole life has to consist of struggle. Because without the Radikalinskis nothing would be achieved. That is the ‘trickle down’ theory, in which even right-wing economists no longer believe. But social warriors still expect all the good from this trickle-down effect.
Not me. I believe in space makers like Selm Merel Wesselaers.
Stephen Sanders writes a column here every Monday.
A version of this article also appeared in the June 19, 2023 newspaper.