A con of the first water

The Neo-lib inspired management-governance split left local councils in New Zealand in the grip of central government by making party political divides in local governance opaque, by placing too much power in the hands of CEOs, and by imposing layers of regulation almost all of which have to funded out of rates, which residents pay out of their taxed income and on which they are then taxed again by central government via GST.

Back in the colonialist days of powerful provincial governance, some people longed for a strong central government to curb the untrammelled greed and rampant self-interest of those who controlled the provinces. 

We live in an era in which those venal, self-serving attributes are firmly in the driving seat at all levels of both the governance and the management of a socio-economic system that is rooted in exploitation in pursuit of private profit. Calls for more local power in that socio-economic landscape are a chimera.

As a case in point: I live in a district with a population of just under 14k in a land area of 8,600 square kilometres. Our rates have skyrocketed, not solely because of the abandonment of Three Waters but because of decades of poor management and governance.

We have water which meets WHO standards but due in part to a council strategy of mixing water from different sources (funded by the last government), our water is so heavy with minerals and chlorine it destroys water heaters and whiteware unless softened and filtered as most people are now forced to do at their own expense. 

The reticulated rural water supply is old in places, and leaks are frequent with untold amounts of potable water being wasted.

The bulk of the district’s roads are unsealed and poorly maintained, due largely to the inefficiencies and false economy of the Neo-lib contract culture in which local councils are firmly enmeshed. 

As a rural property we were forced to install a sewage system which, thanks to the regional government's subservience to the Neo-lib ethos, requires on-going maintenance, initially by the company which installed it, then by a large corporation which bought that company which now out-sources the job to a self-employed contractor. 

We have no rubbish collection, and the council effectively destroyed one of the country’s most advanced and innovative community-led recycling initiatives to pass a key contract onto a private sector provider. When questioned about what was widely perceived locally as a conflict of interest, the then mayor laughed and said, “This is XXX, there’s always a conflict of interest.”

All that aside, NZ’s total population is half that of Seoul. It is skewed, not just in relation to the numbers in the northern island, but in greater Auckland. 

The larger island (also the location of the great, state-funded hydro schemes which supply 60% of the nation’s now privatised electricity) is home to just 1.2 million people, half of them in one province. 

There is a pressing need for governance and management to be genuinely efficient and economic,  and to be responsive to local needs. We simply cannot afford to have deep layers of both national and local governance and management. 

The creation of the all-important buffer zone, the various strata of which have a financial and  status stake in the economic status quo, has resulted in layers of bureaucracy which are all-too often parasitic on essential front-line services. 

This is at its most obvious in the public sector, and at present it provides useful ideological cover for a crackpot coalition government to make swingeing cuts in the sector –  partly as a bone to divert some of its more rabid supporters, but mainly to fund the juicy steaks it intends to serve up to its main financial and political backers.  

They point to the layers of bureaucracy that their ilk created as a buffer zone, and to the struggling, front line service providers who have been starved of funding and ham strung by regulations, and they sacrifice some of the former, not to improve the latter, but to divert the “savings” into the pockets of the already-rich. 

Or, even more brazenly, to create new layers of bureaucracy to facilitate yet more asset stripping. 

It is a con of the first water; unparalleled in its callous impudence.

Gamesmanship

On the NZ left wing site, The Standard, an article written by a woman about the fairness and safety issues implicit in the presence in women’s boxing of two athletes who may / probably have a 46XY disorder of sexual development or differentiation (DSD) of the sort that grants them some degree of androgen-related performance advantage over their 46XX opponents, prompted a response from a man.

The heading and the tenor of the second piece was guaranteed to trigger the, now usual, heated debate about the implications for women’s sex-based rights of gender-identity related shifts in legislation, policy, and procedure.

 

Even though the debate was largely measured in tone, it resulted in a threat to the very existence of the site, and then to the original article being removed. 

 

It’s not appropriate to speculate about the reasons for the threat to close the site being issued, but the invariably intemperate responses swirling around the questions of sex versus gender identity, and specifically, gender self-identification by statutory declaration, may have played a role.

 

Transgender and intersex issues do not overlap usually but the inclusion of the latter in the ever-increasing number of groups jostling for position under the transgender umbrella, means that some people don’t acknowledge any difference. 

 

The problems inherent in this lazy conflation are exemplified by the likes of JK Rowling, Donald Trump and Elon Musk weighing in on the women's boxing.  It was a rerun of the furore when Caster Semenya of South Africa, Margaret Wambui of Kenya, and Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi took the medals in the women’s 800m at the Rio Olympics. All three athletes were found to have had an XY karyotype and to produce levels of testosterone in the male range, with no definitive evidence of how much their bodies benefitted from it. 

 

The resulting controversy saw the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) now World Athletics, impose a differential standard for athletes with male levels of testosterone, which affected African athletes disproportionately. That in turn provoked a storm of protest which led to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) developing a broad framework for fairness, safety, and inclusion within which the various international sporting bodies would develop their own rules for eligibility. 

 

It is worth stating that only the female category in sports is at issue; men's sports are not in any way affected by these fairness, safety, and inclusion issues.

 

There can be no doubt there is a wider geo-political back cloth to all this in the claims of corruption and ties to the Kremlin swirling around the International Boxing Association (IBA) ie the US-led boycott of the 2023 IBA world champs; the formation of World Boxing as an alternative body, in competition with the IBA; the IBA’s disqualification, mid-competition, of the two boxers on the grounds of having an XY karyotype; the removal of the IBAs Olympic accreditation, and the IOC decision to set up an ad hoc committee to run boxing which allowed the two IBA disqualified boxers to compete.

Both swept through their weight grades with unprecedented 5-0 wins in all rounds.

 

Many of the women in the sport of boxing are likely to be on the high side of the standard reference range for female levels of testosterone. On average they are tall for women and are physically tough, and the women at the Olympics will be the best in their respective countries. 

Either Lin and Khelif are both atypical in respect of their physical abilities in the sport, or they possess an androgen-related performance advantage in the male range. 

 

The rise of Islamophobia and the far right across Europe, the specifics of the experience of Algerians when it was a French colony and as migrants to France, all form a backcloth of which the likes of JK Rowling should have been aware.

 

I never expected any better from her because before the issue of sex self ID hit the political fan, she threw her considerable  weight and influence behind the anti-Corbyn faction in the UK Labour Party, and she is a firm ally of Israel. It would have been more surprising if she had refrained from inflaming the situation.  

 

Some people who comment are simply not au fait enough with the issues; some are angry for a wide range of reasons which I have written about extensively – albeit polemically – on this blog, and some of them are engaged in various sorts of divisive and diversionary behaviour. 

 

Without re-entering the ring to engage in further ideological fisticuffs, I will just say that the bottom line for me is as it has always been, we must be able to address these and related issues in a way that doesn’t demonise people who are caught in a geo-political shit storm not of their making. We must avoid division, and diversion of time and energy away from more important issues. 

 

We must also remember the reasons why those who rule us encourage people to obsess about obscenely expensive circuses like the Olympic Games. 

 

I thought the Paris games would be a focus for attention grabbing protests about such issues as Gaza and climate change but if any happened, they didn’t make global headlines. 

 

The brave individual gestures made by athletes to try to get the world's focus onto what is happening across Africa, in Afghanistan, Palestine etc were obscured by an obsessive media and public focus on one person competing in a fringe sport. 


 

And that was not the fault of one side only; it takes two to politically tango.

 

I will not readdress the issues of transwomen’s participation in women’s sport as this is a different, albeit linked issue. 

 

As I try to see all these issues through a wide political lens, for me, this firestorm Illustrates why it’s so important always to pull aside the ideological veils to see if there is anything sinister lurking behind them. 

 

With regard to DSDs and how a decent society responds to people affected by them, the individual’s rights to privacy, to personal dignity, to wider formal tights, and to timely treatment when needed, are a given. There should be no debate. 

 

There are formal, codified rights and informal social rights which are embedded in the social compact. The two don’t always neatly align and sometimes they clash.

 

Neither sort of rights is absolute, as sometimes one set of rights affects others. Also, all rights carry with them a range of duties and obligations to the wider collective. 

 

Social life is a series of compromises, and as we live in world riven with structural inequalities, some people are forced to make endless compromises whilst others, the rich and powerful usually, get to float through life making hardly any. 

 

People with DSDs are not a “community”; there is huge range of types of DSD, some of which vary widely in how they present. They were lumped together under the non-scientific descriptor of “Intersex” for political lobbying purposes because historically many people with DSDs had been treated shamefully by the medical establishment. 

 

Within medicine the attitude was, and remains in some countries and cultures, that if a neonate does not have a normal looking penis and scrotum, s/he should be made a girl, legally and if available, via forms of surgery and drug treatments. 

 

Being crisscrossed by wider social factors like religion, by parental rights and expectations and the rights of the infant/child etc, it is not an easy terrain to navigate.

 

Sometimes these days in the developed world we settle on doing only that which is needed to ensure health and well-being, waiting until the person is old enough to make their own informed decisions. 

 

In some societies, parents don’t have that luxury.  Living inside the imperial bubble we forget the grimmer realities of life for impoverished people, especially women.

 

Our self-congratulations on how progressive we are in the way we now see the wide range of DSDs, rings hollow if we fail to ask whether those conditions are increasing in incidence, range and/or severity, or is it merely the fact that they are now being diagnosed more easily and more often?

 

There is a range of political movements that are aimed at normalising pathologies. All too often, the so-called progressive left fails to ask the obvious question when that normalisation is enthusiastically embraced and even enabled by corporations and powerful corporate-compliant institutions. 

 

The first question to be asked is whether these processes of normalisation help to obscure causal factors which are attributable to those corporations and institutions.

 

There is a global increase in childhood cancers, and in developmental and reproductive disorders. 

Microplastics have been found in all organs in humans, including the brain.

 

Clinical obesity was once uncommon in young people and morbid obesity was once rare in adults; it is now commonplace, especially among the poor.

 

Type 2 diabetes was rare in adults and unknown in children; it is now commonplace and appearing frequently in kids.

 

The range of triggers and incidence of life-threatening allergies has increased, as have rates of autism.

 

There is a global drop in sperm quality and an increase in reproductive cancers and conditions like endometriosis.

 

Kids are entering puberty younger, and the incidence of central precocious puberty is increasing with links to the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment.


 

If we fail to draw aside the ideological veils that we surely all know are used to obscure causal factors directly attributable to profit-hungry corporations and their compliant, enabling governments, we are aiding and abetting the culprits. 

 

Normalisation of the pathological is a widely used ideological veil that is made opaquer when the component of human rights is added to it.

 

Autism becomes something to celebrate as neurodiversity, aka being on the spectrum. 

 

Clinical and even morbid obesity become just normal variations in the amount and distribution of adipose tissue, and any attempts to examine it as a pathological response to metabolic triggers are deemed to be fat-shaming orfatphobic. 

 

DSDs become evidence of human reproductive diversity, or proof that sex is not binary leading to such risible claims as there being 5 or 6 sexes. 

 

Call me a cynic but every time I see attempts to normalise the pathological, I want to investigate further. 

 

Several decades ago, I was drawn into researching endocrine disruption in horses. I was seeing mares with the equine equivalent of polycystic ovarian syndrome; obesity and patterns of grossly abnormal adipose tissue; hind gut disorders leading to catastrophic tissue failure in the hooves; unusual neurological conditions. 

 

There were lots of explanations about why, all pretty much missing the herd of tap-dancing elephants in the corner of the room which included the ubiquity of endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging chemicals in the environment. 


 

Studies which draw a link between EDCs in agricultural chemicals, like a study linking CPP to agricultural EDCs in rural France, once languished in the dark or were dumbed down by that part of the coordinator class which is employed to put an ideological spin on scientific studies for public dissemination via a compliant media.

 

These days there is a critical mass of data about these chemicals – some of which fall into the category of “forever chemicals” because of the time they persist in the environment – so the issue is becoming better known.


 

However, the vast petro-chemical industry responsible for their manufacture, and the various industries which use them, won't suddenly grow a conscience and say "mea culpa" and clean up its mess, so it's up to us to keep shining a light on these issues, and keep demanding answers. 

 

Science strives to be neutral in its methodology, but it has always struggled to be genuinely neutral because research needs funding, and with funds, be they from corporations, governments, foundations etc, come with strings. Those strings define not just what will be studied but also what conclusions are drawn, how the data is presented publicly and to what use the findings will be put. 

 

This is never truer than in the Neo-liberal era in which corporate funders often dictate the subject and scope of scientific enquiry.

 

So, whenever I see processes that seek to normalise pathologies  which appear to  have the laudable aim of benefiting people, but which actually benefit hyper-capitalism, I get edgy.

 

We should always bear on mind that anything which divides people, which distracts and diverts political energy and focus away from the causes of these existential threats is very likely serving the interests of the people who created them...for profit, solely for profit.

 

On Matters Ideological

I've spent arguably far too much time on the topic of the gender identity orthodoxy. If there is a justification for that focus over the past few years, it is that it touches me personally as a woman; and, as a socialist feminist, I'd have to be a saint not to be resentful of the ways that some people, purporting to be on the left, have treated women like me for daring to have an opinion which differs from their doctrinally approved viewpoint.

I'm not interested in the political-critical equivalent of duck shooting when it comes to the ways in which the religious and conservative right have co-opted facets of what came to be known as “gender critical feminism.” My focus has always been and remains on those whose interests are being served by it.

My start point is, any theory and praxis deserving of the description of feminist is inevitably critical of gender, in that feminism analyses and seeks to change the sets of historically and culturally specific beliefs which, in order to subjugate women, are wrapped around the biological reality of reproductive sex. 

Gender has its roots deep in the bio-social realities of species reproduction. 

As a species, we are not powerfully instinctually driven in relation to reproduction, which allows us to be highly adaptable. It also makes us highly reliant on learning.

Given how vital learning is to us, and how highly social we are as a species, it may be that the social rites and rituals early humans wrapped around reproduction were an important part of the learning how to be female and male humans which reinforced relatively weak instinctual drives. Not so much straitjackets binding people into a certain role in production and reproduction, but guides to what was of greatest benefit to the survival of the collective.

The nature and purpose of the rites and rituals, and the beliefs which gave rise to them, and which they reinforced and perpetuated, changed profoundly with the emergence of forms of rigid social stratification characterised by the rule of men.  

“Gender” became ideology, patterns of belief that underpinned behaviours which protected the interests of property-owning or property-controlling men – those who became a ruling class.

The ideas of what it means to be female and male, with the latter always occupying the dominant place, were set in stone with the rise to prominence of monotheist patriarchal religion, but they were by no means confined to it. Patterns of male dominance existed in pantheistic societies also. 

The progression from animism to pantheism to patriarchal monotheism were moves from an acceptance of an essential complementarity between the sexes to extreme expressions of male dominance in which women's reproductive and productive capacities became the property of men. 

At its most extreme, even her personhood became an extension of the male – as father or husband or lord, and ultimately, God.

The most binding and enduring chains on a person are the chains of the mind, especially if they are donned willingly or better still, are not even recognised as chains. In that the role of religion in granting divine approval to male temporal rights cannot be over stated, and it is why in the modern world, the resurgence of forms of fundamentalist patriarchal religion is a major threat to women.

It’s stating the feminist obvious that the way gender as ideology and praxis develops and is perpetuated, differs considerably across historical eras, ethnicities, cultures, classes, and ages. 

Failure to account for those differences and how they impact the women most affected by them, invariably weakens feminism, and what weakens feminism, weakens all other progressive movements.

For convenience, I work with a broad distinction in the schools of thought which influence feminist praxis – liberal, radical, and socialist. 

The former confines itself almost exclusively to gaining parity with male peers within the existing social-economic order. It sometimes sees the liberation of women as being the adoption of stereotypically male behaviour and/ or in accepting the extreme gender stereotypes of appearance and behaviour demanded by men. It morphed into choice and corporate feminism which are a product of Neo-liberal capitalism.

Radical feminism overlaps with socialist feminism and differs from it primarily in how it conceptualises the origins of male power, which in turn influences what is seen as the solution to it. 

Radical feminism places the patriarchy front and centre, and at its most extreme, it posits an essential and therefore unresolvable conflict between the sexes. This involves an acceptance of an almost Nietzschean notion of a male “will to power”, a drive to dominate others which was and is enabled by greater average male aggression and strength. 

These views lead to ideas about separatism or at the most extreme, the pipe dream of revenge in the form of a reversal of the subjugation of women by men.

For socialist feminists, especially Marxists, the liberation of women is inextricably tied up with the liberation of all, which necessitates a change, not just in the dominant ideas and the superstructure, but in the economic base of the power which historically has been held by the males of the ruling class. 

Within capitalism that is the bourgeoisie which exists in sometimes uneasy alliance with the remnants of the older, feudal ruling class. In the capitalist era, that was and largely still is, European men, although it is shifting. Unfortunately for women, it is just shifting from one set of male hands into another.

Patriarchy, as a matrix of ideas and practices, is an ancient and a formidable opponent which has used every means at its disposal to entrench male power – from overt and brutal coercion, to ideologies which draw a legitimating line from man to god.  

The ideological is always preferred because it is so much more efficient and effective when people don their own chains, or justify the wearing of them as being god’s will or nature’s way, but the brute force is always there in reserve. 

You have only to look at the hordes of misogynists on-line to see how ready and willing large numbers of men are to blame their feelings of powerlessness and all facets of their miserable, abject lives, on women, and who fantasise about the use of force to restore the illusion of power which women's rights appears to erode.

That some women have always colluded with men to gain some measure of power, or sought to appease men by wrapping themselves in patriarchy’s chains was tragic; that women in the era of mass communication actively choose to do so, is closer to farce.

This is apparent in that noisy battleground where the gender identity war is being fought. When new forces entered the fray from both the secular and the religious right to reinforce the Gender Critical Brigades, many of the original GCB withdrew, refusing to be in alliance with the right. 

Those who still remain, seeing the far right now lining up with them, are faced with finding ways to justify being in alliance with forces they must know will turn on them in a political heartbeat.

To do so, they have to cast the transgender enemy into the single biggest threat facing women. 

In the context of Palestinian rights versus Zionist colonialism that means siding with the latter because Islam is seen as the greater threat to women.

It is almost beyond comprehension that these noisy, attention-grabbing, opposing forces remain intent upon the destruction of the other at a point when all sane persons know the natural world is in crisis, and the social world, which has created that crisis, could tip at any point from a precarious state of relative equilibrium, into the chaos of barbarism.

There is no excuse for it in this world of instant information. The blame for the failure to widen our own focal lens lies with each of us. 

It is terrifying that the minds of some people are so fixed on the “enemy of the moment”, their eyes will glide past all the misery and horror and the naked brutality of the wider world, and focus solely on images which fuel their hatred and fear of that single enemy.

They expend all their energy digging their well of rancour and disgust even deeper to justify their promotion of that single enemy to the ranks of the worst ever; to make that single enemy so evil, so destructive, all other battles must be put on hold in order to destroy it…even the battle for the survival of the planet as we know it.

They will ignore or justify wars in which the dead and the permanently scarred are overwhelmingly non-combatants and mainly women and children, and ignore famines in which the victims are overwhelmingly women and children.

These are people in the grip of a Samson-psychosis; they will risk destroying it all in order to defeat the detested "other".

If I was religious, I’d say, God help us. 

Punch Bags

Without entering the realms of speculation about the medical history of the two individuals at the heart of the Paris olympics' women’s boxing debacle, there are some pertinent facts about the sport of boxing in general that people should bear in mind before deciding on which ideological hill to make a stand.

Women’s boxing was first introduced into the summer olympics in 2012. From 2016, professionals were allowed to enter and the same year the requirement for male boxers to wear padded head gear was removed on the grounds that padded headgear does not decrease concussion risk. However, women still have to wear it. 

The weight and style of gloves are controlled. Female boxers must not be pregnant, and they are required to wear breast protection because getting punched in the breast is not only potentially very painful, especially during menstruation, it is potentially damaging to long term health.  

Male boxers wear groin protection, and punches below the belt, or to the kidney region or back of the head are proscribed for both sexes.

The reason that women are still required to wear head gear may be more for face and ear protection than concerns about risk of concussion.   

The human face is highly vulnerable to cuts and fractures even from a padded glove, and the female face typically lacks the stronger bone of such post-pubertal male features as the brow ridge and stronger jaw. 

The sometimes permanently disfiguring effects of broken face bones, and damage to nasal and ear cartilage have greater social significance to women and very likely, the sort of facial harm that is routine in male boxing being done to women is not deemed a good look for the olympics. 

Most importantly, the brain of both sexes is highly vulnerable to the effects of a blow to the head because the easily damaged brain bounces around inside the skull. If a fighter falls heavily onto their head, the effects may be worse still. The main reason the floor of the boxing ring is sprung and the posts are heavily padded is to reduce the risk of brain or spinal trauma from impacting them heavily.

If a boxer is dehydrated – a common factor in pre-fight measures to make the very strictly controlled weight grades – the damaging effects on the brain may be amplified. 

Sometimes blows to the head result in obvious symptoms of mild concussion which, in boxing, could be a technical knock out; sometimes they result in a more severe concussion involving loss of consciousness – a literal knock out. 

What is now known about concussion is that if you have even a mild one, you should avoid any further blows to the head as they are likely to exacerbate the damage to the delicate structures of the brain.

More serious brain damage can be catastrophic and from a single blow, or accumulative from repeated blows. 

All contact sports involve the risk of forms and degrees of harm, but boxing is the only sport in which causing harm to your opponent's brain is not just permitted, if the damage is severe enough to result in a technical or a literal knock out, it's an automatic win. 

The aim of delivering blows to the torso and arms in boxing are not just for the points that can be scored by hitting the target areas of head and torso, they are also to hurt and tire the opponent to make them drop their guard so that bout-winning blows to the head can be delivered.

The importance of all this to the current situation in women's olympic boxing is, if boxers competing in the female category happen to have a genetic condition which has resulted in full or partial virilisation at puberty, they will have all or part of the very significant average performance advantage (APA) that male boxers have over female boxers. 

Part of that APA resides in a far greater punching power due, in large part, to the proportion of male body weight which is skeletal muscle and bone. 

People who have gone through a male puberty will typically have a significantly greater proportion of their body weight in bone and skeletal muscle than people who have gone through female puberty. This means their body type is more effective both in delivering punches, and in absorbing them. 

If that happened, it would not be fair, nor would it be safe.

There is no doubt in my mind that all these athletes are being used as pawns by forces engaged in a wider geo-political battle. 

The hapless boxers who have been drawn into this debacle now include a young Russian whose name has been dredged up from the round of 16 in the 2023 world champs as “proof” that the “Russian-led IBA” banned Khelif in order to restore the Russian woman's unbeaten record.   

This piece of mind-boggling post-hoc mendacity, which has appeared on Khelif’s Wikipedia page and widely via the western media, requires us to ignore all the preceding political shenanigans such as the US-led boycott of the IBA, the formation of World Boxing in opposition to the IBA, and the removal of IBA’s olympic accreditation etc. 

It also requires us to completely ignore the other women of colour who Khelif beat to get to gold medal contention, and focus instead on a very young, very blonde Russian thus helping to stoke both Russophobia, and the ethnically-charged elements of the drama which are exemplified by an emotive post on X which claimed in relation to Carini, that “white women’s tears have ruined another brown woman’s life”. 

I deplore the right's hysterical reaction which, by such despicable tactics as declaring Khelif to be a sexual predator, has descended en masse into the gutter where it is indulging in shameless Islamophobia.

On the other side, the west’s various useful idiots are focussing inordinate amounts of time and energy on supporting Khelif (Lin seems to be reduced to a supporting role), and on attacking “terfs”. 

As a result, most are paying little or no attention to the Israeli team whose presence at the olympics was expected to be the focus of much comment and protests, given the Israeli government’s shameful and on-going actions in Gaza and more widely in the Middle East. 

Go figure.