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.
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