The weekly export puzzle:
[This is a discussion of pain felt by trans and intersex people, and the last few deal with sexual violence; I’ve got red highlight indicating when. Thank you to the ironically named ‘safe space for TERFs’ group chat for contributing editing input on this.]
I do not like talking about transphobia and related topics. The subject is unpleasant, I have a lot of personal negative feelings tied up in transness, and I feel pressure to put on a more confident face than I feel. However, compared to my past pissed-off rants, I feel in a better place right now to simply share from the brain the reasons why the latest outburst over the Olympics is as clean and clear a proof as you can get for why these arguments are extremely poorly constructed and can’t hold up. Here’s six problems that the anti-transgender movement has not begun to resolve.
A very brief recap of the background I've touched on in past rants: traditional societal structures, like patriarchy (i.e men call the shots in their households, women obey without recourse), often tend to classify gender into strict boxes: based exclusively on your sex at birth, you are a man or you are a woman. If you start trespassing outside of that, you will face escalating social and eventually legal penalties, up to and including danger to your person.
As has been ably identified over the years, it’s a Very Bad Thing when discrimination and violence are used to keep people, and particularly women and girls, in line. This is the foundation of feminism - freedom to enjoy equality with the humanity of others humans and to aspire to who you want to be without the constraints of gender roles.
This "sex = gender" norm has most powerfully made itself known where physical bodies are seen as most relevant to the subjects at hand - obviously sports, which are all about bodies, but also in changing rooms and the like where common norms around nudity and decency place a premium on preventing people from different genders from seeing each other. These have some generally agreeable foundations to us all: perhaps in the year 3000 society will have merged ever more, but in the meantime, to feel comfortable and to avoid reinforcing “men dominate women without space to express themselves”, feminists can totally agree on gender-segregated sports and changing rooms.
As the unprecedented rate of social progress over the last several decades has worked away at society’s strict and judgemental foundations, more and more people have been able to 1) identify that they are transgender and 2) live accordingly. Life in our most progressive and accepting hubs proves that this works fine; problems occur for, not from trans people re: being trans around the vast majority of the globe where people are not free to be trans. The trouble arises when trans people try to participate, as all other people do, in spaces that are defined by this “sex = gender” rule.
Problem #1: as I laid out a while ago, sow the wind and you reap the whirlwind. If society had developed from the start accepting all people as just people first, instead of classifying them based off of sex at birth, then we would just have sorted people into appropriate weight classes etc. the same way we already do within sports, and let everybody participate, as, for instance, gender-neutral toilets easily accomplish. However, we have the overarching classifications of “men” and “women” that were not made to fit trans people.
You can’t both keep a “sex = gender” rule, and enforce traditional norms that stamp down on people transgressing those rules, because some of them, under modern, progressive social norms, are of a gender different to their sex. That’s fine by me! Let ‘em in. Yet some - not only patriarchal traditionalists, but also feminists whose half-hearted definition of progress does not extend to trans people - have instead doubled down on their old understanding of sex and gender.
Come across them in the algorithm and their rallying cries are easy enough to understand. A classic statement from their ilk is that men can’t have vaginas or menstruate. In these ways, women who rightly identify the serious issue of the suffering and oppression of women up to the present day weaponise the unique challenges that women face as a way to impose their categories of understanding.
Women being oppressed by men on the basis of gender or sex is not the same thing as women undergoing the difficulties of physically being their sex, but it all kind of mushes together into a nebulous narrative of victimhood, contrasted with trans people in convenient ways: trans women who have enjoyed the benefits of patriarchy growing up and most visibly and successfully exist in well-educated rich liberal cities, and trans men and non-binary people (always cast as AFAB) who have internalised the self-hate and physical judgement the patriarchy imposes.
Traditionalists and TERFs alike call for bans and policing to reinforce traditional norms. These are impractical and cringeworthy - how are you planning to enforce a bathroom ban? American state legislatures passing bills to “inspect the gender” of children before they participate in sports is not good!!! Yet they’re also obviously an ad hoc solution, scrambling to paper over the lack of a clear, consistent, and lasting foundation for how society works.
Just take Imane Khelif. She’s an Olympic-level boxer, one of the best in the world at her sport, and she was raised as and identifies as a woman in Algeria. This is despite the fact that her chromosomes are XY, which traditional “sex = gender” understandings means she must, with a certainty, be a man…but she’s neither a man of any stripe nor a trans woman; she’s a cis woman. Problem #2: contrary to the claims of trads & TERFs, existing outside the strict boxes of binary sex by a fluke of nature can work for all involved: she gets to be a woman, and a very successful one at that, in her society.
Harm comes only when those strict binaries are enforced, as with invasive and harmful surgeries and coverups that continue to this day around the world towards intersex people. These deprive some of our most vulnerable people, including women and girls, of knowledge or autonomy about their own bodies. If T&Ts want to get involved with stopping surgeries on children, they can start with these unnecessary, cosmetic, harmful, and ideologically driven acts.
I need to disclaim here that we can’t say anything with certainty about Imane - just like we can’t about anybody! We don’t know everybody’s private medical status, nor should we. This is exactly the kind of bodily autonomy feminists around the world campaign for, like American women demanding the government get out of their bedrooms, doctor’s offices, and uteruses. However, we can assume with a very high probability that she, or if not her then many in her situation, has a vagina, menstruates, et cetera, et cetera.
Problem #3: On Thursday, NZFirst posts "Men don't menstruate. Period." On Friday, NZFirst posts that Imane Khelif is a biological man (and should therefore be banned from competing).
You see what I’m getting at here?
This is the absolute crux of why the gender conformity movement cannot possibly succeed. Their understanding of physical bodies is generations out of date, and rather than do even a quick Google of a situation, they are so ideologically primed about a niche, low-impact issue that they seize on any sign of “somebody doesn’t look right to me” or “this situation evokes a problem I’ve seen before” to repeat talking points that directly contradict each other. There is no possible resolution to this worldview as it stands.
A movement is definitely motivated first by passions and ideology and not at all by rational engagement with the facts at the point at which people can see an Algerian woman, a country in which homosexuality - not gay marriage, being gay - is illegal, and conclude “Yeah, the Algerian state selected a transgender woman to come compete at the Olympics”. There ARE no openly trans women at the 2024 Olympics! You’re so desperate to talk about your pet topic, Joanne, you’re literally not with reality anymore!
They can only progress by progressing with the rest of us - by acknowledging the biological fact that some people are intersex, and there can be no resolution that grants intersex people equality, humanity and autonomy while also continuing to impose their traditional understanding. Demanding bans on some of our most vulnerable women and girls directly harms them, and everybody like them, who not only loses representation in already starkly-underrepresented demographics, but also faces the chilling effect of seeing what happens to anybody like them who pokes their head above the parapet.
This cannot work as the apolitical bro “I don’t care about ideology, I just want sports to be fair” take. Sport is the great unifier, where all of humanity's best can come together and, whoever we cheer for, we all agree what we want: a good competition. Sport has political aspects already worth assessing on their own merits, but the irony is that this is the crowd crying about inserting politics into sports who are, in fact, most bluntly and directly bringing politics into sports. People care passionately about sport, and that's great, but at the point at which reactionary forces can use sport to polarise instead of unite people, that becomes the tip of wider wedges as the passion of the masses is used for ill.
Problem #4: By butting their heads into competition, they are undermining competition! Athletes are not constrained by the standards of equality once they’re in the ring, they are there to see who is better. The freakishly naturally gifted Michael Phelps demolished men who did not have the same biological advantages he did. Nobody suggested banning him, because he didn’t fall afoul of political and ideological agendas that, interestingly enough, seem only to concern the bodies of vulnerable people and not men.
And Angela Carini herself, a competitor, insisted after losing the match that she conceded the bout because she was losing the competition, not to make a political statement. (I think some people pounced on her too quickly to act like she was whipping up hate, when she quickly clarified she holds no such animus.) Just like Imame Khelif loses all the time, because, statistically, a member of a small minority of people is probably not going to be the GOAT just based off of a physical fluctuation, and the day that a trans or intersex competitor gets gold you’d best believe they worked their butt off for it and made the most of their incredible physiology, same as Jordan or Phelps or Adams or anybody else. If you really want to root against her, you can just…tune in and watch her lose. Or maybe watch some sports you actually enjoy, I don’t know? That men’s triathlon was exciting! All the shooting was fun!
Boxing is a sport where you sign up to get punched in the face by the best people in the world at punching you in the face. You can’t cry foul at home about the image of somebody showing signs of getting punched in the face well. By all means you are welcome to participate in a thoughtful social discussion about safety and regulations…but that’s not what this is. This is an ideological agenda to ban people from participating in sport. They want to wish a situation away instead of examining the facts and deliberating on what resolution to move forwards with. A resolution is needed that accounts for trans and intersex athletes as human beings with autonomy, opinions, and sublime experience in their bodies and with athletics. Go talk to some! Loop them in! Make them equals, not subjects to traditional norms!
Sooner or later, hate will abate, people will move on, and they will pick some new group to focus on debating about whether the ongoing discrimination is just or not. I’d bet good money that trans and probably even intersex people will outstrip most indigenous peoples in terms of progress and acceptance, because while trans and intersex people face very serious issues, they’re also ones with quite stupid causes - there’s not much of an interest beyond social agendas in perpetrating injustices. On the other hand, a good chunk of humanity feels a direct economic and political stake in oppressing and marginalising indigenous people, particularly over land. Relatively “cosmetic” social issues seem to abate more suddenly than meaningful ones of class and money in pockets.
Yet how long will this take to stop treating trans and intersex people as legitimate targets? Ten years? Surely too short, right? I mean, that’s the next decade I’ve got to accept for sure as feeling bad and guilty about myself for existing periodically when I see the news. Twenty? That’d be a pretty optimistic timeframe, but then things moved quickly with gay people after millennia of mistreatment. Thirty, forty, fifty? Past my lifetime?
How many will have to be hurt in the meantime while people with no stake in this, who just want to have an opinion about something, continue to define our lives and hem and haw instead of doing a Google and refreshing on common terms, experiences, and problems? That’s so much of what feels so terrible: a feeling of so little control, and counting for so little in the minds of those whom I’ve internalised matter, rather than me.
Problem #5: The gender conformity movement has no viable path to a resolution. The rate of people identifying as trans is not going to sharply decline. The rate of people identifying as intersex is going to sharply increase. You cannot put the cat back in the bag and the spirits back in the pithos. Even if you think this new understanding of self is bad, what’s the plan to deal with this? As usual, conservative movements are at most batting even or inflicting some pointless tactical cruelties, rather than having a clear strategy for victory.
There is none. All they can do is inflict harm on many thousands more people as a rearguard action for a doomed cause, and move on to the next one, just like they did with gay people. Who still live and breathe today. Many of whom bear the scars, from state abuse in care and all the rest. How are we still letting surgeries and coverups carry on in 2024? And speaking of issues we should be pushing as fast as possible to put in the past…
Problem #6: Putting time and energy into this distracts from serious issues. Steven van de Velde is a Dutch man who raped a TWELVE YEAR OLD. The English sentenced him to FOUR YEARS, he did less than ONE, got extradited and the Dutch released him in under a month. Dutch society and law has largely shrugged their shoulders and accepted back a man who committed a horrific crime and who I cannot possibly believe is fully rehabilitated for such a terrible crime in just twelve months.
He is currently competing on the Dutch beach volleyball team at the Olympics.
Go fuck that guy up! Go incite a 24/7 social media and print media and in-person protestor storm of “inflicting extreme trauma on children is not acceptable, and any society that stands by and accepts those monsters is not acceptable”. Make the Netherlands have its #MeToo moment. Make it clear that you have a far more serious debt to repay to society before you can be held up as the gold standard of what a human can be - make it clear that women and girls are safe and welcome at the Olympics and in all sport, not to be silenced for the sake of powerful and dangerous men maintaining their rule over the world.
This opportunity for real, meaningful progress has been entirely forgone, in favour of petty culture war controversies like whining about French artists in the opening ceremony being garish and tasteless. Does a bear shit in the woods? You are not feminists if you turn a blind eye to the absolute definition, and pinnacle, of the kinds of crimes perpetrated when the privilege and power of dangerous men is placed above the safety and humanity of women and girls. All to go indulge in a meaningless obsession with poking at women and girls who already have to deal with the challenges their same society has created for women and girls whose bodies don’t conform in particular ways.
What kind of movement can produce demands to ban an Algerian woman - a success story of a woman succeeding in a patriarchal society, somebody who has risen to the top, put in the hard hours in the .001% of physical effort to make it to the Olympics - somebody who has done nothing wrong; who has, in fact, done everything as right as you could possibly ask for, from a rural welder’s household being told women can’t box to grinding all the way to the peak competition in the world - and silence on a white Dutch guy, whose success we shouldn’t give a shit about given what he’s done to destroy another’s in life? There is no name for that but inequality and inhumanity.
These people have a fundamental lack of respect for human autonomy, so long as those humans are not cisgender men born without an unusual physical sex. And all of this hasn’t even touched on the total erasure of trans men or non-binary people - this isn’t even near the totality of what’s wrong with the TERFs and traditionalists. Ideology gone mad. Shovel this shit out of our society, and the sooner, the better.
The government has declined to act on eight of the forty-four recommendations of the March 15th Royal Commission. Most of the clauses they have left out are not worth discussing. They’re either about technical approaches through agencies that I can’t comment on the specifics of, or concern hate speech, incitement against religious groups et cetera that I’ve discussed before and don’t have anything to add on. However, one move is downright baffling: they have declined to implement mandatory reporting of gunshot wounds, by healthcare officials, to the police.
What are they thinking with this one? A gunshot wound is serious business; this is hardly a huge violation of privacy. Law-abiding people really do have nothing to fear if they accidentally shoot themselves in the foot while hunting and the police database notes that down, because nothing will ever come of it. I can see, perhaps, some argument about how this might deter gang members unsuccessfully whacked by rivals and the like of coming in to hospitals, but I’m not sure a technical policy change behind the scenes is the biggest motivator for a criminal at the point at which you’re already a) bleeding b) well aware you sit outside the law, and likely loudly broadcast that to everybody around you. I can see, but I’d like to hear this elaborated more on why; as it is, Judith has left us at a loss.
Abdur Razzaq Khan of the Federation of Islamic Associations says it best: "Khan could not believe the government would not implement mandatory reporting of firearms injuries by health professionals to police, considering the terrorist accidentally shot himself before the attack and went to Dunedin Hospital. If reported, it could have been a red flag around his firearms ownership. However, Collins was not even aware of that fact." [Source: RNZ] Sure, it’s a long shot, but every little chance at saving lives counts.
Why stop this? The cynical side of me is concerned about what role the minor parties might have played in interfering with this. Presumably, three groups bear the brunt of firearms injuries: gang members and other organised criminals who can procure and likely use guns on other people, their civilian victims, and hunters and other gun enthusiasts. Gun-toting crooks are obviously not a constituency the government cares one whit about. Victims have nothing to lose from their injuries being reported. That leaves those who use guns a lot for legitimate purposes, upping their odds of accidentally injuring themselves or each other Dick Cheney style.
As we know, ACT, and to a lesser extent NZF, have taken a great interest in protecting them as a key constituency - most egregiously, by rolling back firearms restrictions that were one of the most agreeable and meaningful parts of the attempts to avoid a repeat of March 15th, and do better by the rest of society besides. Does avoiding reporting their injuries do much in practical terms? Not really. But this plays to the conspiratorial mindset of some of these supporters (not that most gun nuts are conspiracy theorists, but ACT and NZF are communicating a general vibe to those who already feel under siege) that the government is closing in on them and they resent that when they feel they are law-abiding and in control.
That might be their motive, in which case, that’s a really awful reason not to do something valuable to save lives and protect communities! Or it might not. I just wish we got a public rationale. This is one of those subjects, like state abuse in care, that transcends party lines and obliges governments of all stripes to live up to their responsibilities. A government is not bound to follow every single line of a recommendation - as I’ve discussed, I think there are legitimate arguments against advancing hate speech legislation, and the state abuse in care report itself falls short for protecting people in care and supporting survivors in several ways.
What they do owe us is candid public clarity as to why, instead of using the obscurity of commissions and their reports to sweep inconvenient commitments under the rug once the public eye moves on. Just as Ardern or Hipkins should have done at some point, I think Luxon owes us some day scheduling a press conference and offering the public a conclusive update on what has been done, how they can next-to-guarantee never again, what has not been done, and why. Perhaps they don’t want to raise attention on people trying to live in privacy, but then they owe the community proper communication, and from all I hear that is not being satisfactorily met.
The one thing that does reassure me is that the responsibility for post-March 15th coordination going forwards now lies with Matt Doocey. Of every government MP, there is nobody I would rather have. In particular, given that his emphasis lives in the field of mental health, that’s encouraging about actively continuing to look after survivors, not just writing them off and thinking about the future. There’s no guarantee Doocey will do everything right and there’s no way his government will, but I hope they understand how deeply this commitment runs. If we had soldiers come back from overseas with bullets in them and PTSD, we would owe them a huge commitment; never mind our own civilians suffering the same who never signed up for this.
I’d like to add three thoughts to the veepstakes as they draw towards their conclusion. One is that Joe Biden was picked for vice-president at retiree age, and he still ran for President. They need to seriously consider the prospect that a vice-president might make a run of things down the line, which makes older veeps more concerning: Mark Kelly, Tim Walz, and especially Pritzker, who we know badly wants to run, should be downgraded, while the alternatives should be upgraded.
Two is that Shapiro keeps sliding further and further for me as more comes up about him, both in terms of what he offers to the ticket and how much he personally suits. I am no longer excited for him to be on a national ticket (leaving just Whitmer and Warnock as my personal faves). From allegedly covering up sexual harassment, to writing a racist essay in college demeaning Palestinians as a warlike people, some of these issues might do more damage than others - I doubt he’d significantly hurt Harris on her left despite being too centrist for them. Nonetheless, he represents far too much of a risk to be justified as a choice simply because he comes from a swing state.
Three is that Tim Walz is now in the conversation! I didn’t expect this at all, but yeah, progressives should totally be rooting for him to get the gig. So long as Harris can secure a commitment from him not to run for President (not that a 68 year old running is a disaster, but surely an era of younger Presidents is preferable), and the party’s okay with not anointing a successor right now, I think he suits well. He has sufficient experience as governor since 2019, and another good biography like Wes Moore’s. As somebody who has been pleading for messaging that identifies reactionaries as weird and abnormal for years, he’s bang on the money. I don’t think his message will outlast its welcome by Election Day: him and Harris can confidently present a vision of American normalcy versus a deeply bizarre ticket. Trump is hardly going to tone down the culture warring as time goes on.
Beshear is still well in contention, and I’m sure they’re giving more weight to Shapiro than I would. Yet given that Walz’s former House colleagues are supporting him as the pick, this can’t be good for Kelly’s chances. His pitch would mainly be that he actually has experience in D.C. - an underrated aspect of Harris’s search, now overlapped by Walz. Kelly’s past opposition to pro-labour legislation might also deflate Midwestern working-class union voters, whereas Walz would encourage them. The conclusion one leaves with, this close to the announcement, is that for all the talk of Harris opening up a southern route, the locations of most of her preferred running mates seem to suggest that they are banking on the northern route first and foremost. As they should - more electoral votes at stake and better odds of winning each means sometimes the same ol, same ol is the best road to walk down.
Speaking of vice-presidents, for this week’s media watch I’d like to shout out Veep! I got into the show because, with everything happening with Biden and Harris, a show premised on the inherent comedy in awkwardly waiting around for the presidency with little real power suited the moment. Yet I expected a show that would be only moderately funny, recycling the dead-eyed SNL-circuit comedy that’s a bit too proud of itself for too little payoff.
Nah, Veep is funny! The Suits-level constant quippiness is pretty quality writing, and well delivered by the cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfuss shines as a star by turns sympathetic and sociopathic. I especially appreciate how, through casting and plot choices, the show viscerally demonstrates the divide between the old boys’ club and the wave of young guns coming up in D. C. And even if the first season is a bit ho-hum, resembling comedies that focus on the ultra-mundane like The Office, the pacing picks up as we get to what properly makes this a satirical comedy, as plausible, impactful events are shown through the lens of laughter - in particular, the season 2 and 3 finales really hit. At the time of writing, halfway through season 4, Veep holds up, and I don't expect the show to drop off any time soon.
The mystery country is Algeria! No, seriously - I use a random country generator for this and it happened to line up with this week's events.
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