Distract, deflect, divide and demonise

This post was prompted by the current witch hunt being conducted by the right against a Green Party list MP in New Zealand. 

All this at a time when the right's use of covert domination has never been more apparent, but nor has its politics of overt domination.

The men in suits who run the world largely prefer the use of the ideological cosh and chains, but they know they have to periodically remind the actual and the immanently oppressed of the real cosh and chains – the production of which also has the benefit of yielding immense profits, largely out of the public purse.

"Sanction the scroungers; protect the taxpayer" the ranting right bellows as the state pours $billions of taxes into the pockets of the corporate military-industrial complex.

The reminders take various forms. There are the forever and the periodic wars; the raining of bombs on refugees living in tents; the snatching of families off the street to be imprisoned and deported; the blatant theft of lands and homes; the assassination of leaders and/or the destruction of any and all collectives which pose a threat ... 

How the hell have we ended up in a world teetering on the edge of several coalescing, mutually escalating social and natural disasters? 

What has any of this to do with a Green Party list MP in New Zealand who has become the target of a right-wing dirty politics campaign which, with typical disregard for logic let alone ethics, howls about “child safety” while using photos of a child in its unhinged attack on the child’s parent?

What part has the essentially individualistic and individualising politics of identity played in getting us here?

I’ve said all this before for many years but it bears repeating.

With the rise of Neo-liberalism, the political fulcrum point was shifted rightwards and what was once centrist was framed as left-wing. We will call this the white left which I’ve described elsewhere as the “politically and theoretically exsanguinated left”. 

The old red left, with its emphases on the class struggle, on internationalism and peace, on women's and national liberation and civil liberties was easily routed in the west during the initial Neo-liberal offensive. 

This was due in no small part to the effects of left sectarianism (always a gift to the right and often purposefully fomented by it), and the global power shift created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. 

While some people benefitted considerably from the Neo-liberal surge, in the form of increased social mobility and in greater employment opportunities and levels of remuneration and status, the mass saw the small windows of opportunity that had opened up after WW2 slammed shut.

Key working-class and liberation collectives were demonised or dismantled, with many of their hard-won advances eradicated. 

As Marxist political and social theory was undermined, distorted or discredited, and academia shifted rightward and back towards an emphasis on preparation for the forms of labour demanded by the global corporate capitalism, those movements lost much of their theoretical foundation.

At the same time as the great combinatory movements and the socio-economic theories that informed them were under attack, new movements and theories emerged in the form of the politics of interest and latterly of identity.

These were apparently progressive and liberatory but in reality were a distraction from the bigger picture, a side show to the main event which rapidly moved out of rehearsal into a full-scale production.

The politics of individual or small group interests or identity, filled and still fills several important functions for the men in suits.

It gives the appearance of a political-social opposition which is essential to the maintenance of the myth of capitalist democracy. 

Some of those groups’ demands can be accepted or even promoted, providing a diversion in the form of the appearance of liberality.

The movements can be divided into ever smaller and specifically focussed groups which can be made to compete with, or even to turn on and fight each other, a process that allows the power-holders to deflect attention away from their increasingly exploitative and oppressive actions.

And they can be demonised once it suits the suits to shift into overt forms of authoritarianism, and/or to justify slipping the leash on the attack dogs of the far right, the looming threat of which was obscured both by the fulcrum shift and by the white left’s acceptance of (even obsession with) individualism and identity.

The old red left's job is, as always, to strip off the layers of appearance, expose the essence of what is an ineluctably exploitative and oppressive system, and form powerful combinations in order to change it – foundationally.

Given the might and the viciousness of those who hold the real reins of economic, political and martial power, that was always the hardest thing; it is also the most important thing given the consequences for the entire planet of leaving a quintessentially unsustainable, and socially and ecologically destructive system intact.

 

 

 

 

The Slippery Slope Into Barbarism

A Facebook "friend" keeps posting stuff about transgenderism and how right people like her were/are to have been supportive of the likes of Trump because he is rolling back those "trans rights" which impact on women's rights.

I look at this way; prior to and concomitant with the rise of neoliberal (global corporate) capitalism, there was a radical shift of political theory and praxis to the right which meant that the popular perception of a “centre ground” – the fulcrum point if you will – shifted significantly to the right. 

Accompanying, and in fact aiding that was the rise, first of interest group, and then identity politics.

Instead of great national and international movements aimed at achieving and sustaining systemic change, there was a proliferation of smaller “issue”, latterly “identity” based movements. 

The old "red left" which aimed for foundational socio-economic change – not just accommodations within capitalism –  lost ground, especially with the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.

Social democrats and socially liberal people shifted rightwards with the fulcrum point, adjusting their ideas and expectations of what being "left-wing” meant. 

For many of them it was simply not being “right-wing”. In the weird world of US politics, it was the patent absurdity of the Democratic Party being "left”.

For socially and politically liberal centrists – having abandoned all hope of socialism (if they ever had any) and with that class-based theory and praxis –  the focus on interest group, and then identity politics, was palliative. 

Attachment to movements that merely sought accommodations from Neo-liberal compliant states – but which in no way threatened the economic status quo – soothed their liberal hearts and minds as they benefited materially from neoliberal capitalism’s intensification of economic exploitation which was accompanied by an increased oppression of workers – somewhere.

For me, the big issue with transgenderism as political theory and praxis is that it is both individualistic and individualising. As such it dovetails perfectly with the right’s aim of breaking all great political-social combinations which challenge capitalism – not just into competing interest groups, but right down to the level of the “aspirational individual”. 

In the transgenderist orthodoxy that takes the form of a focus on the right to a bespoke sex/gender social and legal “identity” with an accompanying bespoke physical appearance.

Anyone who supports/promotes “Trumpism” because of the political right’s and ultra-conservatives’ opportunistic coat-tailing of feminist opposition to the transgenderist orthodoxy, is either a rightwing ideologue or some variety of useful idiot.

What annoys me about both extremes of this debate is the level of social and political myopia and a self-centredness that risks tipping into full-blown narcissism. It’s maybe why both extremes are drawn to Trump .. like attracts like. 

The social and natural worlds are in states of intense and worsening disequilibrium. Fact.

Marx warned that there was no inevitable progression of the social world beyond capitalism and into socialism / communism; if the hands of the hyper-exploiters and oppressors are not wrested off the controls, we could see the social world tip into barbarism. 

Women who are cheerleading for the likes of Trump need to look outside the imperial bubble and the smaller bubbles of relative privilege which bounce around inside it, and place all their hyperbole about the threat to women of transgenderism, against what is objectively threatening women in the rest of the world – and who and what is behind those threats. 

More to point; they need to stop exaggerating and catastrophising as much and as risibly as the most ardent of transactivists ever did, and ask who and what can stop the slide into barbarism? 

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.

 

A Plague On Both Houses

 A recent conference here in NZ brought the gender critical feminist (GCF) vs trans rights activists (TRA) stuff back to the forefront of my political consciousness. I’d been a tad distracted by such minor issues as Israel's war on Palestine, the implications of the clearest statement yet of a China-Russia axis in opposition to the US, possible global war and definite global warming, species extinctions, mass pollution, etc etc.

Yes, I know, how dare I expand my political focus to include such things?

Also in the NZ news today, a Palestinian family want to bring four orphaned Gazan children here.  Most of the replies under the story were ... well, suffice it say, the wanton, ugly selfishness of some people never fails to amaze. I think I’ve seen the worst and then the fuckers outdo themselves. 

On X-marks-the-plot a young person who has bought into the gender identity orthodoxy posted a rather silly comment and was piled on by anti-trans accounts with a ferocity and illiberality that matches anything TRAs and allies dished out to GCFs before the political tide started to turn.

And that was on top of the depressing sight of people who claim to be feminists or allies – but whose narrow focus means they never were or are no longer feminist in any politically or critically meaningful sense of the word – lining up to try to give a feminist they disagree with on that one issue, a virtual kicking.

It’s even more depressing because it’s about an alliance with, and in defence of a right wing fundamentalist Christian man who is opposed to pretty much everything feminists ought to stand for. Even on the single issue of gender identity, his start point and what he wants to achieve are radically different from a feminist start point or what any feminist should want to achieve. 

I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything more foolish, this week anyway, than a lesbian defending a patriarchal-family promoting, right wing Christian as being a solid ally to women because he’s nice to her, and they’re in agreement on this one issue – an issue which is so vital we have to put all manner of wider rights at risk by entering into such alliances.

If the religious and secular right wing do gain enough political traction to roll back all those formal rights ... most of which Neo-lib compliant governments doled out as a distraction from their dismantling of working class collectives and hard won rights .. well, she says blithely, we’ll deal with that if it happens.

I want to grab her by the scruff and say, who do you think will be left to deal with it? Exactly how are you going to build a coalition of feminists and allies to defend the rights that you just put in jeopardy because you decided this single issue was so all-important that you allied with the enemies of women’s and gay rights?

Increasingly I can’t stomach those on BOTH extremes of the gender identity divide who :

1. engage in or foment abusive and often ad hominem pile-ons against anyone who disagrees with them; (especially vile are those who do so from behind a veil of anonymity);

2. worry about the ill-effects of puberty blockers on the tiny minority of kids who go on them but who are silent on all other forms of paediatric iatrogenic harm, not to mention the impact on kids of exposure to environmental pollutants etc;

3. obsess about the dangers posed to kids from sexual predators (real and imagined) but have nothing to say about the multiplicity of fatal harms done to millions of small children annually as a direct result of economic exploitation;

4. focus on trans athletes in women’s sports but have never been involved in sport or expressed an opinion about the impact of rampant commercialism on sport generally, or the grossly disproportionate status, funding and remuneration in women’s sport;

5. fret about “trans women “ / “trans identifying males” having access to women-only public facilities but are silent on or even collude with the rise of a religious-secular right that could push women back into the domestic sphere;

6. shout about “trans women “ / “trans identifying males” being incarcerated in women’s prisons but have nothing to say about NZ’s appalling incarceration rate which is second in the OECD to the USA, and which disproportionately impacts Māori & working class people and most especially Māori women. Those who also align with, or who ineffectively oppose political parties with policies that will increase those rates, get bonus points for hypocrisy and opportunism.

If you listen to the “White Left” it’s all the fault of the evil TERFs, that coven of convenient witches who can be dragged to the virtual stake for a now ritual immolation.

If you listen to the “Coalition of the Anti-Woke” or the “Once Were Feminists” brigade, and it’s all the fault of TRAs and the Woke who need to be dragged to the virtual stake for the ritual immolation.

The truth lies somewhere in between these two increasingly noisome extremes and it is the duty of all people of common sense and good judgement to join me in saying, "A plague on both your poxy houses".

More On The Chains That Bind Us

Where and when they can, those who rule us prefer the use of ideological fetters over the sword. If they can persuade us that our economic and social chains are desirable fashion accessories which we should purchase from them and don willingly, so much the better. 

 

Capitalism is nothing if not adept at turning any threats to its existence or its profits, into money-making opportunities.

 

The sword is still there of course, often hiding inside a ceremonial scabbard, but it is wielded frequently enough against external and internal “enemies” to remind the masses of the existence of the powerful coercive apparatuses of the state, and who really controls them.

 

One of Neoliberal capitalism’s greatest victories was its destruction or weakening of any and all collectives that argue for a different social order, especially those which threaten its profit and its entrenched power. 

Up there with it, in terms of strategic importance, is having successfully lured a critical mass of left wingers into the intellectual and political shallows where they don’t have to learn how to survive in rough, cold seas, or be strong enough to swim against the current.

 

These warm shallows provide a false sense of security, and never more so than now when a tsunami of interconnected social and ecological issues is likely to drown many of us, or dash us onto the rocks. 

 

From global warming and resultant climate disequilibrium, to accelerating species extinctions, and mass plastics and chemical pollution … the interacting states of global disequilibrium have the potential to tip into whole system chaos. 

 

The possibility of a fusion of disastrous androgenic outcomes is a terrifying reality that has to be kept well-hidden, or social disequilibrium may rapidly worsen and tip into social chaos. 

 

The obfuscation and camouflaging of these realities is ordered by those whose manicured hands are on the system's controls but it is carried by the various strata of the coordinator class – the system managers who work to hide the deep fissures in the economic foundation, and disguise the various forms of rot that have spread throughout the superstructure. 

 

They continue to refine the well-tested tactics of distract, divert, divide and defame. 

1. Create and amplify social issues which distract and divert people away from the gross inequalities and the rapidly accelerating unsustainable nature of the current socio-economic system.

2. Foment divisions in, or forcibly break up any and all collectives that aim to change the system. 

3. By various forms of defamation, destroy the credibility of those who draw aside the ideological veils, especially those who call for mass collective action for immediate, structural change.

 

Apropos of this, I read a tweet from a person whose analysis of many issues, I rate highly. She was targeting those who focus on “shitting on trans people” or “shrieking about pronouns.” 

Her choice of words suggests she is focusing her anger more, possibly exclusively, on those who are narrowly focussed on opposing the current transgender orthodoxy than on those who are narrowly focussed on supporting it.

The interface between sex based, and gender identity based rights, has become a battlefield.

 

I despair when I see the principled, materialist stand that has been taken by left wing feminists being defamed by association with the religious and secular right's co-option of some of the issues. I also despair when I see people being sucked by the right into a literal hatred and fear of gender non-conforming others. 

However, I am not going to easily forgive all those leftish-liberals who flipped into witch-hunting mode so rapidly and so reflexively, there can be no doubt they harboured a pre-existing, deep-seated resentment of dissenting women.

 

Some of them called those dissenting women, “Nazis”, and refused to engage in good faith discussion. Cowardly or lazy others obediently followed suit, and with an unprecedented speed and fervour, the infantile equation of “TERF=Nazi” was accepted as left-wing political gospel.

 

It was a highly infectious ideological contagion that spread rapidly among those with a compromised socio-political immune system.

 

When various elements of the religious and secular right predictably leapt onto the gender critical bandwagon, grabbed the controls and steered it sharply rightward, the whited sepulchres of the liberal left pompously declared that to be proof they had been correct.

 

Even though the transgender orthodoxy has now lurched into the realms of self-parody, there is still a mass of largely reflexive support among leftish liberals for it. 

 

That support invariably takes the form of attacking selected women, and in my view, most of  those who indulge in it deserve as much of a smack as the other extreme. 

 

In a natural and social world at imminent risk of tipping very rapidly from disequilibrium into chaos, the gender identity issue was a master class in the use of division, distraction, diversion, and defamation.

The political left should at least be asking why and how this ideology, and the forms of praxis which flowed from it, morphed so rapidly into a powerful orthodoxy that was embraced enthusiastically by the corporate world, and by much of corporate capitalism’s compliant politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats.

We need to ask, who benefits from: 

- reducing people to isolated individuals, focussed on what they believe are their personal, and these days, bespoke “gender identity”, which effectively privileges the subjective, gendered “self” over the material, sexed body?

- worsening the conditions in which large numbers of people, especially the young, are profoundly alienated, in the sense of being socially isolated and estranged?

- replacing natural, human connection and community with the chimera of virtual or cyber-communities centred around a shared sense of individual self?

- pushing the ideal of self-improvement, of aspiring to be the best possible version of one’s self while forcing many into a struggle simply for survival? 

- dangling the false promise of appearance enhancement via various surgical procedures and chemical potions, and by so doing, creating arguably the most medically monitored and chemically corralled population in human history?

It’s obvious the capitalist system doesn’t care about the wellbeing of any of the people who have been captured by gender identity ideology, so the motive has to lie elsewhere – in the fact that it’s profitable, and currently, it is politically propitious.

We cannot get a grip on the rapid drive to provide gender affirming surgery and synthetic hormone treatments unless we locate it in the burgeoning medical-industrial complex, at the heart of which are the world’s giant chemical-pharmaceutical conglomerates. 

Gender affirming protocols could not exist without the precondition of the global trend towards medicine for profit, at its most starkly venal in the field of appearance medicine.

 

There couldn’t be all this appearance-related surgery without the Five As of modern, chemical-based medicine: anaesthetics, analgesics, antiseptics, antibiotics, & anti-inflammatories.

 

Almost every pill and potion that props up the entire medical system is produced, not for philanthropic or humanitarian reasons, but for profit, and crouching behind that vast mountain of profit, is the spectre of power.

 

For the medical-industrial complex, the gender identity market is, and will always be fairly niche – although capitalism does like the predictability of long term, captive markets, and surgically or chemically neutering people at a young age makes them dependent on synthetic hormone replacements and other treatments for many decades.  

 

The profit motive is real but I have always been, and remain of the opinion that gender identity ideology’s main utility to corporate capitalism, is its diversionary and divisive potential.

 

Everything points to the fact that if the threat–opportunity scale tilts, eg., if an ultra-conservative and far-right backlash gains sufficient momentum and starts to outweigh current market and social control advantages, gender identity ideology and all its various forms of praxis will be abandoned in a heartbeat. 

 

Surely most of us know, the same commercial, political, media, and academic forces that gave the gender identity orthodoxy so much credibility, so quickly, will be used to call it into disrepute and make it disappear just as rapidly.

 

The concern, for all people of good will, should be whether those who have been physically and/or ideologically captured by the current transgender orthodoxy will be sacrificed, and how wide the net of reaction will be flung.

 

The question then will be, where will you stand?

 

 

Ten Annoying Things

Someone asked me what ten things annoy me most about the current centring of gender identity, and the demand for the codification of gender self-identification, (GSI) which has proved to be the catalyst for a multi-faceted and growing opposition. 

Initially, it was socialist and radical feminists who asked that consideration be given to the implications – for women’s sex-based rights and expectations – of codified gender self-identification, i.e., the legal right to change the sex marker on all official records simply by statutory declaration. 

They were immediately attacked by liberals and some on the left, labelled as TERFs, and deemed to be “Nazi-adjacent”, among a plethora of other insults and threats. 

The later coat-tailing of the issues by ultra-conservatives and the political far right was an outcome that could and should have been predicted had the pro-GSI factions not been so busy congratulating themselves on how progressive and on the right side of history they were. 

 So, here’s my list, written in no particular order of importance, given it’s all inter-connected.

The DISTRACTION away from objectively far more important domestic and global issues arising from current states of natural and social disequilibrium, which have the capacity to tip into multi-system chaos far more rapidly than anyone can predict, let alone prevent. 

The DIVERSION of political energy, and the investment of the left’s dwindling supply of political capital in support for an essentially individualistic, and individualising ideology.

The FAILURE to contextualise that essential individualism in corporate capitalism’s on-going aim of neutralising any and all forms of collectivism that might hinder its pursuit of profit at any cost.

The SCHISMS that were opened in an already fragmented and weakened “left” within the old empires that created the shit in which the entire planet is suffocating, and whose populations are best placed to stop more from being produced, and to clean up what’s already here.

The STUPIDITY of the left in not anticipating the backlash to the attempt to privilege a subjective, often shifting, and individual sense of gendered identity over the material reality of dimorphic biological sex which is cemented into the very foundations of the belief systems and sense of self of most people, across cultures, and all of human social history.

The CUPIDITY of the various commercial promoters of gender identity ideology and praxis, most especially those in the medical-industrial complex’s burgeoning realm of medicine for profit, with its absolute subservience to symptomatic and pharmacological/surgical paradigms. 

The CYNICISM of the various strata of system managers and coordinators, from politicians to pundits, in promoting an ideology which, if the ultra-conservative and far-right backlash really takes off, will leave swathes of vulnerable people directly in the firing line.

The IRRESPONSIBILITY of promoting a movement that claims to be in support of the most at-risk, marginalised, vulnerable of people, but which has the effect of making that population among the most surveilled and medically dependent sector of all.

The COWARDICE of all those who had concerns but who sat and watched as principled people, mainly feminists, were subjected to witch-hunts in an attempt to silence them and close down any debate.

The OPPORTUNISM, retributiveness, and win at any cost mindset of the various right wing coat-tailers of the original gender critical movement.

 

Striking a pose

 You can be sincere and still be stupid.” 

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Back in the day, Thatcher's bully boys in the right-wing British media coined the phrases loony Left and PC madness. They used them to label and to demonise left-wing local authorities, feminist, and anti-racist organisations, and the trade union movement that was fighting to protect jobs and services. 

The motivation was to weaken opposition in advance of the ravaging effects of the disinvestment and privatisation being ushered in by neo-liberal, global corporate capitalism.

The first thing the Thatcher government did was to remove the controls on the export of capital. That signalled the start of a massive flow of investment to places in the world where corporations could extract more profit by paying less for labour and have the bonus of being able to pollute and spoil to their heart's content. 

They did not invest to improve the lives of workers in those regions. Like the first wave of transnational corporate investment and its associated governmental aid, neo-liberal corporate investment was purely in the pursuit of profit. 

The first wave of investment had been aimed at developing infrastructure to facilitate the extraction of natural resources; the second was aimed at the exploitation of “human resources”. (1)  

Neo-liberalism has been in the driving seat for almost half a century. During that time there has been an explosion in digital technology and a dramatic rise in the living standards, choices, and expectations of the buffer class. 

The price for that is a massive increase in energy consumption, the development and use of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals, the dumping of billions of tonnes of toxic waste, along with galloping species’ extinctions and accelerating climate change. 

The threat posed by AI is yet to be fully grasped. 

Arguably neo-liberalism’s greatest harm is also its greatest ideological success – the virtual destruction of the belief in the possibility of foundational economic change. 

In this on-going process, its media game has become more subtle.

The second-wave feminist idea that structural change needs to be accompanied by attitudinal change, has been transmogrified into the idea that attitudinal change alone is sufficient to bring about such structural change as is necessary.  

For neo-liberalism’s well-padded buffer class, whose members are the most heavily invested in identity politics, what constitutes necessary structural change is radically different from that demanded by the traditional left operating in the interests of the working class.

Underlying much of identity politics (rhetorical flourishes on Twitter bios notwithstanding) is the acceptance that a radical change of the economic base is either not necessary or is unachievable.  All that needs to be, or all that can be achieved, are some accommodations for those who are disadvantaged and belong to one or more of the categories on the current list of approved oppressed-minorities. 

This locates the adherents of identity politics as the progressive wing of neo-liberalism, or the neo-liberal Left. It does not make them left-wing in the original meaning of the term. 

What worsens the situation is that for some of the neo-liberal left,  all that is needed to bring about attitudinal change is attitudinising. As a result, posturing on social media often becomes the measuring stick of what is progressive.

That attitudinising has been deemed by the Right to be left wing and the older, discredited right-wing slurs of PC madness and the loony left have been replaced by woke, the radical left, or hard left.

The neo-liberal left falls into the trap set for them by not questioning why it is that demands which question arguably one of the most universal and foundational of human understandings – that there are two sexes  – are not just accepted but are actively promoted by neo-liberal governments and the giant corporations whose interests those governments serve. 

Their narrow focus effectively privileges demands for extensions of, or even entirely new, formal rights within a politico-economic system that is either perpetuating or deepening gross inequalities and injustices in other spheres.  

Those on both sides of the Identity Question who fail to look beyond the labelling and the rhetoric, are helping to fuel the most recent iteration of capitalism’s campaign to keep divided the constituent parts of a global movement which could bring about foundational change.  

  
(1)   Human resources is a phrase that speaks to the dehumanisation of the process ­­– ­­ living human beings reduced to a factor in an economic equation aimed at increasing the obscene wealth of a ruling elite.