It’s a battered Pride Month

Pride kicks off

People around the world celebrated the start of Pride Month this weekend.

• • The big picture: The monthlong global celebration began with Gay Pride Week in late June 1970, a year after the violent police raid at New York’s Stonewall Inn, a gay bar. The first pride week featured marches in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and it has since grown to other cities, AP reports.

It’s a battered Pride Month that kicks off this year.

The weaponisation of anti-trans culture war talking points has opened a door to attack the wider rainbow community and it sees Schools holding Pride month under the threat of protest in NZ…

Pride Week: 200 schools join despite threats of protests

More than 200 schools across the motu held pride events this week, standing firm against a reported rise in anti-rainbow hate.

…with Winston’s constant anti-Trans messaging to Destiny Church’s Christofascist thugs, the tolerance towards the Rainbow Community has imploded into a seething hot mess of outright hatred.

The manner in which Benjamin Doyle was alleged to have been involved in a terrible crime with zero evidence highlights the gutter level haters are prepared to go now.

Hilariously this was fuelled by the middle class woke Identitarians and their social media Lynch mob deplatforming purges which helped alienate voters from the Left and drove them into the arms of the reactionary right.

When it comes to the whole Trans debate, I’m old fashioned. I think finding your true self and being comfortable in your own skin is one of the most important journeys of the human experience.

The idea that there are some men who believe they are women and some women who believe they are men and some people who believe they are both and some people who believe they are neither is as uncontroversial to me as the range of human skin, eye and hair colour.

Referring to someone by their preferred pronouns and identity is just basic good will courtesy offered to every fellow citizen.

If a trans person wishes to share a prison cell or locker room with me, I don’t care, but where I get cancelled by the woke is when I also agree that biological women have a right to philosophically and intellectually challenge some of the identity politics dogma that is being used here.

There is a legitimate debate between gender critical feminists and trans activists but what does it say about that debate when gender critical feminists have been pushed all the way over to the side of Nazis?

I have many self declaring feminist women who privately tell me they have real misgivings with some of the Trans woke dogma but are terrified of saying anything because the Fourth Wave Feminists, non-binary activists and trans ally vegan mommy bloggers rip them to pieces on social media. Part of the problem is that the Trans activists themselves have helped make this debate so radioactively toxic with their cancel culture dynamics.

For me the true tragedy here for the Trans community and the rest of the Idenity Politics movement is how quickly their alienating and over the top attacks along with their fourth wave feminist allies have eroded and burnt so much of the good will the rainbow community had built in the 80s, 90s and 00s.

The rainbow community pre Trans activism had worked to make love and family inclusive, the new woke Trans activists built pure temple cliques that created diversity by cancelling everyone who didn’t agree with them.

This entire issue has caused immense damage on the Left and rather than debating the material well being of citizens, we are lost in middle class identity politics virtue signalling that censors rather than answers and in that cultural space, anger grifters like Posie Parker flourish.

The tiny, tiny, tiny number protesting for puberty blockers on demand alongside the tiny, tiny, tiny numbers attending the ill-named, ‘These Queers Bash Back’ protest in Auckland tells you the political tide has well and truly on the Trans Rights popularity in the wake of Trump’s earthquake political win which is devastating for the wider rainbow community and a more inclusive society.

Dear NZ – a kid transitioning isn’t your enemy – the Billionaires and Banks are!

I have been a lone voice on the Left in NZ highly critical of the tactics middle class woke identity politics activists, fourth wave feminists and their non-binary allies have used since 2016 to alienate and drive many into the arms of the reactionary right in their pursuit of ‘Trans Rights’.

I have argued the Trans Community and their kaleidoscope of grievance pursued insane Pure Temple politics at the cost of Broadchurch Class Solidarity for the narcissism of petty difference.

I argued the roulette wheel of intersectionist victimhood, Outrage Olympics and Social Media Lynch mobs might make us on the Left about as electorally attractive as a cup of cold sick and that the backlash will spark something dark.

No one listened to me.

Now we have an immense cultural backlash generated by the woke after they had their first taste of cultural power in 2016 and that backlash is insane with rage.

For the millionth time.

This is a liberal progressive democracy, and everyone is promised the same agency and we want our Trans whanau to enjoy the same fruits of human rights we all enjoy, and for those who identity is a real issue, we want them to flourish, however when a middle class identity cult takes over the cultural debate to try and enforce a medical solution to their gender dogma, that’s where the adults in the room have to collectively stand and say, ‘hold on’.

This is the number of puberty blockers used in New Zealand alone…

…in the wake of the Cass Review, I don’t think the weaponised certainty of the woke is helping any longer.

There are genuine issues here that we have ignored in the rush to endorse woke Trans dogma, however what we don’t want is the excesses of the middle class cult to excite the transphobic right hate groups into any belief of justification.

My issue has never been anti-Trans, my issue is the radioactive manner in which the Trans activists and 4th wave cancel culture feminists went about alienating every voter.

Remember how we on the Left had people sacked from their jobs during the social media lynchings of 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 for questioning Trans Dogma?

Isn’t it hilarious the first tiny bit of power our activists had they used to alienate almost everyone? Thank Christ they are all on Bluesky now which is the equivalent of screaming into a cushion that no one else can hear.

It is the woke middle class Identitarians who have generated the political backlash we saw in America and globally.

Here is how spastic the Trans debate became in America.

Trump consistently claimed Democrats would allow illegal aliens sex changes in prison, what’s the truth?

Yes the American Prison system allows those transitioning to access the medicines they require because that’s a health issue, but how many have actually accessed sex change operations?

Only 2 prisoners!

2 FUCKING PRISONERS!

When challenged on this, Kamala Harris said “I will follow the law”, rather than explaining that there are only 2 examples of this and both were domestic prisoners, not ‘illegals’.

She didn’t point this out because the Dems were terrified of insulting the woke by mentioning the Trans debate in any way that didn’t worship them.

The Trans debate – thanks to the toxicity the Woke spent 8 years injecting into this issue, was manipulated by the Right to paint us as gender extremists FFS when only 2 prisoners have ever accessed it!

When you replace class and citizenship as our guiding values on the Left for identity politics, you make it impossible to get to the 51% democratic majority required to win power.

We want our Trans whanau to be able to enjoy the same agency that everyone is promised in a liberal progressive democracy, but the extremism of our woke middle class activists drove the debate off a cliff and now they are pissed off at the rest of us for not supporting them in driving off the cliff???

While I’ve been vocal against their woke alienation, I’ve ended up being one of the few still willing to stand with the Trans community against this Government threatening community funding for any amateur sports team having a Trans player because while I disagree with the Trans alienating tactics, I disagree much more with punishing community funding for their mere existence.

This whole debate needed to be far more rational and far less hating.

Unfortunately it’s Open Season for Hate.

The manner in which Trump has manipulated all of this culture war bitterness to eradicate Trans people from existence is dire and deeply fucking wrong.

We can have legitimate complaints about the way the middle class Woke went about alienating voters, but there is no way we can collectively agree with simply eradicating a class of people because people have been whipped up to hate them!

Trans people are people. I think in the hate of the debate we have lost that very simple truth.

Eradicating them in the way Trump has with the signing of his deplorable Presidential bully actions is ugly and an abomination of a Democracy locked into place by the tyranny of the bigoted majority.

First they came for the Trans people and I went out to punch Nazis because I know the rest of the poem.

Happy Pride Month.

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