On Leadership

I've been thinking about leadership a bit recently, what makes good political leaders and how bad ones can derail or undermine a group, a party or even an entire movement.  

 

All the things that affect leadership are magnified when the group or organisation is operating in a hostile environment, and as we are living in increasingly fraught times, I thought I'd write a list of what I see as some key principles of good political leadership – in no particular order of importance. 

 

1. Know the difference between autocratic action and strong leadership; the latter is good, the former is not. Autocratic leadership and an undemocratic structure can work well in organisations which, for example, are formed to respond quickly to a political issue but seldom last the course and are doomed to fail if the organisation tries to move beyond single issue campaigning into a wider political arena.

 

2. Know your people. Some people will embrace even bad leadership because they feel secure when being led; some will happily accept good leadership but resent and reject bad leaders; and some will baulk at any leadership, even if it's the best possible.

 

3. Identify your loose cannons; if they can't be well-anchored, make sure they're not loaded or their fuse can't be lit, or better still, pitch them overboard.  At the very least, have some sort of contingency plan to deal with the casualties from the recoil.

 

4. If you are dealing with drama queens, either within or outside of the organisation, do not provide them with a stage or write scripts for them. Do not make the mistake that their theatrics can be harnessed and utilised.

 

5. If you have loose cannons who are also drama queens – best to part company as quickly and amicably as possible.

 

6. Find ways to encourage and enable people to contribute. Not everyone will feel confident enough to push forward and, by mistaking this for a lack of interest, ability or commitment, you may be missing out on talents and experience that will benefit the organisation.

 

7. Ensure there is a clear distinction between governance and management ie be clear about who takes the decisions in principle and who carries them out, ie do not fall into the trap of thinking that not only are you best placed and qualified to take decisions, but you are also best placed and qualified to carry them out. That way lies burn-out for you and resentment from others.

 

8. Ensure decisions are properly recorded and the record is readily available to those who are expected to carry them out and/or are affected by them. Transparency, like sunlight, is almost always beneficial. Shade or opacity may be essential at times but too much inhibits growth.

 

9. Have clear financial rules including providing accurate information on finances to those who have a vested interest, such as donors and members;  even if you are structured in a way that does not legally require this, it is an ethical requirement and avoids misunderstandings.

 

10. Try to avoid wasting people's time by making promises that you cannot keep or have no intention of keeping, as this will breed resentment – and it is not a matter of if there will be resentment, but how much and how intractable it is.

 

11. Avoid being seen as applying double standards eg demanding unconditional support from members for a political principle, eg unfettered free speech, and then acting in ways which deny that principle within the organisation. This double standard may go unnoticed by some of those you lead, but will result in feelings of anger and resentment in others.

 

12. Have lines of communication that allow any misunderstandings or resentments that do occur to be explored and resolved, i.e. proceed from the understanding that closing down debate may serve to allow misunderstandings and resentments to fester and find another avenue for expression.

 

13. Behave towards others as you'd like and expect them to behave towards you, i.e. if you dislike your political opponents attacking you with hyperbole and emotion-laden rhetoric, don't deploy that yourself.

 

14. And finally – and platitudinally – set the leadership bar high and consistently aim to clear it.

 

Living in Deficit

This is a guest post by Roy Myers

Poverty is spoken about as if it is a one-dimensional problem – the absence of money. However, the reality is that it is a corrosive condition that affects all aspects of a person’s life.

Being poor is not just having no liquidity, most often it means being in debt – owing money – and therefore not just having no cash, but having a deficit, and a what is more, a deficit that is always compounding.

This means that the poor are always running flat out with no hope of ever catching up; they have no safety net to deal with emergencies, like new tyres for the car, new shoes for the children, dentist and medical expenses.

It means living from hand to mouth, except frequently the hand can’t reach the mouth because it is often food that is sacrificed to meet the cost of housing, power and heating.

When buying food, the poor are driven to the apparently cheapest, which may be poor quality at disadvantageous prices because, of necessity, they buy in small, uneconomic quantities. 

This scenario continues into the purchase of other items. Having little money forces one to buy the cheapest, lowest quality item with the lowest life expectancy.

The corollary of living at a subsistence level is that there is no slack for recreation, sport, hobbies and holidays – all of which adds to the other stresses of having no money.

Whilst poverty originates in, and reveals itself at the economic level, it is a corrosive social state which creates anxiety in individuals and strains relationships. It is economic rust, eating away at the social fabric. 

The problem for the poor is that there is no easy way out. It is a state of powerlessness often exacerbated by dependency on handouts and the conditions attached to them.

Poverty has an extreme effect on children. They may be malnourished, carry some of the tensions of their home and may feel inferior to their peers who have more than them. These factors affect their ability to learn and potentially inhibits their future prospects and, in this way, poverty reproduces itself.

Poverty is not good for society as a whole as, ultimately, the problems of poverty are borne more widely, whether they are economic, social, health or education related. Very obviously poverty is also both created and exacerbated by other social ills, most notably racism.

So why is there poverty in a prosperous society? Why are some people struggling whilst others have more wealth than they know what to do with? 

Wait a minute, is there a connection here? Are the wealthy rich at the expense of the poor?

• Who pays people wages they can’t live on?
• Who charges rents that people cannot afford without making other sacrifices?
• Who sells inferior food and goods to the poor?
• Who lends money at exorbitant interest rates to the poor?

In a mechanical analysis there seems to be a symbiosis in which the rich get rich and the poor get poorer.  At the level of loan sharks and food trucks the relationship is obvious but in wider society the connections are less direct and more easily obscured.

So, what are the strategic points of intervention for a society wishing to eradicate poverty?

Firstly, working people need to be paid enough to live on. Personally, I am in favour of a universal basic wage but the onus to pay a wage that people can actually live on, must rest with employers.

The poor are also taxed disproportionately to the better off. There should be tax free allowances to account for an individual’s circumstances and there should be no GST on basic foodstuffs or on local government rates, which is a tax on a tax that is passed onto tenants in increased rents.

Secondly, housing generally is too expensive and for many people, buying is simply not an option. Much of the housing stock is of poor quality which results in adverse effects on health and well-being, higher running costs, and there is no security of tenure, which is a huge stressor.

The answer is a significant development of social housing to provide reasonably priced, comfortable accommodation, which is economic to run. This would also take pressure off the housing market.

And thirdly, primary medical care and dentistry need to be reviewed in terms of cost and accessibility. In part this requires an overhaul of the entire edifice including the over-reliance on pharmacological responses within a symptomatic paradigm. Frankly, a lot of chronic medical issues currently treated with drugs would be resolved by an improved wider quality of life. 

An open letter to all those who helped construct and erect the trans umbrella

Dear Peepx,

Some of you are remarkable people and you’ve had an astonishing journey – personally, politically, and professionally. 

I hope those of you who were an effeminate gay men or a butch lesbian before transitioning, acknowledge how much harder it would have been as an effeminate gay man or butch lesbian, to have done what you’ve done and to be recognised and rewarded by the establishment.

I can only imagine how it must feel for someone who started out as working class and lesbian, to be decked out in a grey morning suit and top hat – that male uniform required when receiving a gong from the very heart of the male-dominated establishment.

And how do all those other transsexual pioneers feel now, as they see the political and theoretical umbrella they helped create to provide much needed shelter for others like themselves, and which they helped force open against a weight of considerable prejudice, being expanded to cover such a wide range of people, that folk like themselves – transsexuals – have been pushed out to the margins or forced to submit to the tyranny of an eclectic bunch of self-declared transgender activists, the interests of some of whom may well be completely antithetical to theirs? 

Some of these newcomers are very obviously highly transgressive fetishists looking to bring their kink – into the mainstream. Their motivation is to make it easier to connect with the like-minded, and – for this is the nature of many highly transgressive kinks – to make it easier to gain access to those upon whom their kink is focused and enacted.

You trans pioneers know, or should do, that those who are the focus of fetishes and upon whom fetishes are enacted, are often highly vulnerable in terms of age, sex, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, ethnicity, psychological health, etc.

You do not have to be a right wing religious fundamentalist to be concerned about parafilias, which have children and very young people as their focus, apparently attempting to claim legitimacy once again. I say apparently because who knows what is genuine and what is not in the digital era?

It is highly likely that among those who, in the 1970s, used gay liberation as a vehicle to promote the idea of "child love" and who wanted to reduce the age of consent back to 13 or even as young as 4 – were malign forces that sought to strengthen homophobia, by casting the shadow of child sexual abuser over gay men.  Perhaps those malign forces are still there in the links some people are now drawing between the transgender movement and attempts to normalise and ultimately to legalise, paedophilia and hebephilia.

But you all know, or should do, that it is not just shadows created by malign external forces that want to promote homophobia and transphobia – a political shadow is also being cast by some of the people who are standing alongside you under the ever-widening trans umbrella, and whose place there you continue to support.

There are a lot of transsexuals and gay men who are worried about this, some of whom have been strong enough and brave enough to speak out in support of those who are called TERFs – amongst whom are the many radical feminists and lesbians who were the first to put their heads above the political parapet.

The links that have been made between paedophilia and male homosexuality are ideological and malign, and the same applies to transsexuals and the threat they pose to women, but the problem with the vastly increased numbers now gathered under the Trans Umbrella is that it’s much harder to know where genuine and good stops and bogus and bad begins, and we are not allowed to ask, and we can thank you for that, can’t we?

That’s the thing; you build a political movement and that movement catches a wave – sometimes a wave which is naturally formed, and sometimes artificially generated –  and it moves with a power and speed that is exhilarating and those riding it are propelled from the margins to the mainstream – politically, academically, economically.

I imagine that riding such a wave is a buzz like no other. I have to imagine it because I’ve never experienced it given every political movement I’ve been closely aligned with remains more likely to be torpedoed and sunk out at sea – ironically, by the some of the same people who now appear to support the trans movement.  So surfing the wave of mainstream populism is an unknown for me, but I imagine it’s a buzz – like any other sort of power trip.

The trouble with big waves comes when they break. The ones that are the most destructive are those which break onto steep, rocky shores – and the sex/gender shoreline is among the most treacherous and rocky of them all.

Forgive the somewhat tortuous marine analogy – but surely, you and all those other comfortably ensconced members of the coordinator class who are surfing the trans wave, must know its destructive potential. 

Some of you will survive; you’ll back off before the wave breaks and maybe even find another wave – but many of those caught by it won't survive, especially those whose genuine economic and social marginalisation the trans members of the boss and the coordinator classes have used to pull in easily persuaded allies from among liberals and the left. 

When someone tweets that TERFs will be “hushed” because there are lots of trans judges, police officers, social workers, etc etc, it sums up the dilemma between, on the one hand, claiming to have real power and significant numbers, and on the other, all those highly weaponised claims of being the locus of the most extreme marginalisation. You know, the sort of claims that lead the politically infantile to assert that  "trans rights are the pre-eminent human rights issue of our era". 

What that hushing the TERFs tweet may point to, but no one is allowed to speak about, is there may well be a large number of men in positions of power who have fetishes and kinks which make them disposed towards taking actions to try to keep the trans umbrella fully erect.

That might be a voluntary assistance, or made in anticipation of coercion, or even actively coerced. Let’s say you’re a high-ranking politician or public servant and you have a kink, which, if known, would make your role difficult or even untenable. You might well be minded to act in ways that help normalise it.

There’s a lot of stuff that's gone on: from the risible – eg. a rubber fetishist filming himself wanking in the staff loos at a children’s charity and posting it online; the sinister – eg David Challenor’s rape and torture fetish enacted upon a ten-year-old girl; and the positively surreal – eg. the Yaniv Affair which lurched crazily from farce to noir and back again.

This is the sort of stuff the gutter press usually feeds on and yet it's unusually quiet – contrary to the claims of trans activists who insist the media is heavy with transphobic rhetoric.

The Yaniv Affair would have remained on the social media gender debate margins if Ricky Gervais had not tweeted in classic Gervaisian fashion about the absurdity of a male-bodied menstruation fetishist suing sole operator, ethnic minority female beauticians for gender discrimination for refusing to perform a scrotum wax. 

Many of those who doggedly defended Yaniv ignored the sex, class, and race dimensions of the multiple discrimination claims, thereby granting a self-identified trans woman’s rights primacy over the rights of the working-class women of colour who were being sued. 

Feminists were highlighting Yaniv’s behaviour for months and were attacked and punished for being transphobic. How was that weirdness not apparent to Yaniv’s supporters, months earlier? Why were otherwise sensible, politically astute people congratulating Yaniv on a “brave transition” at a point where there was ample on-line evidence of a menstruation fetish focused on young girls?

You do not – or at least I really hope you don’t – want to see the normalisation of the sort of extreme kinks which some transgressives want to see made legal and normalised – like sex with children, or sadistic sex where the concept of consent is reduced to a sick joke, or extreme porn, or the abuse of animals.

But this is the point isn’t it?  It’s no longer just about folk like yourself – the worthy, the well meaning, the genuine trans people  – it’s increasingly about the extreme fetishists, the vexatious and the malign who have pushed their way in under your umbrella – that umbrella you needed to expand in order to give you power and political clout, and over which you no longer seem to have control. 

On Cults & Contradictions

Part I.

When NZ journalist Philip Matthews weighed in last year on the reaction to a NZ Herald piece by columnist, Rachel Stewart, I was pleased because I’ve always engaged with him amicably on Twitter, I respected him as a journalist and I thought he’d bring professionalism and balance to what too often degenerates into a highly charged slanging match. I thought he’d help shed light and turn down the heat and, when he came under fire, I offered to discuss the issues with him. He never took up the offer, but he did say in reply that he’d never encountered, and was baffled by, such intolerance, rigidity and hostility. 

Fast-forward a year and that’s pretty much how he now describes those who he was then defending. Such a dramatic U-turn clearly warrants a more in-depth explanation than is possible on Twitter, and he expanded on his reasons in a Q and A with the digital editor of Metro magazine, Tess Nichol. 

The resulting polemic is headlined : “TERF Wars: adopting – and then abandoning – a "cult-like" movement”. The sensationalist headline doesn't disappoint and in the body of the piece, the following heavily charged words and phrases appear:

dogmatic political ideologues; consume its acolytes; cult-like; destructive and hostile; gender essentialist; visceral and emotional reactions; flimsiest cloak of feminist platitudes draped over disgust and hate; disgust is at the heart of it for a lot of people; portray themselves as marginalised, silenced minority; dogmatic parroting; hound; denounce; obsessiveness; single-mindedness; alarmist, conspiracy theories; extremely cruel TERFy ideas; down the TERF rabbit hole. 

The same polemical tone is evident in a footnote:

*Many TERFs now reject this label and prefer to use the term “gender critical feminists”. It has been alleged the term TERF is a slur, and abusive. However the acronym was used for a long time by those who agreed with the political philosophy to self-identify. Although it is often used by critics of the movement, often in highly critical or even aggressive contexts, Metro does not agree it is a slur, and is a more accurate description of the groups’ politics than Gender Critical feminism.”  

There is a degree of cant involved in, on the one hand, giving unquestioning support to the right of trans people to gender self-identification (GSI), and on the other hand, haughtily declaring groups of women do not have the right to name themselves.

What is apparent is the writer either doesn't understand or accept that gender critical feminism (GCF) sets out to challenge the very nature of gender as an oppressive ideology, but rather sees the movement as primarily, or even solely, trans exclusionary. 

In this, Metro and Matthews are singing from the same song sheet – a tune written by US YouTuber, Natalie Wynn. They don't define GCF and they echo Wynn's assertion that TERFs have decided to call themselves GCF because it has fewer negative connotations. In reality, they claim, it's just a cloak over transphobia – with the implied corollary that all those who are progressive have a moral duty to use the term TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminism) and reject GCF. (1)

For the record – the acronym TERF, trans exclusionary radical feminists – originated in Australia * and was coined to describe one side of a split in feminism between women who were okay with including trans women in feminist discourse, politics and women-only spaces; and women who were not. There tended to be a high proportion of radical feminists and lesbians in the latter group. The term was disinterred by transactivists to use as a label for anyone who challenges any aspect of the current trans agenda – irrespective of their political or feminist position or beliefs. 

The groups and individuals labelled as TERF these days have at their core, both radical and socialist feminists, and there are also growing numbers of women who don't necessarily see themselves as feminist, let alone be prepared to specify which type.

In the crucible of social media, TERF has taken on a highly pejorative character – i.e. it is used to express contempt and disapproval, and to corral and to brand a group or groups of persons. It has most definitely taken on the character of a slur – in the sense of an insulting or derogatory term that is applied to individuals who are deemed to belong to a targeted group. 

Contrary to Wynn's claim – a slur is not confined to race, religion, gender or sexuality. A slur is also an allegation or an insinuation that is intended to insult or to harm reputation – something that is definitely intended and which definitely happens. 

Clearly TERF is not simply a descriptor; it is pejorative, and it has become a slur.  More importantly, it has moved into the realms of agit prop given the frequent hyperbolic claims that TERFs are equivalent to Nazis, white supremacists, holocaust deniers, homophobes etc etc.

The inconvenient fact that many of the women who are corralled and branded as TERFs are lesbians and/or politically left-leaning is disposed of by the highly ideological mechanisms of declaring such women to be "biological or vagina essentialist"; or asserting that being a TERF cancels out any claim to being progressive; or by portraying them as the hapless victims of a cult, or as damaged in some way. 

I know quite a few perfectly lucid, principled, and progressive people via social media who are labelled as TERFs. I have a lot of progressive, highly intelligent and principled friends who would be so labelled if they felt able to comment on the subject publicly. I've been labelled a TERF and blocked, muted and unfollowed on Twitter by a number of people (most of whom I suspect have overly reactive knees and a tendency to fling themselves heedlessly onto passing bandwagons) but I'm neither TE nor RF. I own to being a socialist feminist and to be sceptical of aspects of the current trans orthodoxy – so turn that into a snappy acronym if you can. 

Part II. 

Philip Matthews knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of a social media backlash, including implied and actual threats to livelihood. I remember the tone and scale of the reaction to his very mild questioning of the hostile response to Rachel Stewart’s column, and how that ratcheted up to manic level when he tweeted the content of a direct message he’d received. As I recall, a member of NZ Twitter’s self-mandated moral majority threatened to complain to his employer and – perhaps wisely – he backed off. 

Latterly however, he has publicly and fulsomely confessed his wrongdoing and he blames his briefly aberrant behaviour on the mind-altering influence of the cult of the TERF. In seeking absolution he’s performed the required public acts of self-flagellation, recited his mea culpas and has been rewarded by being welcomed back into the fold of the congregation of the righteous.  (Apologies for the religious overtones but they seem strangely fitting.)

People who attacked him at the time – some of them unreasonably and disproportionately so – are saying ‘sorry mate’ and giving him cyber hugs, but on the other side of the fence, the women he's dumped on are angry, and not just because of the poacher turned gamekeeper schtick.

On the basis of his very brief foray into public support for GCF, Matthews claims special insight into the dynamics of the whole global movement – including the psycho-social motivation of “a lot of people” in it. He not only declares "TERFs’" to be “cult-like” but says lots of the people drawn to it are motivated by “disgust and hate” towards trans women. (2) He hastens to add that of course he was not so motivated. 

Whilst it is possible that some of those he and Metro would call TERFs do feel “disgust” towards trans people, most feel no such thing and the numbers of ordinary, decent, intelligent and principled people who are questioning aspects of the current transgender orthodoxy ought to give journalists reason to engage the frontal cortex – not indulge in their own amygdala-driven, aversive responses. 

Anyone who thinks that the liberal feminists who are in opposition to GCF are representative of most women’s views on this, really needs to think again and wake up to the fact that a wide range of women are being drawn to GCF arguments and many of them are angry. It’s stating the obvious that anger is never conducive to calm, rational and productive debate, which is why the Metro article and others like it are irresponsible.

People who are reflexively anti-TERF probably don't care but some of these women are also bewildered or frightened by the vitriol they encounter or which they know they would encounter if they ever went public with their concerns. Those feelings are intensified when they're accused of being both the initiators of, and the worst culprits in, the all too common hurling of vitriolic threats and abuse. 

Consider what’s actually being said here by a magazine editor who writes under the still powerful banner of professional journalism:

“One bugbear of mine is the way anyone who disagrees with the (TERF) ideology, especially if they do so in a way that is rude or uses swear words, is incorrectly labelled as engaging in “abuse”.  My emphasis. 

The logic behind this is, it’s not abuse because the people saying it were provoked. 

Seriously, with "sisters" like this, who needs misogynists?

Is saying to a young woman “choke on my girl dick" incorrectly labelled as abuse? 

How about offering to shit in the urn containing the ashes of the stillbirth you wished on a woman who questioned you?  Or a man calling a woman and fellow party member, “a deplorable TERF cunt”?  Or a group of male proto-anarchists singing that TERFs “deserve to be kerb-stomped”? Or a high profile academic saying, “TERFs should die in a grease fire.”

I wish I could say those sort of comments are rare or unusually extreme but if they were I wouldn’t bother highlighting them. 

I’ve been reading and thinking about this issue for a long time and with renewed interest over the past five years or so (3) and it wasn’t GCFs who ratcheted up the inflammatory rhetoric on social media but, having absorbed the punches for a long time, some women are now openly expressing anger, possibly feeling emboldened, in part by their steadily growing numbers and – dangerously, in my opinion – by apparent support from the political right which is being typically cynical and opportunistic. (4)

In the ramping up of the on-line rhetoric on both sides, it is true that some people are unkind and even cruel towards, and about transwomen. Although a lot of that may be in reaction, I won't employ the Metro argument and try to claim it's justified because people have been provoked. There’s no excuse for unkindness or cruelty and it’s a fact that social media encourages and enables that to flourish. It's also a fact that there are people who cynically whip up the polarising rhetoric for dodgy political or personal motives.

Another reason that social media acts as a bellows and intensifies the heat of debate is that it is a global platform on which people can lose sight of the specific nature of the situation in their own country. Social media allows fears to be both magnified and globalised and pretty soon people look at each other and see only threats.

The situation in the US (which informs Wynn's analysis) is very different from the UK and NZ, which have more in common with each other in terms of how the law works generally and the role of central government in establishing equality law. Both are also more trans-friendly countries than the US where trans people have very good reason to be fearful. 

The highly charged and increasingly polarised debates in the UK and here in NZ were provoked by demands for gender self-identification by statutory declaration (GSI/SD). (5) The questioning of this has led to threats towards, attacks on, and denial of platforms to, dissenting women. People who support these attacks need to ask themselves – when relatively powerful women are subjected to waves of abuse, have their livelihoods threatened and are denied platforms to speak, whether that be on social media, in mainstream media or in a university – what message does it send to women who are relatively powerless?

Part III.

A sentence in the Metro piece, in reference to TERFs, took my breath away :

“It took me a while to learn that just because someone is a minority, they are not necessarily the underdog.”

Aside from the fact that this may equally apply to some trans people, how could a white, middle class, professional, heterosexual man not know that being in a minority doesn’t necessarily make someone the underdog?

Matthews tweeted recently about the “strange bedfellows” In the GC movement – referring to Sean Plunket’s support for Speak Up For Women.  He's right, there are indeed some “strange bedfellows” but these are strange times and a right-leaning radio host providing a platform for SUFW is surely no more strange than a neo-liberal Conservative government in the UK deciding to lead on GSI/SD for transgender people. 

And, for every right wing misogynist who is pretending to support GCF – there are self-styled progressive men who are using it as an excuse to take their misogyny out of the closet to give it an airing.

Metro and Matthews aren't alone in sidestepping the fact that in most of the Anglophone world  (5) – and running counter to the claims of the most extreme personal and collective vulnerability and marginalisation – the trans community actually enjoys a considerable breadth of governmental, institutional, professional, NGO, corporate, voluntary sector, academic and media support.

That breadth of support exists despite the fact that as an ideology, transgenderism challenges one of humanity's most deeply rooted sets of beliefs, which flow from the biological reality of sexual dimorphism and which cut across the divides of sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class, political allegiances, religion, etc.

The right wing press in the UK (Matthews cites The Spectator and the Daily Mail) do indeed publish some articles that are critical of transgenderism, but it's nothing remotely like it’s capable of doing when it really wants to demonise a movement, or a person. Ask Jeremy Corbyn.

And then ask, why would a neo-liberal Conservative government – committed to outrageously harsh policies that have destroyed working class collectives and communities – have been fully supportive of GSI/SD, even though that risked alienating at least some of its traditional ultra-conservative support base?  

Take off the ideological blinkers and the answer's obvious – it was a classic dead cat. The UK Labour Party’s response (driven by its internal divisions and by a large influx of people who are politically ultra-left and/or socially transgressive) was to pick it up and run with it in advance of the promised legislative change and diverting precious time and energy and expending political capital – only to have the Tories subsequently back off from delivering. 

But, while there's no denying either the breadth of the support that transgenderism currently enjoys, or the speed with which it has progressed, both as an ideology and in terms of positive responses to lobbyists –- the important question is how deep and stable that support is. 

That question becomes very important when we pose it in the context of a world at risk of fracturing along an ancient fault line that is a far more powerful driver of behaviour than this one small facet of modern Western identity politics. 

That ancient fault-line is the divide between the socially cautious and conservative, and the socially radical and transgressive. The former will tend to cleave to the known and be more comfortable submitting to authority; the latter will tend to challenge established norms and authority. 

A healthy society acts as a fulcrum that keeps tendencies to the extremes of each in balance. If the seesaw of public opinion were to tip all the way in one direction in the current era (either because the fulcrum point shifts or because of a sheer weight of opinion) it's most likely to tip towards the ultra conservative because of the existence of far more powerful drivers of extreme social anxiety and unease than how members of a numerically tiny minority are able to legally define and socially describe themselves.

In what remains a powerfully phallocratic world (for all the formal equality gained by some women) the ever-widening bandwidth of what it means to be transgender and a rise in heedless assertions about, and questioning of what it means to be female and a woman, could prove to be a tipping point that causes the social and political balance to shift heavily and/or rapidly towards the ultra-conservative and authoritarian.  

If there is such a shift, the outcome for swathes of people could be truly awful. That is why this debate is so important and why anyone who acts in ways that cut out light and turn up the heat deserves to be given a metaphorical clip round the ear.

Metro and Matthews – consider yourselves clipped.

Notes:

(1) If GCFs are expected to use preferred pronouns as a gesture of good faith, why can’t transactivists and allies use the term GCF instead of insisting on using TERF?  After all it might help smooth the pathway to a more productive exchange of views instead of endlessly chasing each other in a circle shouting slogans.

(2) Matthews draws heavily on You Tuber Natalie Wynn's video on GCF. In this video Wynn is far more trenchant in her rhetoric and specific about it being her own views than usual in that she does not hide behind one of her many personae as she often does on other subjects,  ie. present herself as "an abstract figure" thus "easing the burden of being directly held accountable for every opinion (she) express(es)". Her ‘alter-ego’ in this video is a black clad, Medusa-like/witch hybrid character who presents a number of the easily critiqued GCF talking points that litter Reddit -–where Wynn seems to harvest her TERFisms. This specificity is possibly because she'd been the subject of her own woke-Twitter auto da fé when she agreed to be interviewed by Jesse Singal and do an interview with right wing transwoman vlogger, Blaire White, and attacking TERFs is an easy way to regain woke brownie points. Or maybe she just really hates TERFs. In any event, if she wants us all to unite to fight for women’s rights, maybe she should stop using the term ‘fish’ – it’s extremely offensive. 

(3) This is not something that has happened since a small number of feminist academics in the UK became active on Twitter, although they and a few brave celebrities have given it a big boost. 

(4) Some of the broad Left are busy playing at being revolutionaries and lobbing Molotov cock-tales (sic) at the regiment of monstrous women, but a lot of left wingers are staying schtum and hoping it will all blow over and not impact too heavily at the polls. Neither is a very sensible or politically mature strategy.

(5) In NZ, GSI/ SD was included in draft legislation at select committee stage in response to a petition – a move that precluded proper public debate over the implications for wider equality legislation and especially sex based exceptions.

(6) In Trumpist USA, the far right media is far more overt about using transgender issues as a rallying call for the right and as a stick to beat liberals with.

(*edited for accuracy)

A woman by any other name ...

There has to be a common sense and widely agreed definition of "woman" and "man’"or we’ll all disappear up our own fundaments – which very likely is the point of all this, i.e. keep us fiddling while the world burns.

 

I don't see trans people per se as a threat to women or to women's rights – it is what is behind the rampant growth of self-declared gender identity as an ideology and a political movement, that worries me. It's a localised battle in a far bigger and potentially more destructive war – and the latter is why I've written more about it recently than any other topic. 

The underlying, material reality is that, in nature – and we are natural beings however much some of us try to pretend otherwise and however hard others work to maintain that pretence – sex exists for reproduction. It does not exist purely for pleasure or fun, or as commodity, a marketing tool, a weapon or a competition. 

 

Peel off all the social layers and the core of reproductive sex is unambiguously dimorphic –  i.e., the creation of new life needs the coming together of functionally distinct female and male elements – of which the female is the far more important because of a long gestation of a, mainly single foetus, and the birth of utterly dependent and slow maturing offspring, the care of which has always fallen mostly to females.

 This arrangement was and is not just because that suits males, but because in the subsistence societies that make up the vast bulk of our evolutionary and social history,  human infants were utterly dependent for a long time on a lactating female – most commonly the biological mother.

 Every human life that has ever existed came out of the body of a human who was functionally female. Despite the best efforts of trans humanists who would argue it is in women's interests to use technology to transcend that fact – to  "free" women from their "reproductive burden" – it will always be that way given the same sort of people who want to create artificial wombs, clone humans from skin cells etc, are likely to destroy the world as we know it before such technologies can come to pass. That's aside from the host of ethical questions posed by such research.

Those who see trans humanism as the new frontier of human evolution also need to be aware that these super technologies only ever benefit the elite – the mass, as always, will be of no consequence.

We form ideas about sex and the roles we occupy in relation to it, the behaviours and characteristics that flow from, and are linked to the dimorphic elements of reproductive sex because our reproductive behaviour is not strongly instinctively or hormonally driven; 

we have big, active, energy demanding brains; and, we are profoundly, ineluctably social i.e., we have to cooperate with, and learn from other humans in order both to become fully human, and to survive, and the key element of group and species survival is efficient reproduction. 

The importance of reproduction may seem to have receded in a world populated by 7+ billion of us but, should reproductive fitness change, for example as a result of the saturation of the world with endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging chemicals, it may re-emerge as a powerful social driver – as it almost certainly did in the aftermath of the last great genetic bottleneck. 

Gender sits on the bedrock of, and draws its power from, the material realities of dimorphic reproductive sex and millennia of biologically determined and conditioned layers of functions and roles.

 

You can’t just turn all that off by an act of individual will or even by a collective making the declaration that the follow on act from the "end of history" is the "end of sex". Nor can you force a change in reality for all those who live outside the bubbles of relative privilege in which the gender performance artists mostly live.

 

Gender is best understood as a set of norms about what it means to be socially and reproductively female or male. It is enshrined in common sense notions, and encoded in religious lore and secular law and has served, and still serves, an ideological function.  

The aspects of gender which enshrine relations of male dominance and female subordination, were created by, and wielded in the service of the dominant sex class, which – for the past 10k years or so, and across much of the globe – has been male. The dominant social orders across the globe for pretty much all of recorded history, have been, and remain, phallocratic. 

Gender in this sense, is not fixed; it shape shifts to reflect societal needs (usually defined by the dominant social class) and it adversely affects women in varying ways and degrees, according to such factors as class, race and age – but the averaged effect on women is negative. 

 

However, the ideology of gender also benefits men differentially; it cements averaged male power over females but, being part of the dominant sex is an illusory compensation handed down to otherwise absolutely or relatively powerless men. 

 

To me, the common sense definition of female is the human being who is presumed at birth to have the potential to bear children, and who is presumed will go through the menarche, and the menopause.

 

Whether she is in fact able to, or chooses to have children, or if she no longer has the ability to have children, is beside the point. She will still carry her share of the weight of thousands of years and current forms and degrees of oppression and exploitation within various sorts of phallocracies.

 

The current trans orthodoxy (which does NOT reflect the views of all trans people) with its dogma, its catechism, and its tactic of branding, demonising and ritually insulting anyone who dissents from it, is actually phallocentric.

 

It is why over the past five years or so, male-bodied people claiming to be trans women have popped up all over the internet abusing and threatening dissenters – especially lesbians – with phallocentric insults like, "suck my lady dick’"

 

If you think saying this makes me a TERF, transphobe, transmisogynist, bigot, literal killer of trans people – then I respectfully suggest that YOU have a problem, because I am none of those things and frankly, I will match my socialism and feminism against all comers. 

 

I have followed this debate for years – not just dipped my toes into it recently and I smell the presence of all sorts of political rats and spin-doctored dead cats – as do a lot of other rational, reasonable and progressive people.

 

The amount of time and energy being expended on this is not proportionate to its importance in light of global warming, mass pollution, species extinction and the growing threat of right wing authoritarianism.

In other words, gender is still being used ideologically and the best part of the joke for those driving it lies in making those who are being the most ideological think they're actually being liberationist – that by self declaration of a gender identity which runs counter to social norms, the entire edifice of global corporate capitalism and its servant states will crumble and reform into something positive and sustainable.

All those involved – on both sides – need to calm the amygdala, allow the frontal cortex to regain control, take a deep nose breath and see if they too can detect the stench of a classic divide, divert and rule tactic. 

On Fools and Fumaroles

This post was inspired by a Facebook thread shared by someone I know. I haven't used full names because I wasn't involved in the discussion. 

First up is Alex who approvingly posted this meme on his facebook page but made little further contribution to the ensuing discussion apart from bemoaning how sad it is that posts about Syria do not attract the same attention.  

 This meme is one of the host of calls for acts of literal and symbolic violence against women that now litter most of the social media wrangles around this issue. It’s driven by the same sorts of attitude that fuelled the recent actions of trans rights protesters in the UK - squirting water in women's faces at a time when acid attacks are becoming increasingly common. 

It's a call for harm to be done to women and those who make these calls hide behind the claim that so-called ‘TERFs’ are causing a far greater harm to trans people, and are literally all equivalent to ‘Nazis’. 

It is shameful and unworthy of anyone who calls himself a socialist.

And then there is the more outspoken, Shayne, whose attempt to forensically dissect gender critical feminism foundered in the swamp of his own overblown rhetoric and whose hyperbolic views were informed more by misogyny than political analysis, viz: 

"Fucked up bigotry", "Disgusting bigotry," "Hate activists", “Hate preachers”, and - even that favourite rejoinder of anal-obsessed boys - "Eat farts."

In Shayne’s world ‘Terfism’ " ... is about creating an exclusive club for which only those defined by an archaic essentialist conception of sex is allowed into the magic circle of "woman"… "

Woman - that'd be the half of all human beings who have ever lived, within whose archaic and essentialist bodies all humans have been gestated - hard though that might be for pomoblokes to accept.  

Females are the sex that is so often subjected to selective abortion and infanticide because male lives are so much more valued in cultures steeped in millennia of misogyny – a misogyny whose tentacles seem to have wrapped tightly around parts of Shayne’s political and critical anatomy.

TERFism, he claims, is an "arcane system of essentialism that defines a persons worth by the physical attributes they where born with...betrays the whole project of feminisms and winds back the progress of women by decades.”

 Ah, don't you just love a self-proclaimed progressive who sees the four decades of neo-liberalism as having been good for all women. Perhaps Shayne should step outside his bubble of western male privilege and look at the lives of women globally and at the poor within his own, very wealthy country – and consider how many women have been shut out of neoliberal capitalism’s ‘menu of choices’ and how very easily all those things by which the progress of women in the west are often measured, could be lost. 

Doing so might stop him from saying things like, TERFism -  “… actually becomes dangerous to a group of women who are grossly over-represented in statistics on sexual assault victimhood, suicide, and all the assorted cultural and institutional repercussions of being an othered minority.”

Shayne's not referring here to poor women, in case you're wondering. Logic says he shouldn't be referring to all those trans women who, by virtue of being white, educated, affluent and having lived and prospered as men (all of which equates to a considerable level of privilege that's not all lost when they transition to living as a woman) are unlikely candidates for the title of most vulnerable and marginalised people on the planet. But of course he is because Shayne is locked into a rigidly binary paradigm of Trans vs TERF, one of which is as idealised as the other is demonised.

Plunging onwards in his dogged pursuit of reasons to shut the mouths of these troublesome women, he made the obligatory link to racists: “As a society we recognize white supremacists as being harmful people who should be isolated and removed from the body politic”

So Shayne would define those who are white supremacists and along with 'TERFs', isolate them and remove them from the body politic. By what means? Denying them a vote? Refusing them access to public services?  Sending them to a gulag? Guillotining them?  

I think perhaps he needs to slough off some of that adolescent certitude and stop saying things like “....we recognize that misogynists are harmful people and deserve deplatforming.”

This - from a man who says calling for women’s mouths to be glued shut is justifiable.  I think Shayne's a rank misogynist yet I‘m not calling for him to be deplatformed. However,  I would love to see him spend a week or two on a factory floor with a bunch of angry women who’ve just been told that a whole raft of treatments for their archaic and essentialist gynaeocological conditions will no longer be funded by the state.

Ah yes, the state, whose coercive mechanisms Shayne - in the true spirit of pietistic twerpism- would like to see directed at the dreaded 'TERFs - "it''s high time the law got involved,"  he huffed.

“… we've created a situation where hate activists get to call themselves "feminist" and actively infiltrate left wing and progressive movements while prosecuting a campaign of harrasment (sic) and hate against one of the most vunerable (sic) minorities in society. I have seen the damage these people are causing, its an absolute travesty that its allowed to get as far as it is.” 

Some of the women Shayne is referring to here were feminists and leftwing activists when he was probably still pooing in his pants; some helped set up those sort of organisations he refers to so proprietorially; some have devoted a lifetime to fighting for progressive change, and some have suffered actual, real harm in so doing but Shayne is so blinded by self-righteousness, the humbuggery of his pronouncements completely escapes him.

“So do I have a problem with silencing TERFs? Fuck No, for the very same reason I have no problem with silencing Neo Nazis, Women beaters and anti Gay and Lesbian hate preachers.”

Like many others, in 'TERFs' he's found a political fumarole that allows him to vent his resentment of women. These days, blokes like him have to keep their resentment under wraps but in 'TERFs' they've found a group of women- many of whom are leftists and a lot of whom are lesbians - and, by performing a truly astonishing contortion of political logic by aligning them with Nazis, abusers and homophobes, he's able to disgorge his misogynistic bile and get to feel noble and righteous while doing so.

It's quite a party trick.