Fragile Masculinity Syndrome

I recently had an altercation on a local community Facebook page with a person who, contrary to FB rules, uses a pseudonym. He posted something which sought to lay the blame for the smelly and sometimes toxic algal blooms that are now a feature of the region’s rivers in summer, on “council contractors” digging holes. The aim of these “council engineered ponds”, according to him, is so the smell and toxins can then be blamed on farmers to justify further environmental regulation.

I posted a mildly worded reply pointing out that responsibility for issuing licenses to commercial companies to extract gravel lies with the regional authority, Environment Canterbury. I also said that reduced river flows, and the increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers combined with heavy irrigation are factors in the now yearly algal blooms.

Articulate women, especially older women, are anathema to men who suffer from fragile masculinity syndrome (FMS). Another man can call them a dick, thick as shit, a clown, etc but let a woman sound smarter than them, and their emotional fuses start to blow. 

I was soon to find out that this particular FMS sufferer is a misogynist of the first water; a wanna-be patriarch who believes that men should rule, and women should submit; that a woman’s place is serving her husband and looking after kids, and as for old women, they should do the world of men a favour, acknowledge their uselessness, and die.

He began the process of consigning me to the ranks of what eventually became a cabal of screeching-feminist-hippy-climate-change-doomsday-cultist-leftie-vaccine-promoting-authoritarians who, in his view are intent upon destroying the NZ economy. 

That combination of extreme ignorance and arrogance is like a red rag to an earnest pedagog like me, so I tried to explain more about why ECAN licenses gravel extraction, and the part played in the blooms by increased use of artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation.

My explanations about reducing riverbed elevation to maintain capacity between the stopbanks and thereby reduce flood risk, were clearly not comprehensible to someone so deeply mired in confirmation bias. He was clearly ignorant, even of what stopbanks are, why they were created in the first place and are carefully maintained. 

A tongue in cheek reply advising him to calm his amygdala and engage his frontal lobes was a step too far for his FMS, and he fixed me firmly in his misogynistic sights. 

(Spelling and grammar original; my emphasis in bold.)

HOW is THIS thing going to stop any flooding if there is a few banks ACROSS the river bed???if you think what you wrote made you sound smart, it didn't. The world doesn't revolve around you and that might be very hard thing to comprehend for old woman that's well past her expiry date. it doesn't mater if I say 1 + 1 =2 or if I say you are dumb if you don't know 1+1 = 2. It's still correct statement and it's nothing hyperbolic about it. This hippie attitude that it's bad to point out stupidity rather than the stupidity itself is going out of fashion and more and more people are starting to catch up. NZ is too ruined, economy is destroyed and the whole country was run to the ground while hippes were cheering about progression of feminism and environmentalism instead of making sure things are run responsibly, by competent men and in a way that would make tomorrow better than yesterday. So far the only result of this current madness is the fact that median income of $65 000 in 2025 is the equivalent of $8 000 in 2000 and everything is worse than 25 years ago...”

Unwilling to engage on his post any longer but wanting to clarify issues for others, I posted something myself. 

As someone who grew up in Canterbury, I know the streams on our region's shingle riverbeds have always grown algae as the flow decreases and the temperature of the water increases. I know also that there has been an increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers on the plains' thin alluvial soils, along with an increase in heavy irrigation which accelerates the leaching of nutrients into waterways.

As a result of that, when the rivers experience low flow, and/or water gets trapped in either naturally or artificially formed depressions, there is now a greater likelihood that the algae will proliferate and form "blooms".

Each alga is short-lived and as they die off, the resulting high concentration of dead organic matter in the water has the effect of reducing dissolved oxygen. The reduction in oxygen kills freshwater organisms which adds to the organic "soup" and to the unpleasant smell. Some algae also secrete toxins which, in high concentration, can harm mammals.

District Councils do not employ contractors to "engineer ponds" that form algal blooms in order to either deliberately or opportunistically blame it on farmers to justify an increase in environmental regulation of waterways. The responsibility for granting licenses to remove shingle from the region's riverbeds (to help slow bed elevation) lies with the regional authority, ECAN. 

It may be the case that the way shingle is being extracted needs to be more closely monitored.

It is certainly the case that the social and environmental costs of the impact on our region's waterways of an increased reliance on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation to force grass and legume growth on thin alluvial soils, need to be addressed.

There are science-based facts and there are opinions. As noted by a pseudonymous poster on this page, it's a science-based fact that I'm part of the older demographic. His depiction of my age making me, "an old woman who is well past her expiry date", is opinion. We are all entitled to our opinions but when they are ill-informed, ideological, or stray into expressions of bigotry, best be prepared to be challenged.

Mr FMS soon made his noxious presence felt on my post. (Spelling etc as per original)

You sound like someone involved in the scam or devout fanatic of the doomsday cult of climate change. any conflicts of interst you wanna disclose?

Stagnant water is ideal for growing algae and that's a fact. 

Making ponds like that will supercharge algae blooms - fact.  

making banks across river bed doesn't help prevent floods - fact. 

NZ doesn't use liquid manure PITS so leaching nitrogen (aka liquid manure) leaching into rivers is no concern.

Fish, ducks gulls and so shits into the water and that's the main source of nitrogen in the water, not a cow peeing into grass 1km away.

Farmers were blamed for the stink because very few people know about cyanobacteria and how it stinks when the bloom dies off and decays - fact

Kids and families were exposed to the toxins - fact 

FIY: you know how to gaslight and BS and yes you are well past your expiry date but you still think people will treat you like if you were 20 when you had some value. you should be busy taking care of your husband, kids and grandkids insted of trying to mess things up.

On another post, he made the extraordinary statement that “99.999% of science is wrong” which made me chuckle given he’d taken exception to me calling him out for hyperbole. Presumably in his world all the means by which he forms and communicates his views and earns a living are created by magic.

I wanted to address his points, but others weighed in and challenged him which made his final fuse blow and served to increase his obsessive focus on me. He went into a full-throated rant against pretty much everyone who is not a middle-aged, white man with misogynistic, ageist, anti-authority, conspiracist political views. 

Had I been able to address his post, I would have pointed out that I specifically referred to nitrate and phosphate fertilisers in conjunction with heavy irrigation on the Canterbury plains’ largely thin alluvial soils which lie over deep layers of porous gravels containing vast amounts of water, interspersed with impermeable finer sediments. 

When functioning properly the rivers feed water into the aquifers which drain towards the sea. With heavy irrigation on land adjacent to the rivers, the surface flow of nutrient-laden water may be towards them. The amount of liquid cow dung and urine on intensive dairy pasture is undoubtedly an added factor.

A lot of our region’s once pristine bore water is now contaminated with nitrates, and other water sources are contaminated with coliforms and require chlorination.

Our rivers have always had trees dropping leaf into them, and arguably way more fish and birds pooed into them in the past given the populations of both have dropped in recent years. They have also always had naturally formed depressions which trapped water as flow decreased and in which grew mats of algae. Those natural depressions are now added to by gravel extraction, and it may well be that ECAN needs to monitor that extraction more carefully.

Gravel extraction aside, there is no question that the scale of algal blooms, and especially toxic blooms, is connected to changes in land use, away from predominantly dry land sheep and arable farming into intensive dairying that is dependent on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation. 

Eventually I closed the comments and blocked him, and the page admins then removed his post and most of the comments under my post which is a shame as I wanted to screenshot them as evidence in the event that his abuse took a physical form.

This man, who seems to think it’s 1825 not 2025, and doesn't care that his ageism and misogyny will offend a lot of people, has clearly not factored in how easily identifiable he is given the internet and NZ's famous two degrees of separation which, in North Canterbury, is more like 1.25 degrees. 

Anyway, all this brouhaha diverted attention away from the pertinent issues – as it was intended to do. The strategy used by these people is, if you cannot address an argument, you troll the person making it. It's a despicable tactic when the issues are so critically important. 

 

The Slippery Slope Into Barbarism

A Facebook "friend" keeps posting stuff about transgenderism and how right people like her were/are to have been supportive of the likes of Trump because he is rolling back those "trans rights" which impact on women's rights.

I look at this way; prior to and concomitant with the rise of neoliberal (global corporate) capitalism, there was a radical shift of political theory and praxis to the right which meant that the popular perception of a “centre ground” – the fulcrum point if you will – shifted significantly to the right. 

Accompanying, and in fact aiding that was the rise, first of interest group, and then identity politics.

Instead of great national and international movements aimed at achieving and sustaining systemic change, there was a proliferation of smaller “issue”, latterly “identity” based movements. 

The old "red left" which aimed for foundational socio-economic change – not just accommodations within capitalism –  lost ground, especially with the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.

Social democrats and socially liberal people shifted rightwards with the fulcrum point, adjusting their ideas and expectations of what being "left-wing” meant. 

For many of them it was simply not being “right-wing”. In the weird world of US politics, it was the patent absurdity of the Democratic Party being "left”.

For socially and politically liberal centrists – having abandoned all hope of socialism (if they ever had any) and with that class-based theory and praxis –  the focus on interest group, and then identity politics, was palliative. 

Attachment to movements that merely sought accommodations from Neo-liberal compliant states – but which in no way threatened the economic status quo – soothed their liberal hearts and minds as they benefited materially from neoliberal capitalism’s intensification of economic exploitation which was accompanied by an increased oppression of workers – somewhere.

For me, the big issue with transgenderism as political theory and praxis is that it is both individualistic and individualising. As such it dovetails perfectly with the right’s aim of breaking all great political-social combinations which challenge capitalism – not just into competing interest groups, but right down to the level of the “aspirational individual”. 

In the transgenderist orthodoxy that takes the form of a focus on the right to a bespoke sex/gender social and legal “identity” with an accompanying bespoke physical appearance.

Anyone who supports/promotes “Trumpism” because of the political right’s and ultra-conservatives’ opportunistic coat-tailing of feminist opposition to the transgenderist orthodoxy, is either a rightwing ideologue or some variety of useful idiot.

What annoys me about both extremes of this debate is the level of social and political myopia and a self-centredness that risks tipping into full-blown narcissism. It’s maybe why both extremes are drawn to Trump .. like attracts like. 

The social and natural worlds are in states of intense and worsening disequilibrium. Fact.

Marx warned that there was no inevitable progression of the social world beyond capitalism and into socialism / communism; if the hands of the hyper-exploiters and oppressors are not wrested off the controls, we could see the social world tip into barbarism. 

Women who are cheerleading for the likes of Trump need to look outside the imperial bubble and the smaller bubbles of relative privilege which bounce around inside it, and place all their hyperbole about the threat to women of transgenderism, against what is objectively threatening women in the rest of the world – and who and what is behind those threats. 

More to point; they need to stop exaggerating and catastrophising as much and as risibly as the most ardent of transactivists ever did, and ask who and what can stop the slide into barbarism? 

On Bigotry

Another post that started out as a thread on “X marks the plot” but grew too long.

Those who know me are aware that I've been an active anti-racist all my life, which includes opposing all forms of antisemitism. How can I not? My left-wing politics and knowledge of history aside, I have Jewish family, and I count many Jewish people among my dearest friends and comrades.

 

I know that among people who profess support for Palestinians are some who are antisemitic, just as among those who profess support for Israel are antisemites who currently hate and fear Arabs and Muslim people more. 

 

I don't accept the highly ideological or idiotic premise that criticism of the policies and actions of a far-right Israeli government is actual or de facto antisemitism. 

 

Those who stick the labels of "racist" or "antisemite" on any argument or behaviour of which they disapprove, risk emptying the concepts of political and critical meaning, and as such they serve to weaken opposition to racism and antisemitism.

 

Israel is the de facto 51st state of the US. It couldn't exist without US federal backing; its interests align with those of the USA, albeit that the current ultra-right-wing Israeli government has slipped the leash and savaged more non-combatants than its imperial master might have wanted it to. 

 

It’s one thing justifying owning an attack dog by claiming it’s for defensive reasons because of the dangerous neighbourhood; it’s another thing entirely when the dogs get off the leash and rip a load of kids to pieces.

 

The old European imperial powers advanced their interests via settler colonialism. They declared a land to be “empty” of people or populated by people who lacked the ability to utilise its natural resources, and/or to govern themselves in what the imperialists deemed to be a "civilised" way.

 

Zionists couldn’t claim terra nullius in Palestine given the known history of the role of multiple empires in the region since people first settled it … Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Hebrew, Carthaginian, Minoan, Greek, Persian, Illyrian, Thracian, Etruscan, Iberian, Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Arab, Berber, Ottoman, British … so they relied on what is a variation of the lies told by the white South African apartheid regime. 

 

They claim that when Jews began to arrive in Palestine in large numbers from Eastern Europe in the late C19th, only around 250,000 Arabs lived there, most of whom had arrived in recent decades, and all, according to the Zionists (many of whom were mired in European supremacism), were an inferior people.

 

Also, they claim, that although Muslim invasions of the region in the 7th century AD had resulted in Arabic being the main language and Islam the main religion, it was never exclusively an Arab region.

 

No one has ever claimed it was but more than twelve hundred years of settlement and cultural-religious influences cannot be denied or deemed inferior without creating a justified backlash.

 

Many Arab nationalists saw the Levant as a logical part of a Greater Syria with a capital in the ancient city of Damascus. Greater Syria was a potential Arab powerhouse that was anathema to the old and new imperial powers which wanted the Middle East to be a collection of small states they could dominate and play off against each other to protect the trade routes and the oil.

The Balfour Declaration which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the League of Nation’s Mandate that followed it, placated powerful Zionists in the UK and the US. 

It has been interpreted by Zionists as having granted a de facto legal right to sovereignty that was formalised by the 1947 UN partition resolution which established the state of Israel.

After the horrors of the Nazi slaughter of Jews became widely known, the UN resolution served as a political balm to assuage the guilt of the countries that had allowed the horror to happen and had refused entry to refugees.

The ultra-Zionists’ rewriting of a complex history rests firmly on the idea of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as both a lesser people and as aliens, recent “invaders” of a land to which the Jewish people have both a divine right and an indigenous claim because their God promised it to Abraham, and there has been uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua. (Including the hyperbolic claim of being the “world’s first constitutional monarchy” around 1000 BC.)

It also sowed the seeds of the anti-Arab racism that is now a malignant cancer in the Israeli social body.

 

To ensure enough Israelis continue to elect right-wing governments and support their extremist measures, the population is heavily indoctrinated, with the IDF and compulsory military service playing a significant role in that. 

The most potent element of that indoctrination, apart from the fuelling of anti-Arab racism, is stoking fear and rage over the Nazi holocaust. That those right-wing governments directly and indirectly force young Israelis to participate in genocidal acts against mostly young Palestinians, is beyond tragic.

 

 

 

Nothing Wholly Disappears Off The Internet ....

I've been re-reading some of my old blog posts, and 11 years ago I wrote a post about unhinged reactions to a video of some girls having a fight. 

The comments were on a Facebook page (prior to the "feminisation" of the site which led to controls which the newly masculinised-Meta (snort) is now removing to curry favour with Trump Inc.) 

Now, we all know that certain things trigger the Amygdala Brigade into what, in hindsight, even they might see as behaviour deserving of a spell in a mental health facility or a prison.

I quoted the worst of them verbatim and provided links. 

Curious to see how the angry ones have moved on in the intervening eleven years, I checked on them.

About half of the accounts have been deleted but others are still there. There were some that were unintentionally funny, like the one who hurled abuse at the offending girls and then claimed New Zealand is a nation of kind, friendly and welcoming people.

One especially charming fellow wrote: 

"Fuck the fat one is an ugly cunt. Pathetic bitches. Those are some girls ill gladly smash 4 on 1. Dont care that im a male. Scum like that deserve a face kicking" ...

He now seems to have a daughter. I wonder if fatherhood has changed his mind about calling a girl, a fat ugly cunt, and wanting to kick her in the face?  

His was by no means the worst. I think this one, whose FB page is no longer available, takes pride of place for the most unhinged and sadistically misogynistic:

"Fucking fat whores need to get probed in the ass with a knife shot in the knees tounge choped off ears cut off fingers and toes and the shove them in a dumpster"

Given the use of "ass" and "dumpster" I don't know if this person was a New Zealander, but there was a very seriously deviant young man in Christchurch who, in 2016 and 2019, was sentenced to a combined twelve-year sentence for possession and distribution of objectionable material, and for child rape and other serious child sex offending. In May last year, he was released on highly restrictive parole conditions, which includes no unsupervised access to the internet and a curfew.  

What are the odds?

That aside, these sorts of splenetic explosions of vileness are once again granted immunity, courtesy of Meta's spineless capitulation to the New Patriarchs.

The Turn Of The Screw

I predicted a Trump win, and I’ve also predicted he won’t see out his term which would mean the world will suffer a Vance presidency.  

In analysing the Democrats' defeat, it must be acknowledged that Harris had to overcome the double whammy of her sex and her ethnicity in a country which, in its bones, is sexist and racist. In addition, her parents were "immigrants" of the sort that Trumpists have been encouraged to see as the main cause of their mounting social and economic woes. 

There surely is no greater demonstration of the USA's national cognitive dissonance than the spectacle of the descendants of settler colonists and subsequent immigrants railing against other, more recent, immigrants.

Harris had to keep the warmongers (I refuse to grace them with the term hawk) in her party happy, and toe the party-corporate line in continuing to fund Israel’s brutal assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, while trying to persuade Muslim-Americans and anti-Zionist Democrats that they should still vote for her. 

She had to try to win back enough of the millions of angry, disillusioned, fearful working class Americans by promising to keep the trickle-down tap open a notch, while also keeping the predatory corporate class and their legions of affluent enablers and minions happy by not letting too much of what they see as “their money” flow down to the increasingly debased base.

She had to walk the political tightrope between professing an on-going, uncritical support for trans rights, (a cause the Democrats handled in a way that allowed the religious and secular right to make a bumper crop of political hay), and defence of women’s reproductive rights in the form of access to abortion and birth control – which the right want to erode.

She relied on a procession of celebrities using their tinselly star power to win votes from the various cults of celebrity that infest the USA and, due to its cultural hegemony, infest the rest of the world also.

She even appealed for support from some of the worst of USA Inc’s warmongering border-line and actual fascists.

All she had to do was to beat a bumbling, mumbling, incoherent, seventy-eight year-old, self-absorbed rich-boy with improbable hair and orange-hued skin. 

A sexist who holds women in contempt. A convicted felon. A cheat. A liar.  An out and proud ignoramus. A person whose popular appeal can only be explained in the context of the venality, cynicism, and opportunism of his main political opponents.

Some people, men and women alike, are drawn to the maverick, the bad boy – the man who appears to thumb his nose at convention and the forms of authority which maintain it. As is usual in the US, appearance has a tenuous link to essence. 

The real US is hidden under a glossy veneer of democracy and decency which obscures its plutocratic and essentially corrupt social and political foundation. USA Inc's foundation is now so riven with contradictions and so rotten, the veneer, even where it was once thickest and glossiest, has warped and cracked. 

Trump is not a maverick; he’s a narcissist who is driven not by ideology but by ego, by a drive for personal power that fills the places in his psyche where intellect, rationality, self-control and decency should reside. 

Trump’s ego is vast but hollow, and it requires a constant stream of fawning and flattery to keep it inflated. Those who want to influence or wholly control him know this.

Those of his supporters who aren’t drawn to his apparent individualism and political unorthodoxy have been captured by the cult of celebrity which wields immense influence in the US, and Trump was a media celebrity before he decided to enter politics. It is a measure of the USA's cultural depth that even the spurious claim to celebrity via a schlocky “reality-TV” show is enough to draw people to him.

Some people voted for him because they are desperate for anything seemingly solid and unsinkable that they can use as a buoyancy aid to stay afloat in increasingly wild socio-economic seas. 

Some perform a seemingly impossible leap of logic and common sense and turn him into an almost messianic figure. 

People will continue to analyse the reasons why he has won a second term as president despite all the aspects of his life, his intellect, and his morality that should be impediments to it.

The fact is, the Republicans won largely because their opponents failed to provide a viable choice for the tens of millions of Americans who desperately want their country to change – to change in its essence, not just see another coat of gloss paint or cheap veneer laid over the rotting base.

The women who voted Republican because Trump "knows what a woman is", because he promised to roll back trans rights, protect women's sport, keep gender ideology out of schools .... were conned. 

They were led to or actively chose to believe that the ideology of gender identity was the construction of the left; that somehow this "left" which is incapable of achieving much else, managed to impose an ideological framework on global corporations, on NGOs, and on corporate-compliant governments at all levels of governance and management. 

Their narrow focus prevented them from seeing gender identity ideology and praxis as a Neo-liberal project, the culmination of the rightwing politics of the "self", which was a nail in the coffin of mass collectivism, a wedge to topple the last of the trees in the leftwing forest.

The idea of the gender identity orthodoxy being a leftwing movement only makes sense in relation to the infantile notion of the Democratic party being left wing, which, by any sensible measure, it is not. 

It is essentially a right wing, corporate-friendly party that has recently embraced certain "liberal" issues. There is not even the pretence of making systemic changes, just some accommodations to take off the worst of the sharp edges and dull the most glaring contradictions. 

In essence, the Democrats' commitment to traditional leftwing values and causes takes the form of applying more layers of plastic veneer, gloss paint, and glitter.

Left wing feminists said all along that the way the ideology of gender identity was embraced and enacted risked being weaponised by the religious and secular right  – to the detriment of women's rights and wider democratic and social rights. 

As we are pushed into taking a stand on critically important issues, I will enter into strategic alliances with those liberals who embraced gender identity orthodoxy. Those who did so fanatically however, I am unlikely ever to trust, or forgive because they either lacked political acumen or they acted in bad faith.  

A con of the first water

The Neo-lib inspired management-governance split left local councils in New Zealand in the grip of central government by making party political divides in local governance opaque, by placing too much power in the hands of CEOs, and by imposing layers of regulation almost all of which have to funded out of rates, which residents pay out of their taxed income and on which they are then taxed again by central government via GST.

Back in the colonialist days of powerful provincial governance, some people longed for a strong central government to curb the untrammelled greed and rampant self-interest of those who controlled the provinces. 

We live in an era in which those venal, self-serving attributes are firmly in the driving seat at all levels of both the governance and the management of a socio-economic system that is rooted in exploitation in pursuit of private profit. Calls for more local power in that socio-economic landscape are a chimera.

As a case in point: I live in a district with a population of just under 14k in a land area of 8,600 square kilometres. Our rates have skyrocketed, not solely because of the abandonment of Three Waters but because of decades of poor management and governance.

We have water which meets WHO standards but due in part to a council strategy of mixing water from different sources (funded by the last government), our water is so heavy with minerals and chlorine it destroys water heaters and whiteware unless softened and filtered as most people are now forced to do at their own expense. 

The reticulated rural water supply is old in places, and leaks are frequent with untold amounts of potable water being wasted.

The bulk of the district’s roads are unsealed and poorly maintained, due largely to the inefficiencies and false economy of the Neo-lib contract culture in which local councils are firmly enmeshed. 

As a rural property we were forced to install a sewage system which, thanks to the regional government's subservience to the Neo-lib ethos, requires on-going maintenance, initially by the company which installed it, then by a large corporation which bought that company which now out-sources the job to a self-employed contractor. 

We have no rubbish collection, and the council effectively destroyed one of the country’s most advanced and innovative community-led recycling initiatives to pass a key contract onto a private sector provider. When questioned about what was widely perceived locally as a conflict of interest, the then mayor laughed and said, “This is XXX, there’s always a conflict of interest.”

All that aside, NZ’s total population is half that of Seoul. It is skewed, not just in relation to the numbers in the northern island, but in greater Auckland. 

The larger island (also the location of the great, state-funded hydro schemes which supply 60% of the nation’s now privatised electricity) is home to just 1.2 million people, half of them in one province. 

There is a pressing need for governance and management to be genuinely efficient and economic,  and to be responsive to local needs. We simply cannot afford to have deep layers of both national and local governance and management. 

The creation of the all-important buffer zone, the various strata of which have a financial and  status stake in the economic status quo, has resulted in layers of bureaucracy which are all-too often parasitic on essential front-line services. 

This is at its most obvious in the public sector, and at present it provides useful ideological cover for a crackpot coalition government to make swingeing cuts in the sector –  partly as a bone to divert some of its more rabid supporters, but mainly to fund the juicy steaks it intends to serve up to its main financial and political backers.  

They point to the layers of bureaucracy that their ilk created as a buffer zone, and to the struggling, front line service providers who have been starved of funding and ham strung by regulations, and they sacrifice some of the former, not to improve the latter, but to divert the “savings” into the pockets of the already-rich. 

Or, even more brazenly, to create new layers of bureaucracy to facilitate yet more asset stripping. 

It is a con of the first water; unparalleled in its callous impudence.

Gamesmanship

On the NZ left wing site, The Standard, an article written by a woman about the fairness and safety issues implicit in the presence in women’s boxing of two athletes who may / probably have a 46XY disorder of sexual development or differentiation (DSD) of the sort that grants them some degree of androgen-related performance advantage over their 46XX opponents, prompted a response from a man.

The heading and the tenor of the second piece was guaranteed to trigger the, now usual, heated debate about the implications for women’s sex-based rights of gender-identity related shifts in legislation, policy, and procedure.

 

Even though the debate was largely measured in tone, it resulted in a threat to the very existence of the site, and then to the original article being removed. 

 

It’s not appropriate to speculate about the reasons for the threat to close the site being issued, but the invariably intemperate responses swirling around the questions of sex versus gender identity, and specifically, gender self-identification by statutory declaration, may have played a role.

 

Transgender and intersex issues do not overlap usually but the inclusion of the latter in the ever-increasing number of groups jostling for position under the transgender umbrella, means that some people don’t acknowledge any difference. 

 

The problems inherent in this lazy conflation are exemplified by the likes of JK Rowling, Donald Trump and Elon Musk weighing in on the women's boxing.  It was a rerun of the furore when Caster Semenya of South Africa, Margaret Wambui of Kenya, and Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi took the medals in the women’s 800m at the Rio Olympics. All three athletes were found to have had an XY karyotype and to produce levels of testosterone in the male range, with no definitive evidence of how much their bodies benefitted from it. 

 

The resulting controversy saw the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) now World Athletics, impose a differential standard for athletes with male levels of testosterone, which affected African athletes disproportionately. That in turn provoked a storm of protest which led to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) developing a broad framework for fairness, safety, and inclusion within which the various international sporting bodies would develop their own rules for eligibility. 

 

It is worth stating that only the female category in sports is at issue; men's sports are not in any way affected by these fairness, safety, and inclusion issues.

 

There can be no doubt there is a wider geo-political back cloth to all this in the claims of corruption and ties to the Kremlin swirling around the International Boxing Association (IBA) ie the US-led boycott of the 2023 IBA world champs; the formation of World Boxing as an alternative body, in competition with the IBA; the IBA’s disqualification, mid-competition, of the two boxers on the grounds of having an XY karyotype; the removal of the IBAs Olympic accreditation, and the IOC decision to set up an ad hoc committee to run boxing which allowed the two IBA disqualified boxers to compete.

Both swept through their weight grades with unprecedented 5-0 wins in all rounds.

 

Many of the women in the sport of boxing are likely to be on the high side of the standard reference range for female levels of testosterone. On average they are tall for women and are physically tough, and the women at the Olympics will be the best in their respective countries. 

Either Lin and Khelif are both atypical in respect of their physical abilities in the sport, or they possess an androgen-related performance advantage in the male range. 

 

The rise of Islamophobia and the far right across Europe, the specifics of the experience of Algerians when it was a French colony and as migrants to France, all form a backcloth of which the likes of JK Rowling should have been aware.

 

I never expected any better from her because before the issue of sex self ID hit the political fan, she threw her considerable  weight and influence behind the anti-Corbyn faction in the UK Labour Party, and she is a firm ally of Israel. It would have been more surprising if she had refrained from inflaming the situation.  

 

Some people who comment are simply not au fait enough with the issues; some are angry for a wide range of reasons which I have written about extensively – albeit polemically – on this blog, and some of them are engaged in various sorts of divisive and diversionary behaviour. 

 

Without re-entering the ring to engage in further ideological fisticuffs, I will just say that the bottom line for me is as it has always been, we must be able to address these and related issues in a way that doesn’t demonise people who are caught in a geo-political shit storm not of their making. We must avoid division, and diversion of time and energy away from more important issues. 

 

We must also remember the reasons why those who rule us encourage people to obsess about obscenely expensive circuses like the Olympic Games. 

 

I thought the Paris games would be a focus for attention grabbing protests about such issues as Gaza and climate change but if any happened, they didn’t make global headlines. 

 

The brave individual gestures made by athletes to try to get the world's focus onto what is happening across Africa, in Afghanistan, Palestine etc were obscured by an obsessive media and public focus on one person competing in a fringe sport. 


 

And that was not the fault of one side only; it takes two to politically tango.

 

I will not readdress the issues of transwomen’s participation in women’s sport as this is a different, albeit linked issue. 

 

As I try to see all these issues through a wide political lens, for me, this firestorm Illustrates why it’s so important always to pull aside the ideological veils to see if there is anything sinister lurking behind them. 

 

With regard to DSDs and how a decent society responds to people affected by them, the individual’s rights to privacy, to personal dignity, to wider formal tights, and to timely treatment when needed, are a given. There should be no debate. 

 

There are formal, codified rights and informal social rights which are embedded in the social compact. The two don’t always neatly align and sometimes they clash.

 

Neither sort of rights is absolute, as sometimes one set of rights affects others. Also, all rights carry with them a range of duties and obligations to the wider collective. 

 

Social life is a series of compromises, and as we live in world riven with structural inequalities, some people are forced to make endless compromises whilst others, the rich and powerful usually, get to float through life making hardly any. 

 

People with DSDs are not a “community”; there is huge range of types of DSD, some of which vary widely in how they present. They were lumped together under the non-scientific descriptor of “Intersex” for political lobbying purposes because historically many people with DSDs had been treated shamefully by the medical establishment. 

 

Within medicine the attitude was, and remains in some countries and cultures, that if a neonate does not have a normal looking penis and scrotum, s/he should be made a girl, legally and if available, via forms of surgery and drug treatments. 

 

Being crisscrossed by wider social factors like religion, by parental rights and expectations and the rights of the infant/child etc, it is not an easy terrain to navigate.

 

Sometimes these days in the developed world we settle on doing only that which is needed to ensure health and well-being, waiting until the person is old enough to make their own informed decisions. 

 

In some societies, parents don’t have that luxury.  Living inside the imperial bubble we forget the grimmer realities of life for impoverished people, especially women.

 

Our self-congratulations on how progressive we are in the way we now see the wide range of DSDs, rings hollow if we fail to ask whether those conditions are increasing in incidence, range and/or severity, or is it merely the fact that they are now being diagnosed more easily and more often?

 

There is a range of political movements that are aimed at normalising pathologies. All too often, the so-called progressive left fails to ask the obvious question when that normalisation is enthusiastically embraced and even enabled by corporations and powerful corporate-compliant institutions. 

 

The first question to be asked is whether these processes of normalisation help to obscure causal factors which are attributable to those corporations and institutions.

 

There is a global increase in childhood cancers, and in developmental and reproductive disorders. 

Microplastics have been found in all organs in humans, including the brain.

 

Clinical obesity was once uncommon in young people and morbid obesity was once rare in adults; it is now commonplace, especially among the poor.

 

Type 2 diabetes was rare in adults and unknown in children; it is now commonplace and appearing frequently in kids.

 

The range of triggers and incidence of life-threatening allergies has increased, as have rates of autism.

 

There is a global drop in sperm quality and an increase in reproductive cancers and conditions like endometriosis.

 

Kids are entering puberty younger, and the incidence of central precocious puberty is increasing with links to the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment.


 

If we fail to draw aside the ideological veils that we surely all know are used to obscure causal factors directly attributable to profit-hungry corporations and their compliant, enabling governments, we are aiding and abetting the culprits. 

 

Normalisation of the pathological is a widely used ideological veil that is made opaquer when the component of human rights is added to it.

 

Autism becomes something to celebrate as neurodiversity, aka being on the spectrum. 

 

Clinical and even morbid obesity become just normal variations in the amount and distribution of adipose tissue, and any attempts to examine it as a pathological response to metabolic triggers are deemed to be fat-shaming orfatphobic. 

 

DSDs become evidence of human reproductive diversity, or proof that sex is not binary leading to such risible claims as there being 5 or 6 sexes. 

 

Call me a cynic but every time I see attempts to normalise the pathological, I want to investigate further. 

 

Several decades ago, I was drawn into researching endocrine disruption in horses. I was seeing mares with the equine equivalent of polycystic ovarian syndrome; obesity and patterns of grossly abnormal adipose tissue; hind gut disorders leading to catastrophic tissue failure in the hooves; unusual neurological conditions. 

 

There were lots of explanations about why, all pretty much missing the herd of tap-dancing elephants in the corner of the room which included the ubiquity of endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging chemicals in the environment. 


 

Studies which draw a link between EDCs in agricultural chemicals, like a study linking CPP to agricultural EDCs in rural France, once languished in the dark or were dumbed down by that part of the coordinator class which is employed to put an ideological spin on scientific studies for public dissemination via a compliant media.

 

These days there is a critical mass of data about these chemicals – some of which fall into the category of “forever chemicals” because of the time they persist in the environment – so the issue is becoming better known.


 

However, the vast petro-chemical industry responsible for their manufacture, and the various industries which use them, won't suddenly grow a conscience and say "mea culpa" and clean up its mess, so it's up to us to keep shining a light on these issues, and keep demanding answers. 

 

Science strives to be neutral in its methodology, but it has always struggled to be genuinely neutral because research needs funding, and with funds, be they from corporations, governments, foundations etc, come with strings. Those strings define not just what will be studied but also what conclusions are drawn, how the data is presented publicly and to what use the findings will be put. 

 

This is never truer than in the Neo-liberal era in which corporate funders often dictate the subject and scope of scientific enquiry.

 

So, whenever I see processes that seek to normalise pathologies  which appear to  have the laudable aim of benefiting people, but which actually benefit hyper-capitalism, I get edgy.

 

We should always bear on mind that anything which divides people, which distracts and diverts political energy and focus away from the causes of these existential threats is very likely serving the interests of the people who created them...for profit, solely for profit.