To those who are finding that sitting on the Jessica Yaniv fence is cutting deep into their political and ethical nether regions – let me say this: Yaniv is an exhibitionist with a menstruation fetish focused on girls; demonstrates racist attitudes, and possibly has a personality disorder.
I think it's fair to say that, on the good ship Trans Rights, which is navigating increasingly choppy seas, Yaniv is a very big, loose cannon.
I don't know if Yaniv is genuinely trans. Who can know for certain in these days of the primacy of self defined gender identity and blurred boundaries? Whatever the truth of it, #WaxMyBalls has become the quintessence of polarisation in this most polarised of debates.
In an era in which the concept of intersectionality is tossed around a lot, the busiest and most dangerous intersections of all remain the ones where sex, class, and race meet. A large number of people wearing gender identity blinkers (many of whom really ought to know better) are hurtling into that intersection at breakneck speed, shouting ‘we are on the right side of history, give way bigots!’
By so doing, they are helping create the conditions for the father of all pile ups, and as in all great ideological crashes, there will be multiple casualties – mostly poor, genuinely marginalised, highly vulnerable people.
The blinkered ones will largely emerge unscathed because typically they wear quite a lot of protection - in the form of varying combinations and degrees of white, male, middle class, educated, affluent, socially and geographically mobile privilege that serves to cushion them from the damage of the pileups they've helped create.
Sure, the blinkers are very trendy and those who wear them no doubt firmly believe they not only look cool but they're on the right side of history (politically speaking the operative word in that phrase may well be right) but it’s a foolish left wing activist who ignores manufacturers’ labels, ie who fails to question why the blinkers have been created and marketed and made so very popular in a world dominated by the malign influence of global corporate capitalism.
The intersection in the middle of which Yaniv has set up camp, is the deep (think Mariana Trench deep) belief in the fundamental division between : Female, as in possessing a vulva, vagina, uterus and ovaries; and, Male as in possessing a penis, prostate, and testicles.
The roots of the belief in an essentially binary biological sex were well grounded at the dawn of the phallocracy when the rise to dominance of patrilineal descent systems and the triumph over mutuality and cooperation, of aggressive, individualised competition, provided the material impetus for the drive to control reproduction through the sexual sequestration of women, and formed the foundation for all subsequent forms of oppression and hyper-exploitation of women.
Gender identity activists will not change all that with essentially emotive appeals - generated from within the bubble of western privilege - to the primacy of gender identity over biological sex, but they may very well strengthen deeply held conservative beliefs about the latter.
Some of the comments I've seen about the Yaniv Affair are troubling, and all those who have tacitly or overtly supported this person's ascent into global notoriety should be having a serious talk with themselves.
On a linked issue, I saw a Twitter exchange this week that tagged the Twitter accounts of the New Zealand Prime Minister and the Minister of Immigration.
The exchange was between an NHS doctor who is a UK Labour Party member, a former Young Tory, and self-appointed crusader for trans rights, and a Kiwi trans activist.
The former suggested that NZ should provide UK trans kids with "protection and refuge" because they "are facing ongoing systemic oppression and mistreatment" in their own country.
The latter responded with enthusiastic agreement and cited the precedent of NZ having granted residence on humanitarian grounds to a British trans woman who had ‘fled discrimination’ in the UK. (1)
I’ve been seeing National Party billboards going up - in preparation for local government elections I assume - and I'm trying to imagine the political mileage that could be made out the preposterous suggestion that NZ should take British minors as refugees because the NHS won’t automatically prescribe puberty blockers and cross sex hormones and perform genital surgeries on kids who are not yet neurologically mature.
For the ideologically motivated participants, those tweets were either a conscious decision to poke a stick into the spokes of the NZLP’s election bicycle, or they demonstrate a stunning narrowness of political focus and a complete lack of political nous.
Notes:
1) In that case, which was reported in the media in late September 2017, the applicant was a TW who had moved here to join family already living here, and the application on humanitarian grounds was made after a failed application for residency under the entrepreneur category.)
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