TORONTO – Britain’s Conservative party leadership race is turning into a transphobic spectacle – CNN. 

That is the headline from a story on CNN, by Tara John updated, July 18, leading up to a final week of run-off selections to determine the next leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of Britain.

CNN, arguably the voice of left-leaning America, has been losing market share since the departure of their favourite whipping boy Donald Trump was voted out of office. It is natural to expect they would look for another place where “non-issues” are blown out of proportion. Must think ahead because the next Leader will be the Britain’s next Prime Minister.

“Besides the standard pledges of tax cuts or a slimmed down state”, John maintains, “there has also been an enthusiastic promotion of anti-trans positions, potentially marking an intensification of the current government’s ‘war on woke’ (emphasis added).”

Please get a grip. Not many people have seen evidence of that. Not even among those who view the British as having an unbalanced preoccupation with matters sexual. There is no war on woke.

So, what prompted CNN’s concern? Americans have enough “problems” of their own. The recent overturn of the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court; the resurgence of States’ Rights at the expense of federal authority and the growing reaction against bully-boy school districts which seek to pre-empt parental rights come to mind.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, where customs across Nations of similar background, practices become part of the common law often cited as precedent by like-heritage nations (America, Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand) in the local, it is an item of some concern for those living the culture wars movement.

One can only imagine the hysteria generated in that milieu when the campaign team for the front runner, former Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Rishi Sunak (in the pic, from YouTube), leaked stories explaining What their candidate meant on issues of women’s rights and gender vocabulary.

Despite criticism from the media, Sunak’s team claimed he was protecting “women’s rights”…[when}… reflected negatively on “recent trends to erase women via the use of clumsy, gender-neutral language.” His team further went on record to indicate that Sunak “will call on schools to be more careful in how they teach on issues of sex and gender.”

CNN concludes that “many of the candidates have taken up the government’s mantle (war on woke), staking their positions in the debate over sex and gender identity.”

Nancy Kelley, chief executive of LGBTQ rights group Stonewall, surprisingly gave a more “nuanced view”. “We’ve got major cost-of-living crisis, we are facing down a global climate emergency, there is war in Ukraine… (and we are) dealing with the aftermath of Brexit — the fact that the media are asking so obsessively about (trans) issues, and candidates are all being expected to pronounce their views on trans people’s place in society is so disproportionate and scary,” for a group that only accounts for an estimated 0.6% of the population”.

In other words, this may be media focused story. Estimates of the fluctuating numbers of words associated with gender identity in Britain range as high as 150. How to keep track? The only country, Canada, which asked specific identifying questions in its latest Census gave a lower estimate than Ms. Kelley.

In its release of last April 27, StatsCan said that one in 300 Canadians self-identified as either a gay person or trans 1/3 of one %. Of that, 0.19 % was trans. Like everyone else, they deserve equal treatment.

To columnists like Rex Murphy, who writes for the National Post, wokists have seized control of the nation’s mouthpiece – Prime Minister Trudeau – turning otherwise intellectual debate into a “virtuous crusade” that ignores the socio-economic realities being faced by everyone. That crusade accepts no dissent. Not from “normal people”, he says in an article critical of Justin Trudeau, July 16, 2022.

His only sounding boards are the “think-tanks, the policy seminars, the petty school board emperors of woke.” As with CNN and the Conservative Leadership Candidates in Britain, there are no votes to be had by listening to them.