Tilting At Windmills

I trudged through Frank Macskasy’s 2300 word, line by line rebuttal of a 600 word polemic that was written by feminist and Green Party founding member, Jill Abigail, published on Te Awa, and removed by the Editorial Board after pressure from transactivists who claimed it was transphobic.

Macskasy has a very formal style, which can come across as smugly self-congratulatory and patronising. This is apparent in the comments under his posts where people who question any aspect of his work are often dismissed in condescending terms – which would be tolerable were it not for how often he completely misses the point being made by his critics.

I’ve commented on a couple of Macskasy's posts on The Daily Blog where he is a guest writer – both were on the hot topic of the day – gender self-identification (GSI).  

The simmering trans debate was brought to a rolling boil in NZ when there was a spectacularly inept attempt to sneak GSI in through the back door. Unlike the muted public reaction to the exposure in October last year of Associate Health Minister, Julie Anne Genter's surreptitious decision to lift the cap on genital surgeries for trans people, the dodgy GSI tactics backfired when a group of feminists made a lot of noise about both the process and the implications of GSI for women's sex-based rights.

Macskasy has become very outspoken about transgender issues over the past year or so, and good on him for that, but at times his evangelical zeal seems to cloud both his political judgment and his critical faculties. 

The overkill on the Abigail article is a case in point, and as I was wading through the piece (having just read another long Daily Blog piece which was a thinly disguised counter-polemic from AgenderNZ), I was reminded of an exchange I had with him back in March.

At the time I got bored and gave up on it but in light of his heavy handed treatment of the Abigail article, I thought it was worth digging it up and shining a forensic light on it.

A post in late February by Martyn Bradbury on The Daily Blog, about Tracey Martin’s decision to defer GSI, was a well meaning but (sorry Martyn) rather limp call for more kindness and respect on both sides of the debate.

In the comments, a person mentioned their concern about the medicalisation of trans kids. A regular reader named Mjolnir (the Hammer of Thor no less) who often plays Sancho Panza to Macskasy's Don Quixote – and in a bombastic and abusive manner that was at odds with Martyn’s plea for kindness and respect – retorted:

Macskasy also replied:

Someone posted a reply to Mjolnir:  

Macskasy weighed in:


Presumably he then went off and actually looked at the site because, a few minutes later, he added:

I thought this was a step too far in the misinformation department and replied – quoting from the site:

Mjolnir replied to FM: 

The stupidity annoyed me.

Macskasy responded:

This will be news to the BMA, given the British Medical Journal is “published by BMJ, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association” – and BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine is owned by BMJ, and BMJ EBM Spotlight is a free on-line resource owned by the BMJ and, as a result, owned by the BMA. 

In other words, it’s pretty clear that the site is part of the complex of on-line, free and subscription journals that form the BMJ. 

Clearly unwilling to, or incapable of doing any research, the ever loyal Mjolnir kept hammering away:  

The arrogance of it.

Even if the article was not part of the BMJ, the academic and medical backgrounds of the writers obviously raise it far above the level of being merely "opinion based". But by this point I was convinced that Don Q and Sancho P were either drunk, dense or dishonest, so I bowed out. I should have persevered.

I had another encounter with the Macskasy logic in relation to another TDB article, in which he attempted a demo job on an OIA request someone had lodged for information about transgender prisoners in NZ jails. It must be said he had rather more ammunition for that.

As evidence of existing protections for women prisoners, he quoted Corrections policy: 

“a transgender prisoner whose detention relates to a serious sexual offence against a person of their nominated gender, or who was released from a prison sentence for such an offence within the last seven years will not be able to apply to the Chief Executive (for placement in accordance with their nominated gender.”

This indicates Corrections believes there is a potential risk – to women prisoners – of allowing such persons to be housed in the female estate. There is also a procedural issue in what happens when a prisoner in the above category has a birth certificate that categorises them as female. 

I posted:

“What is not stated here is, if Corrections has a copy of a birth certificate that states the prisoner is female, procedure requires they MUST be placed in the female estate. 

There appears to be no procedural clarity around what happens if such a prisoner has a history of violent or sexual offending against women.”

Macskasy’s reply was a classic deflection: 

a) fire off a question that's actually an accusation -“why do you assume only trans women are capable of violence?”; 

b) answer your own question with another inflammatory accusation, i.e., it must be to "demonise one tiny minority";

c) repeat stuff that's nothing directly to do with the point being made.

GSI is aimed at making it procedurally very easy to change the sex recorded on a person's original birth certificate. It is already easy to change other official documentation. There are many questions that arise from GSI – one of which is where the intention of the policy Macskasy cited as evidence of the existing protections for women prisoners, could be frustrated when a person with a history of sexual offending against women has an amended birth certificate which obliges Corrections to place them in the women's estate. 

There is another wider issue in the reasons why a distinction is drawn between the harm that may be done by sexual offending, and the harm that may be done by non-sexual physical violence. The current policy relates only to sexual offending, not to crimes of violence, not even to extreme crimes of violence directed exclusively against females. 

A process that makes it far easier to change the BC needs legal and procedural clarity around how that may play out in relation to women's sex-based rights – and nowhere more so than with female prisoners. As these procedures stand, and I suspect this is one of the many reasons for the deferral, any person who has a birth certificate which says they are female, has a right to be housed in the female estate even if, for example, they were still male-bodied and had been found guilty of an act of extreme physical or sexual violence against a woman. Even if such a person did not have an amended birth certificate, if their transgender status had been accepted prior to, and throughout their trial, they could argue unfair discrimination if they were not housed in the female estate. 

To argue that GSI will not ever create problems in women’s prisons; that transwomen don’t or won’t ever assault women; or that predatory or vexatious men will not abuse GSI to try to get moved into women’s prisons, is either political naivety or political opportunism or political expedience. 

To argue, as Macskasy does, that “prisons by their nature are violent places" and that natal women are capable of violence  – ergo the removal of all gate keeping over who may be housed in women's prisons will not put women prisoners at increased risk – is playing an ideological game with highly vulnerable lives. 

Of course genuine transwomen should not be housed in the male estate any more than transmen should be housed in the male estate because that would be to put them at extreme risk – but this blinkered attitude that no transwoman would be violent or sexually abusive or, more importantly - that predatory or vexatious men will not try to abuse GSI to get access to women and/or to mess with the authorities, is to close your eyes to the obvious and by so doing, to risk exposing already highly vulnerable women to harm.

It’s one of many legal and policy gaps that need to be addressed and it's why the tactic of trying to slide GSI in by the back door was spectacularly dumb politics – even dumber than trying to argue that Jill Abigail's polemic constituted a denial of trans people's rights to exist.