In Want Of Correction

 “It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of an opinion, must be in want of correction.”

-       Lynn Myers (with due acknowledgements to Miss Austen)

How should women respond to active and passive aggression from men who get over-excited at the prospect of being able to publicly insult women with impunity, by pretending to be trans allies? (1) 

Whatever a woman does, she must not use a threat of violence, for that is the province of men, and it is a fact that a threat or act of violence from a woman is often viewed as more pathological than worse threats and acts of violence, from men. 

Furthermore, one threat, even if it is meant as a joke, may be presented as being so SERIOUS, it shades out the great mass of threats which women are in receipt of daily – none more than so-called, TERFs.

I don't agree with Rachel Stewart on this, and I wish she'd stopped and thought about how it would play out before indulging herself in the creation of a tweet which pushed the boundaries on several different levels.  (2)

There’s the possibly criminal threat of a group of armed women in a ute, lamping a naked man.

There's the use of red-neck allusions – "gun-toting, whooping, hollering and drinking" –  no doubt intended to annoy the hell out of the urbanites. 

And then there's the table turning – in the form of a public humiliation of a man by a woman, and what’s more, a gender non-conforming lesbian.

The average chap can take a threat of violence from another chap, it might even make him feel manly, but let a woman draw a word picture in which, in his mind (and what he imagines will be in the mind of others), he is cast as a hapless, hunted victim, stripped naked of all his social armour – that woman becomes a threat. And not just to him, but to all men with fragile egos – especially those men who cynically or reflexively use being a 'trans ally' as a maimai in which to hide while taking pot-shots at gender heretics.

Stewart’s imagery cut deep, not because of a fear rooted in a long history of oppression – as it would be for women and people of colour – but because it mocked and humiliated. It symbolically emasculated. 

The resulting avalanche of “white left” (3) pietism buried the myriad tweets which exhort women to choke on cock, or which declare indescribably abhorrent desires such  as shitting in the urn containing the ashes of a woman’s stillborn baby. Threats of rape, beatings, kerb-stomping, torture, murder – are commonplace, and are forgiven by the “white left” because the authors are deemed to have been provoked, and/or because the women at whom this lahar of foulness is directed have been labelled as non-persons – fair game. 

Have all these members of the Anglophone “white left” seriously never stopped to think – even for a moment – what an absurd spectacle this level of hatred of “TERFs” actually is? That in the face of all that is threatening humanity, or even in the context of what faces us here in NZ, how ludicrous and infantile all that vitriol makes the left look?

Let’s stack it up, shall we? On the one hand we have a group of women arguing that the privileging of a subjective notion of an individual gender identity over the biological reality of sex, will have implications for women’s sex-based rights. Mostly they just want a discussion, or at least they started out wanting that. (4) 

On the other hand, we have a raft of social problems, such as:

• A per capita prison population among the highest in the OECD, and where the overwhelming majority of prisoners are poor.
• 1 in every 2 men and almost 7 in every 10 women in prison are Māori; we imprison, per capita, more indigenous women than any other country.
• We have thousands of homeless, and tens of thousands who live in substandard housing. 
• There is a huge and growing wealth divide, and ethnic and class disparities in health and longevity.
• We have an appalling rate of domestic violence.
• There is a potential for the vicious bigotry which lurks just beneath the surface in some people, to gain confidence and focus on any one or on multiple targets - anti-Māori, anti-Chinese, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-left, anti-woman, anti-LGBT....

Yet – in the light of ALL that and way, way more – the “white left”, chooses the softest of targets –  women, who include:

• Lesbians who will not compromise their lesbianism.
• Wāhine who believe that the extreme individualism of gender identity politics is not what Māori should be fighting to retrieve from economic and cultural imperialism.
• Old women who know way better than men (and sadly some younger women), what it means to be female.
• Young women and left wing women who feel abandoned by the political class which should be at the forefront of protecting sex-based rights.

Some people whose prior attachment to left politics is tenuous – have used trans issues as a trampoline to propel themselves onto what they deem to be the peak of the moral high ground, from where they hurl the most absurd opprobrium at anyone they can label as TERFS.

They hyperbolically declare TERFs to be fascists, Nazi-adjacent, literal murderers of trans people – evil bitches who provoke men to acts of violence against the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, (oh yes, the thirst to blame the Mother for the world’s ills has never been slaked) – and having driven some of those they’ve castigated into the opportunistic arms of the right (or an uneasy alliance with it) the “white left” then piously declares its thesis proven. 

In the stupidest, most infantile expression of left sectarianism EVER – it has catapulted TERFs to the forefront of the ranks of the political ENEMY. This is lily-livered, bubble-headed, pretend-left politics, and it’s embarrassingly awful.

Notes:

1. An offender’s Opportunism Quotient can be determined by establishing when they: a) first realised transgenderism existed; and b) how much they have engaged with second wave feminism, politically or critically. In most cases, the answers are: a) no more than a couple of years ago, and b), zilch.
2. In response to a tweet in which a man called GC women “grubs”, Stewart’s tweet resulted in her gun license being suspended, and having her guns & ammunition confiscated.
3. I have borrowed the term "white left'" from the Chinese. Look it up.
4. Attitudes have hardened and anyone who has been involved in the debate longer than a year will know who started flinging the hyperbolic rhetoric first. Hint, it wasn’t the adult human females.

 

 

 

Guilt By Association

I'm aware of a few people who used to follow me on Twitter – who I still follow –who’ve unfollowed me because they’ve been pressured into doing so by one or more of a gaggle of busy-bodies seemingly with nothing better to do in their lives but bustle around policing other people's social media accounts.

I was witness to one of these bizzies pressuring someone I’ve followed and who has followed me for several years, to unfollow/block me because I was said to be “a bit TERFy”. To her credit, she refused to do so but she did ask me if I was a TERF to which I replied honestly that I do not see myself as either trans exclusionary or a radical feminist, so if TERF is indeed just a neutral descriptor (NB. it's not) I am not one – but I do have issues with the current transgender orthodoxy – explicated at length in this blog. (1)

I could also have pointed out that my interest in the CTO is in relation to my wider interest in the role that identity politics, post-modern academic theory, hyper-individualism, the cult of celebrity, anti-communism, and transhumanism etc etc played/are playing in the genesis and perpetuation of wider neo-liberal ideology. 

If, in the arse-uppards’ politics and logic of some people, that makes me a TERF, I suspect it says way more about them than it does about me.

 

This sort of busy-bodying reached the heights (or is it depths) of absurdity in a scenario in which someone (A) was upset by seeing tweets written by a person who had caused them harm (B) appearing in their Twitter feed because a mutual follower (C) had liked a tweet B wrote. 

 

I find that algorithm irritating and tweets by people who have unfollowed me, and even the very few I have unfollowed, show up in my time line because a mutual liked, or retweeted them – but this aspect of the algorithm upset A so much she expressed her concerns, and some people who follow her leapt into action to unfollow C. One (D) took it upon herself to act as head girl, privately sending C’s user name to people, so they could unfollow / block him/her.

 

I know there are people with vulnerabilities on social media, and bullying, harassing behaviour affects them far worse than it does thick-skinned, old political campaigners like me – but surely the best thing A’s caring followers could have done would have been to help A find ways to take charge of the situation – not elbow in to increase their own kindness quotient.The worst thing, it seemed to me, was  what D did – try to organise a mass unfollow of C – behind his/her back. In other words, the only way D could envisage assisting or supporting A was to share C’s name privately so mutuals could unfollow / block him/her.

  

I don’t know or follow any of these people nor do I have a clue who they are, and ironically, the thread showed up on my timeline because of the offending algorithm. I am sure A is genuinely in need of support, but this was the worst kind of support. Instead of presenting the range of ways A could control her own feed, the bizzies took charge and organised a ganging-up on a third party whose crime was to follow someone, and like some of their tweets. 

The implicit patronisation aside, it's also classic guilt by association. Not only is following a banned person deemed to be a crime, liking a tweet of a banned person is assumed to indicate support for every facet of that banned person’s being. 

I'm surely not alone in resenting being told by a bunch of bizzies, who to follow on social media. I follow people whose views I'm interested in. Most of those I follow, I respect – some I don't but I still want to have the right to see what they have to say. 

 

I continue to follow people who I know have unfollowed or muted me because of pressure from the bizzies. I understand there are some who are genuinely between a rock and a hard place and I give them a pass but others – especially those whose rocks and hard places are pretty much of their own manufacture or choosing, and/or who are well cushioned by class &/or skin privilege –  they get my disrespect. 

But all this is leading up to exposing another more recent and exceptionally nasty example of a Twitter bizzy at work.

A few weeks ago, a pseudonymous bizzy (X) slid into a thread to warn someone, (Y), that one of the people he was engaging with in a conversation was (gasp) a known TERF. 

Y thanked X for the info, claiming to have not known this woman – who was tagged into the conversation – was a TERF. He sought to wriggle off the guilt-by-association hook by claiming he does not engage much with trans issues because as a cisgender man, he does not feel he has the right, and that not many TERFs  follow him because the mere fact of being in his cyber-presence confronts them with being fascist-adjacent –  or weasel words to that effect.

X thanked Y for the clarification and said :

 "I assumed she was a known quantity – as 'allies' have been debating her for years for ...kicks(?) – she's avoided cancellation because her methodology is very much of the "I have reasonable concerns" strain but a search of her history speaks for itself." (My emphasis) 

X went on to say – and bear in mind, the woman was still tagged into the thread – that:

"she occupies a unique space in that she's defo a leftist, writes for XX, seemed fine, (we were mutuals) until that R Stewart column which spurred a fixation with the trans debate, encouraged by leftist 'ally' supporters also hellbent on debating trans rights."  (My redaction)

X then proceeded to list the names of lots of other people who

"have a history of putting their transphobic views online or consorting with/promoting those who do."

Now call me an old leftwing cynic but to me X would scream either, vexatious, passive-aggressive busy-body, or rightwing agent provocateur (the two are not mutually exclusive) –  but not Y who dumped on a left-wing woman without as much as missing a beat, without batting a misogynistic eyelid because – why? 

Is he just a coward? Or is he demonstrating that deep-rooted resentment of women which crosses boundaries of class, political affiliation, age, ethnicity etc and which the CTO gives license to let off the leash?

The two of them demonstrated a stunning arrogance and callousness not just by smearing a good woman's reputation, but by talking about her as if she was not there, as if, by having been declared to be a TERF by someone hiding behind a pseudonym – she became a non-person.

It seems to be par for X's course but what's Ys excuse?  

What is going on here, with all you self-proclaimed lefties most of whom never gave a damn or said a word about trans people up to a couple of years ago? How is it that suddenly, the transphobe test, largely devised and administered by anonymous social media trolls has become the litmus test of leftwing ideological purity?

Seems to me you are being played, sirs and mesdames. Royally.

1. Update: To her discredit, I have just realised she has blocked me. 

 

I know a woman ....

I know this woman who's a long-standing trade union member and activist, and in every respect, bar one, is an embodiment of the zeitgeist of the progressive era – an out and proud, left-wing lesbian. 

 

But, she believes lesbians are same-sex attracted which, for some sufferers of over-active amygdala syndrome, makes her a transphobe. She is not – as anyone who actually engaged their higher brain functions – could work out.

 

She’s not a proponent of corporate / choice feminism, so some would call her a radical feminist. She expresses her genuinely held beliefs trenchantly but articulately and under her own name –- unlike many of those who attack her –  and the way some people respond to her and others like her, exemplifies the ludicrously divisive nature of the debates that swirl around aspects of gender identity theory and praxis. 

 

Henceforth to be known as The Whited Sepulchres – a curiously disparate bunch, united more in their hatred of TERFs, than their demonstrated support of trans people – recently set about a group of older lesbians who had been banned from a Pride event in Wellington because of being labelled as TERFs.

 

For the Whited Sepulchres, trans is a state of being that is self-declared and sacrosanct, while TERFness is a state of being that is ascribed to anyone who deviates to any degree from the current trans orthodoxy. 

 

Whited Sepulchres act like people in the grip of a moral panic that has left them in a state of cognitive disequilibrium – inhabiting a sort of political and intellectual camera obscura, in which the image of the world is upside down and reversed.

 

Some Whited Sepulchres form themselves into gangs – gender identify lore enforcement and disciplinary squads (GILEADs) – and patrol social media to dispense their trademark brand of vigilante justice to any and all who are deemed to be TERFs. 

 

It’s infantile. 

There are lots of entrants in the Twitter Infantilism stakes, jockeying for position on my list of Most Annoying.

 

Top of the list are those left-ish (way more 'ish' than 'left', IME) blokes who, having been dealt a "get out of misogyny gaol free" card, think it grants them license to behave like utter jerks.

 

They often hide behind pseudonyms and by playing the TERF card, they not only get to uncap their little well of unresolved resentment of all things female and let it spurt all over social media – they get plaudits for doing so.

 

(For those who are wondering, the allusion is entirely intended because for the most part, these blokes, especially the pseudonymous ones, come across as wankers.)

 

They seem to get a thrill out of calling women "cunts", or posting memes depicting acts of violence, or calling for acts of violence against TERFs – actions that are deemed acceptable, even by other women, because these hate-filled, highly masculinist, often sexualised threats and insults are aimed at TERFs – which in this context could well stand for The Eternally Reviled Female.

  

Then there are those who proudly and pseudonymously proclaim their progressive credentials in their bios, festooned with emojis and their preferred second person pronouns (PSPPs), who anxiously curate their followers for fear of being thought to be "TERF-adjacent" – and whose greatest crime in my book is their failure to call out the worst excesses of the Twankers -– clearly forgetting that collusion doth make cowards of us all.  (Sorry, Will.)

 

And there are those who make wildly hyperbolic claims such as “trans rights are the preeminent human rights issue of the era in NZ, if not the entire world.”

 

I hope I wouldn't ever be so arrogant as to rank human rights in a shallow, opportunistic way, and if I were to place a rank on an extant human rights issue in NZ, I’d put the incarceration rates of Māori and of Māori women in particular, right at the top. 

Homelessness, substandard housing, wage precarity, disparate health outcomes, etc would also be right up there. 

 

And, if I wanted to write an article to celebrate the gestation of new human life – instead of shouting 'look how progressive I am with my reference to pregnant people” and my picture of rainbow-coloured, hand-knitted booties, I'd be wanting to highlight the class and ethnicity based discrepancies in maternity outcomes for NZ women and their children.

 

Which is the sort of thing the person who prompted this post does, and has done for decades – no doubt like the lesbian elders in LAVA who have been branded and dismissed by the GILEADS as “UK inspired TERFs", with blokes even boasting of physically keeping them out of the Pride event in Wellington – in yet another display of the extreme self-indulgence and head-up-arseness of some adherents of GIP.

 

What a stunningly useful piece of gender identity agitprop “TERF” has proved to be – in this instance being used to diminish and dismiss lesbians who fought for women's rights when it required a lot more than a chain of emojis and statement of PSPPs on Twitter.

 

These are women who would also fight for trans rights, had the social contagion tsunami not swept through the ranks of the politically righteous – obliterating history, common cause, and common sense – and seen them placed in the ranks of the likes of white supremacists. 

 

Honestly, to  all those who are lining up to put the boot into these women and others like them, and especially those wankers who are also members of the well-padded coordinator class, I can say one thing with absolute certainty, come the day when we really have to fight to retain hard-won rights, I don’t want any of you to have my back because I strongly suspect you’d be fucking useless, or you’d suddenly find some compelling reason why you couldn’t be on the barricades –  a zoom meeting perhaps. 

 

Just GTFU. We’re at a tipping point globally – in Yemen, children are starving to death as a result of a vicious war waged by some of our country's allies, trading partners, Team NZ sponsors regimes that are about as literally transphobic, misogynistic and homophobic as they come – not that you’d know it by the deafening silence from the GILEADS on that score. 

 

Our Green Party expended precious time, money, and political capital on a petition calling for the government to speed up action to ban gay conversion therapy when we have a massive, and accelerating crisis in our water ways and drinking water supply, looming species extinctions, a reliance on an unsustainable and cruel form of industrialised, chemical-dependent farming, and globally, the ecological issues confronting us are gargantuan and growing exponentially. 

 

It’s like focussing on a flea bite when the body has sepsis and gas gangrene.

 

Okay, rant over. I’m tired of the ping pong – tired of the extremists inflating this issue so much that it serves to obscure other far more genuinely life-threatening ones, and ratcheting up the emotion so all that is heard is the shouting of mantras and counter-mantras.

 

I am deeply sceptical about the direction of aspects of identity politics in general, and the ideology and praxis of the current trans orthodoxy in particular. If that makes me a TERF – or the cringingly infantile “TERF-adjacent” –  so be it. 

 

I disagree with some on the GC side – some deeply so, but among the Whited Sepulchres I see no comradeship, just a lot of hot air and political opportunism.

What a Tangled Web

There's a lot of talk about the destruction of women's sports by the entry into it of male to female (MtoF) transgender athletes, and one of the highest profile of these is Cece Telfer, a Jamaican-born US runner.

The top US college athletes – those judged likely to become elite – compete in the NCAA Division 1 (the Ivy League elite). Telfer was low ranked in male track and field in Division 2, and the women's 400m hurdles event that Telfer won, was in Division 2.

 

The fastest woman in the world at the moment in the 400m hurdles is Dalilah Muhammad – also a black American – who has run it in 52.16, a full 5 seconds faster than Telfer. Dozens of other elite female athletes have bettered Telfer’s time.

 

At current speeds, Telfer would not make the Olympic final – in fact, would probably not make the US Olympic team BUT if that did happen, chances are it would be a black female athlete who would be knocked out. When Muhammad broke the women's world record at the world championships in Doha in 2019, the entire field was black. 

 

Telfer ran the 400m hurdles in men’s competition in 57.34 seconds, and in 57.53 over the lower hurdles in the women's event, so fractionally slower but  as the young woman in second place was 2 seconds slower, it's fair to say that Telfer was not being pushed to run the fastest possible time.

 

Telfer’s 60-metre dash personal best (PB) in men’s competition was 7.67 seconds;  in women’s, it’s 7.63.  The women’s world record is 6.92.

 

In the flat 400m, Telfer's PB was 55.77 seconds against men; against women, it’s 54.41. The women’s world record is 47.60 seconds; the all-time top ranked 25 athletes in the women’s competition have run the event 5 or more seconds faster than Telfer.

 

The coach puts that better performance in women’s competition down to an “improved work ethic”, with the claim that Telfer’s improvement is due to being more comfortable competing in women's events. 

 

It's just as likely to be due to the power of increased self-confidence arising from having gone from not having a hope of even a place in the top 200 men in NCAA competition, to winning and being placed against women, with the attendant possibility of the financial rewards of going professional, and of fame as the first black transgender track and field athlete in the Olympics. 

 

Self-confidence and status and financial incentives are huge motivators, and anyone who is in any doubt about the importance of that needs to talk to a sports psychologist. 

 

Much is made of the slight disadvantage in the greater wind resistance, of being much taller than your competitors (Telfer is 6’ 2”), and in the different spacing of the hurdles in the women’s event, which is calculated on the considerably lower averaged female height/ stride length. However, that is more than offset by the lower height of the hurdles in women’s competition (30” compared to 36”), and the average performance advantages (APA) gained by having gone through a full male puberty.

 

In relation to the latter, the current rules of NCAA competition require testosterone suppression for one year prior to competition, but no amounts are specified and testing regimes are vague. The rule seems to be a token gesture towards the current IAAF/IOC regulations of a twelve month reduction of testosterone levels to no more than 10 nmols/L, which is the bottom of the male standard reference range (SRR), and over 4 times the top of the female SRR.

 

The fact is, although the likes of Laurel Hubbard will not beat the best of the 105+ kg women weightlifters, MtoF transgender athletes who have gained the APA associated with going through male puberty, will push mid-ranking women out of the picture, which will have a ripple effect down through female sports. 

 

I have no doubt that if they had the ability, most MtoF transgender athletes would remain in male competition because the status and financial rewards are so much greater. The athletes who are most likely to migrate into women’s events are also-rans like Telfer, or over-the-hills like Hubbard. 

 

The situation for FtoM athletes like Chris Moser is different as the unlimited use of a potent performance enhancer (exogenous testosterone) when competing in male competition alters the parameters of the argument.

 

But, however concerned I am about aspects of the current transgender ideology, I am deeply distrustful of right-wing organisations in the US which have chosen to showcase black transgender athletes like Telfer. The racism dimension in the US cannot be extracted from the gender identity and sex-based rights issues – and it's no accident that it is the black transgender athletes who are being showcased.  The appeal is as much to racism as it is to concerns about women’s sex-based rights.

 

It must be said that the other side of this most polarised and polarising of issues, there are many people here in NZ who'd profess the deepest attachment to anti-racism who have blithely ignored the race and the class dimensions of the born-male, white offspring of a multi-millionaire taking podium places away from young Pasifika women. 

 

An interesting case of a glaring double standard – or a politico-ethical blindspot.

On Slogans, Synonyms and Euphemisms

We should all know the dangers of obscuring essentials and by so doing, allowing the powerful to carry on their business unchallenged. 

We all ought to know the dangers of division amongst social forces which, in combination, could feasibly challenge entrenched power; and of diversion away from the essentials into a focus on appearance, but way too many people, many of whom ought to know better, glue their noses to the ground and follow the scent-trail of their particular doctrinal line, or turn on each other, argue and obsess about ephemera, side-line much more pressing issues, and in lieu of sensible debate, develop and deploy slogans, synonyms and euphemisms. 

Slogans often serve to ensure a doctrinal line is followed and they can also relieve the parroters of slogans of the burden of needing to think for themselves. 

Euphemisms are not harmless evasions where they serve to obscure things people need to know in order to be able to safely navigate increasingly dangerous waters – especially those waters which may look very calm and inviting on the surface, but which have deep and dangerous undercurrents.

Here's one to ponder. Breath play is a euphemism for partial asphyxiation, which induces hypoxia, i.e. starving the brain of oxygen, a practice that carries a very real risk of death or brain damage. 

Such a euphemism acts as an obfuscation of the dynamics and physical realities of the use of choking in sexual relationships in which there is a power imbalance, and /or an imbalance in physical strength. It also masks the added dangers of the effects on such relationships of a resurgent misogyny fuelled by the global market in easily accessible porn involving violent, debasing, dehumanising sex enacted, for the most part, on vulnerable female bodies. 

 

Practices like choking – along with some others marketed in brightly hued “sex positivity” packaging, carry a very real risk of immediate harm, even death, and there is a wider and longer term harm that may be done to the glue that holds our increasingly fragmented social world together. 

Synonyms usually have subtle differences in meaning, which may alter according to context and which can greatly increase clarity and nuance in the written and spoken word. They can also serve a powerful ideological function such as can be seen in the current proliferation of essential-denying, appearance-elevating synonyms for woman.

Menstruators. Menopausal people. Individuals with a cervix. Pregnant people. Birthing bodies. Chest feeders. Uterus holders. People with vaginas. Vagina owners. Vulva owners. Surrogate hosts. Carriers. 

Every one of these has been used in a serious newspaper or journal and/or by governments and NGOs involved in such matters as reproductive health and wellbeing.

 

We do not see a similar proliferation of such terms for that which is male, eg. Ejaculators. Individuals with a prostate. Impregnators. Testicle havers. People with a penis. Scrotum owners. 

 

It is the very idea of woman that is being challenged by these linguistic developments. Women as a class. A sex class. A class whose historic and contemporary economic hyper-exploitation and oppression – especially when viewed from outside the blurring effects of middle class life inside the imperial bubble – was, and still is rooted in potential, presumed, current, or prior reproductive capacities. 

This is not reducing women to those capacities; it is acknowledging their historical and contemporary material reality and it challenges society to change its phallocratic ways in relation to them – to acknowledge, celebrate, and materially support that which is female – not blur, deny, or subvert it.

To those who think the protection and advancement of trans people's rights lies in a nose-down, arse-up pursuit of the current transgender doctrine, I'd say, who do you think has laid the ideological scent you are following, and where do you think it will lead? I'd say much the same thing to the die-hard scent-followers on the other side of this most vexed and vexing issue. 

 

Ruminations on an equine theme

Often, when I am feeding animals, watering plants, attacking the evil cocksfoot clumps that are intent upon strangling my young native trees – I talk to myself – sometimes I even talk aloud. Yes, crazy old lady territory but a major advantage of getting older is, I no longer give a damn what people think of me.

Whilst watering young trees the other day, I was thinking about all the crazy shit that's going on inside the neo-liberal bubble and I looked up to see the three mares who live here with me – Sally, Molly and Mandy (I kid you not)  peering over the fence at me as if concerned for my mental well-being. 

Are you all right, crazy but kind person, they seemed to be asking.

Always pleased to have an audience, I began to explain to them just how crazy humans are.

Like them, I said, we humans are social creatures, profoundly so. And hierarchical. We probably didn't start out hierarchical but we have become status-crazy, and like horses we engage in all sorts of behaviours and practices to establish and reinforce hierarchy.

Often the most extreme hierarchy-reinforcing or challenging behaviours among horses (stallion behaviour aside) occur among the younger horses which may jostle for a step up the status ladder. But in every herd there are the stabilisers, the peace-keepers, those whose calm, measured approach to the business of living serves to ensure peace and order. Sometimes there's an alpha mare but usually the natural equine herd – which is fairly small in number – is managed by a coalition of the mature and sensible.

Like horses, many humans are forced to live in ways that are demonstrably harmful, such as being socially isolated and/or confined in species-inappropriate spaces, and/or forced into species-inappropriate behaviours. As a result, some become damaged and behave in anti-social ways. Sometimes the anti-social behaviour is so harmful to the group, the damaged one is driven out, but sometimes where circumstances result in them remaining in the group, a damaged one becomes dominant and adversely affects others by its pathological conduct. 

Also like horses, we humans are suffering from the ill-effects of unnatural lifestyle and exposure to a mass of chemicals in our food and wider environment which leads to metabolic (and possibly reproductive) disequilibrium.

It has been established that what is called metabolic syndrome in horses (obesity, accumulation of visceral fat, hindgut disturbances and laminitis) has been linked to endocrine disrupting chemicals in forage and grain. It's probable there's also an increase in the equine equivalent of polycystic ovary syndrome in mares which results in increased testosterone, reduced fertility, and stallion like behaviours. If male horses were left entire, it's also possible we would see a similar reduction in sperm quality as has been charted in human males globally over the past half century.

In the equine world, as in the human one, it is the females which are the most important to, and heavily invested in species reproduction – the driving force behind all life. Unlike humans in the modern world, among equines it is the females which are socially most dominant. The stallion parades around protecting his mares from other stallions, but it is the mares which run the show.

Horses, like all mammals, are sexually dimorphic i.e. there are observable physical differences between females and males other than genitalia. Unlike some of our primate cousins, we humans exhibit moderate sexual dimorphism, while equines are further towards the less side of the sexual dimorphism spectrum. In both species, the easily observable differences between the extremes of each sex are greater than the average differences between the two sexes. 

The visible differences in the size and appearance of a mare and a stallion are slight; the mare may have a slightly longer back and the stallion may have a neck crest. Athletically there is no difference – although there may be a human prejudice against mares –  the world record for the fastest gallop over a mile is held by a  thoroughbred mare.

This athletic equivalency is because the horse was a steppe and prairie dwelling herbivore which lived in small herds, and whose defence mechanisms against predators were (still are)  – growing fast, sleeping mostly upright once mature, having acute hearing, sense of smell and almost 360 degree vision, having hair-trigger reactions and being able to sprint very fast over short distances and run at moderate speed over much longer distances. Like us, the horse has a long gestation, but the foal is up and walking quickly, and because of its small body and long legs, it is quickly able to run very fast and is highly manoeuvrable. 

For the mare to be smaller and slower – to have muscular and biomechanical differences which made them less efficient runners than the males – would make no evolutionary sense.

We differ from equines in being continuous breeders and in terms of ovulation signalling. When mares come into oestrus they signal that state by copious amounts of hormone laced pee, vulva eversion (winking), posturing, and squealing. Human ovulation signals are hidden or perhaps so subtle our dulled senses no longer register them.

The reasons for this are the subject of scholarly interest and as with all things reproductive, that interest may be heavily influenced by an ideological agenda. More on that later perhaps.

Our "success" as a species is rooted in our high sociability and extreme adaptability. Horses are just as social as us and moderately adaptable and it is those qualities that both motivated and enabled us to exploit the horse – an exploitation which arguably shaped the modern world as we know it as much as the development of agriculture.

In zoological terms, we humans are highly adaptable, omnivorous generalists which moved from living within and as part of the natural world, to acting upon it, altering it, and exploiting it. By so doing, we have also irreparably harmed it.

This state of human affairs was enabled by a complex interaction of abilities and attributes flowing from those high levels of adaptability and sociability, being bi-pedal and having an opposing thumb, and having a big, energy-demanding brain.

The ability to reflect, to develop complex language, not being tied to a seasonal cycle of oestrus, and having weaker instinctual drives to mate led us to wrap up the foundational biological facts of species reproduction – i.e. both the fact of having a sex and the act of having sex – in a mass of often obfuscating myth and ritual.

Within phallocratic societies, that mass of myth and ritual was – and still is –  tied tightly with ideological ribbons which look pretty in their heavily gendered colours but serve as a sex-role straitjacket.

By this stage in the lecture the mares were getting a bit restless so I thought I'd keep their attention by pointing out a consequence – to them – of what became the dominant human view of reproduction in androcentric/phallocratic societies, i.e. the way that male humans placed the stallion at the centre of horse breeding.

In earlier eras these myopic chaps had the excuse of not knowing the female contributes 50% of the genes but they had no excuse for ignoring the easily observable fact that the mare contributes 100% of the gestational, ante-natal nutritional, protection and social needs of the foal – within a mildly hierarchical but essentially cooperative and female-dominated social structure.  

But such was – and still is – the dumbing and numbing effect of phallocentric ideology, men determined that all the desirable characteristics of a foal lay in the stallion's sperm. The mare was merely a vessel.

My mares did not look impressed.

Of course powerful men did not apply this idiotic notion fully to their own situations. For the rich and powerful throughout stratified history, marriage and child bearing/rearing was primarily strategic and aimed at merging fortunes, forming and strengthening alliances and dynasties, but they were also well aware of the genetic need for reproductive and wider health and good looks in their spouses to off-set the ill-effects of generations of in-breeding.

By now the mares were getting bored with the crazy lady, and they began to think about eating.

And that's another thing, I said, being a herbivore means eating loads of vegetation (for the horse a wide range of grasses and leafy material for 16+ hours a day) and having a huge gut to be able to extract sufficient nutrition, while we omnivorous, bi-pedal, big-headed (literally and metaphorically) primates have developed ways of producing, not just the means of day-to-day subsistence, but vast surpluses of energy-rich foods and the means to store and to trade those surpluses which all adds up to allowing humans way too much time and spare energy to think up a host of daft notions such as, we as a species are somehow separate from, and superior to the natural world we inhabit. And the even dafter notion that our bodies are somehow separate from, and inferior to a disembodied internal essence, or soul, or gendered self.... 

By this time Sally, Molly and Mandy had decided I was a lost cause, and they wandered off to rest and discuss matters-equine in the shade. 

I was left to ponder what makes a happy horse. Food security. Fresh air and cool, clean water. Space to roam and to run on healthy, well-formed feet. Shade and shelter. The company of others of its own kind.

We should learn from them.

Layers of Culpability

The huge tyre fire near Amberley in North Canterbury last Friday is in an area with a high water table, extreme fire risk in summer, two kilometres from a town of 2000 residents, and on the edge of one of NZ’s premier wine regions.

 

The extreme risks to immediate and long-term health, from smoke and leachates from a tyre fire are well known. Some of the large number of particulates and gases released are highly toxic and can cause both acute and chronic health problems. A tyre burns as hot as coal and emits almost as much carbon dioxide. Because of the extreme heat generated the smoke plume rises high and the toxins can be carried many kilometres, polluting air, plants, soil, and water and harming humans, stock, and wildlife. The soil under the fire will be heavily contaminated, with the potential for toxins to be easily leached into surface and subterranean water systems.  (1)

 

The owner of the block of land where the tyres were dumped, Warren Hislop, was permitted by Hurunui District Council’s ten-year plan to lease his land to a tyre disposal firm to store waste tyres before permanent disposal. That latter stage never happened, and the pile grew until it contained somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 tyres. 

 

It was the subject of constant complaints locally for its potential impact on the health and the safety of people who lived close by – from the threat of potential fires and contamination of ground water – and the adverse impact on the value of property. 

 

After a deliberate fire in a smaller pile of about 20,000 tyres was started two years ago, local people decided to take matters into their own hands. Julia McLean, then a Hurunui District councillor, formed Accountability Action (AA) and with a waste management consultant, Bruce Gledhill, put together a viable plan for disposal (chipping, transport, and use in cement production), raised pledges of money locally, and applied for grants from the Canterbury Waste Joint Committee and The Waste Minimisation Fund. The group had wide-ranging support including FENZ, HDC, the Chair of ECAN, all the Canterbury Mayors, local schools and the grape growers’ association. (2)

 

AA’s plan would have cleared the pile within three months from getting funding approved and established an important template for dealing with the problem of waste tyres across NZ. 

 

However what they did not have was the support of the landowner and his lawyer who in May last year approached ECAN to submit another application for funding, in competition with AA’s application.

 

When approached by Hislop and his lawyer, Instead of acting as an honest broker to support the community group which had done all the work, and assuaging any legitimate concerns the landowner and his lawyer had (3), officers decided to submit a second application for funding.  By so doing they effectively undermined their own Chair’s support for the project, shafted AA and then reinforced the impression of bad faith by refusing to confirm that was what they were doing when asked by the media. 

 

AA eventually agreed to withdraw its application in order to move matters forward, and to support ECAN’s application which was based on AA’s plan.

 

Then, nothing much happened except lots of meetings, until someone set fire to the entire pile last Friday.

 

The resulting fire, whilst contained, may burn for weeks and when it can be handled, it seems the landowner has undertaken to clear the remaining heavily contaminated material and arrange for its disposal in the Kate Valley landfill – if KV will take that much heat damaged tyre waste. How he will do this and meet the very considerable cost (4) is anyone’s guess. 

 

Perhaps ECAN has a plan.

 

The CEO of ECAN was quick to point the finger of blame in the direction of the arsonist, and claimed they were just “weeks away from a solution”. A day later, at a local meeting, ECAN officers blamed the inaction on the limitations of the organisation’s legal powers.

  

The questions I want an answer to, and which were sidestepped at that meeting, is why ECAN was not more proactive at an earlier stage and why, when approached by the landowner – who was complicit in creating the toxic mess and who had made money from it – officers chose to collaborate with him and to blindside the community group which had done all the work.

 

The Mayor of Hurunui District Council was quick to tell people now is not the time to apportion blame. Whilst HDC had been prepared to work with AA, the council would do well to reflect on how much effort it had put in to resolving an issue that was caused because its district plan permits people to use their land for such purposes. It might also consider how much support it really gave to the one councillor who took the threat seriously. 

 

Central government should reflect on its failure to deal with this growing environmental threat. This tyre fire will dump a cocktail of toxins onto vineyards, olive groves, and farms where stock will eat polluted grass. NZ’s clean green image is already tarnished. Japan has already rejected NZ honey because of glyphosate residues, what effects will the toxic fallout from this fire have on local honey production, agriculture, horticulture, and viticulture?  

 

It might also reflect on how much responsibility it holds for forcing local government into a largely toothless revenue gathering entity administering centrally imposed laws and as a result often incapable of mounting effective responses to pressing local issues.

 

How insane is it, that a local council has the powers to seize a person’s property for non-payment of rates, and calling for a rate strike is an illegal act, but when it comes to controlling a highly dangerous activity with obvious potential ill-effects and massive social costs, nothing can be done?

 

The District Health Board ought to reflect on whether it should have been more proactive in warning the public and relevant agencies of the considerable health risks in the event of a large tyre fire. It might also reflect on how effective its immediate response to anyone directly affected by the smoke has been – stay indoors, put your air con on recycling, try to avoid breathing in the smoke and if you feel unwell see your doctor. I’m pretty sure people could work that much out for themselves.

 

FENZ – the organisation on the front-line – should have added its institutional voice more loudly to the call for this mess to be sorted out quickly, if only to protect its personnel and been more proactive in respect of fire prevention.

 

The heat generated by a mass tyre fire is enormous, the smoke is thick and oily and contains a vast range of toxic gases and particulates which no one should be anywhere near without full protection equipment, including BA. FENZ top brass acknowledged they have never had to deal with such a fire; all they can do is let it burn and eventually try to separate any unburned material – using local contractors with diggers. 

 

This decision is not solely because the land where the dump is has a high-water table and is where Amberley’s best well is located so contaminated water runoff would be an immediate and long-term ecological disaster – it’s also because using water to fight a large tyre fire demands vast amounts delivered via special nozzles from huge pumps – none of which are available to the volunteer firefighters in rural fire services with their standard pumps and severely limited access to water.

 

The firefighters also encountered access issues because old machinery had been dumped on the site which begs the question – why weren’t all those hazards assessed, mapped, and a plan quickly put in place to deal with them? 

 

And what did happen to good old fire prevention? North Canterbury had just had the highest temperatures, lowest humidity, and strongest, hottest winds seen in decades. A perfect storm of adverse conditions for a dump of anywhere up to 200,000 waste tyres, haphazardly stored in an area surrounded by pine trees, tinder-dry grass, and old machinery. Even if someone hadn’t set fire to it, a grass fire upwind of it could easily have ignited it.

 

BUT, the true villains in this tale of multiple layers of culpability, incompetence, or failure to be proactive, are the dumpers. Michael Le Roy and Peter George Benden failed to arrange for proper disposal and hid behind company law to avoid their legal and ethical responsibilities. Le Roy has slid out from under any responsibility by declaring bankruptcy, and the fines and compensation costs levied against Benden are risible when the actual harm and social costs are added up.

 

A great many officials and officers have presided over this poorly coordinated response to an inappropriate land use permitted by the local council, and as a result have failed to protect both residents’ health and well-being, and an already under threat wider environment. 

 

Officers and officials alike should remember that citing reasons why they could not act at all or act any faster, is to add insult to what may prove to be a terrible injury.

 

Notes:

(1) Open tyre fire emissions include "criteria" pollutants, such as particulates, carbon monoxide, sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds. They also include "non-criteria" hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), such as polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins, furans, hydrogen chloride, benzene, polychlorinated biphenyls; and metals such as arsenic, cadmium, nickel, zinc, mercury, chromium, and vanadium. Both criteria and HAP emissions from an open tyre fire can represent significant acute and chronic health hazards. Depending on the length and degree of exposure, these health effects could include irritation of the skin, eyes, and mucous membranes, respiratory effects, central nervous system depression, and cancer. 

(2) Not one of the 42 tyre firms which had used the services of Le Roy and Benden contributed to the AA project when asked to. 

(3) These concerns included the completely incorrect assertion that McLean and Gledhill wanted to make money out of the project.

(4) Dumping the material from the first fire involving 20,000 tyres cost $160k.