The Political Twisties

The term wokeism has been weaponised by the right and to understand why that is, we have to engage with the philosophical, social, psychological, and political reasons why the gender identity movement has taken off with such speed and power – largely in the anglophone world. 

Firstly, for those who would argue it is not a movement and nor does it have an ideology – it is, and it does. I am happy to explain why if anyone is interested but in the meantime I am indulging myself in a bit of social speculation.

This extraordinary social movement questions arguably the most deep rooted, ancient and universal of human understandings – not the multitude of kinship arrangements and gender-roles we wrap around sex, but the understanding of what it takes to perpetuate the species which, at its core, is biological and binary.

Given the universality and the complexities of what it challenges, and the implausibility and sheer nonsensicality of much of the evidence it uses to construct its theories and support its claims, the GI movement could easily become the focus of the sort of moral panic and witch hunt it seems intent upon creating in relation to so-called TERFs and “white feminists”.

There can be no doubt that gender identity theory and resulting praxis are being propelled by powerful social, political, commercial interests which undoubtedly see the phenomenon as far more of an opportunity than a threat. At present.

However, those drivers only have so much power because they tap into something very deep in the human psyche – I think at the species level, which is one that is as often obscured and denied as it is examined and embraced.

Post-modernism, which gave birth to gender identity theory and praxis, is arguably one of the most ideological of epistemologies – the more so because it claims not to be. The denial of "grand narratives" and the claim that there is no universal hierarchy of values etc, constitutes a system of ideas and beliefs (an ideology) which was aimed at, and has had the effect of undermining class-based theories and the great social and political movements associated with them.

In a deeply stratified world, post-modernism serves entrenched power. By undermining materialism, Marxism, and class-based, collectivist politics - it laid the foundation for the emergence of the hyper-individualism and extreme commodification of the neo-liberal era / digital age.

The thing with the destruction of collectives and of community, the undermining of widely accepted ethics and norms, and the rise of hyper-individualism, is that many people, young people especially, have ended up stranded on the island of the 'self'. 

This can lead to a profound sense of alienation – in the psychiatric sense of a loss of identity– because we can only make sense of our ‘self’ and the world, within physical collectives - or more properly, in a series of interconnected collectives.

We are profoundly social creatures – we instinctively clump and coalesce – and in the context of the loneliness and disconnectedness of extreme individualism and individualisation, the unceasing demands of aspirational culture, and the unrelenting, judgemental ‘gaze’ of (anti)social media – the need to be a part of something bigger than the hermitic, be-spoke, ‘self’, results in an almost hysterical release when a sense of wider community is established. 

'I am not alone. There are others on my island. I am more than just me, and I must signal my belongingness and protect my community from those who would destroy it or make me question it.'

Cue religiosity, dogmatism, the creation of absolutes, the drive to hunt and to punish heretics in what at times, approaches a fundamentalist frenzy. 

That of course, cuts both ways, and it is a mischief-maker’s paradise.

If you will forgive a segue into a flight of fancy, it often seems to me that the groups which now comprise the two polar extremes of the gender identity debate are – to borrow a quote from Dostoyevsky – like two enemies who are in love with each other. 

They hate each other with a passion but cannot envisage a world in which the other does not exist, for what validates them as a group is the existence of the enemy. But when a common hatred of an enemy is the only thing binding a group together, if you take away the object of hatred, the group has no basis for internal or external validation. 

Having no other shared purpose or belief, there is nothing to stop them flying apart and floating off into cyber space.... lost souls in search of another enemy to love to hate.

Who benefits from this polarisation? What other progressive movement has been embraced and elevated in this way, and with such speed?

For all the over-blown rhetoric about the far right and religious fundamentalists in alliance with the evil bitch-witch TERFs, what other movement representing the interests of a tiny minority, and which challenges such deeply entrenched beliefs, has gained so much governmental, corporate, institutional heft so quickly and with so little effort?

Can we explain that extraordinary progress and its astonishing degree of institutional and policy capture simply by reference to a critical mass of social progressivism?

And if there is such a critical mass, how then to explain what has been left behind in our aspirational, me-first world?

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it -– this issue is divisive. And who is being divided, distracted and diverted? Who are turning in on themselves, having declared largely socialist and radical feminists to be the greatest enemy of social progress ever?

On the one hand, cast as a tiny, insignificant bunch of lunatics who can be ignored because they are at odds with a broad consensus, and on the other, the most terrible enemy the progressive world has ever faced. Well, having already declared TERFs to be a tiny insignificant minority, to justify the hyperbolic reaction they have to be made the vanguard of the looming horror of a far-right backlash. 

I think too many of the neo-liberal left have the political version of the twisties. They’ve spun the narrative so much they’ve lost all sense of where they are in political space.

Latter Day Mccarthyism?

Created a powerful social contagion through the creation of the spectre of a highly stereotyped "enemy" said to exist both within and without.

Demonised and witch-hunted both political opponents and ordinary citizens.

Created a powerful culture of guilt by association. 

Demanded conformism via public loyalty statements and gestures from employees, especially in government.

Created a lexicon of slurs to further stereotype & demonise the "enemy".

Banned books, films, the content/authorship of which was deemed ideologically suspect.

Called for people to be arrested, sacked or not employed on the basis of their expressed or presumed political beliefs.

Told outright lies often and boldly enough, they came to be believed.

In Want Of Correction

 “It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of an opinion, must be in want of correction.”

-       Lynn Myers (with due acknowledgements to Miss Austen)

How should women respond to active and passive aggression from men who get over-excited at the prospect of being able to publicly insult women with impunity, by pretending to be trans allies? (1) 

Whatever a woman does, she must not use a threat of violence, for that is the province of men, and it is a fact that a threat or act of violence from a woman is often viewed as more pathological than worse threats and acts of violence, from men. Furthermore, one threat, even if it is meant as a joke, may be presented as being so SERIOUS, it shades out the great mass of threats which women are in receipt of daily – none more than so-called, TERFs.

I don't agree with Rachel Stewart on this, and I wish she'd stopped and thought about how it would play out before indulging herself in the creation of a tweet which pushed the boundaries on several different levels.  (2)

There’s the possibly criminal threat of a group of armed women in a ute, lamping a naked man.

There's the use of red-neck allusions – "gun-toting, whooping, hollering and drinking" –  no doubt intended to annoy the hell out of the urbanites. 

And then there's the table turning – in the form of a public humiliation of a man by a woman, and what’s more, a gender non-conforming lesbian.

The average chap can take a threat of violence from another chap, it might even make him feel manly, but let a woman draw a word picture in which, in his mind (and what he imagines will be in the mind of others), he is cast as a hapless, hunted victim, stripped naked of all his social armour – that woman becomes a threat. And not just to him, but to all men with fragile egos – especially those men who cynically or reflexively use being a 'trans ally' as a maimai in which to hide while taking pot-shots at gender heretics.

Stewart’s imagery cut deep, not because of a fear rooted in a long history of oppression – as it would be for women and people of colour – but because it mocked and humiliated. It symbolically emasculated. 

The resulting avalanche of “white left” (3) pietism buried the myriad tweets which exhort women to choke on cock, or which declare indescribably abhorrent desires such  as shitting in the urn containing the ashes of a woman’s stillborn baby. Threats of rape, beatings, kerb-stomping, torture, murder – are commonplace, and are forgiven by the “white left” because the authors are deemed to have been provoked, and/or because the women at whom this lahar of foulness is directed have been labelled as non-persons – fair game. 

Have all these members of the Anglophone “white left” seriously never stopped to think – even for a moment – what an absurd spectacle this level of hatred of “TERFs” actually is? That in the face of all that is threatening humanity, or even in the context of what faces us here in NZ, how ludicrous and infantile all that vitriol makes the Left look?

Let’s stack it up, shall we? On the one hand we have a group of women arguing that the privileging of a subjective notion of an individual gender identity over the biological reality of sex, will have implications for women’s sex-based rights. Mostly they just want a discussion, or at least they started out wanting that. (4) 

On the other hand, we have a raft of social problems, such as:

• A per capita prison population among the highest in the OECD, and where the overwhelming majority of prisoners are poor.
• 1 in every 2 men and almost 7 in every 10 women in prison are Māori; we imprison, per capita, more indigenous women than any other country.
• We have thousands of homeless, and tens of thousands who live in substandard housing. 
• There is a huge and growing wealth divide, and ethnic and class disparities in health and longevity.
• We have an appalling rate of domestic violence.
• There is a potential for the vicious bigotry which lurks just beneath the surface in some people, to gain confidence and focus on any one or on multiple targets - anti-Māori, anti-Chinese, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-left, anti-woman, anti-LGBT....

Yet – in the light of ALL that and way, way more – the “white left”, chooses the softest of targets –  women, who include:

• Lesbians who will not compromise their lesbianism.
• Wāhine who believe that the extreme individualism of gender identity politics is not what Māori should be fighting to retrieve from economic and cultural imperialism.
• Old women who know way better than men (and sadly some younger women), what it means to be female.
• Young women and left wing women who feel abandoned by the political class which should be at the forefront of protecting sex-based rights.

Some people whose prior attachment to left politics is tenuous – have used trans issues as a trampoline to propel themselves onto what they deem to be the peak of the moral high ground, from where they hurl the most absurd opprobrium at anyone they can label as TERFS.

They hyperbolically declare TERFs to be fascists, Nazi-adjacent, literal murderers of trans people – evil bitches who provoke men to acts of violence against the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, (oh yes, the thirst to blame the Mother for the world’s ills has never been slaked) – and having driven some of those they’ve castigated into the opportunistic arms of the Right (or an uneasy alliance with it) the “white left” then piously declares its thesis proven. 

In the stupidest, most infantile expression of left sectarianism EVER – it has catapulted TERFs to the forefront of the ranks of the political ENEMY. This is lily-livered, bubble-headed, pretend-left politics, and it’s embarrassingly awful.

Notes:

1. An offender’s Opportunism Quotient can be determined by establishing when they: a) first realised transgenderism existed; and b) how much they have engaged with second wave feminism, politically or critically. In most cases, the answers are: a) no more than a couple of years ago, and b), zilch.
2. In response to a tweet in which a man called GC women “grubs”, Stewart’s tweet resulted in her gun license being suspended, and having her guns & ammunition confiscated.
3. I have borrowed the term "white left'" from the Chinese. Look it up.
4. Attitudes have hardened and anyone who has been involved in the debate longer than a year will know who started flinging the hyperbolic rhetoric first. Hint, it wasn’t the adult human females.