To T or not to T

It is unsurprising to those with a clear view of the genesis and progression of the current transgender orthodoxy (CTO) that the perception of large numbers of natal males entering female sports, plus growing concerns about paediatric transition framed both as enabling child sexual abuse, and an attack on parental rights, would become the main foci of a powerful right wing and social conservative backlash. 

The abject failure of much of what passes for the left in the neo-liberal era, to see the potential for such a backlash is depressing enough, but that many on the left have blamed feminists for both the right wing coat-tailing of the issues and the social conservative backlash, adds insult to injury. 

What follows focusses on the issue of transgender riders in women’s cycling.

 

Making the headlines

 

The latest trans sports imbroglio is centred around a transgender cyclist having won the 5-stage Tour of the Gila, ⁽¹⁾ a victory that has resulted in 27-year-old Austin Killips, a relative newcomer to both cycling and to transgender identity, being tipped for a place on the US women’s cycling team in next year’s Paris Olympics.

 

Killips initially took up the sport of cyclocross in 2019, and switched into road cycling, racing for the Amy D Foundation team. ⁽²⁾ There’s no doubting a competitive drive that was on display in what looked like a deliberate barging of fellow competitor, Hannah Arensman, in an attempt to push her off her bike in the 2022 US Cyclocross National Championships. Being relegated to fourth place, and there being two transgender cyclists in the top five riders, precipitated Arensman’s retirement from the sport. ⁽³⁾

Despite an intense competitive drive, it’s fair to say that the only way Killips was ever going to stand on a winner’s podium in an elite cycling race, was to compete against women. 

 

The wider significance of a transgender cyclist’s victory in a race which is minor league in the UCI international calendar, should not be overstated, but it may be important for what it signals for the future of women’s sport, and for professional women’s cycling in particular. 

 

Cycling, a niche for everyone

 

Cycling has a huge range of events to choose from, most of which are Olympic sports, and all of which attract sponsorship. Road racing ranges from multi stage races, to one day classics, time trials, and criteriums. On the track there’s a range of team and individual sprint and endurance races, and there other disciplines like cross country mountain and downhill mountain biking, BMX, gravel racing and cyclocross.

 

Women’s cycling has struggled for parity in a sport that was once completely dominated by men, so much so, it took 88 years after the first men’s road race at the Olympics in 1896 for a women’s race to be introduced. ⁽⁴⁾

 

Eleven years ago, then UCI president, Pat McQuaid, declared that women’s cycling had not progressed sufficiently to warrant mandating a minimum wage for female cyclists. A year later, his successor, Brian Cookson, said it would be introduced within a year; it was finally introduced in 2020 with incremental increases aimed at parity with men by 2023. 

Suffice it to say, no elite woman' salary comes close to €6m  that UAE currently pays Tadej Pogacar; AnneMiek Van Vleuten's annual salary with Mobistar is €250k.

 

In 2014, Nairo Quintana received €200,000 for winning the Giro d'Italia, while Marianne Vos received €535 for winning the women’s race. There is still not full parity in prize money and there’s a vast gap in commercial sponsorship but this year’s Tour of the Gila did see equal prizes for the women’s and men’s races.

 

It’s no accident that more transgender cyclists who went through a male puberty, and many of whom were only moderately successful as men, are entering women’s elite and professional events just as women are beginning to somewhat level the cycling course.

 

It’s also no accident that the sport’s largely male hierarchy can get its institutional head around transgender riders in women’s events more easily than it can pay parity or any of the other discriminatory facets of the sport.

 

Fairness versus inclusion

 

Sports psychologists will attest to how important self-belief is in any athlete, especially those subjected to the intensity of elite competition. Male humans all grow up with the knowledge that when they mature they will be, on average, bigger, stronger, and faster than a comparable female. 

 

Such a grounding may confer a competitive advantage in athletes who grew up as male, went through male puberty and competed as men, when they compete against women.

 

It’s well known that in almost all sports males have a significant average performance advantage (APA) over females. However hard women train, whatever advances are made in sex-specific training and coaching, that APA remains intact. 

 

In cycling, the APA is around 10%. A measure of this is to be found in the comparative times of Annemiek Van Vleuten and Simon Yates on the 11.9k kilometres and 1,200m of vertical ascent of the Monte Zoncolan in stage 9 of the 2014 Giro Rosa and the Giro d'Italia. Van Vleuten’s time was 48 minutes 3 seconds; Yates was 40 minutes 4 seconds. 


 

A more accurate measure is the world hour cycling record which removes most of the variables. For men, in completely comparable Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) mandated conditions and using UCI mandated equipment, the current record for men is 56.792km while for women it is 49.254km.

 

The UCI initially adopted the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) 2015 revised standard for trans athletes of an upper limit of 10nmols/L of serum testosterone for 1 year prior to competition, a level that is four times higher than the top of the female standard reference range (SRR). ⁽⁵⁾ 

 

That disparity was justified by trans lobbyists and advocates with such arguments as: a small minority of women who have an endocrine disorder such as PCOS have higher levels of T than the top of the female SRR; a genetically male body needs a certain level of androgens to maintain wider health; and, any residual advantage is just another in the range of naturally occurring athletic advantages, such as height. ⁽⁶⁾

 

What is seldom commented on except by women, is that this is an additional athletic advantage which only women are being forced to accept. Natal females entering men’s sports, even with an automatic therapeutic use exemption (TUE) for unlimited use of exogenous testosterone, do not pose the same risk to male athletes.

 

Opponents of the entry of natal males into female sports, pointed out that not only was the level and the timing of the reduction grossly unfair, any reduction in serum testosterone ignores the retention of the muscular-skeletal and cardio-vascular advantages gained by being genetically male and having gone through male puberty, plus the psychological advantages of having competed in male events. ⁽⁷⁾

 

After challenges to this compromise solution, the IOC threw up its hands and left it to individual international sporting bodies to make their own rules.

 

Some international and national sporting bodies e.g., World Athletics and World Aquatics, have since moved away from allowing transgender athletes who’ve gone through male puberty, to compete in women’s events, but the UCI and USA Cycling (USAC) adopted a compromise position of a reduction to no more than 2.5 nmols/L for two years prior to competition.

 

Androgens rule, or do they?

 

In 2006 the cycling world watched in amazement as US cyclist, Floyd Landis, recovered after being dropped on a mountain stage in the Tour de France, to power up the next day’s climb, not just convincingly winning the stage but recovering all the time he had lost in the general classification the previous day. He went on to win the GC but was stripped of his title when it was found he had doped with exogenous testosterone. 

 

We all know how far competitive athletes will go in order to win. We also know that for male and female athletes, exogenous testosterone is a powerful performance enhancer, which is why it is banned, and why anything outside of the upper levels of the SRR is likely to lead to suspicion based testing which can now detect exogenous testosterone.

 

It’s also well established that the muscular-skeletal and cardio-vascular changes to the male body during puberty grant an average performance advantage (APA) over females in most sports, and in ALL sports in which speed and power are in play. 

 

There is a growing body of evidence that all those post-pubertal changes are not lost even when natal males have lowered their endogenous testosterone to the top of the female SRR of 0.5 to 2.4 nanomoles per litre (nm/L) compared to a range of 10 to 35 nm/L for men, even with a major reduction of testosterone for two years prior to competition. 

 

If, as has been argued, there is a statistical over-representation in elite sports of female athletes with an undiagnosed 46XY DSD who have male levels of androgens but compete androgen insensitivity, that would suggest male APA does not rest on serum testosterone levels alone. 

 

The Dirty Riever, a largely off-road gravel race in the UK, was recently brought to public attention by Cara Dixon, a trans rider in the 20 to 29 age category, winning the overall women’s 200km event by almost an hour over the second placed woman overall, who was racing in the 30-39 age category. Dixon beat the second placed woman in the 20-29 category by more than two and a half hours. 

 

A man, racing in the 60-69 age category beat the fastest woman overall by an hour and a half, and he beat the fastest natal female in the 20-29 age category by more than 3 hours.

 

There are of course a huge range of variables in play behind those race results but they support two things:  

a) the fact that testosterone is a major player in performance in respect of both power and endurance; and, 

b) it is not the sole component of the APA which post-pubertal natal males have over post-pubertal natal females.

 

The long-term retention of varying degrees of APA, even with full surgical reassignment, is supported by the performance of cyclist, Natalie van Gogh, who transitioned at the age of 30, and rode as a professional for four different women’s teams between 2012-2021, i.e., between the ages of 38 and 46. Despite being far older than any of the other elite female cyclists in the field, Van Gogh still gained 18 top-ten places, including 3 first places. 

 

Other important evidence of serum testosterone being just one, albeit a very important, component of male APA is the fact that some men who have abnormally low testosterone have been highly successful in elite sports.

 

Chris Boardman, a gifted British time trial and prologue specialist who won numerous races and broke the men’s world hour record three times, has an abnormally low endogenous testosterone level which meant he was unable to recover as well as other riders from the rigours of stage racing.

 

The UCI refused to grant him a therapeutic use exemption (TUE) to take prescription exogenous testosterone, despite him having osteopenia and thus being at a far higher risk of severe fractures in a fall. He eventually had to give up cycling in order to take testosterone to slow his bone loss. 

 

It’s interesting that a natal female trans cyclist, under existing UCI rules, is granted an automatic TUE to take exogenous testosterone in order to masculinise, and there’s no stated upper limit on how much is an acceptable level although anything too far over the upper male limit might attract attention as well as cause serious health problems. ⁽⁸⁾

 

British Cycling is currently considering following World Athletics and World Aquatics in not allowing a natal male who has gone through male puberty to compete in women’s events, and it may follow Triathlon in establishing a natal female and an open category.

 

 The UCI’s current standard for transgender athletes to compete in women’s events was a significant downward shift from the IOC’s arbitrary 2015 standard. In reaction to the Gila result, the UCI’s medical director initially remained adamant that there was no intention to move from the current standard. However, in the face of a growing backlash to the win, and the suggestion that it positions Killips for selection for the US Women’s Olympic team, they are now backpedalling.

 

Real threat or yet more ideological hot air?

 

A lot is talked about all this signalling the end of women’s sport. Some of the claims use the same sorts of sweeping statements, hyperbole, and inflamed rhetoric as have been and are deployed by trans rights activists and lobbyists to push for trans inclusion. Both extremes are now highly politically motivated and both sets of arguments and data should be treated with caution as the terrain is even more of an ideological minefield. 

 

The relaxation of entry requirements, including effective self-identification at lower national governed races (in the US, Category 3-5 riders do not need to prove hormone levels), and races that are completely based on self-identification has seen an increase in the numbers of natal males entering women’s events. 

 

Attempts to balance fairness, safety, and inclusion have seen some people advocate for a removal of the sex category in sport entirely, and going over to a Paralympics’ type of weighting of advantages. This would not only be extraordinarily clunky and throw up just as many contradictions, it would serve to draw a veil over the reality that yet again women and girls would lose out.

 

I have listed below all the trans cyclists I can find in the anglophone world in all the many different cycling events, and frankly there aren’t many in total, and there are fewer still who currently pose a real threat to elite women cyclists in any of cycling’s many events – at the moment. ⁽⁹⁾

 

The only truly world class cyclist known to have transitioned, Robert Miller, came out in 2017 as Philippa York. That was long after retirement, and after the 2015 revision of the 2004 Stockholm Consensus and in the context of the spectacular rise in acceptance of gender self-identification.

 

It’s interesting to speculate whether Millar would have transitioned had it been possible, and how the current UCI standard of 2.5 nmols/L for two years would have affected Phillipa York’s performance in the women’s events relative to that of Robert Millar as a male rider. 

 

Whilst that is just speculation, one thing is certain – the status and financial differentials between women’s and men’s cycling are still such that world class male cyclists are highly unlikely to transition when they are in still the running in male events. 

 

There are as many imponderables in all of this as there are hyperbolic assertions but the point for me is, it’s not just about elite, professional sport, and the money and status it generates, it’s about the grassroots of the sport. 

 

One thing is absolutely certain; damage the roots and chances are you will kill the plant.

 

To pee or not to pee

 

One final and slightly tongue-in-cheek point about peeing and bottom hygiene. As all cyclists know, care of the butt when you spend hours in the saddle is analogous to “no hoof, no horse”.

 

It’s also incredibly important for riders to stay well hydrated but the more you drink, the more you may need to pee – and therein lies the anatomical rub for women.

 

Male anatomy allows men to pee while staying on the bike, and there are informal race conventions which prohibit attacking the race leaders if they are having a pee. Women have to stop to pee. 

 

Most elite cyclists these days wear bib shorts, the bib part is under a top, and in cold weather they may wear leg warmers. As female riders don’t want to have to dismount, disrobe and squat, they dismount, pull one leg of their shorts aside and crouch just enough to direct the pee stream to the ground and not down the leg or into their shorts.

 

Thus, riders who have an in-built plumbing advantage, even if they don’t attack while the female race leaders have stopped to pee, could gain considerable ground on them. Too much of this male anatomical advantage in the peloton could see female riders holding on, or not drinking as much, neither of which is good for health. 

 

 

Notes:

 

(1)   The Gila is five-stage road race was added to the UCI American Tour in 2012 as a UCI classification 2.2 stage race meaning it restricts UCI professional continental teams to just two entries, which greatly reduces the level of competition. It was added to the Women’s UCI International tour in 2015.

(2)   The Amy D foundation was set up in memory of US female cyclist, Amy Dombroski, to encourage and support young women through cycling. Tragically, Dombroski, an advocate for equal pay for women in professional cycling, was killed in 2013 when she was hit by a truck while training in Belgium.

(3)   Arensman is religious, and it may be that the bad feeling between her and Killips is because of her anti-trans stance. She is party to a filing with the US Supreme Court aimed at banning natal males from women’s sport that is supported by a powerful right-wing lobby ostensibly aimed at protecting women’s sports but is evidence of the extent to which this issue is fuelling the religious and secular rights’ wider attacks on reproductive rights, and diverting attention away from more covert attacks on such things as labour rights. 

(4)   Having been dominated by men, cycling is set up for men in terms of training/coaching regimes, hierarchies etc. Women’s races are typically shorter and there are fewer competitors meaning smaller pelotons. Riding in a large group allows for a massive saving of energy; the bigger the peloton, the more opportunity to conserve energy. The shorter races may also mean that female racers spend more time relative to men in peak energy output which may have implications for training regimes, for recovery and for long term health.

(5)  The 2004 Stockholm Consensus had allowed transwomen to enter women’s events in the Olympics if they had had full gender assignment surgery, i.e., they no longer produced any endogenous testosterone other than the minute amount produced by the adrenal glands. Due to lobbying, and roping in the situation of legally female athletes with a 46XY DSD, this was changed in 2015 to an upper limit of 10nmols/L of serum testosterone for 1 year prior to competition, i.e., athletes who had gained the APA gained in male puberty and who had competed as men, only had to reduce their testosterone level to four times the top of the standard reference range for women.

(6)  Some women have abnormally high endogenous T levels which, medically, is regarded as a hormone imbalance, e.g., as a result of polycystic ovary syndrome, (PCOS). The possible over-representation at elite levels in some women’s sports of women with PCOS has been cited as proof that natal males who have transitioned, and who lower their T levels in order to compete in women’s events, have no innate average performance advantage. Some trans advocates even argue that because men typically have a larger, heavier body than women, transgender athletes who have had to lower their testosterone levels, are at an athletic disadvantage. Some, TRAs, like Veronica Ivy, argue that any restriction on androgens is an infringement of human rights. 

(7)   Women athletes with an undiagnosed 46XY DSD with complete androgen insensitivity will show high serum testosterone but their bodies are unable to respond to it. Their inclusion in women’s sports is roped in by trans lobbyists in support of trans inclusion.

(8)   Trans lobbyists have argued that exogenous testosterone is a more potent performance enhancer than endogenous testosterone; if this is the case, it raises performance enhancement issues both for natal females competing as men, and for surgically transitioned natal males in women’s events for whom TUEs are decided on a case by case basis. 

(9)  Some of the following 51 are riders who have retired, no longer compete. I have underlined those who might feasibly compete at UCI elite or professional levels.

 

Taryn Askew: Competes in BMX.

Jillian Bearden: 45; won El Tour de Tucson in 2016. Raced with the pro women at the Colorado Classic. Masters national champion. Colorado state Champion. Hoped to make the 2020 US team. 

Roxy Bombardier: 50s; ex-military; started racing as a woman in 2019; races cyclocross and gravel.

Emily Bridges: 21; in British Cycling development squad as a man; ID as trans in 2019 but a planned move into women’s cycling is blocked while British Cycling reviews its policy. Still races against women in races which are not sanctioned by British Cycling.

Molly Cameron:  46; Raced for many years against males at the elite level while IDing as trans. In independent, high-profile gravel races that allow self-ID, competes in those races against women. Transactivist.

Lilly Chant: 20s; competed as a man 2019/20 Southampton Uni Bike club; races as a woman in races not sanctioned by BC, e.g., Thundercrit.

Cara Dixon: 20s; won the women’s Dirty Riever in a time of 7.46; 2nd place overall was 53 minutes behind; 2nd place in the 20-29 age category was 2 hrs 37 behind. Trained to be an ultra-cyclist while still identifying as male and had a feature article written in The Radavist. 

Sammy Rose Dobrozsi: 29; Raced (road and gravel) successfully as a man. Was welcomed racing with males while IDing as a woman. 2023 season racing as woman.

Michelle Dumaresque: 52; entered women’s downhill MTB May 2001 easily beating women; allowed by the UCI to continue competing despite complaints from women competitions. Wins were all contested but upheld. Won 2002 Canada Cup series qualified for national team. Represented Canada at World MTB champs not placed because of tech issues with bike. Won national champs in 2003 and 2004 but was not placed in the worlds. 

Leia Genis: 25; USA Cycling Elite Track National Championship in Pennsylvania on July 27, Genis won second place in the Individual Pursuit event - stripped of place after not meeting new UCI standards.

Blake Hansen: 33; transitioned aged 25; races mountain bikes as a pro. Has been featured by numerous publications as a "rider to watch" as "breaking barriers" in mountain biking.

Sandy Hosey:  62; Races in Sol Squad, women’s team in Colorado. Gravel, road and cyclocross.

Veronica Ivy, aka Rachel Mackinnon: 41; took up track cycling & in 2018 became world masters’ champion; in 2019 broke the 200m sprint world record for females aged 34-39.

Tessa Johnson: Raced cyclocross and road at Clemson University. Raced in the women's cat 4/5's in 2022 (beginner) for Comrade Cycles and dominated the 2022 season in Chicago.

Dahron Johnson: 53; Races in women’s masters’ events; road and cyclocross.

Jordan Johnson: 34; Cat3 Canadian based in Colorado. Races road and cyclocross for Ride or Die Collective.

Andy Lee Jordan: Races road and cyclocross in the non-binary category and female category. Doesn't race in the male category.

Candace Kennedy-Hess: 69; masters’ races on road for Sturdy Girl Cycling.

Austin Killips: 27; ranked 35 in UCI cyclocross; took up cyclocross in 2019 as a woman. Took 3rd place at US national championships, beating Hannah Arensman. Came 3rd in the Gila in 2022, and took first place in 2023. 3rd at the US National Cyclocross Championships in the women's elite. Raced UCI World Cup in Europe.

Claire Law: 35; Races road, track, cyclocross, and mountain bike for Breakfast Racing. Self-described bad bike handler with good power numbers.

Jenna Lingwood: 42; Ranked 146 UCI cyclocross; Came 5th in US National Cyclocross Champs 2022. Women’s masters 40+ national cyclocross champion. Raced for many years with males without much success.

Anna Caterina Lisk: 48; started cycling aged 29 as Cat 5 male; transition 2015; races road. Arizona state champion, masters.

Elena McCready: 51; transitioned aged 47; Kiwi born, UK based road and cyclocross racer.

Kyo Zero Mars: 37; Cat 5; Road and track racer for R MacKinnon’s defunct team, Foxy Moxy Racing.

Harper Martinez: 30s; Raced as Herman in women’s category; member of Automatic elite road racing team.

Jacqueline Maunter: 41; cat 4; raced road & cyclocross as woman since 2017. Frame builder & recipient of Women Build Bikes grant.

Erica Miller:  Club rider; races road, gravel, and cyclocross in Colorado.

Lesley Mumford: 40s; transitioned 2017; races gravel and mountain bike. 1st in field of 31 in the women's open at the Colorado Cup; 1st out of 31 (& a course record) at the Tennessee Pass Night Jam. 

Christine Penn: 56; Races road for Sturdy Girl Cycling.

Lucy Rogers: 50s; Vet; Started racing as woman in 2019. UK road, gravel, and mountain bike racer. Wins and high placings in big fields.

Prim Rose: US bike messenger & beginner road racer for PDX Dream Team. After seeing two males on the extended podium at the Portland Criterium last season, it's Rose's goal to podium at this race in 2023.

Riley Claire Sato:  Cyclocross; 7th in the elite women category at the Ontario 2022 provincial championships.

Ruth Seaman: 57; Cat3 road racer; racing since 2016. Set women's course record at the Pace Bend Ultra 12 Hour race at age of 55.

Tara Seplavy: 48; Mediocre racer for years as a male; slightly more successful against women since 2017; Cat3. Cycling journalist for Bicycling magazine & avid TERF blocker on Twitter.

Alex Showerman: 35; mountain biker, marketer; transitioned aged 31.

Evelyn Sifton: 29; Canadian road and track racer for Shadow Elite women's cycling team 2018/19

Natasha Smith: Raced elite road and track in the UK; ranked 88 in 2018. Masters record holder.

Bev Sorsby: Cat 2; Club rider; races road in the UK. Member of Women’s Cycling Sheffield.

Kenzie Statz: 40: Races road and mountain bike.

Sara Stearns: 70s; Masters 70+ national and world track champion; world record holder.

Addisyn Stout: Track and mountain bike racer.

Morgan Styer: 40s; Raced road and cyclocross through 2017 with Foxy Moxy. Was a mid-pack cat 4/5 male who became a successful cat 3 female ten years later.

Kristin Sundquist: 33; Raced in the nonbinary category at cyclocross nationals; claims to have a T level of .02nmol/l?) Was cat 2 in male cyclocross competition.

Tiffany Thomas: 46; took up cycling in 2018; won a criterium; pro racer for team LA Sweat. 

Natalie van Gogh: 49; retired; transitioned 2005; rode pro 2012-2021. 

Henrietta Watts (Henry): Races in the nonbinary category when the rules don’t allow for racing in the women’s category, otherwise races in the women’s category.

Kate Weatherly: 21; average male rider now dominating elite women’s downhill MTB in NZ; started hormone treatment at 17, claims a current T level of 0.4 mol/L. First women’s race, beat a former junior world number 2 by more than 30 seconds, a huge margin in downhill MTB which is not an Olympic sport but is on UCI calendar and attracts big sponsorship deals.

Evelyn Williamson:  One of two men who raced for elite women's team Pratt Racing. 

Chelsea Wolf: 29; out since 2014. BMX rider. At end of first UCI World Cup season 2019, was ranked 5th in the world; 3rd place finishes at both the US National and Pan-American Championships & 11th place at the 2019 UCI World Championship was her lowest finish of the season; went to Tokyo as an alternate on the U.S. Women's Olympic BMX freestyle team.

Philippa York: 65; transitioned after retirement from successful road racing career as Robert Miller, in 1995; came out as trans in 2017; cycling commentator and writer.

Maxine Yates: 20s; won women’s expert category (below elite) in downhill racing but was stripped of place for failing to meet British Cycling criteria.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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To be safe or to be inclusive

A while back Sports NZ published its Guiding Principles for the Inclusion of Transgender People in Community Sport

In the now de rigeur format, in which appearance not so much overrides essence as smothers it, the guidelines start with a foreword from the CEO which signals the policy's underlying ideological thrust.

It moves on to the ubiquitous glossary of terms, which, in light of how politically and academically contested many of the concepts are, is highly ideological. This glossary does not disappoint and even notes that the concept of simply identifying as a particular gender has been phased out in preference for being a gender. 

Par for the current gender identity course, they sidestep the vexed question of what gender is other than to saygender or gender identity describes "one's actual, internal sense of being male or female, (note the default order)neither of these, both etc."

Nor do they define female or male other than to make the standard nod to sex characteristics as "each person's physical features relating to sex, including genitalia and other sexual and reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, hormones and secondary physical features emerging from puberty."

As if all that exists separately from the wider body; as if it is possible to literally or even figuratively dissect the complex web of reproductive sex out of the body.

Symptomatic, compartmentalised, pharmacocentric, commercialised medicine has a lot to answer for.

But back to community sports.

We know that most sports and ALL big money/blue riband sports were developed to showcase male abilities and attributes, and they are still dominated by men because of historical sexism and misogyny.

Women were barred from all sports, then from some sports, and in some countries they are still barred or have to play in kit which hides their bodies to satisfy male created and imposed chastity standards.

In the sports in which women have fought their way to some level of equality, men are still very much the senior partners. Professional, elite sport is a huge global corporate industry, in turn dominated by men, and which channels most of its sponsorship etc to elite male athletes.

The discrimination against women in sports flowed/flows from patriarchal attitudes which are still very much in play even in countries which believe they've moved beyond them.

Discrimination was once always linked to qualifying words such as "unfair". The term now stands alone which makes a nonsense of the underlying concept in any sphere where decisions are made about inclusion – be that in recruitment and selection for a job, or who gets to play in a given sport at a given level and against whom.

To discriminate between two people each vying for a job or a place in a team or a competition, is to discriminate in favour of one and against the other.

Denying an adult 100kg rugby player a claimed right to play against kids who weigh 60kgs is to discriminate against that older, heavier person but in no sane world would anyone see that as unfair discrimination.It is discrimination in the sense of recognising relevant distinctions and differences which form the basis of a judgement.

The point – the entire point – of equality of opportunity in all spheres and at all levels, is to ensure that the processes and procedures involved, and the decisions arrived at are as fair as it is possible to make them.

In a community sport in which a male-bodied trans or non-binary person wishes to compete as a woman, and in which their right to absolute privacy is deemed to be paramount, how are the cultural and religious needs of women that preclude undressing in the presence of or being in bodily contact with a male person (irrespective of that person’s gender identity), to be met?

It is either weirdly illogical or stunningly cynical on the one hand to call for sporting uniforms / costumes to be of a sort that allows transgender and gender diverse people to hide the aids they use to “enable their body to more closely match their gender”, and to haul in the cultural and religious demands on women in support of that, while completely ignoring how those cultural/religious constraints will act to exclude natal women if male-bodied people are included in women’s sports.
 
It's just a small example of the contortions of logic this issue demands of its adherents.
 
There are no easy answers in this and those who simply say female equals anyone without a Y chromosome, stray into a form of biological determinism or reductionism which serves to exclude people born with compete androgen insensitivity syndrome, for example, who are phenotypically female but chromosomally male.
 
In a way, the issues facing competitive athletes are clearer and more easily resolved. Although natal females in competitive sport are still very much the junior partners, they have a louder voice than girls and women who want to play sports at a community level.
 
I'm not going to write a prescription but I will reiterate this: natal males are on average taller, heavier, and stronger than natal females. This is not an ideological statement about male superiority and female inferiority; it is a statement of material fact.
 
The performance advances made by female athletes have been matched by men, and the average performance gap in most sports remains.
 
Women are not just small men; we have very significant anatomical and metabolic differences. One to which far too little attention is paid are the differences between the musculature of the female and the male posterior cervical spine. Women are more prone to whiplash than men. Women might also be more prone to brain injury as a result of the lesser ability for the musculature of the female posterior cervical spine to stabilise the head in the course of a collision.
 
Given men on average are heavier, taller, and faster than women, if natal males enter contact sports as women, they will serve to increase the average weight, height, and speed of the players. In contact, team sports that will serve to increase the average impact forces bodies may experience.
 
In some contact sports the height, weight and speed differentials between players and resulting harm from impact are already a health and safety issue for players. Increase height, weight, speed differentials in women's sport, and it seems logical that given the more vulnerable female cervical spine, the potential for serious harm is also increased.
 
I'm perhaps more alert to this than most because I have a congenital fusion of my cervical spine which, combined with age related osteoporosis, puts me at a higher risk of catastrophic neck injury as a result of a whiplash injury. My sort of congenital fusion is common enough and its added risk factors are serious enough that arguably anyone engaging in contact sport should be screened for it.
 
To blithely ignore these sort of realities in the name of some people’s ideas about inclusion is unforgivable.

The Ideological Grift That Keeps Giving

I've been pretty much correct in my predictions about the direction of the gender wars. I don't claim any special insight, just a knowledge of history guided by a materialist analysis, a grasp of politics, and a measure of common sense.

 

The disparate groups which arose in Aotearoa-NZ in reaction to the Labour Government’s initiatives on such things as climate change and water reform, gained traction with opposition to Covid measures, especially mandates.

 

A loose coalition of far-rightists and conspiracy theorists maintained a degree of unity which was assisted by what became for some, a fanatical focus on, and maniacal hatred of Jacinda Ardern.

 

Once Covid restrictions eased and Ardern left office, those disparate groups have been left in need of a common enemy, the hatred and fear of which could help hold them in alliance, and recruit members.

 

The organisers of the protest against the Let Women Speak rally in Auckland, who clearly lacked the political and tactical nous to anticipate the direction all of this was likely to go, seemed to have handed one to them on a plate.

 

The moment an as yet nameless man, high on a toxic mix of moral certitude and adrenaline, and in the grip of testosterone disinhibition, swung his fists into the head of a much older woman, the trans rights movement lost a lot of the moral high ground where it matters most, in the centre.

 

Just like most people will never stop believing in the material reality of reproductive sex because a bunch of middle-class people with various sorts and degrees of vested interest tell them to, most people also accept there should be a proscription on young men punching older women.

 

Attempts by various trans allies to justify that man’s breach of both the criminal law and the social contract, have served to undermine their own moral and political positions, not just in respect of trans rights, but in relation to other, arguably more important, issues and causes they support.

 

Prompted by the coverage given to that incident and others, a group proclaiming itself to be made up of real men supporting the rights of real women, indicated it would be organising rallies across the country on April 15^th in support of women’s rights. 

 

Nazi-watchers in NZ duly issued dire warnings about the scale of the threat that these far right wingers pose to trans people. 

 

In anticipation of real men throwing real punches, trans rights activists who had called for mass protest against Let Women Speak, promptly bottled out.

 

They had created their very own Hobson's Choice: turn out and protest against some real fascists and angry men, and possibly get punched, or stay away and be accused of being cowards who only gang up on women.

 

As it happened, the groundswell of real men in NZ seems to have been more akin to a barely discernible ripple, a fact that makes the Nazi-watchers’ and TRAs’ hyperbole about an imminent trans genocide, sound more OTT than usual.

 

But, it is an embryonic movement and it may yet grow into something dangerous if it continues to follow the lead of the far right overseas. 

Today's damp squibs aside, it's a pretty well known fact that angry and hurt people are likely to seek redress, and anxious people will seek certainty. It’s why “strong man” leaders often have an appeal they don't have when people feel secure and happy.

 

History tells us what can happen if too much of the middle ground is lost to the far right. I’m not talking about the middle ground in party political terms, but the broad fulcrum point in society across which the extremes of social conservatism and social transgressivism are kept in balance.

 

Those trans rights activists and allies who thought they could rip up, without consequence, the most ancient and deeply rooted of material realities, with its vast weight of ideological beliefs and obfuscations, its physical coercions, and its mass of historical and contemporary casualties, are either dunderheads or they have a malign agenda of some sort. 

 

The middle class social justice warriors in the affluent world surely realise that for a huge number of women in the world, the most pressing priority is survival for them and their children, for some, so much so it forms the very boundaries of their existence.

 

We have to place glib claims by a transgender activist that “sex essentialism was left behind last century”, alongside such global realities of the 800 or so, mainly black and brown skinned poor women who died every day in 2020 from easily preventable birth complications, and the millions of female lives that have been lost to sex selective abortion and infanticide over the past three decades. 

 

Liberal feminists who place gender identity as the number one item on their political agenda should ask themselves what priority they give to the estimated two million women in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa who are living with an untreated obstetric fistula caused by obstructed labour –  the main causes of which are the effects of genital mutilation, becoming pregnant too young, and anaemia caused by malnutrition. 

 

On the other side of the gender identity vs sex divide, those women who see transgenderism as the greatest threat to women’s rights, and who think a resurgence of patriarchal family values is a price worth paying in order to defeat it, need to start thinking sensibly and strategically.

 

The alternative is to stay in an alliance which may well tip more towards the secular and religious far right, in which case they will have to stop all pretence of being feminist, and watch while other women and a host of gender non-conforming people pay the price for the devil's supper.

 

I would ask all those women and men who place responsibility on the “left” for the direction that the gender identity orthodoxy has taken – what did they do to rescue the women’s liberation movement from the encroachments of post-modernism and gender ideology?

 

What did they do to fight for women’s sex-based rights inside the broad left and in all those wider collectives that have been gradually captured by gender ideology over the past three decades or so?

 

I’d judge it was SFA otherwise we wouldn’t be in this mess.

 

 

Until the issues of gender identity and sex self-identification cut though all the neo-liberal gloss paint and glitter and re-energised radical and socialist feminism, most women inside the imperial bubble had been prepared to settle for the formal rights which granted them parity with their male peers, and all the baubles dangled in front of them by corporate capitalism.

 

Some right wing women rejected and still reject socialist and radical feminism's insights, and some women were and still are embarrassed by any sort of feminism, and were anxious not to be labelled as a hairy-legged harridans, man-haters, or members of a puritanical coven.

 

Many men across the social and political spectra welcomed the defeat of the monstrous regiment of women, and none more so than those right wing men who are now posing as the most vociferous critics of gender ideology, and defenders of women’s rights. (Cue hollow laughter stage left.)

 

We all allowed this to happen in various ways and to various degrees. What we must not do is continue to obsess about what’s happening in the margins, and feminists must not allow schisms to develop further.

 

The first wave of radical separatist feminism lost a lot of working class women and women of colour because it forced an unbearable choice on them. I was put off as a working class young woman, and it was one reason I was always more at home in the wider left. I feel the same chill when I read, the always anonymous, radical feminist Twitter accounts now proclaiming a hatred of men, and advocating female separatism and aborting male foetuses.

 

By all means rub men’s noses in the shit they’ve dumped all over the world but we must never lose sight of the fact that gender ideology was and is used in the same way as the ideology of race.

 

Both serve to legitimate the hyper-exploitation and the vicious oppression of classes of people deemed to be inferior. Both also serve to divide natural allies by means of the illusory compensations of sexual/racial superiority, and scraps of highly conditional, devolved power.

 

It’s as true now as it ever was, and as simple as it is complex.

For the oppressed, there is only strength in unity.

What divides us, weakens us, and what divides us always serves entrenched power.

Who are the real victims?

It's grimly fascinating to see people who would protest loudly if anyone dared victim-blame an assaulted woman for dressing the wrong way, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, effectively doing the same to the mainly older women who organised and attended the Auckland "Let Women Speak" rally. 

It’s almost as riveting as someone feverishly likening those chaotic scenes to the ANZACs "keeping Nazism from our shores”. Or equating the righteousness of those advancing the ideology of gender identity to that of the anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand in the 1980s when protesters faced down both police and angry rugby fans in brutal battles which divided the country. (1) 

The politicking of some of the loose groupings that make up the broad left in the Neo-liberal era, owes too much to virtual and real life cosplaying and on-line attitudinising. When such people declare that "Nazis must be opposed", which of course they must, what seems to escape some of them is that the sentiment is widely accepted, even among most of the moderate right. 

It's so self evident and uncontroversial that most people are surprised when it is voiced so fervently and indiscriminately. Many people are even more surprised when they're told that a group of women from a wide range of socio-economic, personal, and political backgrounds who want to talk publicly about sex-based rights, are Nazis. 

Some people's surprise tips into incredulity when they're told that the empirical proof of all these women being Nazis rests on their "leader" having been photographed with, and having accepted various forms of comparatively small scale tactical or financial support from people on the secular or religious far right. 

Most recently, the image of twenty black clad crypto-fascists in Melbourne giving Nazi salutes at the Let Women Speak rally, has been cited as further proof that the organisers and attendees at the LWS rally are Nazis.

Like a swarm of wasps, the Melbourne crypto-fascists were attracted to the LWS rally possibly because the opponents of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, had declared her to be a Nazi. Equally likely, given the crypto-fascists seem to hate her almost as much as the "paedo freaks" they claim to be opposing, is the possibility that the wasps were coat-tailing the rally to stage a recruitment photo opp, and the media and Victoria police duly obliged them.

We now all know that Posie Parker expresses very strong opinions in opposition to transgenderism, a political ideology that currently preoccupies the left of neo-liberalism almost to the exclusion (and to the detriment) of all the other massive issues confronting us here in New Zealand, and globally.

What people may not know or choose to ignore is that the moment she formed a group to oppose what she sees as a threat to women's sex-based rights, the label of TERF was slapped on her. 

People may also not know or choose to ignore the fact that TERF was already equated with Nazi, and the angry toddler corollary had already been written that as it’s okay, even a moral obligation, to punch Nazis, it’s okay to punch TERFs like her and her supporters, even if they're older women or left wingers or lesbians.

After Melbourne, some people amused themselves by putting up Twitter polls asking, "is it OK to punch a Nazi?" 

People who've probably never physically encountered a real Nazi, let alone punched one or faced down large numbers of them, all cried, "Yes". 

Punching is all well and good when it's actual Nazis, but the optics change when the chief "Nazi" is a diminutive, middle aged mum of four, and her supporters are mainly middle aged and older women, and include lesbians and Māori and Pasifika women. 

Even if she is a calculated far right winger (as opposed to an angry woman who had made some  unwise political and tactical decisions) does that mean everyone drawn to her as a figurehead, is a literal Nazi? 

How many credibility gaps does that sort of claim result in – gaps in which the real Nazis can hide?

Like the term feminazi, coined in the 1990s, the labelling of TERFs as Nazis serves to demonise the wide range of arguments and claims which counter those of transgenderism's primary platform of gender self-identification.

What trans advocates and allies fail to acknowledge is that this indiscriminate labelling has the side effect of diluting both the historical and the contemporary reality of Nazi ideology and its outcomes. 

There is a huge risk in the rise of the far right globally, and here in NZ; we have seen the tragic outcomes of that in Christchurch, but is this sort of indiscriminate labelling of women as Nazis really the best way to counter that rise?

Labels not only serve to corral and to brand a person or a group, they often obscure hugely complex realities, reducing them to the political and intellectual equivalent of sound-bites. 

In the politics of appearance, this reduction of complex issues to slogans and mantras is almost always accompanied by hyperbolic rhetoric, and catastrophising. 

Trans rights activists and allies claim that Posie Parker is a Nazi who wants literally to exterminate all trans people who are the most marginalised, disadvantaged, vulnerable, at risk minority of all.  

In reaction, the Parkerites now shout back about the "mass mutilation of children", the imminent erasure of all women's sex-based rights, and the risks to women and children of persons with a penis being allowed into women-only spaces.

The clamour of the arguments and the inflamed rhetoric now being generated from behind dense barriers of moral certitude, means there is insufficient space or quiet in the middle ground for the sort of nuanced debates this issue needs. Nor can it be put into the context of the mass of other pressing issues facing us. 

A basic political principle for me is, in order to see the bottom line of who benefits from a given action or issue, we always have to look up. That is never more essential than in this issue. 

The truth is that far from all trans people being a hugely marginalised and disadvantaged group, some, maybe even a lot of trans people are well buffered by advantages accruing from their birth sex, ethnicity, socio-economic status etc. Here in NZ, trans people have full legal equality and considerable social acceptance. There are very few acts of reported violence against trans people for being trans, and so safe is NZ, trans people apply for asylum here. 

Furthermore, trans rights and the positioning of them on the zenith of the political-moral high ground, are supported by the entirety of the corporate world and most of mainstream media, and by all the main political parties. Pretty much all the country’s governmental and non governmental organisations and institutions are fully supportive, and transgender activists have made incredible headway since the 1990s, in quietly creating a pro-trans legal and social environment. (2) 

In this context, and the absence of a body of empirical proof, the argument that the anti LWS protest was in support of the most marginalised, at risk of violence, hated, discriminated against minority of all time illustrates the sad fact that hyperbolic rhetoric, sloganeering, and catastrophising now dominate the discourse around this and related issues.I do not deny the fact that trans people could easily become the first target of a far right and social conservative backlash. 

The trick for trans allies is supporting in ways that don't provide fuel for such a backlash. A start point would be to stop behaving like sanctimonious jerks.

* * * *

This was the backcloth to a large number of people, high on a heady mix of adrenaline and moral certitude, heading out protest the Let Women Speak rally – to figuratively "punch some Nazis". 

Among the crowds were some who were prepared to take that literally, and one man, hyped up on that heady mix of moral certitude, adrenaline and testosterone, punched a 72-year-old woman in the face three times because she was wearing a tee shirt that identified her as an attendee at the rally.

She’s the same age as me. Those punches could have killed her or caused brain damage, or cervical spinal injury – and that is not hyperbolic or catastrophising, it is medical, anatomical fact.

That cowardly attack and other footage of women being driven out of a public space in a violent manner, by people claiming to be defending trans people from violence, is now firmly embedded in far right agit prop, i.e. it's given ammunition to the actual or wanna-be fascists.

Even though it's been sanitised post hoc by the same media outlets which actively raised the political temperature and helped to foment the rage, I suspect considerable damage in the electoral middle ground has also been done.  (3) 

In contrast to the LWS protest, a rally and march down Queen Street, of forces which pose arguably a greater threat to the rainbow community, resulted in just a brief scuffle. There was no  throwing liquids over Bishop Tamaki and his wife; no rushing into the massed ranks of big, tough men to throw punches. 

No, that behaviour was reserved for the soft targets in Albert Park. 

Maybe the protesters’ amygdalas had switched off and the adrenaline rush had subsided by the time they confronted the Destiny Church rally but what are the odds the brave social justice warrior who punched a pensioner in the head wouldn’t have dared to as much as say boo to the Bishop?

What many people outside the social media bubbles of self-reinforcing beliefs, will take away from this, is that "antifa" and the "woke left" pick on soft targets, eg. older women. What will your average, middle of the road Kiwi take from the weirdo who thought it was a good idea to express support for trans people by tweeting that she “gets off on seeing fear in the eyes” of a small, middle aged woman being mobbed by angry, mainly male protesters?

Those who let your political knees jerk so violently that your remaining sense is being knocked out of your heads, and who decry the likes of me as nazi adjacent, may I suggest you climb down off your moral high horse and turn it out to pasture – the poor beast needs a rest.

Talk to women outside your political bubbles, face to face. Look into the eyes of the ordinary concerned women, lesbians and socialist feminists, and if you still want to reject everything we say and call us fascists, then clearly the traditional left in NZ has died of pernicious political anaemia, and with it, all hope of mass resistance to the real enemy.

Footnotes:

1) The conflation of WW1 and 2 and the historical fact that NZ’s shores were more at risk from Japanese RW nationalist militarism than European Nazism is silly but hauling it into a debate about sex-based rights is surreal. A person who argued that the LWS protesters were on the same side of history as the protesters against the Springbok tour who were abused and spat on is seemingly oblivious to the fact that not only were the protesters in Albert Park facing small numbers of older women as opposed to cops and burly rugby fans, it was they who were doing the spitting and abusing.

2) This process of largely unnoticed changes at the level of policy and regulation ended when the right to sex self-identification by statutory declaration was included in an omnibus bill which led to opposition from groups concerned about its wider implications.

3) Marama Davidson's glib comment that white straight men are the main perpetrators of violence was the most spectacular of the left's many own goals.

Schisms to the left of us, advantages to the right ....

What follows is a bit of ramble around the edges of a rather messy ideological battleground. I've covered a lot of the ground in earlier posts but some points are so important, they bear repeating.

The forces that advance and protect global corporate capitalism set about routing its main enemy, the old red left, by destroying its collectives, corrupting its political parties, and denying the existence of universalist, class-based theories. 

They also replenished their armoury of divert and divide tactics.

Neo-liberalism's promotion of hyper-individualism and aspirational culture – we can / must be the best possible versions of our unique selves – was so successful because it was grafted onto older ideologies that posit the existence of an immutable and unique individual soul or spirit housed within a mutable (mortal) body. 

In its most alienated and harmful expressions, the physical body is reduced to a "meat sack" or "flesh suit" inhabited and "piloted" by the "authentic self".

The left of neo-liberalism (the system-adjusters) – already enthralled by identity and emergent queer politics – seized on gender identity as its cause du jour, as did parts of the wider left which, in other respects, are anti-capitalist. 

The odd alliances and enmities that have flowed from all this are a neo-liberal spin doctor's dream, and have become arguably one of the most effective diverters and dividers we've yet seen.

* * * *

The new wave of feminism that was energised by opposition to gender identity ideology and praxis  is now in the throes of a major sectarian schism between a loose coalition of socialist feminists – from social democrats to communists – and a loose coalition of liberal and radical feminists aided by an growing horde of opportunist right-wing blokes, which has just one target in its sights – transwomen or, in the gender critical nomenclature, trans-identifying males.

Sometimes a strategic response to a single issue serves to galvanise and to unite a broader movement, pulling people into political activism on a wider front. However, that might not be progressive activism – and it can sometimes be the antithesis of it. 

In the absence of the strong organisational and theoretical frameworks that are needed to hold progressive movements together, instead of a focus on a single issue serving to pull people into wider progressive activism, it can as easily lead to them being pulled into wider reactionary activism.

The dangers of a narrow focus on a single issue and the sorts of political opportunism that can accompany it, was illustrated when some gender critical women in NZ promoted right-wing libertarian, David Seymour's scaremongering and tub-thumping about the Labour Government’s repeal of the infamous and discredited "Three Strikes" legislation. 

His cynical and opportunist appeal to the law and order brigade was used to inflate the bogey man of a specific threat to women via a claimed mass release of sex offenders. 

The women responsible for promoting this were either right-wingers cynically aiming to use the new wave of women's rights activism as a platform, or they were so focussed on a narrow goal, they failed to see the wider political picture.

There are gender critical feminists who’ve never taken any notice of, for example, the class and ethnic skewing of the female prison population, but who became incensed over the housing of male-bodied trans prisoners in female prisons. 

Their sex-based prisoner rights' activism goes only as far as stopping that one sort of potential harm to female prisoners, and does not address or want to change the socio-economic underpinnings of wider prison policy with its disproportionate adverse effects on the poor and on people of colour, both female and male.

Women who said nothing about the adverse effects of neo-liberal economic policy on health care provision, now rail about the presence of transwomen both as patients and health care workers. Many had and have little to say and are prepared to do less about the impacts of low quality or non-existent health care on all members of impoverished communities, especially women and kids.

The same with sport; people who never said a word about the sexism and the pay and status differentials in the world of commercialised sport, are up in arms about the inclusion of male bodied trans people in female categories.

Arguably the most emotive of these linked issues is paediatric transition. Many of the people who rage about the adverse effects on children of gender ideology and its associated medicalised care paradigm – have little or nothing to say about the thousands of children under the age of five who die every single day, most from easily preventable causes. 

Few voices were or are raised to express horror about that death toll, let alone demand and fight for the structural changes needed to end it, while the relatively small number of kids affected by gender identity medical protocols in the affluent world is held up as the pre-eminent child protection issue of the era.

Paediatric transition is of course hugely important but the medical “advances” that have both enabled and profited from the transgender wave were made in the context of the prior immense growth of medicine for profit. 

The underlying ethos and the influence of medicine for profit serves to corrupt medical ethics, and it has a grossly disproportionate impact on the poor, caused both by the inability to pay for access to medical care and by the diversion of medical services into the provision of various forms of appearance enhancement, for example.

This development in commercialised medicine preceded the rise of gender identity ideology, including gender affirming paediatric medical protocols, and arguably was a necessary precondition for it. 

                                                                       * * * *

I've said before that I see this more as a battle between social conservatism and social transgressivism than a simple left/right division.

Tendencies towards social conservatism, in the sense of an attachment to, and respect for traditional social and moral norms, and social trangressivism, in the sense of disrupting or changing those norms – cut across all social and economic boundaries. There are politically left wing social conservatives and politically right wing social transgressives. Also, people may be socially conservative on some issues and socially transgressive on others. 

Very simplistically, the conservative pole helps maintain a necessary degree of social stability and cohesion – especially with regard to the unwritten social contract; the other is necessary for change and innovation. 

A healthy society keeps a balance because if the two poles are not held in tension, they will start to pull towards extremes. Social conservatism acting as a brake on change can energise a counter-reaction which pulls societal norms towards the social transgressive pole. Push too far in that direction and social conservatism will start to pull back. 

Neo-liberalism, with its profit at any cost monetarist ideology, weakened left wing progressive movements by undermining both their organisational bases, and the theoretical-intellectual frameworks which give the movements political coherence and resilience. It also continued an older tradition of fomenting sectarianism, which is the kiss of death for progressive movements, especially when sects centre around a cult of personality – in the digital era, cults of celebrity.

Neo-liberalism has put cults of celebrity on steroids and "democratised" them via social media such that a huge range of people can become "famous" and some sort of "influencer" – having their ego boosted, promoting or undermining a cause, making money ...or all of the above. 

The single biggest question mark over gender identity politics for me was always the speed with, and extent to which global corporates and corporate-friendly governments, institutions, and NGOs etc embraced it.

The reasons for that are complex – partly market-driven, partly ideological.

Gender identity with its precursor, the denial of sex dimorphism, once it was pulled to the extremes of “I feel I am, therefore I literally am” was always going to galvanise opposition among social conservatives. Not all of these people are political conservatives but when confronted with an issue that goes beyond their personal or political pale, they may be pulled into alliances with the political right, and even the far-right.

The fact that so many on the white left stood alongside the corporate establishment as it embraced gender identity, and then went far beyond it by attacking anyone, women especially, who refused to toe the gender identity line, is a measure of how thoroughly gutted the left in the west is. 

These attacks on anti-gender identity feminists preceded the rise of sections of the gender critical movement which are prepared to ally with the far right on this one issue, and arguably helped propel a lot of those women into the right's waiting arms.

One could be forgiven for thinking that amongst the ranks of the white left were some people who deliberately fomented that division, tapping into a vein of unreconstructed sexism and latent or internalised misogyny amongst enough on the broad left to create an activist groundswell. 

A motley mix of flip floppers, political cowards, and opportunists followed the activists onto what was declared to be the zenith of the moral and political high ground. Some of them are now straggling down under the cover of darkness leaving the hard core defenders, still convinced they’re firmly on the right side of history. 

Meanwhile the forces that would actually "annihilate" women or queer people (as opposed to the angry rhetoric of a woman who shoots from the lip) are gathering force and momentum.

The big question is, at what point will the corporate world decide that gender identity has ceased to be a political and economic opportunity, and become a threat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.