The Ideological Grift That Keeps Giving

Cross-posted with permission from Te Whare Whero

16 April 2023

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.

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