Who are the real victims?

It's grimly fascinating to see people who would protest loudly if anyone dared victim-blame an assaulted woman for dressing the wrong way, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, effectively doing the same to the mainly older women who organised and attended the Auckland "Let Women Speak" rally. 

It’s almost as riveting as someone feverishly likening those chaotic scenes to the ANZACs "keeping Nazism from our shores”. Or equating the righteousness of those advancing the ideology of gender identity to that of the anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand in the 1980s when protesters faced down both police and angry rugby fans in brutal battles which divided the country. (1) 

The politicking of some of the loose groupings that make up the broad left in the Neo-liberal era, owes too much to virtual and real life cosplaying and on-line attitudinising. When such people declare that "Nazis must be opposed", which of course they must, what seems to escape some of them is that the sentiment is widely accepted, even among most of the moderate right. 

It's so self evident and uncontroversial that most people are surprised when it is voiced so fervently and indiscriminately. Many people are even more surprised when they're told that a group of women from a wide range of socio-economic, personal, and political backgrounds who want to talk publicly about sex-based rights, are Nazis. 

Some people's surprise tips into incredulity when they're told that the empirical proof of all these women being Nazis rests on their "leader" having been photographed with, and having accepted various forms of comparatively small scale tactical or financial support from people on the secular or religious far right. 

Most recently, the image of twenty black clad crypto-fascists in Melbourne giving Nazi salutes at the Let Women Speak rally, has been cited as further proof that the organisers and attendees at the LWS rally are Nazis.

Like a swarm of wasps, the Melbourne crypto-fascists were attracted to the LWS rally possibly because the opponents of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, had declared her to be a Nazi. Equally likely, given the crypto-fascists seem to hate her almost as much as the "paedo freaks" they claim to be opposing, is the possibility that the wasps were coat-tailing the rally to stage a recruitment photo opp, and the media and Victoria police duly obliged them.

We now all know that Posie Parker expresses very strong opinions in opposition to transgenderism, a political ideology that currently preoccupies the left of neo-liberalism almost to the exclusion (and to the detriment) of all the other massive issues confronting us here in New Zealand, and globally.

What people may not know or choose to ignore is that the moment she formed a group to oppose what she sees as a threat to women's sex-based rights, the label of TERF was slapped on her. 

People may also not know or choose to ignore the fact that TERF was already equated with Nazi, and the angry toddler corollary had already been written that as it’s okay, even a moral obligation, to punch Nazis, it’s okay to punch TERFs like her and her supporters, even if they're older women or left wingers or lesbians.

After Melbourne, some people amused themselves by putting up Twitter polls asking, "is it OK to punch a Nazi?" 

People who've probably never physically encountered a real Nazi, let alone punched one or faced down large numbers of them, all cried, "Yes". 

Punching is all well and good when it's actual Nazis, but the optics change when the chief "Nazi" is a diminutive, middle aged mum of four, and her supporters are mainly middle aged and older women, and include lesbians and Māori and Pasifika women. 

Even if she is a calculated far right winger (as opposed to an angry woman who had made some  unwise political and tactical decisions) does that mean everyone drawn to her as a figurehead, is a literal Nazi? 

How many credibility gaps does that sort of claim result in – gaps in which the real Nazis can hide?

Like the term feminazi, coined in the 1990s, the labelling of TERFs as Nazis serves to demonise the wide range of arguments and claims which counter those of transgenderism's primary platform of gender self-identification.

What trans advocates and allies fail to acknowledge is that this indiscriminate labelling has the side effect of diluting both the historical and the contemporary reality of Nazi ideology and its outcomes. 

There is a huge risk in the rise of the far right globally, and here in NZ; we have seen the tragic outcomes of that in Christchurch, but is this sort of indiscriminate labelling of women as Nazis really the best way to counter that rise?

Labels not only serve to corral and to brand a person or a group, they often obscure hugely complex realities, reducing them to the political and intellectual equivalent of sound-bites. 

In the politics of appearance, this reduction of complex issues to slogans and mantras is almost always accompanied by hyperbolic rhetoric, and catastrophising. 

Trans rights activists and allies claim that Posie Parker is a Nazi who wants literally to exterminate all trans people who are the most marginalised, disadvantaged, vulnerable, at risk minority of all.  

In reaction, the Parkerites now shout back about the "mass mutilation of children", the imminent erasure of all women's sex-based rights, and the risks to women and children of persons with a penis being allowed into women-only spaces.

The clamour of the arguments and the inflamed rhetoric now being generated from behind dense barriers of moral certitude, means there is insufficient space or quiet in the middle ground for the sort of nuanced debates this issue needs. Nor can it be put into the context of the mass of other pressing issues facing us. 

A basic political principle for me is, in order to see the bottom line of who benefits from a given action or issue, we always have to look up. That is never more essential than in this issue. 

The truth is that far from all trans people being a hugely marginalised and disadvantaged group, some, maybe even a lot of trans people are well buffered by advantages accruing from their birth sex, ethnicity, socio-economic status etc. Here in NZ, trans people have full legal equality and considerable social acceptance. There are very few acts of reported violence against trans people for being trans, and so safe is NZ, trans people apply for asylum here. 

Furthermore, trans rights and the positioning of them on the zenith of the political-moral high ground, are supported by the entirety of the corporate world and most of mainstream media, and by all the main political parties. Pretty much all the country’s governmental and non governmental organisations and institutions are fully supportive, and transgender activists have made incredible headway since the 1990s, in quietly creating a pro-trans legal and social environment. (2) 

In this context, and the absence of a body of empirical proof, the argument that the anti LWS protest was in support of the most marginalised, at risk of violence, hated, discriminated against minority of all time illustrates the sad fact that hyperbolic rhetoric, sloganeering, and catastrophising now dominate the discourse around this and related issues.I do not deny the fact that trans people could easily become the first target of a far right and social conservative backlash. 

The trick for trans allies is supporting in ways that don't provide fuel for such a backlash. A start point would be to stop behaving like sanctimonious jerks.

* * * *

This was the backcloth to a large number of people, high on a heady mix of adrenaline and moral certitude, heading out protest the Let Women Speak rally – to figuratively "punch some Nazis". 

Among the crowds were some who were prepared to take that literally, and one man, hyped up on that heady mix of moral certitude, adrenaline and testosterone, punched a 72-year-old woman in the face three times because she was wearing a tee shirt that identified her as an attendee at the rally.

She’s the same age as me. Those punches could have killed her or caused brain damage, or cervical spinal injury – and that is not hyperbolic or catastrophising, it is medical, anatomical fact.

That cowardly attack and other footage of women being driven out of a public space in a violent manner, by people claiming to be defending trans people from violence, is now firmly embedded in far right agit prop, ie it's given ammunition to the actual or wanna-be fascists.

Even though it's been sanitised post hoc by the same media outlets which actively raised the political temperature and helped to foment the rage, I suspect considerable damage in the electoral middle ground has also been done.  (3) 

In contrast to the LWS protest, a rally and march down Queen Street, of forces which pose arguably a greater threat to the rainbow community, resulted in just a brief scuffle. There was no  throwing liquids over Bishop Tamaki and his wife; no rushing into the massed ranks of big, tough men to throw punches. 

No, that behaviour was reserved for the soft targets in Albert Park. 

Maybe the protesters’ amygdalas had switched off and the adrenaline rush had subsided by the time they confronted the Destiny Church rally but what are the odds the brave social justice warrior who punched a pensioner in the head wouldn’t have dared to as much as say boo to the Bishop?

What many people outside the social media bubbles of self-reinforcing beliefs, will take away from this, is that "antifa" and the "woke left" pick on soft targets, eg older women. What will your average, middle of the road Kiwi take from the weirdo who thought it was a good idea to express support for trans people by tweeting that she “gets off on seeing fear in the eyes” of a small, middle aged woman being mobbed by angry, mainly male protesters?

Those who let your political knees jerk so violently that your remaining sense is being knocked out of your heads, and who decry the likes of me as nazi adjacent, may I suggest you climb down off your moral high horse and turn it out to pasture – the poor beast needs a rest.

Talk to women outside your political bubbles, face to face. Look into the eyes of the ordinary concerned women, lesbians and socialist feminists, and if you still want to reject everything we say and call us fascists, then clearly the traditional left in NZ has died of pernicious political anaemia, and with it, all hope of mass resistance to the real enemy.

Footnotes:

1) The conflation of WW1 and 2 and the historical fact that NZ’s shores were more at risk from Japanese RW nationalist militarism than European Nazism is silly but hauling it into a debate about sex-based rights is surreal. A person who argued that the LWS protesters were on the same side of history as the protesters against the Springbok tour who were abused and spat on is seemingly oblivious to the fact that not only were the protesters in Albert Park facing small numbers of older women as opposed to cops and burly rugby fans, it was they who were doing the spitting and abusing.

2) This process of largely unnoticed changes at the level of policy and regulation ended when the right to sex self-identification by statutory declaration was included in an omnibus bill which led to opposition from groups concerned about its wider implications.

3) Marama Davidson's glib comment that white straight men are the main perpetrators of violence was the most spectacular of the left's many own goals.

Schisms to the left of us, advantages to the right ....

What follows is a bit of ramble around the edges of a rather messy ideological battleground. I've covered a lot of the ground in earlier posts but some points are so important, they bear repeating.

The forces that advance and protect global corporate capitalism set about routing its main enemy, the old red left, by destroying its collectives, corrupting its political parties, and denying the existence of universalist, class-based theories. 

They also replenished their armoury of divert and divide tactics.

Neo-liberalism's promotion of hyper-individualism and aspirational culture – we can / must be the best possible versions of our unique selves – was so successful because it was grafted onto older ideologies that posit the existence of an immutable and unique individual soul or spirit housed within a mutable (mortal) body. 

In its most alienated and harmful expressions, the physical body is reduced to a "meat sack" or "flesh suit" inhabited and "piloted" by the "authentic self".

The left of neo-liberalism (the system-adjusters) – already enthralled by identity and emergent queer politics – seized on gender identity as its cause du jour, as did parts of the wider left which, in other respects, are anti-capitalist. 

The odd alliances and enmities that have flowed from all this are a neo-liberal spin doctor's dream, and have become arguably one of the most effective diverters and dividers we've yet seen.

* * * *

The new wave of feminism that was energised by opposition to gender identity ideology and praxis  is now in the throes of a major sectarian schism between a loose coalition of socialist feminists – from social democrats to communists – and a loose coalition of liberal and radical feminists aided by an growing horde of opportunist right-wing blokes, which has just one target in its sights – transwomen or, in the gender critical nomenclature, trans-identifying males.

Sometimes a strategic response to a single issue serves to galvanise and to unite a broader movement, pulling people into political activism on a wider front. However, that might not be progressive activism – and it can sometimes be the antithesis of it. 

In the absence of the strong organisational and theoretical frameworks that are needed to hold progressive movements together, instead of a focus on a single issue serving to pull people into wider progressive activism, it can as easily lead to them being pulled into wider reactionary activism.

The dangers of a narrow focus on a single issue and the sorts of political opportunism that can accompany it, was illustrated when some gender critical women in NZ promoted right-wing libertarian, David Seymour's scaremongering and tub-thumping about the Labour Government’s repeal of the infamous and discredited "Three Strikes" legislation. 

His cynical and opportunist appeal to the law and order brigade was used to inflate the bogey man of a specific threat to women via a claimed mass release of sex offenders. 

The women responsible for promoting this were either right-wingers cynically aiming to use the new wave of women's rights activism as a platform, or they were so focussed on a narrow goal, they failed to see the wider political picture.

There are gender critical feminists who’ve never taken any notice of, for example, the class and ethnic skewing of the female prison population, but who became incensed over the housing of male-bodied trans prisoners in female prisons. 

Their sex-based prisoner rights' activism goes only as far as stopping that one sort of potential harm to female prisoners, and does not address or want to change the socio-economic underpinnings of wider prison policy with its disproportionate adverse effects on the poor and on people of colour, both female and male.

Women who said nothing about the adverse effects of neo-liberal economic policy on health care provision, now rail about the presence of transwomen both as patients and health care workers. Many had and have little to say and are prepared to do less about the impacts of low quality or non-existent health care on all members of impoverished communities, especially women and kids.

The same with sport; people who never said a word about the sexism and the pay and status differentials in the world of commercialised sport, are up in arms about the inclusion of male bodied trans people in female categories.

Arguably the most emotive of these linked issues is paediatric transition. Many of the people who rage about the adverse effects on children of gender ideology and its associated medicalised care paradigm – have little or nothing to say about the thousands of children under the age of five who die every single day, most from easily preventable causes. 

Few voices were or are raised to express horror about that death toll, let alone demand and fight for the structural changes needed to end it, while the relatively small number of kids affected by gender identity medical protocols in the affluent world is held up as the pre-eminent child protection issue of the era.

Paediatric transition is of course hugely important but the medical “advances” that have both enabled and profited from the transgender wave were made in the context of the prior immense growth of medicine for profit. 

The underlying ethos and the influence of medicine for profit serves to corrupt medical ethics, and it has a grossly disproportionate impact on the poor, caused both by the inability to pay for access to medical care and by the diversion of medical services into the provision of various forms of appearance enhancement, for example.

This development in commercialised medicine preceded the rise of gender identity ideology, including gender affirming paediatric medical protocols, and arguably was a necessary precondition for it. 

                                                                       * * * *

I've said before that I see this more as a battle between social conservatism and social transgressivism than a simple left/right division.

Tendencies towards social conservatism, in the sense of an attachment to, and respect for traditional social and moral norms, and social trangressivism, in the sense of disrupting or changing those norms – cut across all social and economic boundaries. There are politically left wing social conservatives and politically right wing social transgressives. Also, people may be socially conservative on some issues and socially transgressive on others. 

Very simplistically, the conservative pole helps maintain a necessary degree of social stability and cohesion – especially with regard to the unwritten social contract; the other is necessary for change and innovation. 

A healthy society keeps a balance because if the two poles are not held in tension, they will start to pull towards extremes. Social conservatism acting as a brake on change can energise a counter-reaction which pulls societal norms towards the social transgressive pole. Push too far in that direction and social conservatism will start to pull back. 

Neo-liberalism, with its profit at any cost monetarist ideology, weakened left wing progressive movements by undermining both their organisational bases, and the theoretical-intellectual frameworks which give the movements political coherence and resilience. It also continued an older tradition of fomenting sectarianism, which is the kiss of death for progressive movements, especially when sects centre around a cult of personality – in the digital era, cults of celebrity.

Neo-liberalism has put cults of celebrity on steroids and "democratised" them via social media such that a huge range of people can become "famous" and some sort of "influencer" – having their ego boosted, promoting or undermining a cause, making money ...or all of the above. 

The single biggest question mark over gender identity politics for me was always the speed with, and extent to which global corporates and corporate-friendly governments, institutions, and NGOs etc embraced it.

The reasons for that are complex – partly market-driven, partly ideological.

Gender identity with its precursor, the denial of sex dimorphism, once it was pulled to the extremes of “I feel I am, therefore I literally am” was always going to galvanise opposition among social conservatives. Not all of these people are political conservatives but when confronted with an issue that goes beyond their personal or political pale, they may be pulled into alliances with the political right, and even the far-right.

The fact that so many on the white left stood alongside the corporate establishment as it embraced gender identity, and then went far beyond it by attacking anyone, women especially, who refused to toe the gender identity line, is a measure of how thoroughly gutted the left in the west is. 

These attacks on anti-gender identity feminists preceded the rise of sections of the gender critical movement which are prepared to ally with the far right on this one issue, and arguably helped propel a lot of those women into the right's waiting arms.

One could be forgiven for thinking that amongst the ranks of the white left were some people who deliberately fomented that division, tapping into a vein of unreconstructed sexism and latent or internalised misogyny amongst enough on the broad left to create an activist groundswell. 

A motley mix of flip floppers, political cowards, and opportunists followed the activists onto what was declared to be the zenith of the moral and political high ground. Some of them are now straggling down under the cover of darkness leaving the hard core defenders, still convinced they’re firmly on the right side of history. 

Meanwhile the forces that would actually "annihilate" women or queer people (as opposed to the angry rhetoric of a woman who shoots from the lip) are gathering force and momentum.

The big question is, at what point will the corporate world decide that gender identity has ceased to be a political and economic opportunity, and become a threat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Strategic Blunder?

The image above is a screenshot from a video of a trans rights protester and security men at the Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne. The mike had been grabbed from a woman speaker, and two men wrestled with the protester to retrieve it. 

The way the two men are behaving, and especially the hand around the protester's throat, and how they frame part of the sign behind them, caught my eye. it also caught the eye of influential trans activist, Katie Montgomery. Let Women Speak organiser, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, claims that the protester was trans, but a masked woman calling herself Joanne, and claiming to be the protester, appeared on Montgomery's You Tube channel.  

Given her face is clearly visible on two of the videos I've seen of the incident, quite why Joanne needed to wear a mask while being interviewed by Montgomery, is anyone's guess. 

Joanne also said, along with some standard issue Antifa agitprop, that no complaint would be laid with the police as they are "all bastards".

It's a bit immaterial in any event given the image has already provided grist for the trans rights mill, and it's completely inappropriate for a bloke to grab anyone by the throat in that way.

The security overreach aside, I don't much like the image of big men acting as "protectors" of little women, nor the name of the event which to me sounds a bit too much like a request than a demand. 

More importantly, there is the question of how the person who has made herself the iconic centre of the movement, ought to have reacted to actual Nazis gatecrashing her event. If she was sensible, and if she wants to win the middle ground on this issue – and that is where it will be decided – Keen-Minshull should have immediately issued a press statement condemning that sort of far right, ultra-nationalist, white supremacist movement without reservation, and distancing her organisation, and gender critical feminism more widely, from it. 

She, or the Aussie organisers, should also have immediately asked formal questions of the Victoria police as to why Nazis were allowed to parade in that way at that point, and why they ushered the twenty Black Shorts out through the cordon they'd established between the LWS rally and the trans rights protesters.

It seems that Keen-Minshull decided not to comment until pressured during an interview which made it all too little, too late. Had she never been prepared to share platforms with far right organisations and individuals, her claim that people should realise Let Women Speak is nothing to do with the far right might hold more water than it does.  

Her supporters, instead of urging her to distance herself, are arguing she should not have to issue a statement because the trans activists won't believe her, and they will demand more and more retractions and qualifying statements until she is forced to resile from gender critical claims and demands completely. But, without such a statement, and in light of her prior connections, the trans activists were always going to dominate the media discourse, and her refusal to speak out was always going to be widely interpreted as further proof that she is either on the far right or is indebted to far right organisations in some way. Every far right, religious extremist organisation or individual coat-tailing these issues which are not rejected by GC feminists, will be taken as proof, either of political naiveté or of cynical collaboration, or worse, as evidence that the entire movement is what the gender identity extremists claim – far right and transphobic.

Keen-Minshull is gutsy and self-opinionated; she is clearly stubborn and she likes to win. These qualities, combined with a lack of political campaigning experience mean she makes tactical blunders. The rambling video she made that was directed at the NZ prime minister over the questions raised about her right of entry to the country, is a case in point. 

Her stubborn insistence that, for example, gender identity is so important an issue for all women, losing abortion rights would be a price worth paying to stop it, is either acting as a calculating spokeswoman for the forces that want to remove the right to abortion, or she is so focussed on a single goal, so intent on winning, and so buoyed up by her own celebrity, she fails to consider the wider implications of what she says. 

NZ transactivists and allies are indulging in the most inflamed rhetoric imaginable, for example, seeing "white power gestures" in her hand movements, which only serves to polarise the debate even further. 

She should have taken every opportunity to defuse that sort of foolishness by making it absolutely and immediately clear she will have no truck with far right extremists. Instead, she tacitly encouraged her supporters to counter-attack with salvos of their own hyperbolic claims and feverish rhetoric. 

I don't know enough about her to be able to say with absolute certainty whether she is a right winger who is calculatedly using this facet of a re-energised women's rights movement, or if she is a well-intentioned woman whose anger has been fanned by the hyperbolic rejection of her concerns by trans activists and allies in white left. 

Their smug certitude often makes me spit tacks so I can understand why some women are now anti-left, or at least, the so-called "woke" left. Whether that makes them committed to the right or to the far right is moot, as is whether any of them can be won back to the left. 

That political ball is in very much in play. 

Keen-Minshull is now being presented both in the legacy media and on social media in NZ in the most ludicrously hyperbolic terms. An article on what should be NZ's voice of balance, rationality, and moderation, Radio NZ, failed to do even the most basic checks on the story. Had they done so, they'd have seen that the Black Shorts were not there to support LWS but to hijack both the rally and the counter-protest for their own political ends ... the promotion of their brand of fundamentalist, white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, hyper-patriarchal Christianity. 

These "anti-paedo" groups are currently focussed on the same sort of claims that drove a man to rush into a pizza restaurant in Washington with an automatic weapon, to "rescue" the kidnapped children he believed had been chained in the basement by Democratic Party child abusers. It's also behind the links now being drawn between drag queens and paedophilia.

These are the sort of people who form real-life vigilante squads, and some of whom are so full of rage they have lost all connection to reality. The story about vigilantes who attacked a UK paediatrician's home in 2000 because they got confused about her job title is amusing... until these people turn their on-line conspiracy theorising into more serious forms of action and people get hurt or killed. (1)

Notes:

(1) These conspiracists don't realise there are two sorts of child sex abusers (leaving aside the far great number of adults who physically abuse kids) – those driven by a parafilia, and those who are just selfish, callous sexual opportunists. Malignant paedophiles don't do their grooming by dressing in drag and reading to kids in a public library; they groom by stealth, and they mostly wear business suits or forms of religious garb. For an abused kid it doesn't much matter which they are in truth, but hysteria or blinding rage from the adults around them is likely to add to the long-term harm.