To be safe or to be inclusive

A while back Sports NZ published its Guiding Principles for the Inclusion of Transgender People in Community Sport

In the now de rigeur format, in which appearance not so much overrides essence as smothers it, the guidelines start with a foreword from the CEO which signals the policy's underlying ideological thrust.

It moves on to the ubiquitous glossary of terms, which, in light of how politically and academically contested many of the concepts are, is highly ideological. This glossary does not disappoint and even notes that the concept of simply identifying as a particular gender has been phased out in preference for being a gender. 

Par for the current gender identity course, they sidestep the vexed question of what gender is other than to saygender or gender identity describes "one's actual, internal sense of being male or female, (note the default order)neither of these, both etc."

Nor do they define female or male other than to make the standard nod to sex characteristics as "each person's physical features relating to sex, including genitalia and other sexual and reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, hormones and secondary physical features emerging from puberty."

As if all that exists separately from the wider body; as if it is possible to literally or even figuratively dissect the complex web of reproductive sex out of the body.

Symptomatic, compartmentalised, pharmacocentric, commercialised medicine has a lot to answer for.

But back to community sports.

We know that most sports and ALL big money/blue riband sports were developed to showcase male abilities and attributes, and they are still dominated by men because of historical sexism and misogyny.

Women were barred from all sports, then from some sports, and in some countries they are still barred or have to play in kit which hides their bodies to satisfy male created and imposed chastity standards.

In the sports in which women have fought their way to some level of equality, men are still very much the senior partners. Professional, elite sport is a huge global corporate industry, in turn dominated by men, and which channels most of its sponsorship etc to elite male athletes.

The discrimination against women in sports flowed/flows from patriarchal attitudes which are still very much in play even in countries which believe they've moved beyond them.

Discrimination was once always linked to qualifying words such as "unfair". The term now stands alone which makes a nonsense of the underlying concept in any sphere where decisions are made about inclusion – be that in recruitment and selection for a job, or who gets to play in a given sport at a given level and against whom.

To discriminate between two people each vying for a job or a place in a team or a competition, is to discriminate in favour of one and against the other.

Denying an adult 100kg rugby player a claimed right to play against kids who weigh 60kgs is to discriminate against that older, heavier person but in no sane world would anyone see that as unfair discrimination.It is discrimination in the sense of recognising relevant distinctions and differences which form the basis of a judgement.

The point – the entire point – of equality of opportunity in all spheres and at all levels, is to ensure that the processes and procedures involved, and the decisions arrived at are as fair as it is possible to make them.

In a community sport in which a male-bodied trans or non-binary person wishes to compete as a woman, and in which their right to absolute privacy is deemed to be paramount, how are the cultural and religious needs of women that preclude undressing in the presence of or being in bodily contact with a male person (irrespective of that person’s gender identity), to be met?

It is either weirdly illogical or stunningly cynical on the one hand to call for sporting uniforms / costumes to be of a sort that allows transgender and gender diverse people to hide the aids they use to “enable their body to more closely match their gender”, and to haul in the cultural and religious demands on women in support of that, while completely ignoring how those cultural/religious constraints will act to exclude natal women if male-bodied people are included in women’s sports.
 
It's just a small example of the contortions of logic this issue demands of its adherents.
 
There are no easy answers in this and those who simply say female equals anyone without a Y chromosome, stray into a form of biological determinism or reductionism which serves to exclude people born with compete androgen insensitivity syndrome, for example, who are phenotypically female but chromosomally male.
 
In a way, the issues facing competitive athletes are clearer and more easily resolved. Although natal females in competitive sport are still very much the junior partners, they have a louder voice than girls and women who want to play sports at a community level.
 
I'm not going to write a prescription but I will reiterate this: natal males are on average taller, heavier, and stronger than natal females. This is not an ideological statement about male superiority and female inferiority; it is a statement of material fact.
 
The performance advances made by female athletes have been matched by men, and the average performance gap in most sports remains.
 
Women are not just small men; we have very significant anatomical and metabolic differences. One to which far too little attention is paid are the differences between the musculature of the female and the male posterior cervical spine. Women are more prone to whiplash than men. Women might also be more prone to brain injury as a result of the lesser ability for the musculature of the female posterior cervical spine to stabilise the head in the course of a collision.
 
Given men on average are heavier, taller, and faster than women, if natal males enter contact sports as women, they will serve to increase the average weight, height, and speed of the players. In contact, team sports that will serve to increase the average impact forces bodies may experience.
 
In some contact sports the height, weight and speed differentials between players and resulting harm from impact are already a health and safety issue for players. Increase height, weight, speed differentials in women's sport and it seems logical that given the more vulnerable female cervical spine, the potential for serious harm is also increased.
 
I'm perhaps more alert to this than most because I have a congenital fusion of my cervical spine which, combined with age related osteoporosis, puts me at a higher risk of catastrophic neck injury as a result of a whiplash injury. My sort of congenital fusion is common enough and its added risk factors are serious enough that arguably anyone engaging in contact sport should be screened for it.
 
To blithely ignore these sort of realities in the name of some people’s ideas about inclusion is unforgivable.

The Ideological Grift That Keeps Giving

I've been pretty much correct in my predictions about the direction of the gender wars. I don't claim any special insight, just a knowledge of history guided by a materialist analysis, a grasp of politics, and a measure of common sense.

 

The disparate groups which arose in Aotearoa-NZ in reaction to the Labour Government’s initiatives on such things as climate change and water reform, gained traction with opposition to Covid measures, especially mandates.

 

A loose coalition of far-rightists and conspiracy theorists maintained a degree of unity which was assisted by what became for some, a fanatical focus on, and maniacal hatred of Jacinda Ardern.

 

Once Covid restrictions eased and Ardern left office, those disparate groups have been left in need of a common enemy, the hatred and fear of which could help hold them in alliance, and recruit members.

 

The organisers of the protest against the Let Women Speak rally in Auckland, who clearly lacked the political and tactical nous to anticipate the direction all of this was likely to go, seemed to have handed one to them on a plate.

 

The moment an as yet nameless man, high on a toxic mix of moral certitude and adrenaline, and in the grip of testosterone disinhibition, swung his fists into the head of a much older woman, the trans rights movement lost a lot of the moral high ground where it matters most, in the centre.

 

Just like most people will never stop believing in the material reality of reproductive sex because a bunch of middle-class people with various sorts and degrees of vested interest tell them to, most people also accept there should be a proscription on young men punching older women.

 

Attempts by various trans allies to justify that man’s breach of both the criminal law and the social contract, have served to undermine their own moral and political positions, not just in respect of trans rights, but in relation to other, arguably more important, issues and causes they support.

 

Prompted by the coverage given to that incident and others, a group proclaiming itself to be made up of real men supporting the rights of real women, indicated it would be organising rallies across the country on April 15^th in support of women’s rights. 

 

Nazi-watchers in NZ duly issued dire warnings about the scale of the threat that these far right wingers pose to trans people. 

 

In anticipation of real men throwing real punches, trans rights activists who had called for mass protest against Let Women Speak, promptly bottled out.

 

They had created their very own Hobson's Choice: turn out and protest against some real fascists and angry men, and possibly get punched, or stay away and be accused of being cowards who only gang up on women.

 

As it happened, the groundswell of real men in NZ seems to have been more akin to a barely discernible ripple, a fact that makes the Nazi-watchers’ and TRAs’ hyperbole about an imminent trans genocide, sound more OTT than usual.

 

But, it is an embryonic movement and it may yet grow into something dangerous if it continues to follow the lead of the far right overseas. 

 

Today's damp squibs aside, it's a pretty well known fact that angry and hurt people are likely to seek redress, and anxious people will seek certainty. It’s why “strong man” leaders often have an appeal they don't have when people feel secure and happy.

 

History tells us what can happen if too much of the middle ground is lost to the far right. I’m not talking about the middle ground in party political terms, but the broad fulcrum point in society across which the extremes of social conservatism and social transgressivism are kept in balance.

 

Those trans rights activists and allies who thought they could rip up, without consequence, the most ancient and deeply rooted of material realities, with its vast weight of ideological beliefs and obfuscations, its physical coercions, and its mass of historical and contemporary casualties, are either dunderheads or they have a malign agenda of some sort. 

 

The middle class social justice warriors in the affluent world surely realise that for a huge number of women in the world, the most pressing priority is survival for them and their children, for some, so much so it forms the very boundaries of their existence.

 

We have to place glib claims by a transgender activist that “sex essentialism was left behind last century”, alongside such global realities of the 800 or so, mainly black and brown skinned poor women who died every day in 2020 from easily preventable birth complications, and the millions of female lives that have been lost to sex selective abortion and infanticide over the past three decades. 

 

Liberal feminists who place gender identity as the number one item on their political agenda should ask themselves what priority they give to the estimated two million women in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa who are living with an untreated obstetric fistula caused by obstructed labour –  the main causes of which are the effects of genital mutilation, becoming pregnant too young, and anaemia caused by malnutrition. 

 

On the other side of the gender identity vs sex divide, those women who see transgenderism as the greatest threat to women’s rights, and who think a resurgence of patriarchal family values is a price worth paying in order to defeat it, need to start thinking sensibly and strategically.

 

The alternative is to stay in an alliance which may well tip more towards the secular and religious far right, in which case they will have to stop all pretence of being feminist, and watch while other women and a host of gender non-conforming people pay the price for the devil's supper.

 

I would ask all those women and men who place responsibility on the “left” for the direction that the gender identity orthodoxy has taken – what did they do to rescue the women’s liberation movement from the encroachments of post-modernism and gender ideology?

 

What did they do to fight for women’s sex-based rights inside the broad left and in all those wider collectives that have been gradually captured by gender ideology over the past three decades or so?

 

I’d judge it was SFA otherwise we wouldn’t be in this mess.

 

 

Until the issues of gender identity and sex self-identification cut though all the neo-liberal gloss paint and glitter and re-energised radical and socialist feminism, most women inside the imperial bubble had been prepared to settle for the formal rights which granted them parity with their male peers, and all the baubles dangled in front of them by corporate capitalism.

 

Some right wing women rejected and still reject socialist and radical feminism's insights, and some women were and still are embarrassed by any sort of feminism, and were anxious not to be labelled as a hairy-legged harridans, man-haters, or members of a puritanical coven.

 

Many men across the social and political spectra welcomed the defeat of the monstrous regiment of women, and none more so than those right wing men who are now posing as the most vociferous critics of gender ideology, and defenders of women’s rights. (Cue hollow laughter stage left.)

 

We all allowed this to happen in various ways and to various degrees. What we must not do is continue to obsess about what’s happening in the margins, and feminists must not allow schisms to develop further.

 

The first wave of radical separatist feminism lost a lot of working class women and women of colour because it forced an unbearable choice on them. I was put off as a working class young woman, and it was one reason I was always more at home in the wider left. I feel the same chill when I read, the always anonymous, radical feminist Twitter accounts now proclaiming a hatred of men, and advocating female separatism and aborting male foetuses.

 

By all means rub men’s noses in the shit they’ve dumped all over the world but we must never lose sight of the fact that gender ideology was and is used in the same way as the ideology of race.

 

Both serve to legitimate the hyper-exploitation and the vicious oppression of classes of people deemed to be inferior. Both also serve to divide natural allies by means of the illusory compensations of sexual/racial superiority, and scraps of highly conditional, devolved power.

 

It’s as true now as it ever was, and as simple as it is complex.

For the oppressed, there is only strength in unity.

What divides us, weakens us, and what divides us always serves entrenched power.