A Strategic Blunder?

The image above is a screenshot from a video of a trans rights protester and security men at the Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne. The mike had been grabbed from a woman speaker, and two men wrestled with the protester to retrieve it. 

The way the two men are behaving, and especially the hand around the protester's throat, and how they frame part of the sign behind them, caught my eye. it also caught the eye of influential trans activist, Katie Montgomery. Let Women Speak organiser, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, claims that the protester was trans, but a masked woman calling herself Joanne, and claiming to be the protester, appeared on Montgomery's You Tube channel.  

Given her face is clearly visible on two of the videos I've seen of the incident, quite why Joanne needed to wear a mask while being interviewed by Montgomery, is anyone's guess. 

Joanne also said, along with some standard issue Antifa agitprop, that no complaint would be laid with the police as they are "all bastards".

It's a bit immaterial in any event given the image has already provided grist for the trans rights mill, and it's completely inappropriate for a bloke to grab anyone by the throat in that way.

The security overreach aside, I don't much like the image of big men acting as "protectors" of little women, nor the name of the event which to me sounds a bit too much like a request than a demand. 

More importantly, there is the question of how the person who has made herself the iconic centre of the movement, ought to have reacted to actual Nazis gatecrashing her event. If she was sensible, and if she wants to win the middle ground on this issue – and that is where it will be decided – Keen-Minshull should have immediately issued a press statement condemning that sort of far right, ultra-nationalist, white supremacist movement without reservation, and distancing her organisation, and gender critical feminism more widely, from it. 

She, or the Aussie organisers, should also have immediately asked formal questions of the Victoria police as to why Nazis were allowed to parade in that way at that point, and why they ushered the twenty Black Shorts out through the cordon they'd established between the LWS rally and the trans rights protesters.

It seems that Keen-Minshull decided not to comment until pressured during an interview which made it all too little, too late. Had she never been prepared to share platforms with far right organisations and individuals, her claim that people should realise Let Women Speak is nothing to do with the far right might hold more water than it does.  

Her supporters, instead of urging her to distance herself, are arguing she should not have to issue a statement because the trans activists won't believe her, and they will demand more and more retractions and qualifying statements until she is forced to resile from gender critical claims and demands completely. But, without such a statement, and in light of her prior connections, the trans activists were always going to dominate the media discourse, and her refusal to speak out was always going to be widely interpreted as further proof that she is either on the far right or is indebted to far right organisations in some way. Every far right, religious extremist organisation or individual coat-tailing these issues which are not rejected by GC feminists, will be taken as proof, either of political naiveté or of cynical collaboration, or worse, as evidence that the entire movement is what the gender identity extremists claim – far right and transphobic.

Keen-Minshull is gutsy and self-opinionated; she is clearly stubborn, and she likes to win. These qualities, combined with a lack of political campaigning experience mean she makes tactical blunders. The rambling video she made that was directed at the NZ prime minister over the questions raised about her right of entry to the country, is a case in point. 

Her stubborn insistence that, for example, gender identity is so important an issue for all women, losing abortion rights would be a price worth paying to stop it, is either acting as a calculating spokeswoman for the forces that want to remove the right to abortion, or she is so focussed on a single goal, so intent on winning, and so buoyed up by her own celebrity, she fails to consider the wider implications of what she says. 

NZ transactivists and allies are indulging in the most inflamed rhetoric imaginable, for example, seeing "white power gestures" in her hand movements, which only serves to polarise the debate even further. 

She should have taken every opportunity to defuse that sort of foolishness by making it absolutely and immediately clear she will have no truck with far right extremists. Instead, she tacitly encouraged her supporters to counter-attack with salvos of their own hyperbolic claims and feverish rhetoric. 

I don't know enough about her to be able to say with absolute certainty whether she is a right winger who is calculatedly using this facet of a re-energised women's rights movement, or if she is a well-intentioned woman whose anger has been fanned by the hyperbolic rejection of her concerns by trans activists and allies in white left. 

Their smug certitude often makes me spit tacks so I can understand why some women are now anti-left, or at least, the so-called "woke" left. Whether that makes them committed to the right or to the far right is moot, as is whether any of them can be won back to the left. 

That political ball is in very much in play. 

Keen-Minshull is now being presented both in the legacy media and on social media in NZ in the most ludicrously hyperbolic terms. An article on what should be NZ's voice of balance, rationality, and moderation, Radio NZ, failed to do even the most basic checks on the story. Had they done so, they'd have seen that the Black Shorts were not there to support LWS but to hijack both the rally and the counter-protest for their own political ends ... the promotion of their brand of fundamentalist, white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, hyper-patriarchal Christianity. 

These "anti-paedo" groups are currently focussed on the same sort of claims that drove a man to rush into a pizza restaurant in Washington with an automatic weapon, to "rescue" the kidnapped children he believed had been chained in the basement by Democratic Party child abusers. It's also behind the links now being drawn between drag queens and paedophilia.

These are the sort of people who form real-life vigilante squads, and some of whom are so full of rage they have lost all connection to reality. The story about vigilantes who attacked a UK paediatrician's home in 2000 because they got confused about her job title is amusing... until these people turn their on-line conspiracy theorising into more serious forms of action and people get hurt or killed. (1)

Notes:

(1) These conspiracists don't realise there are two sorts of child sex abusers (leaving aside the far great number of adults who physically abuse kids) – those driven by a parafilia, and those who are just selfish, callous sexual opportunists. Malignant paedophiles don't do their grooming by dressing in drag and reading to kids in a public library; they groom by stealth, and they mostly wear business suits or forms of religious garb. For an abused kid it doesn't much matter which they are in truth, but hysteria or blinding rage from the adults around them is likely to add to the long-term harm.

Filthy Forestry

In 2016 I wrote this. People have been warning about the disastrous effects of poor land management for decades. My dad grew up in rural Whanganui, and as a young man he farmed on Banks Peninsula, and he always said that to stop the erosion, NZ’s steeply folded major catchments would need to be reforested in native bush.

The destruction of Aotearoa-NZ's dense, multi-story, water retaining native forest in order to plant pasture, led to a massive loss of top soil as rains eroded the bare tops of steep land. (1) This sort of erosion resulted in the silt laden flooding that has occurred before in exceptional rains  in places like the Esk Valley. 

What we now know, or should, is that these once exceptional rains are now happening frequently.

Pinus radiata grows faster in NZ than anywhere else on the globe. Historically, mass planting of it and other exotics was done by the state to stabilise areas of land exposed to erosion by earlier native forest clearance, and on so-called marginal land as job creation schemes during the Great Depression.

The planting to stabilise eroding catchment areas staved off the erosion problem for a time until, as happens with all mass commercial planting, the trees reach harvesting stage, and are clear felled. 

 

What was not known then, and is seldom commented upon even now, is the fact that pine trees give off large amounts of gases containing alkaloids which have the useful by-product of making the area around the trees hostile to other plant species. 

 

When these gases react with the sort of airborne artificial chemicals produced by human activity, they create toxic biogenic particles which "are chemically transformed by free radicals after they are first formed in the atmosphere." 

 

The greater the numbers of pine trees there are combining with airborne artificial chemicals from human activity, the worse this aerosol pollution will be, and it can travel for hundreds of kilometres on the wind, and is not just harmful to human beings. (2)

 

To allow access for the giant trucks and other huge machines on which commercial forestry depends, roads are carved out which, on steep land, become water courses and add to erosion. 

 

Clear felling is carried out even though not all trees will be ready or suitable for harvest. Clear felling is purely for industry convenience. The only logs that are wanted are those of a certain range of diameter, straightness, and length. All others and the tops of the trees, roots, side branches, bark etc are left as waste.

 

Screenshot of part of the Esk River catchment from Google Maps 

 

Areas are cleared in the forest for the processing and stacking of logs, and the slash is rowed up, or pushed into heaps. When water rushes down off the bare hillsides in heavy rains, it takes with it vast amounts of this debris – combining with loose rock and top soil into a literal lahar. 

The destructive force of a heavily silt laden river is bad enough, add rock and wood and it becomes the sort of monster we have recently seen devastate parts of Hawkes Bay.

The forest floor in a commercial pine plantation is a desert because dense pine forest is inimical to most other plants species, and to native birds.  One plant that can co-exist with pine if there is enough light, is gorse – one of the most invasive noxious weeds in NZ. Gorse also grows here faster than anywhere else and it can seed up to three times a year. When the pines are felled, before any new planting can be done, plants like gorse take off.

Far more of the alkaloids pine releases when it burns are produced in cooler, smouldering fires such as you might see in a controlled burn or in the burning of slash, which brings me to the question of how the industry ought to dispose of its monumental amounts of waste. 

 

I’ve read some stupid, politically motivated posts on social media from people claiming that the burning of slash was stopped in the 1980s because of pressure from environmentalists. Given these people cannot envisage the possibility of forestry corporations being expected to invest in other ways of disposing of their waste, they conclude that the destruction we saw last week was caused by "greenies and lefties". (3)

 

The issue of carbon emissions from huge fires aside, those who think burning forestry slash is a problem-free solution should address themselves to the other potential adverse effects of the practice.

 

You either leave the slash to dry out, which creates a flood and fire risk while it’s drying, or you burn it green, which means it smoulders possibly for weeks, and as stated above, green pine burning at lower temperatures produces larger amounts of toxic alkaloids. So, if it's burned when still green, there will be an increase air pollution.

 

If it's left to dry, even if rains like the ones we saw last week don't occur, there's an increased fire risk given these huge piles of slash can smoulder for weeks and possibly months, and be reignited in dry and/or windy conditions. (4)

 

The fire risk is exacerbated by the fact that even if it’s quickly replanted, other plants which tolerate the wasteland created by densely planted pines will have started growing. The most prolific of these is gorse, which is both highly invasive, difficult to eradicate, and highly flammable even when young and green.

 

Recently, as part of the emissions trading scheme, the planting of massive pine forests has become doubly attractive to corporations, both as a longer term cash crop and to create carbon credits. Moves by the NZ Labour government to remove such forests from the ETS were blocked by the forestry lobby. Māori especially objected, claiming it could cost the Māori economy billions of dollars given Māori are major forest owners (they will own 40% once Treaty settlements are completed), and make up around 40% of the forestry workforce.

 

Environmental activists who are calling for an end to dirty dairying must also face the realities of filthy forestry, especially when mass planting of pines under the ETS moves from forestry on marginal land to planting on productive farmland, and if bad forestry management practices result in more disasters such as the one we have just seen in Hawkes Bay.  

Notes:

 
1.   NZ always has and continues to lose top soil at one of the highest rates in the world. For an economy that depends on agriculture and viticulture, that’s several stops past Stupid and Unsustainable.

2.   Aerosol pollution is unquestionably deadly; in the United States alone it kills more than 50,000 people each year.

  
3.   This is on a par with right wing radio hosts using the cyclone as a political weapon with which to beat the government, and appealing to those people who are already convinced the country’s “going down the woke toilet”, we have lost resilience, etc etc. Arguably the least “resilient” people in the country riding their political high horse was a sight some of us will never forget or forgive. 

4.   A man who had a huge macrocarpa tree on the boundary with a property with extensive native plantings, created a stockaded area under the tree from old dry wood from conifers in his shelter belt. Unbeknown to his neighbours, he build a campfire under the tree, with a tripod for his billy and he’d go down there and make himself a cup of tea. The region had a few days of gale force nor’westers, which, unusually and fortunately for the neighbours, had dumped a lot of rain. In a break in the gales, even though more were predicted, the man decided to light his campfire and boil his billy. Having doused the fire, he went back indoors. The wind picked up again and his neighbours looked out a while later to see smoke on their boundary, then saw the flames race up through the huge tree. The fire the man thought he had totally doused had enough life in it for a damp nor’wester to reignite it, and blow burning embers into the dry wood of his stockade which burst into flames and set fire to the tree. The fire burned fiercely enough to kill the huge old tree, melt fence wires and burn deep into fence posts. Fortunately, the volunteer fire brigade put it out before it could travel downwind into neighbouring properties. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hypocrisy Rules

It's appalling that the tragic death of a man in Auckland who was stabbed after chasing a robber, is being used as a political football. 

The equally tragic death by stabbing of a Christchurch man who was out walking his dog is not attracting quite the same attention from the law and order mob.

The same people who mocked and derided Jacinda Ardern for "playing to the gallery" after the Christchurch mosque murders, are now praising her political opponents for doing the same over Janak Patel's tragic death, and they are lambasting the PM for not cancelling a trip to the Chathams to show due respect.

Say what you will about Ardern's politics, but I'll stand by my opinion that she's completely genuine in her empathy with, and sympathy for, all victims of violence.

I can't say the same about many of the political poseurs and opportunists who are helping stoke the fires of the current moral panic over rising street crime.

There's nothing more useful to the political right in the run up to an election than a moral panic – except several, mutually reinforcing moral panics.

It's a well established fact that socially conservative people tend to drift towards, and to be more accepting of authoritarian governance (or people who promise it) especially at times of heightened social uncertainty and personal anxiety. 

Media-inflated moral panics are a great way of ensuring high levels of both, and none more so than those centred around such things as violent crime, parental rights, and child abuse. 

If you can place an ethnic, or other minority at the heart of the moral panic, so much the better.

Janak Patel's death is an outcome of a set of social issues and problems that are far wider and more entrenched than the law and order tub thumpers have either the wit or the heart to comprehend, let alone respond to sensibly. 

This was an instance of horizontal violence, ie poor people robbing slightly more affluent people.

Very affluent people with legitimate avenues of making money don't tend to rob little corner shops, or carry a knife and stab a worker who chases after them.

These small businesses, in terms of location, opening hours, staffing levels etc are vulnerable, easier to target and to rob than larger businesses. Their profit margins mean the owners can't afford sophisticated security measures, or to employ several members of staff which could be a deterrent. 

A lot of those who are crying crocodile tears about the small businesses that are falling victim to horizontal crime don't give a damn about them in truth. If they did, they'd stand up for them against the giant corporates whose economies of scale force the likes of dairies into the sorts of opening hours and staffing levels which make them all the more vulnerable to being robbed by low level criminals.

For those who are minded to use this sad death to score political points, let me remind you of another time when a senseless, tragic death occurred as a result of a similar example of horizontal crime, and which was also used by a cynical law and order lobby. 

A pizza delivery man, was lured to an address where a group of kids waited to rob him. The kids were all brown-skinned and they ranged in age from twelve to seventeen. One of them hit the man with a baseball bat and they robbed him. He staggered back towards his vehicle, tried to get assistance from people in the locality but no one helped him and he died from a brain bleed. 

Utterly tragic.

Much of the NZ media gorged on the spectacle, whipping up rage among a population already in a state of heightened alert as a result of the efforts of right wing law and order lobbyists.

All the kids were charged with murder and the youngest became the focal point of a salivating media in what has to be one of NZ journalism's least edifying moments. 

Sensible and scientifically supported arguments in the kids' defence – e.g they were not neurologically mature enough to fully understand the consequences of their actions; they'd been raised on a diet of television and video games in which people get whacked on the head with a baseball bat and are up and about immediately with little more than a few cuts and bruises – were waved aside. 

None of it resonated with the police, the prosecution, the courts, the media or with way too many of the NZ public, especially the racists.

The kids were cast as callous little monsters. People who, in every other respect, wouldn't have given the likes of Michael Choy as much as a passing thought, elevated him to the highest level of victimhood – not because they cared about him or others like him – but because by elevating him as a victim, they could all the more effectively diminish and dehumanise the kids whose reckless criminal action had cost him his life. 

This is obviously not a direct parallel as Janak Patel's alleged killer is a grown man but expect a lot of similar media overkill and cynical and politically opportunist tub thumping if he fits the law and order mob's template for a legitimate target. 

On Compassion

Some Sunday post-Twitter musings. 

Why do some women see compassion as a quality that has been imposed on them to ensure their compliance within the patriarchy or various forms of phallocracy? 

If women are indeed socialised into being more compassionate, surely that's a good thing and should be encouraged. 

If we shrug off female compassion as a mere outcome of patriarchal / phallocratic social relations – what are we saying about the quality of being human? 

Being compassionate and having empathy are human qualities; in a healthy society we'd all be socialised into them, and people who lacked them would be a cause for concern or would be ostracised. 

Could it be that it these essentially cooperative qualities have to be socialised out of people?

To me, the very essence of being human is the capacity for compassion and empathy – especially extending beyond your own ‘kind’ ie kin / ethnic group / religion / country etc.

It's an essential ingredient in the glue that holds people together in groups, and it's only in groups that we become fully human. 

How those groups function internally powerfully influences how they function externally. The dominance of aggressive competition within a group or society increases the likelihood of that group or society being in aggressive competition with others.

There's too much glorifying of the stereotypically masculine and denigrating of the stereotypically feminine in our world; it's what liberal feminism has capitulated to – the eulogising and reifying of some ultra-feminine stereotypes, especially related to appearance, combined with the uncritical adoption of some masculine stereotypes, especially related to aggressive competitiveness.

I can get as infuriated with the self absorbed, heedless machinations of social media influencers,  identiactivists and smug beardy-bros as anyone, and on a gut level I might want to punch them; on a more intellectual level I see them as products of a dysfunctional society. 

There has NEVER been a more dangerous time than this moment in history; never has humanity faced challenges on a scale of those we face here at this precise point in our existence as a discrete species. And such is the impact we have had on the planet, what adversely affects us also affects all other living creatures.

To hear a person I once admired hugely for his style of gentle, targetless humour (so rare in our world) talk about the 21st century as if it was a thing of which to be proud because he, now she, can be in permanent "girl mode", is a tad annoying. 

As is knowing that someone has become famous and hugely influential by donning the most crippling of gender straitjackets ...the ones that depict women as airheads and bimbos. 

Only narcissists and psychopaths fail to accept the fact that life involves a series of compromises. Properly socialised people accept there are a number of triaging processes going on, and sometimes someone else gets priority. 

All those who are lining up to fight for sex-based or for identity based rights need to ask, am I in this because I really care about vulnerable people?

Outside of pointing out and opposing the additional risk posed to those vulnerable people by malignant or vexatious actors, what have I done, what am I prepared to do to make their lives less vulnerable?

What would I be prepared to do and to give up to ensure poor, marginalised, abused people are better placed to protect themselves, to make their own choices rather than continue to be the objects of state aid or private charity? 

The tragic answer is, quite a few not only do sod all, they're not prepared to give up anything.

The rapidly widening schism in what had the capacity to be a re-energised women's liberation movement, has given rise to those who are on the political right and those who need justification for allying with it, referring to themselves not as feminists but as "femalists".

This is a forelock tug to the simple, if ingenious, marketing strategy of Posie Parker – placing the standard dictionary definition of woman onto a range of "merch". 

(I don't know about you but I find that word to be intensely irritating. Merch, schmerch.)

Honestly, can it get any more surreal? 

If you have no commitment to structural change, or if you are anti-trans in the sense of finding trans people to be unnatural and unacceptable, then I have to repeat, I'm not your ally.  

But, if you are so mired in your desire to be woke, or so fearful of being branded a TERF you refuse to look past the immediate issue to what's really at stake, I'm not your ally either. 

Someone recently accused me of sitting on a burning fence; I prefer to see myself as having climbed a small prominence nearby in order to be able to keep a better eye on the antics of both extremes. Of course, being stuck up there also makes me an easy target for both. 

Ho hum.

Yet more matters ideological

Still on the identity politics theme, which is getting increasingly hard to avoid on both social and mainstream media, and breaking news for those who claim there’s no such thing as a transgenderist ideology, there is in fact a set of beliefs about the state of being transgender, which are characteristic of a group – ergo an ideology. 

These beliefs are usually presented on social media in the form of memes and mantras, and in mainstream media, in opinion pieces and articles that are often poorly-researched and one-sided.

These beliefs include: 

• Biological sex is not binary, it is on a spectrum, and the existence of the range of disorders or differences of sex differentiation is appropriated to support that claim.
• Gender identity is innate, or develops so early in development, it might as well be.
• Gender identity can also be fluid.
• People who are born male, even those who make no medical or appearance changes are, if they so declare, to be regarded as adult human females, legally and socially, and vice versa. 
• Any negative impact on current sex-based rights which exist to protect women and girls, or to counter-balance historical or current sex-based disadvantages, is deemed to be either non-existent or insignificant in comparison to the advantages accruing to transwomen of being fully included in the category of women or adult human female.
• To be inclusive of the tiny minority of transmen who still menstruate, or who want and are able to conceive and go through pregnancy, and so as to not emphasise the inability of transwomen to menstruate or to gestate new life, the terms associated with all aspects of being reproductively female, must be made gender-neutral. Hence terms like pregnant people, menstruators, people with a cervix, gestational or non-gestational parent, human milk, chest feeding, etc should be used. 
• Terms like biologically or genetically female or male must not be used.
• It is literally possible to be born in the wrong body, i.e. there is such a thing as a female brain in an otherwise male body, or vv.  
• At a more metaphysical level, there can be a female or male essence/ soul / spirit  inhabiting a male or a female body.
• Misgendering (ie use of incorrect third person pronouns) or dead naming (using a former name) should be designated as hate crimes. 
• It is possible for a three-year-old to know they are transgender, and appropriate for such a chid to be socially transitioned.
• If trans kids are not allowed to delay puberty chemically, they will kill themselves in alarming numbers. (1)
• Puberty blockers are harmless, or any harm they do is analogous to chemotherapy for childhood cancers.

And so on – a number of beliefs that constitute an ideology in the current sense of the word, and many of which are also ideological in the archaic sense of the word – i.e. visionary speculation of an unrealistic or idealistic nature.

In the 1980s – as neo-liberalism was poised to send the social and natural worlds into a tail spin from which both may never recover – a social contagion swept the anglophone world. 

Large numbers of people – many in  positions of authority – believed absolutely in the existence of a giant, global conspiracy of satanic child abusers. This drew together some very unlikely bedfellows such as the police, religious fundamentalists, and some radical feminists – and spread its tentacles into the corridors of governance. 

The evil-doers who were the focus of that moral panic were both male and female, and deemed to be literal immolators of children. Most of the victims of the moral panic were ordinary people, many of them parents, caught up in the hysteria. 

Most of the witch hunters and the vigilante mobs unleashed by them were not remotely interested in changing society foundationally in order that all children might be protected from all forms of abuse. They were in the grip of a weird form of bloodlust that demanded – and got – sacrifice. There are some who are still in its grip.

In this current era – which is a tipping point for neo-liberal capitalism and may well herald a rapid descent into some form of overt authoritarianism – there is a current social contagion, a wave of a fervent, almost blind-to-reason belief in the immutability of gender identity. It is ostensibly in defence of transgender people, and widely seen as progressive, ergo a phenomenon of the left. 

The witch hunters of this movement are both male and female, but it's the former who tend to be the most aggressive and domineering in pretty much all facets – who’d have guessed?

The designated evil-doers are TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who are deemed to be the worst enemies (the hyperbole even extends into them being literal killers) of trans people, by being the primary instigators and transmitters of transphobia.

Trans people are depicted as uniformly weak and vulnerable and in need of protection – even those who gained (and retain) all the physical, social, and economic benefits of being born male, middle or upper class, and white.

Although there are men involved, in the mind's eye of the social media mobs, TERFs are female – and not just female – white, middle-class, feminist females. (2)

If these mobs, and the mass of institutional fellow travellers, were all in pursuit of a permanent change in the social and economic base of the world that was aimed at benefitting all people, if they were removing and disposing of the behavioural straitjacket of sex-role stereotypes – their fervour could be applauded – but mostly, they’re not. 

Mostly they're in the grip of a social contagion, or they are displacing their own disquiet, transferring their intense emotions from one sticking point to another. Or they are – not to put too fine a point on it – moral and political cowards. 

The TERF has become gender identity obsessed progressives’ social media scapegoat – rid the world of the TERF, and all will be well. 

Of course, most of them know that it won't. They know there'll still be racism, poverty, war, femicide, rape, economic and sexual exploitation, the annual holocaust of needless deaths of small black and brown persons, and all against the backcloth of a looming, multi-faceted global ecological disaster, but they can shelve all that while they're doing the work of the virtuous in silencing the Terrible TERFs.

It would be funny if it were not so destructive and divisive.

Notes:

(1)  An almost inevitable consequence of delayed puberty is multiple, major surgeries to change the body, and a life time of cross-sex HRT with attendant medical surveillance and testing regimes because of increased risk of cancer and of metabolic organ damage. There is also the hugely vexed question of whether, without such medical intervention,  some – possibly most – of these kids would become lesbian or gay. 

(2) This should also be considered in relation to another rising phenomenon - blaming white, middle class women for - well,  just about everything.

Essence vs appearance

I'm getting hesitant about dipping my toes into the gender identity piranha pool but to me what matters about this ideology is its incredibly divisive and polarising nature – which is well demonstrated in this Facebook thread.

 Of particular note in the thread is the unedifying spectacle of biological determinists accusing the other side of being biological essentialists, and people roping in the complexities of differences of sex differentiation as proof of the assertion that gender (learned behaviour) is in fact innate whilst biological sex ­­– the foundation of species reproduction – is on a spectrum and mutable and can and should be changed as far as possible to align with a subjective, empirically unverifiable sense of an individual gendered self. 

 

Essence is in a battle to the death with appearance.

 

In my view, the current gender identity orthodoxy has been and still is accommodated by neo-liberalism and its compliant governments and NGOs precisely because it is idealist, individualistic, and divisive of the broad left. 

In truth, GI is a key player in NLism’s drive to break up all mass collectives which might threaten its economic dominance, and it has proved to be the perfect bandwagon for the west’s large numbers of useful idiots in search of a trendy cause. 

Gender identity ideology and its praxis breaks populations down to the level of a bespoke and subjective individual sense of gendered identity; reaggregation into small groups occurs and is tolerated and even promoted but only as long as those groupings pose no threat to the economic status quo. 

 

Anyone who refers to gender identity activists as being far left is ill-informed, or so far to the right they’ve either tipped over into a state of unreason or are at imminent risk of doing so. The primary source of support on the left for the ideology and its attendant praxis comes not from the old red left, but from the politically exsanguinated neo-liberal left which has given up on achieving foundational change and makes itself feel virtuous by filling in some of the superficial cracks in an inherently inequitable, grossly exploitative, and unstable system. 

 

Many on the neo-liberal left are in fact so comfy in the managerial / academic / technocratic roles they occupy, or anticipate occupying, they’re blind to how tactically dumb it is – in a world teetering on the edge of a perfect storm of natural and social disasters – to risk driving impoverished and anxious people into the waiting arms of the right. 

 

All those who are now crying about the alt-right leaping on the gender identity rights versus sex based rights issue need to ask whether, had trans activists not ridden rough-shod over sex-based rights, would there have been a backlash for the right to coat-tail and exploit?

 

Eg. why did TAs not lobby for additions to language to acknowledge and accommodate gender non-conforming people instead of a seemingly arrogant insistence on replacing language that was inevitably going to piss off large numbers of people, help further erode confidence in the left, and expose trans people to ridicule and aggression? 

 

And before anyone winds up the virtue sirens, replacing breast feeding with chest feeding, vagina with (the truly execrable) front hole, mother with birthing parent, menstruating women with bleeders etc is not the same as challenging sex and race stereotypes in language. 

 

Attacking arguably the most foundational of human beliefs about a material reality that cuts across sex, class, race, age, and in what is often a heedless and at times embarrassingly dumb fashion, was always going to result in a backlash. 

 

Like many of the older left wing feminists involved in all this, I was agitating for the destruction of the gender straitjacket decades before gender identity became the trendy issue du jour, and I’m frightened for all those who stand to be harmed when the political pendulum swings back and acts like a scythe. 

Gender critical feminists who are on the right or those who are prepared to ally with the right on this one issue, who think that scythe will somehow miss the sex-based rights they're fighting to protect, need to think again.

The last iteration of divisive and diversionary politics on the left helped usher in NLism. Given what may follow corporate capitalism could well be barbarism, people need to stop arguing over how to treat a headache when the patient’s clearly at risk of dying of sepsis.

 

On Schisms And Who Benefits From Them

I’m from a working class background, and I owe everything I have and am to a window of opportunity that opened up for working class girls and women in the west, post WW2. 

That window has not just been slammed shut, it has been bricked up, and a trompe l'oeil painted on it to fool people into thinking it’s still there and any failure to get through it is their own fault. 

I started this year determined to move past the issue du jour – gender identity – and widen my focus. I failed, and recently a thing I've been gloomily predicting for some time has come to fruition – social and political ultra-conservatives have coat-tailed feminist concerns about the effects of gender self identification on women's sex-based rights, and a schism has opened in the movement.

Some seasoned feminists, as well as women new to feminism, have been persuaded that entering into an alliance with people who are their nemesis on every other issue, is both essential and sensible because gender identity is more immediately threatening than anything else – even the terrifyingly obvious threat of several converging social and natural crises, each capable of causing a global catastrophe.

Some people, on what can usefully be described as the left of Neo-liberalism (NLL), and with utter predictability, have seized on the now openly acrimonious schism within what has become known as “gender critical feminism” (GCF).

For those who don't know, GCF is a default name for various sorts and degrees of opposition to the “gender identity” movement and its political orthodoxy.

A straight-talking, spirited woman in the UK, who "boldly channels her inner Monroe", has emerged as a somewhat unlikely leader of a single-issue coalition which now ranges from radical lesbian separatists and radical feminists, to people who are on the political far right.

A clever marketer, and unashamed populist, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull  (aka Posie Parker), has used the issue of gender self identification, with its negative connotations for women's sex-based rights, as a base on which to build an influential platform.

 

Seemingly oblivious to the part they have played in the rapid progression of this over the past five years, the NLL can’t resist having a dig at those left wing feminists who have been labelled as “gender critical” but who would and will not countenance entering into alliance with the far-right on this, or any other issue, and whose approach to gender (as in sex stereotypes) is to want to destroy it.

 

The schism runs along an older fault line and was inevitable but the NLL does not get to slide out from under its culpability in all of this.

 

In the UK, labelled "TERF Island" by TAs, the NLL leapt on gender identity as an excuse to divert away from the myriad and pressing feminist and traditional left wing concerns such as poverty and the life expectancy of poor working class girls dropping for the first time in a century, plus what anyone with half a political brain can see – the rapid advance of right wing authoritarianism globally which will hit women first and worst.

 

The NLL's preparedness to drop even the pretence of a commitment to class politics, and to declare gender identity to be the "preeminent human rights issue of the era", is to their eternal discredit. 

 

The NLL –  or people purporting to be leftists – have in fact helped KJK to build her platform by pushing socially conservative women to the political right via such unedifying tactics as calling them “deplorable cunts", or "Nazi adjacent,".  If not actually stooping to telling dissenting women to “suck my big fat trans cock”,  they defend or fail to challenge the almost always pseudonymous accounts that do so.

 

From where I stand, there’s a depressingly small number of mainly left wing, principled women and men who have held the line that gender identity is, and always was a diversionary politics, and a part of wider and more dangerous movements aimed at weakening the broad left, in the service of global corporate capitalism.  

 

When did capitalism ever actively promote a movement which so much as threatened its profits, let alone its existence?  What other movement in the history of opposition to entrenched power has been so rapidly and enthusiastically embraced by the capitalist power nexus and its governmental and NGO helpmates? 

At best, the gender identity movement is accommodative politics; at worst, it’s among the most divisive ideological weapons capitalism has ever deployed.

 

Both the political principles and the praxis of gender identity politics were always going to provide fuel for the right to use to whip up fear and anger among the vast ranks of the socially conservative.

 

And sorry, all you white leftists and actual or would-be social trangressives, but socially conservative people are not just vast in number, they cut right across class, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, and yes, even gender identity. 

 

Make them feel really threatened, and you've turned up the heat under the mother and father of all moral panics. Even in a more stable world that would be dangerous; in a world in a state of growing social and natural disequilibrium, it's reckless beyond justification.

 

                                                                     * * * * 

On both the extremes of this most polarised and polarising argument are those who, for a variety of reasons, see it as the single, maybe the only issue that matters. 

Gender critical feminism is a single issue movement which attracts a cross-section of feminists who see gender identity ideology and praxis as a major threat to women's sex-based rights, and to lesbianism. Within the ranks of the feminists involved in this, the essential divide for me is between radical, socialist, and liberal feminism. 

Very broadly and simplistically, the first is female-centric and locates the oppression of women within patriarchal arrangements, and its political priority is destruction of  the patriarchy. The second sees the liberation of women as a prerequisite of, and dependent on the liberation of all, and the third focusses on formal rights and parity with male peers within the existing socio-economic order.

Although she allies with radical and lesbian feminists, Posie Parker is neither a lesbian nor a radical feminist; she is purely and solely against gender identity ideology, and if she's any sort of feminist at all, it's a liberal feminist.

 

She now talks about the failures of left wing women to hold back the tide of transgenderism over the period since the “dead cat” of Gender Recognition Act reform was dropped Into UK politics by Tory spin doctors. 

 

That’s the time she’s been building an increasingly populist platform, which she is now using to turn women against other women – some of whom have spent ten times that long working tirelessly for women’s and wider rights.

It's hard not to see her as anything other than sectarian; or an opportunistic bandwagon jumper who has dragged her supporters into covert and overt alliances with the political and religious right in pursuit of a perilously narrow political aim. 

At best, she's well meaning but too narrowly focused; at worst, she has slipped into being (maybe always was), a tub-thumping, right wing populist and ideologue who's using this issue to divide women, and to demonise the entire left, including left wing feminism. 

 

That narrow focus serves only one set of political and economic interests – and it’s not the bulk of women, and it’s not the working class.

 

She’s not saying – “Let's unite to fight this one manifestation of Neo-liberalism as a priority, and use it to build a vast movement to tackle all the other issues that are grinding vast numbers of people into the ground, and threatening the entire planet".

What she's saying is – “Stopping people with a penis saying they're women and invading women’s spaces is the only battle that matters.”

 

In that, she has become the polar opposite of the other extreme of the gender identity divide which claims – "People with a penis are female if they say they are." 

 

A key difference between KJK and the gender identity radicals is most of the latter at least pay lip service to some older left wing priorities.

 

Any working class woman who thinks KJK will take a stand against Tory austerity measures; any woman of colour who thinks she'll stand up against racism; any disabled woman who thinks she'll stand against the iniquities of an unravelling welfare system; any lesbian who thinks she’ll stand against the far right when it turns on the wider LGB population – needs to wake up.

 

And anyone who thinks any of this sectarian division is remotely good for anyone outside of the economic elite and those it deems to be currently useful, needs to think again. 

 

The ruling class and its helpmates have spent centuries perfecting their divide and rule tactics. In over half a century of various forms of left activism, I’ve never seen anything quite as divisive of the left as this – or as useful and timely for those whose pappy, manicured hands are on the controls of the economic train that’s about to take us all over the edge of a precipice.

 

This isn’t a game or a drill.