I know a woman ....

I know this woman who's a long-standing trade union member and activist, and in every respect - bar one – is an embodiment of the zeitgeist of the progressive era - an out and proud, left-wing lesbian. 

 

But, she believes lesbians are same-sex attracted which, for some sufferers of over-active amygdala syndrome, makes her a transphobe. She is not - as anyone who actually engaged their higher brain functions - could work out.

 

She’s not a proponent of corporate / choice feminism, so some would call her a radical feminist. She expresses her genuinely held beliefs trenchantly but articulately and under her own name - unlike many of those who attack her - and the way some people respond to her and others like her, exemplifies the ludicrously divisive nature of the debates that swirl around aspects of gender identity theory and praxis. 

 

Henceforth to be known as The Whited Sepulchres  - a curiously disparate bunch, united more in their hatred of TERFs, than their demonstrated support of trans people – recently set about a group of older lesbians who had been banned from a Pride event in Wellington because of being labelled as TERFs.

 

For the Whited Sepulchres, trans is a state of being that is self-declared and sacrosanct, while TERFness is a state of being that is ascribed to anyone who deviates to any degree from the current trans orthodoxy. 

 

Whited Sepulchres act like people in the grip of a moral panic that has left them in a state of cognitive disequilibrium - inhabiting a sort of political and intellectual camera obscura, in which the image of the world is upside down and reversed.

 

Some Whited Sepulchres form themselves into gangs - gender identify lore enforcement and disciplinary squads (GILEADs) - and patrol social media to dispense their trademark brand of vigilante justice to any and all who are deemed to be TERFs. 

 

It’s infantile. 

There are lots of entrants in the Twitter Infantilism stakes - jockeying for position on my list of Most Annoying.

 

Top of the list are those left-ish (way more 'ish' than 'left' IME) blokes who, having been dealt a ‘get out of misogyny gaol free’ card, think it grants them license to behave like utter jerks.

 

They often hide behind pseudonyms and by playing the TERF card, they not only get to uncap their little well of unresolved resentment of all things female and let it spurt all over social media - they get plaudits for doing so.

 

(For those who are wondering, the allusion is entirely intended because for the most part, these blokes, especially the pseudonymous ones, come across as wankers.)

 

They seem to get a thrill out of calling women "cunts", or posting memes depicting acts of violence, or calling for acts of violence against TERFs - actions that are deemed acceptable, even by other women, because these hate-filled, highly masculinist, often sexualised threats and insults are aimed at TERFs – which in this context could well stand for The Eternally Reviled Female.

  

Then there are those who proudly and pseudonymously proclaim their progressive credentials in their bios, festooned with emojis and their preferred second person pronouns (PSPPs), who anxiously curate their followers for fear of being thought to be "TERF-adjacent" - and whose greatest crime in my book is their failure to call out the worst excesses of the Twankers -  clearly forgetting that collusion doth make cowards of us all.  (Sorry Will.)

 

And there are those who make wildly hyperbolic claims such as “trans rights are the preeminent human rights issue of the era in NZ, if not the entire world.”

 

I hope I wouldn't ever be so arrogant as to rank human rights in a shallow, opportunistic way, and if I were to place a rank on an extant human rights issue in NZ, I’d put the incarceration rates of Māori and of Māori women in particular, right at the top. 

Homelessness,  substandard housing, wage precarity, disparate health outcomes etc would also be right up there. 

 

And, if I wanted to write an article to celebrate the gestation of new human life - instead of shouting 'look how progressive I am with my reference to “pregnant people” and my picture of rainbow-coloured, hand-knitted booties', I'd be wanting to highlight the class and ethnicity based discrepancies in maternity outcomes for NZ women and their children.

 

Which is the sort of thing the person who prompted this post does, and has done for decades - no doubt like the lesbian elders in LAVA who have been branded and dismissed by the GILEADS as “UK inspired TERFs", with blokes even boasting of physically keeping them out of the Pride event in Wellington – in yet another display of the extreme self-indulgence and head-up-arseness of some adherents of GIP.

 

What a stunningly useful piece of gender identity agitprop “TERF” has proved to be - in this instance being used to diminish and dismiss lesbians who fought for women's rights when it required a lot more than a chain of emojis and statement of PSPPs on Twitter.

 

These are women who would also fight for trans rights, had the social contagion tsunami not swept through the ranks of the politically righteous - obliterating history, common cause, and common sense - and seen them placed in the ranks of the likes of white supremacists. 

 

Honestly, to  all those who are lining up to put the boot into these women and others like them - and especially those wankers who are also members of the well-padded coordinator class - I can say one thing with absolute certainty - come the day when we really have to fight to retain hard-won rights, I don’t want any of you to have my back because I strongly suspect you’d be fucking useless, or you’d suddenly find some compelling reason why you couldn’t be on the barricades -  a zoom meeting perhaps. 

 

Just GTFU. We’re at a tipping point globally - in Yemen, children are starving to death as a result of a vicious war waged by some of our country's allies, trading partners, Team NZ sponsors - regimes that are about as literally transphobic, misogynistic and homophobic as they come - not that you’d know it by the deafening silence from the GILEADS on that score. 

 

Our Green Party expended precious time, money, and political capital on a petition calling for the government to speed up action to ban gay conversion therapy when we have a massive, and accelerating crisis in our water ways and drinking water supply, looming species extinctions, a reliance on an unsustainable and cruel form of industrialised, chemical-dependent farming, and globally, the ecological issues confronting us are gargantuan and growing exponentially. 

 

It’s like focussing on a flea bite when the body has sepsis and gas gangrene.

 

Okay, rant over. I’m tired of the ping pong - tired of the extremists inflating this issue so much that it serves to obscure other far more genuinely life-threatening ones, and ratcheting up the emotion so all that is heard is the shouting of mantras and counter-mantras.

 

I am deeply sceptical about the direction of aspects of identity politics in general, and the ideology and praxis of the current trans orthodoxy in particular. If that makes me a TERF – or the cringingly infantile “TERF-adjacent” –  so be it. 

 

I disagree with some on the GC side - some deeply so - but among the Whited Sepulchres I see no comradeship, just a lot of hot air and political opportunism.

What a Tangled Web

There's a lot of talk about the destruction of women's sports by the entry into it of male to female (MtoF) transgender athletes, and one of the highest profile of these is Cece Telfer, a Jamaican-born US runner.

The top US college athletes – those judged likely to become elite – compete in the NCAA Division 1 (the Ivy League elite). Telfer was low ranked in male track and field in Division 2, and the women's 400m hurdles event that Telfer won, was in Division 2.

 

The fastest woman in the world at the moment in the 400m hurdles is Dalilah Muhammad - also a black American - who has run it in 52.16, a full 5 seconds faster than Telfer. Dozens of other elite female athletes have bettered Telfer’s time.

 

At current speeds, Telfer would not make the Olympic final - in fact, would probably not make the US Olympic team BUT if that did happen, chances are it would be a black female athlete who would be knocked out. When Muhammad broke the women's world record at the world championships in Doha in 2019 - the entire field was black. 

 

Telfer ran the 400m hurdles in men’s competition in 57.34 seconds, and in 57.53 over the lower hurdles in the women's event - so fractionally slower but –  as the young woman in second place was 2 seconds slower – it's fair to say that Telfer was not being pushed to run the fastest possible time.

 

Telfer’s 60-metre dash personal best (PB) in men’s competition was 7.67 seconds;  in women’s - it’s 7.63.  The women’s world record is 6.92.

 

In the flat 400m, Telfer's PB was 55.77 seconds against men; against women, it’s 54.41. The women’s world record is 47.60 seconds; the all-time top ranked 25 athletes in the women’s competition have run the event 5 or more seconds faster than Telfer.

 

The coach puts that better performance in women’s competition down to an “improved work ethic”, with the claim that Telfer’s improvement is due to being more comfortable competing in women's events. 

 

It's just as likely to be due to the power of increased self-confidence arising from having gone from not having a hope of even a place in the top 200 men in NCAA competition, to winning and being placed against women, with the attendant possibility of the financial rewards of going professional, and of fame as the first black transgender track and field athlete in the Olympics. 

 

Self-confidence and status and financial incentives are huge motivators, and anyone who is in any doubt about the importance of that needs to talk to a sports psychologist. 

 

Much is made of the slight disadvantage in the greater wind resistance, of being much taller than your competitors (Telfer is 6’ 2”), and in the different spacing of the hurdles in the women’s event, which is calculated on the considerably lower averaged female height/ stride length. However, that is more than offset by the lower height of the hurdles in women’s competition (30” compared to 36”), and the average performance advantages (APA) gained by having gone through a full male puberty.

 

In relation to the latter, the current rules of NCAA competition require testosterone suppression for one year prior to competition, but no amounts are specified and testing regimes are vague. The rule seems to be a token gesture towards the current IAAF/IOC regulations of a twelve month reduction of testosterone levels to no more than 10 nmols/L, which is the bottom of the male standard reference range (SRR), and over 4x the top of the female SRR.

 

The fact is, although the likes of Laurel Hubbard will not beat the best of the 105+ kg women weightlifters, MtoF transgender athletes who have gained the APA associated with going through male puberty, will push mid-ranking women out of the picture, which will have a ripple effect down through female sports. 

 

I have no doubt that if they had the ability, most MtoF transgender athletes would remain in male competition because the status and financial rewards are so much greater. The athletes who are most likely to migrate into women’s events are also-rans like Telfer, or over-the-hills like Hubbard. 

 

The situation for FtoM athletes like Chris Moser is different as the unlimited use of a potent performance enhancer (exogenous testosterone) when competing in male competition alters the parameters of the argument.

 

But, however concerned I am about aspects of the current transgender ideology, I am deeply distrustful of right-wing organisations in the US which have chosen to showcase black transgender athletes like Telfer. The racism dimension in the US cannot be extracted from the gender identity and sex-based rights issues – and it's no accident that it is the black transgender athletes who are being showcased.  The appeal is as much to racism as it is to concerns about women’s sex-based rights.

 

It must be said that the other side of this most polarised and polarising of issues, there are many people here in NZ who'd profess the deepest attachment to anti-racism who have blithely ignored the race and the class dimensions of the born-male, white offspring of a multi-millionaire taking podium places away from young Pasifika women. 

 

An interesting case of a glaring double standard – or a politico-ethical blindspot.