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By and large, much of society has moved on. Target scaled back its celebration of pride month, presently channeling its activism into forcing customers to use and reuse fabric bags that no one washes and that inevitably become increasingly soiled over time. The baristas at your local coffee shop have mostly gone off their cross-sex hormones. And even that married mother of two at your office who suddenly decided to experiment with she/them pronouns upon turning 35 has stopped including them in her email signature.
Yet, then again, despite the apparent return to normalcy, it would be inaccurate to claim remnants of these ideologies cannot still be found in some corners.
There’s still enough campus craziness around race, sex, and even abdominal girth to provide ample content for outlets such as the College Fix. A failing Massachusetts lesbian bar recently faced accusations of participating in eugenics, not to mention a “mass disabling event,” because the debt-ridden owner suggested the establishment go mask-optional on Saturday nights. And the WNBA continues its struggle to define the “W” in its acronym, even though it has declared that Enes Kanter Freedom and sometimes trans-black-lesbian Roysha White, formerly known as Royce White, are not woman enough for the league’s 2027 draft.
Additionally, there are lingering remnants of wokeness far more consequential, and thus far harder to laugh off, than whether the WNBA refuses to let two guaranteed future hall-of-famers make history or whether Swarthmore is offering courses on “The Fat Renaissance” and divine queerness.
Perhaps most notably, there are still schools and states trying to maintain policies that assist minors in their attempts to transition regardless of parental knowledge or consent.
For example, on Sept. 1 the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. attorney for the District of Kansas sued Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools for directing staff to develop transition plans for transgender and gender nonconforming students through a process that entails meetings between students and school officials from which parents can be excluded, despite the likelihood that sensitive topics such as a student’s mental health and their family’s religious beliefs may be discussed.
Weeks later, the Education Department announced an investigation following reports that personnel at one Massachusetts school helped facilitate the social transition of a teenage girl, in part through counseling sessions disguised as math tutoring.
Furthermore, in December, the Supreme Court will be hearing a case concerning a Washington state law described by critics such as the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, a public-interest law firm specializing in children’s health and parental rights cases, as allowing “youth shelters to withhold a runaway child from their parents if the child is seeking or receiving what the state defines as ‘gender-affirming treatment.’”
I SPEAK FLUENT SOCIALIST. HERE’S WHAT THEY’RE ACTUALLY SAYING
How common such cases and policies are, the extent of their real-world consequences, and the question of whether they are truly remnants of the past that officials simply failed to strike from the books versus features of the present, alive and well in places in which they are allowed to thrive, remain open questions.
However, such cases should nevertheless serve as reminders that, as easy as it is to roll one’s eyes at these apparent anachronisms from the era of peak wokeness, we may not be as free from them as we would like to think.
Daniel Nuccio is an independent journalist and a spring 2026 College Fix fellow. He is a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute. He earned his doctorate in biology in 2025.
