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.