Amber Heard and the crisis of feminism: Why the woke set believes some women and tells others to shut the hell up.

Even during the Depp / Heard trial – even as Vogue and other woke outlets were insisting that believing Amber’s every claim was the solemn duty of all right-thinking people – we had examples of women being disbelieved. So when it was reported that a young female school student in the UK had been severely bullied for questioning the ideology of transgenderism, the kind of people who normally say ‘Believe women’ essentially said this young woman was iffy as hell. Or at least that the story of her abuse at the hands of 60 trans-believing fellow students sounded very fishy. The Guardian’s Owen Jones led the charge. This ‘story’ – his scare quotes – sounds incredible, he said. He reached out to the 60 students – the alleged bullies, remember – so that he could hear ‘their story’. If you were to use scare quotes around the word story in relation to Amber Heard – Amber’s ‘story’ – you’d be branded a disbelieving bigot. But do it in relation to a girl allegedly bullied for doubting the gospel of genderfluidity and you’re a progressive hero.

Then there’s the Wi Spa incident. People don’t talk about it much these days, but this was surely one of the most shocking examples of British media failure in recent times. This story – or ‘story’, as some might have it – concerns a group of women who were using the female changing area in a spa in Los Angeles when a ‘trans woman’ came in with his tumescent knob swinging about. Bullshit, said the Guardian. It cast aspersions on the black woman who brought this alleged incident of flashing to public attention, pointing out that she’s a Christian. Shudder. ‘Her social-media page frequently features Bible quotes’, the Guardian said from behind its smelling-salts hanky. The whole story – ‘story’? – stinks, the Guardian reported. It is even ‘unclear whether a trans woman was actually present’ on the day in question. Erm, wrong. A 52-year-old male – which is how most of us refer to people with penises – has now been charged with exposing himself to women at the Wi Spa, and to a minor, too. Maybe those bitches were telling the truth?

And what about lesbians who tell their stories of being pressured by ‘trans women’ – again, men – into having sexual relations? They must not be believed, either. In fact, so-called progressives will literally protest against media outlets that provide those women with airtime. So when the BBC published an article in October last year headlined ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’, there was fury. The woke mob went mad. Trans activists and their allies gathered outside BBC HQ, with one of their placards reading: ‘We demand that the BBC retract the article.’ In short, not only should we automatically disbelieve lesbians who claim they have been abused by trans women (men) – we should silence them. Remove their filthy, dangerous claims from your website, is essentially what the so-called progressives in the woke set were saying to the BBC.

Just imagine if any of this happened to Amber Heard. If the Guardian sent its reporters to demolish her every claim, as it did with the Wi Spa women. If the BBC largely ignored her story, as it did with the girls and women targeted by grooming gangs in the UK. If woke people turned up outside the courthouse waving placards demanding that any article containing Heard’s side of the story should be retracted, as they did with those lesbians concerned about trans authoritarianism. There would be outrage. Indeed, the Depp-heads being criticised for disparaging Heard have only done what the woke elites have been doing in spades to ‘difficult’ women, whether that’s the black Christian woman who reported being flashed at in LA or the young lesbian who says she was cajoled into sex with a person with a penis – that is, cast doubt on a woman’s claims of abuse, and depicted the woman in question as a conniving, lying demon.

The woke set’s sanctification of Heard, who must be believed, alongside its casting of copious amounts of shade on other women, who must be disbelieved, speaks to some serious confusions in the discussion around feminism, women and truth today. It confirms just how ideological the ‘Believe women’ slogan has been. ‘Believe women like me’ would have been a more honest rallying cry for the woke, well-educated, pussy-hat-wearing warriors of the #MeToo era. They want to hear stories of wealthy celebrities falling victim to male bullying and high-flying female employees overhearing sexist jokes in the workplace. But working-class women being abused by Muslim men? And trans-critical women being bullied and threatened with rape and death? And young lesbians feeling pressured to have sex with penis people? That stuff they don’t want to hear about. It complicates their moral narrative. It pollutes their political agenda. And more importantly, it raises the possibility that their own belief system – their Ivy League, eccentric, reason-defying view that sex is changeable and that brown men are higher up the Oppression Ladder than working-class white girls – might be actively contributing to the abuse of women in certain settings. ‘Believe women, except those poor, stupid or blasphemous women whose oppression we have personally facilitated…’

Chiefly Illiterate in San Francisco Schools: The district pulls ‘chief’ from its CFO’s title as a progressive gesture to Native Americans

The San Francisco school district is a slow learner, apparently. In February voters ousted three school-board members in landslide elections. One complaint was that the board was more interested in progressive gestures, such as scrubbing Abraham Lincoln’s name off school buildings, than in reopening classrooms amid the pandemic.

Now the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the school district is planning to phase out the word “chief” in its job titles, “given that Native American members of our community have expressed concerns.” Currently the district has executives with the customary roles of chief financial officer, chief of staff, and so on.

Here’s what is particularly amusing in this attempt at progressive sensitivity: While the English language has lots of words that can be traced to the native peoples of the Americas, including “chipmunk,” “barbecue” and “hurricane,” they don’t include “chief.” That word comes from Old French, and originally Latin, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations back to 1297.

“Farewell great Chiefe,” says a character in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” That’s dated to the early 1600s. Somehow we doubt he was thinking about the Sioux. A biblical translation from William Tyndale in 1526 speaks of “the power of Belzebub, the chefe of the devyls.” The earliest examples are hard to parse unless you’re fluent in Beowulfese, but here’s one we grasp from 1483, a decade before Columbus sailed to the west: “She was made abbesse and chyef of al the monasterye.”

Don’t San Francisco schools have English teachers who can explain this? And even if “chief” did have Native origins, so what? The English language is a melting pot, to use another disfavored term. Or maybe real progressives should forswear French-derived words entirely. Decolonizing the language would sure stick it to William the Conqueror, the Norman who subjugated England in 1066.