Queen of Woke Titania McGrath is a titan of social satire
Her tirades against colonialism and gender-biased dog owners have made Titania McGrath a Twitter darling. Now the man who created her reveals the joke is on the left.
Titania McGrath is a radical intersectionalist poet, the Queen of Woke.
In three years on Twitter — tossing off such gems as “If you only have sex with people you find attractive, you might want to ask yourself why you’re such a superficial bigot” — she has amassed 634,000 adoring followers.
She has inspired votive candles and other merch, been pursued by a small army of journalists, and kept the word “outrage” in the headlines with her tirades against anything from colonialism in Newton’s laws of motion to hateful dog owners who use the gendered terms of endearment “good boy” and “good girl”.
But Titania is not real. The unflinching blonde in her Twitter profile is a digital composite, and she is the satirical creation of Andrew Doyle, a writer and stand-up comedian who was born in Northern Ireland.
A scourge of today’s crude tribalism, Doyle is predictably awkward to categorise.
“Most of my views would traditionally be considered left-wing, but in truth left and right has become meaningless, mostly because of the way that identity politics has infected the mainstream left,” he tells me from Hertfordshire, England, where he lives.
He’s performed solo at the Edinburgh Fringe, written political rants for the piss-take-to-camera reporter Jonathan Pie; and will host a weekly show, Free Speech Nation, on the start-up GB News channel that is being launched by the journalist Andrew “Brillo Pad” Neil.
Doyle is pleasant, thoughtful, quick with nuance; qualities which his interviewers feel the need to contrast with Titania’s take-no-prisoners sophistry. Doyle has to explain that Titania is not him.
“I created her as a Twitter character to entertain myself but also to poke fun at this very intolerant and illiberal social justice movement,” he says.
A big inspiration was a chap called Godfrey Elfwick, a self-defined “genderqueer Muslim atheist” put to air in 2015 by the BBC World Service with his view of the Star Wars films as “rooted in homophobia and casual racist stereotypes”.
“The only female ends up in a space bikini chained to a horny space slug,” Elfwick pointed out to startled listeners around the globe who, unlike the Beeb producer, might have twigged that this was a hoax.
Godfrey’s Twitter schtick wasn’t just pranks. He put serious critics in the shade with his insight into the film 12 Years a Slave. “Typical of Hollywood to cast a black actor in a stereotypical role as a slave,” he wrote. “Why not 12 Years a Bank Manager?”
Twitter killed off his account three years ago, but not before his immortal line: “It’s 2018 and women should be free to do whatever feminists say they can.”
Doyle’s friend Lisa Graves, the artist whose digital mischief made Titania the Mona Lisa of Woke, has admitted co-authorship of Elfwick, but supposedly did it in tandem with a shadowy male.
Knowing Graves and Doyle both enjoy misdirecting sleuth-journalists, I opt for a subtle inquiry: “Have Titania & Godfrey Elfwick ever been seen in the same room together?”
Doyle: “Many times. They are good friends.”
So, I switch to the direct approach, and he denies outright any hand in Elfwick’s sock puppetry. Maybe we will never know. Woke, after all, is a world of confusion.
Doyle does have a touch of the Titanias in his own bio. Although he may not subscribe to her edict that “Heterosexuality is a hoax”, he’s gay. And the title of his Oxford University PhD in poetry uses the terms “outsider epistemology” and “discourses of homophilia”.
Online, Titania gets mistaken for the real social justice deal, both by the genuinely woke and the angry unwoken.
“The fact that people still take Titania seriously, every day, would suggest to me that we’re not out of the woods yet,” Doyle says.
Dogs of colour are woefully underrepresented in children's cartoons.
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) April 18, 2021
I've watched "Bluey". Believe me, those dogs are oppressively white.
Especially the blue one. pic.twitter.com/OsHeMWUTRW
“This cult is so powerful. It wouldn’t matter if they were just confined to the recesses of the internet or a few over-zealous student meetings on a university campus.
“What matters is that (social justice ideology) is the predominant force in all our major cultural, artistic, political and media institutions.”
Even the CIA. This month the spooks who gave us waterboarding handed their Twitter account over to an intern, presumably, who declaimed: “I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are. Whether you work at #CIA, or anywhere else in the world.”
The agency had been running a slick recruitment ad with a lady proudly ticking all her identity boxes, such as “a cisgender millennial”. All this moved the American journalist Matt Taibbi to suggest “the CIA is actually launching a rival account to Titania McGrath”.
If you want to to overdose on woke ahead of time, follow Titania. Her absurd improvisations have an eerie habit of resurfacing as realworld social justice claims. She has devoted a triumphant Twitter thread to this proof of her thought leadership. For example: “On 19 September 2018, I criticised Julie Andrews (aka Mary Poppins) for chimney soot blackface. On 28 January 2019, The New York Times concurred.” The Times headline? Mary Poppins and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting with Blackface.
Doyle says he’s no prophet, just steeped in social justice theory.
“All you have to do is try and think of the most extreme policy that is logically consistent with this ideology and it will happen — if it is not curbed,” he says.
“If I said to you three years ago that schools would be segregating parents by race for dialogue sessions with teachers, people wouldn’t have believed that — and yet it happened a few weeks ago in California.”
As the ideology has attained ever greater heights of surreal nonsense, the term woke is no longer worn as a badge of pride, and the fiction has been put about that, like cancel culture, it’s all a fascist fabrication.
Titania has been given some credit for this victory, although Doyle says it’s hard to prove. He does believe she brings comfort at a time of “collective madness when people who are meant to be the court jesters and the subversive voices in society have suddenly marshalled themselves along the establishment line”.
“And I have had messages and emails from people who have said they have been effectively deradicalised through Titania, that she helped them to see how ludicrous their belief system was.”
Cancel culture is a myth invented by fascists.
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) July 5, 2020
If you see anyone disagreeing with this statement, please send me their name, twitter handle, address and employment details.
I’ll do the rest.
Titania may proclaim her compassion like new pronouns in her profile but Doyle appears to live his, and sympathises with the ideological locked-in syndrome afflicting woke folk.
“They don’t understand why you wouldn’t see these power structures in society that they see, why you wouldn’t think that cheese is racist, or that the concept of gravity is white supremacist.
“It must be a hard life, it must be very exhausting, living in the most enlightened, tolerant and progressive society that has ever existed on this planet at any time, and yet at the same time believing that oppression is everywhere.
“That must be very bad for you psychologically, so yeah, I feel for them.”
So far today I’ve got a woman fired for claiming that sex is binary, shouted abuse at an old man collecting money for the British Legion, dog-piled people on Twitter for disagreeing with me and burned some books by Dr Seuss.
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) March 4, 2021
It’s SO exhausting being on the right side of history.
But he’s under no illusions about their ability to accept the ground rules for discussion of the kind that might detoxify the public square.
“They are continually attempting to impute bad faith, discredit you or dox you (expose you to harassment by putting your personal contact details online). Truth is not their goal, ultimately.”
They certainly will not be in the queue for signed copies of his new book Free Speech and Why it Matters, which attempts to reach a generation exposed to teachers and academics keener to suppress what they deem “hate speech” than to defend liberty.
“The vast majority of people are still open to persuasion, and do instinctively believe in liberal values and free speech and personal autonomy, the Enlightenment and rationalism and evidence-based thought,” Doyle says.
But is classical liberalism too bloodless now to compete with the emotive tribalism of identity politics?
“We shouldn’t give up on liberalism just yet, it’s far too premature for that,” he says. “You’ve got to remember — woke activists, there are hardly any of them, they’re just incredibly powerful.”
That power is amplified by the weakness of institutions and companies which so readily capitulate to online mobs, or even a handful of anonymous social media trolls.
“We have to win the argument so that, ultimately, employers understand that when they are the subject of these targeted attacks, they stand up and say, ‘no you can whinge all you like, I’m not going to listen to you, I’m not going to change anything’.”
• We reject the current predominance of identity politics and will simply treat everyone equally (staff and customers alike) irrespective of their race, gender, sexuality, or any other immutable characteristic.
— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) September 10, 2020
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