The Real Issue Du Jour

This started as a thread on Twitter but it grew too long and so a blog post it is.

Formal rights are never just handed over because the powerful see the natural justice in doing so; they have to be fought for and the powerful will always seek to roll them back – ideologically if they can, but coercively if they must. 

The intensified attacks on organised labour that began with the rise of neoliberalism went hand in glove with extensions of legal and civil rights to women and previously marginalised groups. 

The last forty years has seen a massive growth of opportunity and choice for what has been termed the "coordinator class'"– the buffer zone of relative privilege between the tiny but increasingly powerful global elite, and the vast and increasingly desperate and surplus to requirements, global poor. This is the core reality of global corporate capitalism.

The issues addressed by identity politics are of critical importance, no one with any sense can deny that, but it is the way these have been and are being addressed that should be of concern to the progressive forces in the world. The battle between transactivists – some trans people and a range of allies – and women, spearheaded by radical feminists, is a case in point.

I don’t agree with all of radical feminism because it can be blind to issues of class and race, and it often comes too close to blaming everything on men or on a vague notion of a Patriarchy that draws its power from an equally vague coalition of male interests.

I’ve no time at all for either of liberal feminism’s two wings: corporate feminism with its focus on gaining formal equality and economic parity with male peers within existing socio-economic structures; and choice feminism, which concentrates on widening the palette of individual choice and agency. 

Liberal feminism is the feminism of the coordinator class; it often reinforces what radical and socialist feminists see as sexist stereotypes and doesn’t challenge either the corporatocracy or the phallocracy in any meaningful way. As the acceptable face of feminism it’s not subject to the vilification and demonisation its radical and socialist sisters have always encountered.

Socialist feminism, after the heady days of Women’s Liberation, either retreated into the academy – where it has been all but suffocated under the weight of post modernism and queer theory – or its adherents have chosen to fight inside progressive organisations, having recognised that the threat posed to the entire planet by rampant globalised corporate capitalism can only be countered by a strong and united front.

What has brought a lot of radical feminist and socialist feminist women together recently, and into conflict with liberal feminism and the so-called 'woke left', is in reaction to modern transgender politics.  

This is not because the former women are anti-trans rights but because transgenderism is seen by them as another manifestation of a growing attack on women’s rights, and for many, as symptomatic of a far wider problem – the undiminished and malign power of global corporate capitalism.

At the heart of the transgender politics of the moment, which is powerfully influenced by queer theory, is a conflation of biological sex and gender with a resulting theoretical and political confusion about each. 

Gender identity is seen as an individual and individualised perception of one's self as a sexual entity, which may be at variance with the biological sex category that the person was assigned at birth. (1)

If a person’s sense of their gender varies from the sex they were assigned at birth, there must full legal recognition of that, and access to the means by which physical features can be altered to be as congruent as desired with the individual's gender identity. This may range from drug therapies and full surgical alteration of genitalia and a range of cosmetic surgeries and procedures, through to simply making a declaration of identifying as a woman or a man (or as non-binary).

The theoretically lazy and politically expedient conflation of biological sex and gender allows some people to declare that it is not just gender that is socially constructed and thereby changeable, biological sex itself is a social construct and as such can be deconstructed. 

Furthermore, they often argue, sex is not dimorphic, but is on a spectrum.  The existence of a number of different intersex conditions (disorders of sex differentiation) is often co-opted by trans activists to seek to prove this, ie to challenge the biological fact that humans are sexually dimorphic. (2)

Some transactivists argue that one's gender identity is established in utero – i.e. that after sex differentiation is complete early in pregnancy, there are genetic/hormonal influences on the foetus which "feminise" or  "masculinise" the brain and thus, a reproductively normal male can be born with a feminine brain and vice versa, popularly known as being "born in the wrong body".

It may be there are pre-natal, post sex differentiation influences on neurological development –  we don’t know enough yet to be absolutely certain one way or the other – but the denial or the reduction of the importance and scope of ante-natal influences on the human neurological system is highly problematic, especially given we now know that important parts of the brain may not be fully mature until the early to mid twenties.

Feminists have resisted the idea of a female brain that gives rise to innate feminine attributes and behaviours and with good reason, given the role that this as an ideological notion has played in six millennia or so of varying forms and degrees of female oppression, and over four centuries of economic hyper-exploitation.

It is odd that in 2018 some women fight to be free from the gender straitjacket of how women ought to dress, talk, walk, work, play, relate to others socially and sexually – and other women, many trans women included, fight to retain it, and sometimes in its most extreme and hyper-sexualised forms. 

The fact is that one’s sense of self is more complex and wider than gender identity, although the facts of our biological sex and the associated normative gender roles obviously play a huge part in developing a sense of self. It’s also a fact that no one develops a sense of self or a gender identity in isolation. It is never an individual process as we are, above all else, social animals.

For me, gender, as the set of ideas, beliefs and social norms that flow and eddy around the fact of biological sex, is obviously a social construct but more importantly, it is an ideological construct which, in stratified societies, serves power.

Biological sex is a material reality. We are all born with a biological sex – most commonly XX female, or XY male, and rarely, variants of either of those because, such is the complexity of embryonic sex differentiation, sometimes anomalies occur. 

The rationale for, and the power of gender as an ideological construct flows from the material reality of human sexual reproduction, which is dimorphic – i.e., requires the coming together of two distinct gametes each produced within the gonads of a female person and a male person, and gestated in the body of the female person.

You cannot separate gender and biological sex, or understand gender in isolation from biological sex, or from the class relations that gave rise to, and which perpetuate the ideology of gender as an oppressive tool.

Gender is the ideologically oppressive means by which women have been subordinated to men within stratified, male dominated societies, and the means by which women have been hyper-exploited economically within capitalist society.

Gender ideology involves the ascription of a physical, intellectual and moral inferiority to the female, and a superiority in those areas, to the male.

Religious notions of female chastity as a duty to god are gender ideology in action. Once the guarantee of paternity became an issue for men, the only way to ensure it was through the sexual sequestration of women. Physical sequestration is difficult for obvious reasons. Ideological sequestration was achieved via the demands of female obedience and chastity in which the threat of male punishment for transgressions in the here and now was backed up with the threat of divine eternal damnation.

The oppression of women, to enable the control of both their reproductive and productive capacities, took on a special character under capitalism, which prefers the ideological to the openly coercive, especially when there is a market opportunity attached to it. Just as the covert coercion and apparent freedoms of the wage contract were preferred to the open coercion and lack of freedoms of slavery for example, the ideological coercion of women was preferred to physical coercion, and it worked via religiously enforced notions of the essential inferiority of females. (3)

Women as the weaker sex, intellectually and morally, were deemed to be in need of both protection and correction; men as the stronger sex were deemed to be capable of providing it.

Given the considerable overlap between the sexes, by every physical and psychological parameter, this rigid gender division forced and still forces both women and men into behavioural straitjackets that can harm and deform.

Women have had to fight,  and sometimes fight men who should have been their allies, for every advance. Every sex-based right women have is compensation for centuries of averaged greater levels of exploitation and harm from the sex-specific forms of oppression used to facilitate that exploitation.

Refuges for women who’ve been raped or abused; compensatory measures to offset the historical exclusion of women from public life, or to aid them in overcoming barriers to public life created by their still greater domestic responsibilities – all women-only services remain important for women, and especially for women who are economically or socially marginalised and vulnerable.

It’s astonishing to many women, after millennia of male imposed modesty standards, and the creation of a climate of fear among women occasioned by the threat and the fact of male violence towards women that suddenly, women who say they’re not comfortable with male-bodied persons sharing their facilities, that they don’t want a male-bodied person performing a personal service, are deemed – by self-proclaimed progressive people – to be vile bigots and equivalent to Nazis.

And that is not an exaggeration. Granted there are a few among the gender-critical movement who are anti-trans rights and there are overtly right wing people who opportunistically coat tail women’s concerns, but the majority of gender critical women are not anti trans rights. Yet, among transactivists, there are a lot of people whose demands and responses to even the mildest of questions are so disproportionate and so extreme it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they’re either in the grip of a narcissistic rage, or they’re trolls or agents provocateurs actively fomenting division.

The mantra, "transwomen are women" – repeated like a catechism – obscures for some and highlights for others the fact that it is exclusively the category of "woman" that is being interrogated and changed.

It is no accident that in the world of transgender politics it is male to female trans voices that are loudest. Transmen mostly get noticed by having babies – an astonishing feat and one that requires much more critical attention. (4) 

"Transmen are men" is always an after-thought and it doesn’t have the same historical, social and political meaning because this is still a profoundly phallocratic world, and however much its advocates hope otherwise, a small minority of people transgressing gender norms in varying ways and to varying degrees, will not shake its foundations one iota. In fact, if that transgression serves to divide and divert people and obscure common interests, it may strengthen it.

When genuine gender critical women say they’re worried about gender self ID because men may abuse it, they’re not saying that genuine transwomen are a threat, they’re acknowledging the historical reality of the lengths to which predatory and abusive men are known to go in order to harm women and children. 

You would have to be deranged to argue that women are unreasonable for being worried about male violence. You would also have to be politically naïve or deliberately perverse to not acknowledge the existence of, and increase in, expressions of extreme misogyny across the globe.

At the moment, the left is busy alienating a lot of people –  feminists, lesbians, transsexuals, and gay men among them. Some may fall into the waiting arms of the right; some will remain in the left and fight, and some will become politically homeless because so many on the left are demonstrating stunning levels of arrogance and disdain – or, refuse to engage with the issue because it is "too toxic" and considered to be a diversion away from, or peripheral to, more important issues.

The vitriol and retributive malice that is aimed at gender critical women from some self-styled progressives is alarming. You could be forgiven for thinking that just as support for Palestinian rights can mask an underlying anti-Semitism, support for trans rights can mask an underlying misogyny, and one which a lot of women seem to have internalised.

If a right wing person supports gender critical feminists, transactivists label all gender critical women as right wing, even though any left winger worthy of their political salt should know, if there’s a certainty in any of this, it’s the operation of the right wing tactic of divide and rule.

Identity politics divorced from class politics tends to be both fragmenting and divisive – acting as an outgrowth of, and supporting and intensifying the left sectarianism that’s been a significant contributor to the appalling state the world currently is in.

Neoliberal governments which have served corporate global capitalism for forty years, have advanced and extended formal rights to women, and to previously marginalised groups and there has been a growth in greater levels of social acceptance but this has come at the same time as the ability of many economically marginalised people to exercise formal rights and access choices, has been reduced or removed.

There has also been a massive growth in the coercive power of the state – some of it obvious, like paramilitary style police forces, some less so, like massively increased surveillance and financial controls, and the hyper-exploitation of women has intensified both within and outside of the affluent countries of the first world.

Capitalism excels at using ideology to get people to build their own prisons, willingly don straitjackets, police each other, hate and fear each other – but it’s ready and prepared to be openly coercive when it needs to be.

Globalisation means the capitalist class, which has morphed into a global corporatocracy, has appropriated and deformed the old left’s vision of the socialist international, which did not deny national, cultural or ethnic differences but, by emphasising commonalities, sought to turn them away from being divisive and competitive.

Neoliberalism has embraced identity politics, not because it values diversity, but because, in the absence of a unifying force – a political catalyst – identity politics inevitably fragments and divides people into smaller and smaller competing groups.

Against the might of global corporate capitalism and the state machines which support it, the only way that resistance can be effective is in a unified, mass movement.

In the context of such things as the lurch to the far right, the scale of the ecological horrors that will be unleashed unless effective action against climate change, habitat loss and pollution is taken now, the on-going nightmare of the millions of easily preventable deaths, especially of children – the time and energy being devoted to gender self ID seems bizarre until you put it in the context of the divide and divert strategies the right is so good at deploying. 

The pendulum on gender self ID is centring a bit and a lot more sensible voices are being heard and they need to be, because the father of all conservative backlashes is building and when it has the power of the state behind it, it may sweep away far more than the rights of the tiny minority of people currently sheltering under the trans umbrella.  

Notes:

(1) The use of the term "assigned" is calculated to imply an element of arbitrariness to the process.The categorisation by sex is most commonly based on an examination of external genitalia, which, very rarely, is not indicative of the individual’s chromosomal arrangement, and does not predict how the person will respond to established gender norms.  

(2) Many intersex people and advocates object to the often unthinking co-option of their realities by trans activists, to promote the idea that sex is fluid and can be changed.  The widening of the list of DSDs means it now covers about 1% of the population but this list ranges from the extremely rare, to the rare, and from conditions which can be life threatening unless treated and render the person infertile, to ones which have no adverse health implications and do not affect reproductive capacity.

The case of an XY person – ie someone who has a Y chromosome but who has female external genitalia and ovaries and uterus – who had an unassisted pregnancy – is often cited as evidence of the fluidity of the XX:XY dichotomy but this is the only known case of someone with female reproductive organs but a predominantly male karyotype, getting pregnant unassisted, and the child was born XY female with complete gonadal dysgenesis, i.e. infertile.  Given the fact that, in zoological and biological terms, sex and sexual dimorphism exists for the purposes of species reproduction, such an arrangement is both an extremely rare anomaly and is not proof that there are a number of sexes, or that biological sex is a spectrum. There is a child with female reproductive organs whose XY karyotype was identified during amniocentesis, who has histologically normal ovaries. If this person can produce eggs and naturally gestate a reproductively normal child, the debate will shift but even if that were the case – and even if the prevalence of such a condition goes beyond two known cases out of a global population of 7.5+ billion  – it still does not mean humans as a species are not sexual dimorphic.  It simply means that genetics and the endocrine system are vastly complex – and may be becoming more so because corporate capitalism has saturated the world with substances that damage DNA and others that are potent endocrine disruptors. 

(3) There is no clear linear progression in this, and the ideological is always backed up by the fact and threat off the coercive. 

(4) I don’t know how a gender dysphoria powerful enough to drive a person to attempt suicide and to warrant virilising hormone treatment and a double mastectomy, can be controlled while the person goes through that most profoundly female experience of gestating and giving birth to a baby.

On the Vexed Issue of Sex and Gender

Sex roles – now referred to as gender – are a powerful and ancient social construct with a tap root deep in the material reality of reproductive sex which, at its core, is biological and dimorphic.  

The conceptualisation of, and discourse around sex are social processes. We wrap up the material reality of sex in layers of social meanings, processes and rituals – the most powerful and opaque of which are beliefs about how females and males should look, behave and be treated.

The degree of human sexual dimorphism is moderate; there are wide physical, psychological and behavioural overlaps between the sexes. As a species we are ineluctably social, flexible and adaptable – as much in when, and with whom, or with what we will have sex, as we are in what we can, and will eat. 

But it is the case that it takes a functional ovary to produce an egg, a functional testicle to produce sperm, and a functional uterus to gestate a foetus to the point of viability, i.e. where it can survive outside the body of its mother. 

The female of the species is the one who possesses the means by which new humans are both gestated and – for all of evolutionary and most of social history and for the majority of people alive today – are fed as infants. She is more crucial to species and group reproduction than the male for reasons that are obvious.

A sexual division of labour was conditioned by the material realities that underpin human reproduction, i.e. long gestation, bipedalism, big head, utterly dependent offspring, slow sexual maturation etc, and this current debate centres around the extent to which and manner in which that foundational reality resulted in ideas about an immutable basis to both sex and sex roles, and how gender was forged into an ideological weapon used to subjugate people – most especially women.

The biological process of sexual differentiation in utero is complex, completed early in pregnancy and sometimes throws up anomalies. This is neither remarkable nor surprising and is not proof of a range of sexes or a 'spectrum of reproductive sex’. 

Capitalist production has saturated the world with DNA damaging and endocrine disrupting substances. If these do make humans less fertile, as seems to be the case, or causes an increase in the incidence of reproductive anomalies, it may be that the current sanguine attitude towards "gender fluidity" will change. 

And if reproductive anomalies are increasing and male fertility is decreasing due to the presence in the environment of massive amounts of DNA damaging substances and endocrine disruptors, there are people who would have a massive vested interest in obscuring that fact.

Our social world is dominated by a system of production which commodifies everything – even intangibles like debt – and it commodifies sex and all the social stuff which is wrapped around sex.

It enables and promotes individualism, social fragmentation and a rampant consumerism which  serves to blind the main beneficiaries of the system to the vast and growing gulf between their beliefs, priorities and concerns, and those of the rest of humanity.

The beliefs, concerns and priorities of the main beneficiaries of the capitalist mode of production that has dominated the world over the past 400 years, and more specifically the last forty years of rampant growth under neo-liberalism, are not those of all humans. Fact. Get over it.

This is still a world in which every day of every year, around 200 women – mostly poor women of colour – die in childbirth, many of them because they are anaemic and malnourished. 

Yet human rights organisations refer to "pregnant people" in order to be "inclusive" of the tiny number of affluent, well nourished and mainly white transmen who choose to give birth – in safe, hygienic conditions.

No one comments on why it is that transmen only get media attention when they give birth, or why it is that anyone who wants a say in this mass interrogation of the categories of woman and female risks being subjected to a torrent of abuse from transactivists and from their liberal and leftwing allies.

The modern era is a mere blink of the eye in the evolution of the species and it has thrown up and given power to people (mostly male) hell-bent on replacing human labour with technology – including technology to replace the humans who gestate new humans.

In the view of some people, our world is over populated and some of these people see this "surplus" as  dehumanised "useless eaters" whose deaths are just "collateral damage".

In the forty years of the spectacular growth of global corporate capitalism, 200+ million children under the age of 5 have died, 40 million of them in their 1^st week of life, and 3 million women have bled to death in childbirth or died of post-partum infection. Almost all of these were easily prevented deaths.

Control of the reproductive capacity of females is no longer needed to ensure generational replacement or population growth – now it is about controlling the number and the type of people who are born, and to whom.

Those who are behind the capitalist drive to technologise do so, not to free humans from soul and body destroying labour, or to free women from their role in reproduction – they do it to exert control. Technologise a thing or a process and those who control the technology, control it.

Something transactivists slide around or ignore is the fact that, as a population, trans people are among the most surveilled and medically controlled on the planet. 

Gender self-ID may remove one aspect of bureaucratic and medical gatekeeping but it will be at the price of a greatly enhanced public profile. People already have become way more aware of, and interested in the previously fairly sequestered private lives of those within the trans community. 

There is the other quid pro quo – if you want to argue for a higher priority on the triaging system which is at work in ALL publicly funded health care – you must expect to have your priority and eligibility publicly debated.

Gender self-ID as a human right that is denied to trans people, is strengthened if the idea is extended into the need for ALL people to have the human right to declare their bespoke gender identity – hence the widening of the project to include removing the entire process of categorising people as female or male at birth.

Gender self-ID by statutory declaration is not essential to ensure the legal equality of trans people in NZ or the UK as this is already guaranteed by statute. Nor will it, in and of itself, guarantee greater levels of social acceptance, in fact it may have the opposite effect, which is what some transsexuals fear.

Questioning the effects of gender self-ID on women is not a denial of trans rights, and the incessant repetition of the hyperbolic assertion that any questioning of any aspect of the trans project literally kills trans people, is wearing thin.

In fact, some of the trans rhetoric is so torrid, so abusive, so absurd and so potentially damaging to the cause it claims to support, that those who indulge in it have either lost the plot, or they’re plotting a loss.

There is no free lunch in any of this, and what sensible people know is that some transactivists' GO line is already way past a lot of other people’s WHOA line – and a conservative backlash could sweep away a lot more than trans rights.

The Ideology of Gender and Identity Politics

It’s hard to know where to begin with this. It’s wrong and it’s basically the old "plague on both your houses" style of politics.

 

The way I see it is this: gender is an ideology that is used as a weapon of oppressive social control by those who rule – which is mostly men.

 

It is used to oppress others in order to control and exploit them. For women, that oppression, prior to capitalism, was primarily centred on their reproductive capacity.  

 

At the heart of the ideology of gender is the far greater role the female plays in species and group reproduction – due to humans’ long gestation, the production of mostly single and utterly dependent offspring etc. What many who live in the insular bubbles of westernised affluence forget is that this is still the reality for the vast majority of humans.

 

That foundational material reality also created and demanded high levels of sociability; the things which mark us out as a species are that we're ineluctably social, and highly adaptable.

 

The ideology of gender arose once humans moved beyond subsistence into the production of surpluses – and it was accompanied by another great ideology – which enshrined the right, by virtue of belligerence or birth, to oppress and economically exploit, others. 

 

The ideology of an essential, god-given, gender difference and of the innate superiority of the male over the female was a compensation to otherwise powerless men. Patriarchal authority in the domestic and personal sphere served to mask the reality of a lack of power in the public sphere.

 

In capitalism, things changed. The market rules. People are nominally "free" to enter the labour market, ie to "sell" their labour as free agents. The value of that labour and the scope of civil and legal rights became and remain points of tension between the buyer and the seller and the various bodies which represent the interests of each.

 

The reproduction of labour – both in terms of the new generation of workers and in terms of the provision of domestic services – remained the province of women.

 

The capitalist ideology of gender drew on more ancient beliefs of women’s role with its innate attributes and essential inferiority, to justify both the hyper-exploitation of women within paid employment, and, where it suited the market, to confine women to the – unpaid – domestic sphere. 

 

This made her and her children dependent on a male wage and in turn made men less able to withhold or withdraw their labour, which was their only weapon in the negotiation of the wage contract.

 

Win, win for capitalism. Lose, lose for women, and for poor women especially.

 

The world is still a phallocracy – not simply because of capitalism but because of the millennia of societies dominated by hierarchical, patriarchal religion, mostly monotheistic – which capitalism emerged from, and built on.

 

Capitalism used and still does use, the ideologies of gender and class. The latter was extended from the right to exploit acquired by belligerence or birth, to a right accrued on the basis of "merit".

 

Capitalism also created another powerful ideology – that of race and of inherent racial difference – to justify the hyper-exploitation of people of colour, and most especially of black people, and the vicious forms of oppression that were used to achieve and maintain that hyper-exploitation.

 

It also extended to poor white people – men and women – the illusory compensation of their racial superiority over people of colour. Capitalism added the hierarchy of race to the hierarchy of class and the notion of an innate, god-given superiority of the male over the female. 

 

The quintessence of all this is divide and rule through the promotion of religious and political sectarianism, gender and racial difference.

 

Fast forward to the modern era – to the most rampant and dangerous form of capitalism – which has not, as Marx anticipated, created the conditions of its own demise through its inherent contradictions, but has created the conditions of the entire species’ demise, possibly the entire planet as we know it.

 

And what has this era of massive contradictions and hyper-exploitation of peoples and the natural world also seen? The greatest extension of formal rights and the creation of a large and highly privileged buffer class positioned between the reducing numbers of a super-rich elite and the growing number of a super-poor – many of whom are surplus to the system's requirements.

 

The trans rights issue is the logical outflow of identity politics – which is essentially accommodative and poses no direct threat to the economic status quo. It is another divide and rule tactic based on the promise and the delivery of formal rights and lifestyle choices to all but which have most meaning to those who are in a position to exercise rights and access choices, i.e., mostly those in the buffer class.

 

This gives the BC a stake in an obviously iniquitous, highly dangerous, unstable and unsustainable economic status quo; it blinds many to both the system’s faults and to the possibility of an alternative, and it offers a life belt to those in the mass who haven’t yet lost any hope of being saved.

 

The left needs to stop falling into the divide and rule trap. Sectarianism, factionalism and dogmatism are all enemies of the left and therefore are enemies of the powerless.

 

Social fragmentation – especially fragmentation into competing clumps held together by some vague notion of personal identity – is the enemy of all. When the illusions of freedom and choice, proffered by a profoundly and inherently flawed economic order, become people’s reality, we have a problem.

 

We must of course keep fighting for the rights that neoliberal governments extend but never let that create divisions and divert us away from the ever more pressing issues of a world which is literally teetering on the brink of disaster.

Free Speech

Everyone technically has free speech in NZ but it's stating the obvious that some people's speech is a lot louder, travels a lot further and carries a whole lot more political weight than others. 

 

Some people who – by any objective measure – talk and write utter rot have not just one, but several platforms from which to assail the nation's sensibilities. Loads of others have no platform at all. Their job is to be spoken at – or to, if they’re lucky.

 

It’s a fine thing, the right to speak freely, a precious thing given the reasons why people who have the power might want to curtail what other people have to say. It has been fought for, people died for it. Many are still fighting and dying for it. 

 

The right of free speech, like the right of free assembly, gained its significance by being denied.

Freedom of speech is bound indissolubly with the right to know, to be informed, to have access to knowledge. This is important for both speakers and those who hear the speech.

 

But neither speech, nor the knowledge which informs it, is politically neutral. It can be used as a weapon to silence, to stereotype, to discriminate against – to harm others. 

 

When the right to speak freely comes up against the right of others to be free from exposure to speech that harms – it’s always going to be difficult. 

 

I acknowledge the far greater impact of racist ideology and rhetoric on those it targets – it damages all of us, but it hits people of colour, harder and deeper. 

 

On a personal level I have no problem with gagging all racists but on a political level the core question is, who gets to draw the line, and where do you draw it? 

 

There really is no easy answer. Those who think there is are being naive or politically infantile. You have only to look at the situation in the UK over amendments to the Gender Recognition Act and the way that the labelling of "gender critical" arguments as hate speech is being used to close down discussion.

 

Free speech versus hate speech is a difficult one and extremely polarising, and professional right wing agitators like Southen and Molyneux revel in the damage it does.  

 

Unchallenged, they get to make money out of preaching their ugly ideology to like-minded people. Challenged, they get to present themselves as martyrs to the cause of free speech and proof of the essential illiberality of the left.  

Win win. 

 

On an emotional level, I'd want to ban them from even entering the country. They offend me way more than the likes of the tattooed putz gurning and gesticulating at a Muslim woman bus driver in the UK. 

 

He’s raw and obvious in his bigotry and awfulness. Molyneux and Southen are carefully packaged, with a telegenic gloss to cover up their feculence. They put a veneer of urbanity and corporatised style over the brutish essence of their message.  

 

They are dangerous, and I detest them.

 

And they get to do the other thing that right wing agitators love to do and, having written the rulebook, are very good at -– promote division on the left.  

 

We’ve seen heaps of that over the past few days and some of it on Twitter has descended into spiteful, sophomoric, ad hominem attacks dressed up as valid political comment. Enough already. It’s not like NZ has a surfeit of left wing activists and commentators. 

 

Not that the smug ones can actually bring themselves to acknowledge there is a "left" any more or if they do, they can’t reach agreement on what it is.  I’d like to see the loudest critics get off their political backsides and share their vision for the future with the rest of us. 

 

My feeling is this. The right loves the left to behave in the same ways that it does.  What they’re not good at is being funny. Let’s face it. Lying, being obnoxious and bigoted – they’re without parallel – but humour? Nah. And because they have no humour, they really hate being the butt of it.  

 

So I say, mock the living daylights out of them. Mock them up hill, down dale, round the corner and back again. And then mock them some more before they have time to draw breath.

A Parable for Our Times

Once upon a time, there was a species that was too clever by half.  It had highly dextrous fore paws, was omnivorous and developed complex vocal communication. It was both a predator and the prey of predators. It was highly social in nature and adaptable in all things, including reproduction. It was sexually dimorphic but moderately so, and initially it managed that biological fact without too much drama.

It had a big brain, which needed a big skull to accommodate it. It walked on its hind legs, which made giving birth difficult for the female so its offspring were born effectively premature and utterly dependent. 

It developed a sexual division of labour that was powerfully conditioned by a long gestation, and helpless offspring completely dependent on the milk of a lactating female – most often the female who gave birth to it.

 

At first – because maternity was a certainty and paternity was an opinion – familial descent was in the maternal line. Females stayed with their kin, their children became part of her family and their father (or male presumed to be) became part of her kinship group. Biological paternity did not matter all that much, it was the social responsibility that counted; and adverse effects of incest were controlled for through forms of exogenous marriage, i.e., males married out of the group.

 

Society was flat and egalitarian because they had to cooperate in order to survive. The needs of the group ruled. 

Personal and family prestige or mana, was gained through the act of giving.  

Behaviour which threatened the survival of the group was not tolerated. The most common form of punishment was banishment. Mostly those who were banished were aggressive or overly competitive males who would not accept the rules.

 

After being banished these males would either die or wander around killing stuff, feeling sorry for themselves, or fighting with each other.

 

The settled ones eventually worked out that keeping animals in captivity was safer and less energy intensive than hunting them, and growing crops yielded more than gathering. 

Farming became a thing.

 

With farming came the production of more tools and more stuff and eventually the production of more than they needed – a surplus. And with a surplus came the question of what to do with it. 

One day someone had the good idea of swapping their group’s surplus with a neighbouring group for stuff they didn’t have. This increased communication and led to more stuff being produced. 

They were on a roll. Trading became a thing.

 

Some of those who had been banished because of their aggression and refusal to accept the rules, saw this. They’d learned from the strategies which some other species used to survive – i.e. that you don’t have to hunt – you can just steal other species’ prey.  

 

They worked out that, where there was trading, there could be raiding. And they found they were very good at it.  So they raided the settled ones and took – not just livestock and tools and stuff  – but females. And they killed all the males.

 

They killed so many males in fact that many, many years later when their even more clever but completely screwed up descendants discovered genetics and DNA, they found the genetic diversity of the male of the species had been hugely diminished by all that killing.

 

These males then formed their own groups in which descent was in the paternal line. Their female offspring became part of her husband’s family.  Sometimes she’d be one of several wives because there were more females than males, due to all the killing.

 

They also worked out that there was an animal they could use to increase the speed and reach of their raids – a four legged, fleet footed, highly social herbivore. 

Horse riding became a thing.

 

Prestige and mana came to be acquired through the act of taking and later on, even the act of giving itself became an expression of power.  

Charity became a thing.

Among the males were ones who were so good at the raiding and the killing that others in their group were frightened of them so they became leaders and they declared all that was stolen belonged to them.  

Private property became a thing.

 

These individuals held their power through fear and by using all the stuff they stole to buy the services and loyalty of others.  And they bartered their female offspring to form allegiances with other powerful males. 

Strategic marriage became a thing.

 

Females’ authority was diminished even further and patriarchy was well on the way to becoming a thing because subordinate males, who had to defer to more powerful males, gratefully accepted power over females and offspring as a compensation for their subjugation.

 

Then came the question of what to do with all the stuff after death. The leaders were so obsessed with their power and their stuff they couldn’t bear to leave it behind. So they invented an afterlife and had their stuff buried with them, sometimes even women, servants, dogs and horses. 

 

Others realised that was a bit of a waste and wanted their sons to have it so that the male line and its wealth and power could be carried on.  But there was a problem – the old "paternity is an opinion" problem – i.e., how to ensure your son really was your son.

 

Well, they’d been building the coffin for female authority for quite a while and this was to prove to be the final nail in the lid.  To absolutely ensure you’re the father, you have to lock up the mother, i.e., deny any other males access to her.  

Physically sequestering a female is a bit of drag if you need her to work or if you’re off raiding and killing all the time, and it’s expensive if you have a lot of females you need to lock away.  

 

So what to do?  

 

Killing transgressors was always a popular option especially with public displays of extreme cruelty to act, both as a deterrent to others, and a salve for wounded male pride. But that had its down-sides and eventually someone had the bright idea of making it the divinely ordained duty of the female to be chaste before marriage and to be dutiful and obedient to the males in her life.

 

She faced not just punishment in the here and now for actual or presumed transgressions -– but also eternal damnation. It’s one thing to defy your father or your husband, it’s another thing entirely to defy a vengeful male god who can punish you horribly forever.

 

Now, this was also where rape really started to become a thing. 

Rape had long been an actual and symbolic expression of male power over females but with the importance of paternity as a certainty, it became an attack on the property rights of other males. 

 

It all got a lot harder for the females when the males got the bright idea of doing away completely with female deities.  

 

Long before the rise of patrilineal descent and the emergence of an imbalance in power between the female and male, the members of this species had developed beliefs about supernatural powers which ordered the natural world – of which they were just one part.

 

In this belief system, the power of the female was strong and it retained some of that strength as the old beliefs gave way to ideas about the world being governed by a range of male and female deities, representing different aspects of life. 

The top job eventually went to a male deity but most pantheons remained pretty equally divided by sex, and some of the female deities were powerful and had many followers.

 

That was the way of things until some leading males had another good idea, which proved great for them and a total disaster for the females.

 

The idea was that there was in fact only one God who was not only conceived of, and described as male, His laws, as expressed via His chosen males, enshrined the absolute dominance of male over female. 

 

The inferior status of the female was declared to be the will of an all-powerful male deity.  

Females’ acceptance of this was a duty to an absolutist god who, it must be said, was pretty gung-ho in the vengeance department.

 

A set of social roles and responsibilities and physical, emotional and intellectual attributes emerged, forming a sort of prison of ideas which justified the ascription of a subordinate status to females and declared females’ productive labour to be of less value.

Gender became a thing.

 

It eventually came to pass that the male leaders developed their most sophisticated form of raiding yet – which depended on another clever prison of ideas – the right and the apparent freedom to sell one’s labour in a job market. 

Capitalism became a thing.

 

Female labour was not only worth less,  females were often shut out of the job market entirely and a woman's subsistence was deemed to be included in the rate paid to her husband which made her dependent and denied the role of female reproductive labour in enabling all production. 

 

You can see where this was heading – yes, yet more female subjugation. 

To cut a long story short, many of the females eventually rebelled and they gained some equality in the form of formal and employment rights which some thought was an end to it all.  

Sorted. 

 

Except it wasn’t. 

But that’s a story for another day. 

 

 

When I was about the same age as Eurydice Dixon

An aeon ago – when I was about the same age as Eurydice Dixon – I was assaulted in Sydney as I was walking home alone from my restaurant job late at night. 

 

I wasn't far from my house when a car pulled up alongside me. Two men jumped out, grabbed my arms and tried to pull me into the car. I screamed and struggled as hard as I could.  I have never been as frightened as I was at that moment. 

 

One of the men grabbed my breast, twisted and squeezed really hard. The other put his face right up to mine and spat out the word – "cunt".  He stank of booze.

 

Some people who lived near me heard my screams and came out of their house. The men let go of me, jumped back in the car and drove off.

 

The assault probably lasted no more than twenty seconds. 

 

In earthquakes, time stretches. A minute feels like an hour. In an assault, in fear of my life, those twenty seconds seemed like forever.

 

I don't know what they'd have done if they'd got me into the car – rape probably, murder possibly.  Or maybe they just got their sick thrills from cruising around looking for a lone woman to terrorise and brag about. 

 

What shocked me to my core was the aggression that radiated off those two men. A toxic mix of alcohol, adrenaline and testosterone in a culture which licensed male violence. 

 

What changes?

 

My neighbours, who were drag artists, asked me if I wanted to call the police. I said no as I knew the police in 1970s Sydney wouldn't do anything and would probably blame me for being out late on my own at night. They agreed. That was their experience also.  

 

I cried most of the night. In the morning I found I had extensive bruising on my arms, breast and my shin where one had kicked me. 

 

I should have reported it but I had no confidence in the police and with good reason.  I felt guilty about not reporting it once the shock subsided, and I thought about the possibility that they may have gone on to attack other women. But what could I have told the police? It was dark, I had no recollection of any detail of the men's appearance except they were young and white, were violent, and had been drinking.  

 

Adrenaline propels most of us into a set of reactions that are not conducive to accurate recall of useful details like what people look like, number plates, or colour and make of car. 

 

It was not the first time I had experienced male sexualised physical violence although it was the most frightening. Thankfully it was the last but it was not the last time I have encountered highly corrosive forms of sexism and misogyny. 

 

Women and girls should not have to always be on the alert for male predators. We should not have to stop and think, should I walk there / at this time of day / wearing these clothes in case there's a male predator lurking waiting to rape, beat or murder me? 

 

But, we are not going to rid the world of sexual predators and violent men overnight – or ever unless we fundamentally change society – so, alongside doing everything possible to stop male violence against women and children, women do have to be careful and vigilant – and we owe it to girls to equip them to be as safe as possible. 

 

Most importantly, women need to be able and prepared to do what I couldn’t do back in the day – report assaults to the police. The way the police handle complaints these days is far from perfect but it's light years away from the reaction a friend and I got when, aged 17, we reported a man for repeatedly waving his dick at us while we were waiting at an isolated bus stop. 

 

The two male police officers at first were dismissive. They said it was not a serious offence and implied we were over-reacting. Then they became manipulative. They told us if we laid a complaint a man's life could be ruined. When we argued with them, they became extremely hostile. 

 

The complaint was laid.  The man was cautioned. And two girls learned how hard it was to be heard.