On the Politically Infantile

For those who read this blog – all ten of you – and in case you hadn't yet worked it out, I'm left wing and have been for over half a century. For me, being left wing is more than thinking the state should provide health and education safety nets for the poor and marginalised, and/or belonging to a trade union – you can be and/or want all those things and be ideologically right wing. 

If you claim to be a leftist but cannot or will not describe yourself as a socialist, you’re not actually left wing. You may be centrist or on the soft right – i.e. those who want to maintain the economic and social status quo but make it less obviously exploitative and oppressive – but you’re not left wing.

 

Being left wing means being committed to bringing about foundational – structural – change as well as attitudinal change and seeing each as being essential to achieving and maintaining the other.

 

To those who say, “the left has forgotten the working class”, I say the true left has never forgotten the working class but, in the neoliberal era there is a mass of obfuscation about what the working class is – usually involving a high degree of disregard of the global context. 

This results in a lot of people claiming to be on the left, or who are assumed to be so by others, or who are assigned to the left by people who want to disparage and/or divide it. 

 

The outcome has been confusion and diversion and a loss of a belief in the possibilities for genuine, sustainable change. That loss has no immediate effect on the many layers of the buffer zone that is maintained between those who have too much and those who have too little – especially not the well remunerated members of the coordinator class – but it leaves the mass abandoned and isolated.

 

“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate and the poor woman and her children? Who cares?”

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Since the 1960s, the broad left in the developed world has come to be dominated by two powerful political trends: interest group politics and identity politics. (1)

 

These encompass a variety of ideologies and praxis, which prioritise, in varying ways and degrees, issues related to sex/gender, race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation etc.

 

Interest group politics differs from identity politics in that it sought to organise collectively (often within the wider left wing and labour movements) to counter ideological and material conditions which adversely affect people who share commonalities of sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability etc, while identity politics tries to draw together people who have a shared sense of one or more aspects of individual identity – sense of self.

 

The latest and arguably most successful (especially relative to the numbers affected) manifestation of identity politics is gender identity.

 

Interest group politics grew out of attempts to counter-balance the sexism and eurocentrism that dominated both theory and praxis in some left wing political movements and working class collectives.

 

Identity politics, which draws heavily on queer theory and has hijacked the concept of intersectionality, is an almost complete capitulation to the aspirational individualism that underpins and fuels neoliberal capitalist ideology.

 

Both can cut across the traditional left-right political divide but both find their most comfortable political home within the broad left which, in the era of neoliberalism, seems to have lost both its mojo and its compass.

 

These fractionalising movements have become (in the case of identity politics, arguably always were) divorced from the class struggle – the broad aim of which is to abolish class as the base of economic exploitation, and the forms of oppression which facilitate exploitation.

 

In its current form, identity politics has become a kind of political cuckoo in the left wing nest, diverting time and energy away from both class and interest group politics and, as has happened in the UK Labour Party, turfing them right out of the nest and by so doing, helping to serve up a humiliating electoral defeat at the hands of a Tory party whose class interests have never more starkly apparent.

 

In most advanced economies, the capitalist class and the state have been prepared to concede to some demands that arose from interest group politics but never without a struggle, and it is noteworthy that they have embraced, and indeed actively promoted, demands which have come out of identity politics. 

 

As long as a social or political movement's demands and methods of organisation do not threaten the overarching economic status quo, (which is still largely white and phallocratic) and if there is the added bonus of the development of new markets or growth of existing markets, many states that broadly support and act to protect and advance the interests of global corporate capitalism have been happy to acquiesce to a range of demands that have arisen as a result of identity politics – even when these have the potential to alienate sectors of the wider population. 

 

It’s not too far-fetched to see, in this acquiescence, the capacity for the counter-emergence of a broad coalition of socially, religiously and politically conservative groups.

The extraordinary range of concessions to, and adoptions of aspects of identity politics, and the speed with which these have been achieved, should be juxtaposed against the swingeing attacks on working class standards of living, rights and collectives across the developed world,  which has been accompanied by the movement of capital to parts of the globe where its controllers can hyper-exploit labour and more freely plunder natural resources. 

 

Logically, the reasons for this should be a matter of all-consuming interest to those on the left. Yet, strangely, many who claim to be on the left or who are assigned to the left, have immersed themselves so fully in identity politics, they seem to have lost sight of the relevance or the very existence of one or more of the two main axes of oppression – sex and race – which, within capitalism, are deployed, singly and in concert, to enable the economic exploitation of all working people and the heedless plunder of the natural world that inevitably accompanies it. 

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Part of the explanation for this may lie in the fact that those who are most deeply immersed in identity politics are at risk of political and critical hypoxia.

 

These people, most of whom conduct their organisational and political lives on various forms of digital media – are now referred to as the woke left. 

 

The term woke has been lifted out of the African-American vernacular stay woke or be woke – meaning having an awareness of the origins and effects of racial, social and economic inequality. 

 

As with many other African-American vernacular sayings, it has been appropriated, repurposed and stretched to cover a wide range of issues that can loosely be aggregated under the umbrella of identity politics.  In the process, the term woke has lost much of its historical, political and social specificity and, by being stretched so thin, has become easily mocked and misapplied. Just like political correctness before it. 

 

Woke has replaced political correctness or PCness in the political lexicon of the right wing – but with an added twist. The woke left, aka the far left, the neo-radical left, is deemed to be as bad as or worse than the far right because their political demands are declared to be anti-democratic and anti-free speech. Thus, the antics of sections of Antifa in the US, are claimed to be as bad as those of the heavily armed, white supremacist, misogynistic alt-right, which Antifa opposes.

 

There is a special brand of 21st century absurdism in the sight of lesbians and radical feminists, concerned about the impacts on women's sex-based rights, of transgender ideology and demands, who – because Antifa is seen as a hotbed of transgender activism – effectively allying themselves with far right, racist, misogynistic groups on the basis of the politically infantile notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

 

This absurdity is compounded by equally infantile responses from transactivists and their earnest, but often appallingly badly informed or politically myopic allies, which consists largely of aggressive posturing and belligerent expressions of anti-TERFism on social media platforms – mostly Twitter. 

 

On the one side, there are leftish (often way more ish than left it must be said) and liberal people who defend the principles espoused and demands made by the transgender movement, which has massively widened in scope over the past decade and as a result has become more numerous but also more critically and politically amorphous; and on the other, a collection of rather odd bedfellows comprising radical feminists, lesbians, left-wingers and various sorts of social and political conservatives.

 

Here in Aotearoa-NZ, in the midst of the pandemic crisis with all its massive implications for the most economically marginalised, we have the bizarre spectacle of highly intelligent and influential people who would, if they were prepared to clamber down off their virtual barricades or to stop posing on top of their small-c celebrity columns, have to accept that they agree on far more than they disagree on.  

 

Yet there they are – flinging virtual shit at each other on social media as we all face a crisis which, however you come at it, is very likely to fundamentally change the world we live in, most probably – because of the disarray on the left – by the construction of an even more oppressive and coercive superstructure on the solid foundations already laid by the neoliberal world order.

 

How much more absurdist can this get?  It seems there are no limits.

 

(1) The latter is sometimes inaccurately referred to as being identitarian – which is a far right, white supremacist, misogynistic political ideology aimed at cementing white and phallocratic power. 

 

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)