More churnalism

On page 4 of today's Press newspaper, there's a story, headlined "Child poverty puts NZ on 'roll of shame' " – the Children’s Commissioner deploring, yet again, the fact that this wealthy nation has an estimated 125,000 kids living in poverty.

Taking up two-thirds of the front page, is a story with a huge photo, headlined: "Transgender woman who waited 80 years to be herself".

To me, those two headlines and their relative positions, sum up the superficial, diversionary priorities of the Neo-liberal era. 

 

The transgender story also takes pride of place on the Stuff website and includes a 5 minute video with a suitably reverential voice over. The child poverty story does not figure on the Stuff website front page at all, and nor was it in the Press Twitter feed at the time of writing this.

 

To a person who lived as a boy and man for 80 years, married, and fathered four children, and who now wants to dress openly in stereotypically female clothing, use a stereotypically female name, and have people use female third person pronouns when referring to them – I would normally say, do whatever makes you happy. I would not make a big deal out of it being written up as a human interest story. 

 

But occupying almost the entire front page of the weekend edition of a major NZ newspaper and headline story on a major news website has made me take a huge decision. For the first time in my long life there will be no printed mainstream newspaper in my house. I will not be renewing my Press subscription, and I will write to the editor to explain why. 

 

Furthermore, until such time as New Zealand no longer has:

 

appallingly high rates of child poverty, extreme and growing differentials in income and wellbeing, and a growing number of so-called working poor;

 

obscenely differential Māori incarceration rates, especially of wāhine, and grossly differential post-surgery survival rates and life expectancy for Māori;

very high rates of family violence and rape;

one of the worst records in the world for native land and marine species extinction; 

 

an economy that is reliant on a mainly for export, industrialised form of primary production which is resulting in a catastrophic loss of top soil, and is dependent on imported artificial fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and anthelmintics, the use of which has resulted in high and growing levels of water contamination and wider environmental pollution ....

...I will continue to call out this sort of knee-jerk, diversionary, superficial, miserable excuse for journalism which, as well as being an insult to women, and promoting what will be viewed in the future as a social contagion, may – by fuelling a conservative moral panic – put transgender people and a host of others, at risk in the future.

I remember the Press too often engaging in populist, tub-thumping, moral panic inducing reportage such as the deplorable coverage of the prosecution case in the Lipine Sila trial. I remember all those crass and racist cartoons. 

This sort of flag-waving in its way is worse than that because it poses as progressive.

This is not a game. This is not a means by which middle-class people, who otherwise tacitly or overtly support the socio-economic status quo, get to acquire some political brownie points and make themselves feel better about their social and economic privilege.

This serves as a diversion away from the vast array of current and looming economic, social, and environmental crises which will hit the poor and especially poor women and kids, first and worst.

If I live long enough to see the knee-jerkers wake up from their gender-identity stupor, I'll get no satisfaction from saying "we told you so". 

 

On being nice and stuff...

I just saw a meme about how women can't afford to be nice or some such wording. 

That rather depends on your definition of "nice" I guess.

Women need to avoid behaving like men do – i.e., swallowing the line that compassion, empathy, cooperation, and mutuality are somehow lesser emotions and ways of being and organising than their opposites.

Women need to protect already stressed female collectives, which sometimes means shelving differences, i.e., remembering that life always involves degrees of compromise.

Whilst I do understand visceral anger – it's an old companion and the multi-faceted chip on my shoulder sometimes still dictates my responses to people and situations – I also know that women cannot afford to waste precious time and energy on misdirected anger and aggression. 

We need to be strategic.

And we need to be consistent. We can't rail against state enabled violence against women on the one hand, and on the other, call for the death penalty for men we disapprove of.

Well, not in my ethical universe.

Sometimes kicking in a door that remains stubbornly closed against us is the only way to gain entry. But sometimes picking the lock might work, or climbing in through a window ... or better still, saying "sod you" to gaining entry to the structure with the closed doors, and create a whole new structure which we control.

Sorry, I'm in an analogy mindset; must be the drugs.

Speaking of which – anyone who is opposed to the Covid vaccine and doesn't also take a stand against the makers of the chemical soup we are forced to live in, is being foolish. 

And that's being kind.

If you take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs regularly or longterm without understanding their mechanism of action; If you go to the doctor with a cold and expect antibiotics; if you swallow paracetamol as if it's completely benign; if you never check the additives in the food you eat ....you have no business pontificating on the safety of vaccines.

We all know, or should, that modern medicine is bound by its symptomatic and pharmaco-surgical paradigms. If we want holistic, less drug-centred, high quality health care, we need to be aiming at changing the entire edifice -– not just tidying up the waiting room.

The Political Twisties

The term wokeism has been weaponised by the right and to understand why that is, we have to engage with the philosophical, social, psychological, and political reasons why the gender identity movement has taken off with such speed and power – largely in the anglophone world. 

Firstly, for those who would argue it is not a movement and nor does it have an ideology – it is, and it does. I am happy to explain why if anyone is interested but in the meantime I am indulging myself in a bit of social speculation.

This extraordinary social movement questions arguably the most deep rooted, ancient and universal of human understandings – not the multitude of kinship arrangements and gender-roles we wrap around sex, but the understanding of what it takes to perpetuate the species which, at its core, is biological and binary.

Given the universality and the complexities of what it challenges, and the implausibility and sheer nonsensicality of much of the evidence it uses to construct its theories and support its claims, the GI movement could easily become the focus of the sort of moral panic and witch hunt it seems intent upon creating in relation to so-called TERFs and “white feminists”.

There can be no doubt that gender identity theory and resulting praxis are being propelled by powerful social, political, commercial interests which undoubtedly see the phenomenon as far more of an opportunity than a threat. At present.

However, those drivers only have so much power because they tap into something very deep in the human psyche – I think at the species level, which is one that is as often obscured and denied as it is examined and embraced.

Post-modernism, which gave birth to gender identity theory and praxis, is arguably one of the most ideological of epistemologies – the more so because it claims not to be. The denial of "grand narratives" and the claim that there is no universal hierarchy of values etc, constitutes a system of ideas and beliefs (an ideology) which was aimed at, and has had the effect of undermining class-based theories and the great social and political movements associated with them.

In a deeply stratified world, post-modernism serves entrenched power. By undermining materialism, Marxism, and class-based, collectivist politics, it laid the foundation for the emergence of the hyper-individualism and extreme commodification of the neo-liberal era / digital age.

The thing with the destruction of collectives and of community, the undermining of widely accepted ethics and norms, and the rise of hyper-individualism, is that many people, young people especially, have ended up stranded on the island of the 'self'. 

This can lead to a profound sense of alienation – in the psychiatric sense of a loss of identity– because we can only make sense of our ‘self’ and the world, within physical collectives, or more properly, in a series of interconnected collectives.

We are profoundly social creatures – we instinctively clump and coalesce. In the context of the loneliness and disconnectedness of extreme individualism and individualisation, the unceasing demands of aspirational culture, and the unrelenting, judgemental ‘gaze’ of (anti)social media – the need to be a part of something bigger than the hermitic, be-spoke, "self", results in an almost hysterical release when a sense of wider community is established. 

"I am not alone. There are others on my island. I am more than just me, and I must signal my belongingness and protect my community from those who would destroy it or make me question it.'"

Cue religiosity, dogmatism, the creation of absolutes, the drive to hunt and to punish heretics in what at times, approaches a fundamentalist frenzy. 

That of course, cuts both ways, and it is a mischief-maker’s paradise.

If you will forgive a segue into a flight of fancy, it often seems to me that the groups which now comprise the two polar extremes of the gender identity debate are – to borrow a quote from Dostoyevsky – like two enemies who are in love with each other. 

They hate each other with a passion but cannot envisage a world in which the other does not exist, for what validates them as a group is the existence of the enemy. But when a common hatred of an enemy is the only thing binding a group together, if you take away the object of hatred, the group has no basis for internal or external validation. 

Having no other shared purpose or belief, there is nothing to stop them flying apart and floating off into cyber space.... lost souls in search of another enemy to love to hate.

Who benefits from this polarisation? What other progressive movement has been embraced and elevated in this way, and with such speed?

For all the over-blown rhetoric about the far right and religious fundamentalists in alliance with the evil bitch-witch TERFs, what other movement representing the interests of a tiny minority, and which challenges such deeply entrenched beliefs, has gained so much governmental, corporate, institutional heft so quickly and with so little effort?

Can we explain that extraordinary progress and its astonishing degree of institutional and policy capture simply by reference to a critical mass of social progressivism?

And if there is such a critical mass, how then to explain what has been left behind in our aspirational, me-first world?

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it -– this issue is divisive. And who is being divided, distracted and diverted? Who are turning in on themselves, having declared largely socialist and radical feminists to be the greatest enemy of social progress ever?

On the one hand, cast as a tiny, insignificant bunch of lunatics who can be ignored because they are at odds with a broad consensus, and on the other, the most terrible enemy the progressive world has ever faced. Well, having already declared TERFs to be a tiny insignificant minority, to justify the hyperbolic reaction they have to be made the vanguard of the looming horror of a far-right backlash. 

I think too many of the neo-liberal left have the political version of the twisties. They’ve spun the narrative so much they’ve lost all sense of where they are in political space.

Latter Day Mccarthyism?

McCarthyism –

Created a powerful social contagion through the creation of the spectre of a highly stereotyped "enemy" said to exist both within and without.

Demonised and witch-hunted both political opponents and ordinary citizens.

Created a powerful culture of guilt by association. 

Demanded conformism via public loyalty statements and gestures from employees, especially in government.

Created a lexicon of slurs to further stereotype & demonise the "enemy".

Banned books, films, the content/authorship of which was deemed ideologically suspect.

Called for people to be arrested, sacked or not employed on the basis of their expressed or presumed political beliefs.

Told outright lies often and boldly enough, they came to be believed.

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.