LONGFORM

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Women stand up!

Many women I know are livid that the NZ coalition government’s Pay Equity Amendment Bill was passed this week by Parliament.[i] This has brought back Fair Pay Agreement processes, as previously laid out in the Equal Pay Act, to a grinding halt. The outcome is the cancellation of 33 claims being currently negotiated, along with several tighter restrictions making it much harder to make such claims in future.

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War – what is it good for?

We cannot understand the waves and forms of Palestinian resistance unless we understand the inter-generational effects of the initial forced displacement of Palestinians and the obliteration of all vestiges of Palestinian occupation of the land followed by a rewriting of history through a Jewish supremacist and anti-Arab lens.

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On peeing, pronouns and politics

A recent debate on The Standard about trans rights touched on a range of  issues – dead naming, the use of preferred pronouns, the actual incidence of sex self-ID related harm to women since the passing of legislation, access to toilets, and so on. If this was a 1960s British comedy, it would be titled Carry On Up The Cul-de-sac.
The issue of female-only facilities such as public lavatories1 changing rooms, domestic violence and rape crisis centres, hospital wards and prisons has to be placed in both an historical and a contemporary context.

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Fact or Fantasy?

In an interview in March this year, in response to a question from Ash Sakar about whether the housing of trans prisoners in the female estate puts women prisoners at risk of assault, Professor Judith Butler said that until people identify how much at risk female prisoners are from guards and from other women prisoners, we should not even be asking the question.

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The Rise and Fall of Transgenderism

If you allow yourself to be distracted, diverted and divided by any single issue at this horrifyingly dangerous point in history, you are complicit in a looming catastrophe.

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AN IDEOLOGICAL DRAG RACE: Part Two

Gender identity as an issue and a movement was created and marketed in the first world. In that context, a leader of women opposed to gender identity, who “channels her inner Monroe” while surfing a wave of anger on social media, is unsurprising.

I don’t know if Kelly-Jae Keen believes in her brand, but I do know that many of the women who support her are well-intentioned and genuine in their beliefs and concerns.

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AN IDEOLOGICAL DRAG RACE: Part Three

The embryonic coalition between the religious right and the secular ultra-right, and women angry about being silenced over what they perceive to be a range of threats to sex-based rights and to children’s safety, has focussed on the phenomenon of drag queen story hour.

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WLA submission to the Safer Online Practices and Media Platforms Consultation

This is the WLA submission to the NZ government, Safer Online Practices and Media Platforms Consultation. The government was asking for feedback on their proposal, which is to be made into a Bill in 2024.

They are proposing to have a government appointed regulator to set codes of practice for social media and the NZ media. But, who will be watching the watchers?

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Feminism is for all women, not just the privileged few (NZ election) Pt 1

We are living through a time of turbulence, instability, and uncertainty. The decades long neoliberal dominance within Western-European patriarchal capitalism is under extreme pressure. The four biggest political parties in NZ have all been infected to a greater or lesser degree by neoliberalism, with National and the ACT parties being the most deeply contaminated.

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Fair pay for exploited women

Employers and business owners, who wish to extract maximum profits by paying their lowest ranked and most precariously employed workers a pittance, are the people most likely to welcome the new right wing coalition government’s repealing of NZ’s Fair Pay Agreement. Unsurprisingly, given the long history of women being an exploited sex-class, there tends to be a disproportionally high percentage of women in such low paid positions. 

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Women’s Sports, inclusion & fairness: Part Two

It is surprising that transwomen have been the main focus of transactivist lobbying for their inclusion in female sports, when it is fair treatment for trans identified females (transmen), and some people with Difference/Variations of Sex Development (DSDs) that really is the difficult issue. This is glaring evidence of yet another form of sex-based inequality.

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Women’s Sports, inclusion & fairness: Part One

The World Athletics Council are to be congratulated for recently joining international organisations, like World Rugby and swimming’s Fina, in restricting competition in the international women’s athletic division to those who have not gone through male puberty. It’s not banning trans identified males from competition as some of NZ’s media has hysterically proclaimed.  Transwomen can compete in the category designated for their sex, subject to further revisions of the policy. It is up to men to make transwomen welcome, safe, and accepted in their competitions.

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‘Meat pies’ aplenty: NZ women’s rugby on the up

I’m excited about the women’s Super Rugby Aupiki semi-final games on Sunday (19 March 2023), in spite of the small number of teams competing in the current competition. ed the top slot in the HSBC international rankings, winning the last 4 tournaments on the circuit. The domestic Super Rugby Aupiki competition shows a vast improvement in skills and tactics from last year.