A running leap into political quicksand...

Sands UK - a UK charity that exists to support bereaved mothers, tweeted a message of support for "all birthing parents" – presumably a well-intentioned attempt by whoever was running their social media account to be "inclusive" of transgender and non-binary people who give birth. In the context of the ideological battles being waged around these issues, this was arguably not a good decision.   

 

Freddy Connell – a UK journalist  and transman who made headlines by giving birth and trying (unsuccessfully) to argue for his name being listed on the child's birth certificate as its "father" – tweeted that the people objecting to Sands' message were "transphobes" and "bullies".

By so doing, Freddy managed to offend and upset the loads of women who feel they have also a right to a say in how a charity they support and use, refers to them.

This encapsulates the essence of this increasingly ludicrous debate and highlights how dangerously divisive and polarising it can be. 

I tweeted a thread in response. No doubt like most of my tweets it will go unnoticed, as will this post, but every little helps.  

If Fred reads it I hope he knows it's written in good faith and that when the chips are down it'll be people like me who will have his back – whilst I'd hazard a guess that a quite a few of his erstwhile allies will do what they did when neoliberalism was busy dismantling working class collectives – and are doing as it tightens the austerity screws on the poor – be otherwise engaged in protecting their well-padded backsides.

So here's the meat of the thread. For what it's worth.

Look at the world that the child you gestated and gave birth to, stands to inherit and tell me, Fred – is this is the hill you want to make a stand on?  Calling people – including loads of bereaved mothers – “transphobes” because they objected to the erasure of the word “mother” by a charity that was founded by bereaved mothers, to support bereaved mothers? 

At least SandsUK had the good grace and common sense to backtrack.

“Mothers and other birthing parents” would have been inclusive – erasing the word mother is not just a step too far – it's a  running jump into political quicksand. 

 

There’s an old pre-DNA saying: "maternity's a certainty; paternity's an opinion". 

 

There's a powerful material reality underpinning that – the same reality that’s the foundation of people’s deep-rooted attachment to words like mother, woman, female. 

 

It's arguably the most ancient of all human realities with roots that run far too deep and wide to be removed as a result of sometimes petulant, sometimes bullying demands from a tiny minority mostly living, not just inside the imperial bubble, but within the well-buffered coordinator class that helps keep the bubble intact and inflated.

 

Outside the bubble and that strata, most of human and all of other life still moves to more ancient and foundational rhythms  – I suggest you take the literal or figurative ear buds out and have a listen.  

 

You won’t succeed in undermining the deep beliefs in the material realities that underpin the word mother with this sort of foot-stamping in the name of inclusivity – but you might very well help erode wider support for far more important aspects of inclusivity.

 

So, a word in your shell-like, Fred, my old china, ease off the entitlement pedal and learn to pick your battles. 

Somewhere over a spectrum.....

Someone was paid a lot of money to produce a glossy set of Relationship & Sexuality Education  guidance to teachers in NZ and we have a right to expect them to be of a very high quality given the consultation around the implementation of them involves no need for negotiation or agreement, ie. it is solely about informing and implementing, irrespective of stakeholders' opinions.

Some of what is in the guidelines is very good and it is pleasing to see the ubiquity of porn and its effects on young people being addressed, it is to be hoped the education process will also involve the interrogation of the malign and growing power of the global porn industry and sex trade, the incidence of femicide and rape, the merging patterns of economic exploitation in commercial surrogacy, and all the other massive impactors on young people's (especially girls and women) sexual health and wellbeing - in the broadest sense of the terms.   

But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this is more a vehicle for the promotion of gender identity theory and praxis or what can broadly be described as the current transgender orthodoxy.(CTO) 

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I have some issues with that orthodoxy. This does not mean I am anti transgender  – I am not – but I find it both politically and critically impossible to reconcile my support for women’s sex-based rights with support for gender self ID specifically and for other aspects of the CTO.

 

The bottom line of what I see as a post hoc attempt to impose logic and consistency on an essentially contradictory set of metaphysical and highly politicised beliefs – is that gender – framed as the subjective, possibly inconstant, sense of personal identity on a continuum of masculinities and femininities – trumps biological sex; that there is a disembodied, inner, gendered self that is, and can conceive of itself as, separate from the material reality of the biological, sexed body.

 

In the Years 9-13  glossary of 44 terms – which is an important guide to people who aren't well versed in the CTO, and who want to make sense, both of ideas that are being embedded into the social contract, and ideas that are being removed from it – this results in some major inconsistencies and omissions. 

Sex is defined as "biological sex characteristics - male, female, intersex" - which strongly implies there's a third (or more) sex(es) existing between male and female. (1)

Biological sex characteristics are defined as a person’s physical features – “genitalia and other sexual and reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, hormones and secondary physical features emerging from puberty.”

 

Gender is defined as "individual identity related to a continuum of masculinities and femininities.  Neither femininities nor masculinities are defined, but we can assume this is derived from the pink to dark brown spectrum of jelly baby figures so popular with transgender equality and diversity trainers and lobbyists. Or more graphically – Barbie to GI Joe.

 

Sexual orientation is defined as a person's "sexual identity" - which is defined by the point/s on the "continuum of masculinities and femininities" a person is sexually and/or emotionally attracted to. 

 

So, both your gender and your sexual orientation / identity are where you sit on the Barbie-GI Joe “continuum of masculinities and femininities”, and your sexual orientation or sexual identity is where the persons you are attracted to sit on that same continuum. 

 

Apart from demonstrating how the lazy conflation of gender and sex gets people’s intellectual and political knickers in a knot – according to this, there is no such thing as a sexual orientation – there is just gender orientation. 

 

Is it any wonder some lesbians and gay men are feeling anxious? They have good cause as shown when we delve deeper into the glossary of terms underpinning these important guidelines.

 

Lesbian is defined as "women who are attracted to other women" but woman itself is not defined, nor is man although trans woman and trans man are defined as people who were assigned male or female at birth but who identify as the opposite.  (2)

 

Homosexual is not defined except in reference to the existence of homophobia, which is defined as an “irrational fear of or negative response to people who are homosexual.”

 

There is no definition of homosexual men - just “gay people (mostly men) who are attracted to "people of the same gender".

 

Heterosexual is defined as “attraction to the other binary gender" – so presumably they see homosexual as attraction to the same binary gender.

 

BUT…

 

Binary gender is defined as "the (incorrect) assumption there are only two genders".

 

So, if binary gender is deemed to be incorrect – i.e. to not actually exist because - spectrum – by this document’s logic, neither do heterosexuality nor homosexuality.

 

I'm all for kids being encouraged to dispense with those "masculinities and femininities"  that owe much to imposed gender stereotypes, which have their roots deep in the biological, material reality of reproductive sex – (especially those heavily gendered, pornified behaviours and appearances that are commodified and sold to young people these days) (3) and to break with these essentially patriarchal and oppressive constructs. 

 

Who knows, doing that might allow kids to do simple things like question the automatic positioning and implied hierarchy of male/female; man/woman; masculinities/femininities that is used throughout these guidelines. 

Bottom line - if you are going to attempt to dig out the roots of the many complex beliefs and practices that centre around the existence of two sexes, and seek to undermine feminism’s differentiation between the material realities of biological sex and the social construction of ideas about sex roles i.e. gender, and how that has been and still is used to subjugate women – then best be prepared for a long hard dig. Best also be prepared for the very real possibility that your attempt will actually promote even more vigorous and invasive new growth.

 

 

(1)  The wording of this reinforces the ideologically motivated claim that there is a literal “spectrum of sex” – which leads to confusions like the widely repeated and woefully wrong, assertion that there are as many as six sexes, all capable of reproducing. This is absurdism. All intersex conditions are chromosomal / endocrine disorders of the biological sex characteristics of one or other of the two sexes – female and male. All, apart from the purely cosmetic, like mild hypospadias, involve either infertility or sub-fertility, and some have profound implications for health or, in the absence of medical intervention, even for survival. The harnessing of these rare conditions to the gender identity plough is political, and it is all too often cynical or heedless of consequence. Acknowledging the existence of DSDs (originally disorders of sex differentiation, now differences of sexual development), in a world that is literally saturated in DNA damaging and endocrine disrupting chemicals, charting the incidence of them, ensuring people affected by them are treated with dignity and respect and have all the medical and other services they need – are all vitally important. Deploying this diverse (and increasing) set of genetic/endocrine disorders as a weapon in the arguments around sex and gender identity is unfair to the tiny and diverse minority of people who are affected by them.

(2)  Given the current influence of a social milieu that believes or purports to believe gender identity is separate from, and superior to biological sex – i.e. the current transgender orthodoxy has a considerable weight of political, institutional, corporate, media acceptance and influence (despite its claims to be the most politically, economically, socially marginalised and vulnerable of all minorities) – the political slogan “transwomen are women” has a material outcome in the expansion of the term lesbian to include male-bodied persons who identify as women and who are sexually oriented towards women. For the most part, transgender lesbians (trans women who are sexually attracted to natal females) are not sexually oriented to other transgender lesbians. Lesbians who were born female can find themselves being shamed – by means of the socially toxic labels of transphobe, genital fetishist or essentialist etc –  into being open to the idea of a sexual relationship with transgender women, many of whom retain male genitalia and who may have made no, or only superficial, changes to their biological sex characteristics or social gender expression, Including retaining male-typical patterns of behaviour if the extraordinary prevalence on social media of phallocentric, masculinist threats and insults from people claiming to be translesbians is any measure.

(3)  What second wave feminist foresaw a 21^st century in which masses of young women would believe looking and behaving in hyper-feminine and/or pornified ways, as liberatory? Who could have foreseen cynical fashion designers attempts to surf the gender wave and sell little girl gingham dresses, modelled by anorexic androgynes, to young men?

 

Imagine...

 

Imagine being born in 1900.

When your 14 years old

World War 1 begins

And it ends when you are 18

With 22 million dead.

Shortly after, a world pandemic,

an influence called “Spanish”,

It kills 50 million people.

You come out alive and unscathed,

you are 20 years old

Then at 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York stock market, causing inflation, unemployment and famine.

At 33 years old Nazis come to power.

You’re 39 when World War II starts

And it ends when you’re 45 During the Holocaust (Shoah) 6 million Jews die.

There will be over 60 million dead in total.

When you are 52 years old the Korean War starts.

When you’re 64 the Vietnam War starts and ends when you are 75

A baby born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, 

And survived several wars and disasters.

A boy born in 1995 and today 25 thinks it’s the end of the world when his Amazon 

package takes more than three days to arrive or when he doesn’t get more than 15 “ 

likes” for his posted photo on Facebook or Instagram…

In 2020 many of us live in comfort, have access to different sources of 

entertainment at home and often have more than necessary.

But people complain because of everything.

Yet they have electricity, phone, food, hot water and roof over their heads.

None of this existed in the past.

But humanity survived much more serious circumstances and never lost the joy of living. 

Maybe it’s time to be less selfish, stop complaining and crying.

(Anonymous)

 

 

The above was posted on a friend's Facebook page - spelling, punctuation as per original. I've seen loads of these sort of memes and all I can say about this one is whoever wrote it was wise to stay anonymous. 

 

 A baby born in 1995 lives in a world in which if s/he is lucky enough to be born into affluence may indeed have electricity but around one billion people don't.

  

They might have access to a cell phone but 40% of the world's population do not.

 

Parts of the world have more food than they need and waste obscene amounts of it but around 700 million are under-nourished and every day scores die of starvation.

  

Let's forget the luxury of hot water – let's look at safe drinking water - around 800 million people don't have that, and in fact most drinking water across the entire globe, even if is considered 'safe', is heavily polluted with industrial and agricultural toxins – and is getting worse every year.

 

A roof over their heads? Around 1.6 billion people are homeless. 

 

And as to none of these advantages having existed in the past – the Romans, as just one example, had running water, underfloor heating and public loos and it might come as a bit of a surprise to Anonymous but people have been building various sorts of houses with roofs for thousands of years. 

 

So whoever wrote this bit of homespun nonsense clearly lives inside the imperial bubble and doesn't bother looking outside it. 

 

ALSO, let's just consider the world these ever-so lucky kids born in 1995 live in.

 

If they aren’t in one of the parts of the globe suffering famine or food shortages caused by war – thanks to the explosion of hyper-processed food, they are much more likely to be obese, develop type-2 diabetes, colorectal and other cancers and – thanks to the approximately 144,000 chemicals humans have released into the environment so far and are still releasing at a rate of about 2000 a year, and the 250 BILLION tonnes of toxic waste poured out into it every year – are far more likely to suffer DNA damage and/or endocrine disruption. 

 

And then there's the fact that they and their kids face a future – not just of a threat of global pandemics, nuclear, chemical or biological war or accidental catastrophe, but global warming and mass species extinction - including of species utterly essential to our long-term survival – indeed to the survival of pretty much everything except cockroaches and Donald Trump.

 

Plus they have been deskilled, dumbed down and made reliant on various forms of technology that stop the moment the electricity supply fails.

 

And as for wars – how dumbed-down do you have to be to not know that, since the end of the Vietnam war, around 21 million people have died in or as a result of the constant wars being waged across the globe, including many examples of America's imperialistic meddling. 

 

And what do all these things have in common? Like the wars listed in the post – they're pretty much all directly caused by greed – lust for wealth and power – aided and abetted by people idealising and not learning from the past, and taking a narrow view of the present.

On Voting Intentions

Speak Up For Women NZ (SUFW)  analysed some of the policies of the five “major” parties (1)  as they impact women, and scored each issue based on an analysis of how that policy would “progress or hinder women’s liberation” and colour coded them : red = negative; yellow = neutral/could do better; green = positive; or no information, which might be either +or-.

The areas they list are gender identity ideology (referencing policies on children, education, healthcare, sex self-ID, definitions); reproductive rights (abortion, maternal and sexual healthcare);  surrogacy; prostitution;  childcare; violence against women; pornography; unpaid labour; and women’s sports in relation to funding, fairness and safety.

The group was taken to task on its Facebook page by a left-wing woman who is vehemently opposed to the group's stand on gender self-ID specifically and gender identity ideology more widely, but she is a long-standing and strong advocate of women's and workers' rights. She queried why the group had not addressed wider policies that impact on women.

Sadly, the resulting exchange - especially from whoever was writing on behalf of SUFW - was rather too much an exercise in ego to be of much use in clarifying the issues. 

Women’s sex-based rights are framed explicitly and implicitly within laws and attendant policies but can be undermined and even rendered meaningless unless they are firmly embedded in the wider social contract – ie broadly accepted by a large enough number of citizens to become normative.The issue of women-only toilets and changing rooms is a case in point in that, both the need for, and respecting access to them, have been widely accepted by men without needing to be formally legislated or policed. 

 

Formal rights can be rendered effectively meaningless if people lack the economic means to access and exercise them. eg.

• The Nordic model on prostitution is unworkable without genuine, permanent ways out of the sex trade, in the form of education/training opportunities and secure well-paid employment.
• Commercial surrogacy becomes a more attractive option to women who are economically marginalised.
• Domestic violence is often triggered, made worse by wider domestic stressors such as racism,  overcrowded or substandard housing, poverty and precarity.
• The pressures on women and girls of unpaid labour are always far greater in conditions of poverty or precarity caused by a low wage economy.
• Funding for sport is rendered meaningless for people who suffer poverty-related poor health outcomes that act as a barrier to participation in sport.
• 
  

One area not mentioned by SUFW is prison reform. The appalling rates of, and gross disparity in, both female and male incarceration rates when measured by ethnicity and socio-economic status, are not challenged by any of the right wing parties. 

 

If SUFW is committed to prison reform – ie not just using the extreme vulnerability of female prisoners in its arguments around transgender prisoners, but wanting to end the iniquity of almost all NZ’s female prisoners being poor and 62% being Māori –  why was there no interrogation of the parties’ stand on issues specific to women in the  criminal justice system?

 

ACT is rightwing libertarian and, until a current boost in the polls, was a one-man band gifted a seat by National. In principle it is opposed to government intervention in pretty much all money-making activities – unless there is political mileage to be made–  so it is unlikely to want to control the sex or porn trade or to do anything to address the poverty that makes poor women most vulnerable to them. 

 

Both ACT and National pay lip service to women’s rights, while having economic and social policies that serve to maintain or widen a poverty gap which impacts women first and hardest.

 

Missing out wider economic and social policies that very obviously impact heavily on women, either positively or negatively, makes SUFW's exercise look strongly ideological rather than purely informative and non-partisan. (2)

In fact, in the absence of a wider lens on how these parties' policies will impact on all women – the exercise looks perilously like a call to NOT vote Labour/Green, largely on the basis of their stance on gender identity, and/or to vote FOR a Nat/ACT alliance on the basis of their highly equivocal or unstated stances on the same issue.

Notes:

(1) In a podcast two of the SUFW leadership also discuss New Conservative but I admit to having lost interest before I got that far. 

(2) Semiotically it's interesting - in its positioning of National first and making it look like the party of 'least harmful' centrist moderation, and the placing of the Greens dead centre and with a much wider column than all the others resulting in far more prominent blocks of DO NOT VOTE red.