I like NZ Herald columnist Lizzie Marvelly. I think she brings attention to important issues and she is passionate about her beliefs. She is a strong voice for social justice and she leads with courage. I agree with the vast amount of things she writes about and believe she’s right on many issues.
Her latest column however, I can’t agree with because in it, Lizzie lashes out at many people for the Pride Parade fiasco except the extremists who broke it and seems incapable of acknowledging that her support for those extremists means if she wants to blame someone, perhaps she needs to look in the mirror.
You do not need to be queer to love, respect and support the Pride Parade. Celebration of diversity is an essential element within a progressive democracy, Auckland is made better by this event, New Zealand is made better by this event, we are all made better people by the pride Parade and we can all feel ownership in that so her constant referencing of the straight community watching and commenting on this sad meltdown is not the schadenfreude she tries to construct, it’s genuine disappointment in an event that we all rightfully felt value of and connection with.
Criticism of the woke stupidity of millennial identity politics extremists is not a trashing of the Rainbow, it’s a valid response to those who trashed the Rainbow,
To listen to the manner in which these woke extremists refer to the Gay, Lesbian, Bi and Trans activists of the 1980s and 1990s who battled HIV and pushed for the Homosexual Law reform gives you a far clearer perspective of the kind of people who wrecked the Parade.
Lizzie’s support for asking Police to wear T-shirts so that Police in uniform wouldn’t trigger trans people suggests Lizzie didn’t know the police fought to gain the right to wear their uniform in the parade and that asking them to remove it was always going to elicit this type of response which of course would immediately cascade out to the entire super-structure of good will these extremists destroyed.
When you empower extremists to decide who to cast out and who to include, there are consequences.
Understanding how you helped create those consequences is the first step to ensuring todays mistakes aren’t caused tomorrow.
What goes down well in the echo chamber of Woke Twitter is not a real reading of the wider community.
The excluded here are not the police who should never have been included in the first place. It is women, specifically lesbians, who are being targeted as transphobic because they reject the ideology that biological men have the right to claim to be women. That exclusion by transactivists who kick out the police while begging the Coalition to pass the self-ID law that makes transwomen legally women, is a another form of attack by men on women.
This results from two immediate causes. First, the neo-liberal backlash against women’s liberation which targetted the most oppressed element in the working class resisting neo-liberalism. Second, a specific attack on the staunchest element of the women’s movement, lesbians. Transactivism is a state and corporate capitalist sponsored culture reflecting the post-modern individualism of neo-liberal capitalism that substitutes extreme individual choice for the solidarity of gender and class politics.
Capitalism on its last legs uses every means at its disposal to prevent the unity and solidarity of women with men posing a revolutionary threat to its class rule. When Renee Gerlich says that it is not climate change but women’s struggle that is the big issue today she is right. It is women who are leading the climate emergency charge and it is women who have the least to lose in challenging the oppressive, exploitative and ultimately destructive rule of capital and climate collapse. In that sense, the transactivist attack on lesbians is part of the counter-revolution.
Nope. No one was targeting any one. The police admitted to an unconscious “bias,” there is no deliberate conspiracy targeting trans people or lesbians.
The problem with SJWs is that each think they are the most oppressed, hence the term “Oppression Olympics”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/855/334/db2.jpg
They end up consuming themselves by swarming individuals with plagues of wokusts on Twitter and Facebook. Ironically, the targets of these wokust swarms often initially supported them either sympathetically or as fellow “oppressed minorities”.
The smartest thing to do is to not look at Facebook, not look at Twitter, and thus completely ignore their over-the-top reactionary knee-jerk nonsense generally.
Top marks for enlightening me to ‘wokusts’.
It’s an apt term because they behave exactly like their insect counterparts (locusts). After swarming onto something, utterly decimating it, they move on to the next target.
I do not pretend to know what goes on inside the heads of the most ardent rainbow activists but I do understand this; their concern the coercive arm of the state is marching around pretending they are not the coercive arm of the state, but a bunch of cuddly old Aunty social workers is wrong and concerning is bang on the money to me.
The police are trying to be the good guy, the smiley magnanimous old relative but one who we know can turn nasty in a heartbeat because at times they have too. It is this dual personality of fun-loving silly old duffers that makes the police disingenuine and not trustworthy and patently so.
The police exist to enforce laws made by the state on behalf of the people. That is it. But somewhere as of late, the NZ Police have decided that they need to market themselves with all the verve of an airline with accompanying PR. Some in it, spending far too long away from the reality of police, have lost the plot and think their job is to be loved and feel love. They are not the people who will take your liberty, tell you what you can and cannot do and back it with force, they are some other weird organisation that pretends its not like that.
There is NO place for police in uniform representing the police in this parade because as an organisation they aren’t meant to. They are there to serve the people without fear or favour, to be 100 straight down the line neutral, to be there silently whenever they are needed.
There is a whole lot going on in the police at the moment that revolves around corporate goals and with it more and more weird ways to promote up the ranks within and the Pride parade was a huge box ticking opportunity to show just how diverse you can be.
Its pure bullshit and it is confusing as hell. What next, the IRD?
Police need to stay the hell away from politics and get back to their core job, period. If those gay people in the police want to march, march but for yourselves, not your organisation.
I just can’t see why the cops got all precious and didn’t want to march in mufti (maybe a black woolen singlet?). They then could have marched lockstep carrying little placards declaring: “We are police”.
spot on @ x-ray!
And why can’t they march in mufti?
They can still carry a banner at the front and bloody well be themselves instead of the neutral arm of the law! As if that was ever the case.
Martyn, I say this as a middle aged lesbian who fought hard and took a lot of homophobic violence and hatred in the 1980s. I completely agree with every word you have uttered on the issues around the Pride debacle. You actually get it in a way that I am finding difficult to connect with amongst my own friends and community. I question myself daily at the moment, thinking am I just getting old and comfortable and out of touch with my radical roots? Shouldn’t I be more supportive? And then I read your pieces and think That! What he said! We are all fighting amongst the crumbs while the 1% laugh all the way to the bank and their bunkers. Thanks
Wow. Watching that last video was just sad. “Fuck small businesses! Fuck all of them!” That young woman is so hilariously stupid and hypocritical it beggars belief. You can’t preach inclusivity and then declare you hate vast tracts of society for some bizarre and irrational reason that makes sense only to you. They’re behaving like spoilt toddlers and I feel bad for the rest of the rainbow community.
Brilliant post Dave Brown. None of the subsequent posts engaged with your points. Is that because people are fixated with the ‘sovereign individuals of Capitalism’ so that individual choice to self-identify as a woman is a more compelling position to take, over the fact that half the world’s population are biologically women? Individual choice in these circumstances is flawed, even dangerous.
Some men transition to being women by having sex change operations. Men who claim to be women while remaining physically men, can cause problems. Some men are imprisoned for committing violent crimes against women. If they are trans in prison they may be attacked themselves. Corrections have moved to protect these people by transferring them to women’s prisons. They also give them the chance to have sex change operations. However, not all opt for these and Correction says that over the year there have been six attacks on women prisoners by these trans men who retain their male bodies.
Some women MPs advocate law change to make those who self identify as women,legally women. Green MPs and Labour’s Louisa Wall, reject opposition to this proposal as transphobic. They see lesbian activists who oppose their views, as their main threat. In rejecting opposing views they try to close down other women’s speech. They ignore the danger they put women in by allowing men entry into women’s spaces. They also fail to ask where these men were in women’s struggles for equality Once again, male rights take precedence over women’s.
So you claim. But we have no evidence of this. Just your assertions which, based on your other comments indicate a hostility toward trans-women.
I’ve read that claim before, Janio, and when further information was requested none was forthcoming. Without knowing the details of those alleged “six attacks on women prisoners by these trans men”, your claim cannot be verified.
By the way, the correct term for men-transitioning-to-women is “trans women”.
“Trans men” are women-transitioning-to-men.
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