The Woke’s Shania Twain cancel culture argument returns to bite the Left in the arse as NZ First goes trans rights romper stomper
‘Man I feel like a woman’ doesn’t have the intellectual heft it did in 2016.
The woke cancel culture hasn’t helped us debate important issues and has only allowed us on the Left to hand the political right ammunition.
I believe Identity Politics is an important personal journey into how you understand the power systems around you, but if all you have is a tribal allegiance to your skin colour, genitalia or sexual identity, what use are you to the movement?
The true demarcation of power in a democratic capitalist State is the 1% richest plus their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us.
Woke middle class Identity Politics is pure temple politics over the Broadchurch politics of Left class solidarity.
All the middle class woke know how to do is alienate and drive people away from the Left because of their purity tests.
Every time Shaneel Lal speaks, they drive another 10 000 voters away from us.
Objectivity, reason, logic – these are heteronormative white cis male privileges where as lived experience, grievance and victimhood are the new cultural currency.
Peak woke was 2016 with #MeToo, #BLM and the Trans movement.
The woke’s social media lynchings and cancel culture outrage olympics only helped hand the Right culture war ammunition that the Right have used against us.
We see this all play out in the latest IPSOS poll on extremism.
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 Posie Parker?
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.
Puberty blockers ARE an issue but anyone who dares question it receives a Wellington woke kamikaze pile on.
We want to be respectful of people living their true selves, but the cancel culture absurdity of the woke has made the debate radioactive.
Look at how NZ First have now manipulated this debate…
An open letter is calling on the Government to keep the current relationship and sexuality education guidelines in schools and kura, despite coalition promises to do otherwise.
…now one would have thought in NZ that the pressing issues for sex education was, biological facts, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, biological facts, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent, consent and some more biological facts, look at what the woke pushed through as the sex education…
Level 1 – recognising body parts; knowing about appropriate touching; being able to accept and celebrate difference; and understanding the relationship between gender, identity and wellbeing.
Level 2 – understanding what consent means in a variety of contexts, including online; recognising other people’s feelings and respecting them; being able to identify gender stereotypes and understanding the difference between gender and sex.
Level 3 – knowing about pubertal changes; understanding different types of relationships; understanding consent, pressure, coercion and rights; being able to critique the ways in which people’s bodies, relationships and gender might be represented in the media and online.
Level 4 – further knowledge about pubertal changes and how they relate to social norms around gender and sexuality; understanding approaches to conception and contraception; learning to manage intimate relationships; understanding how to get help if needed.
Level 5 – knowledge about cultural approaches to gender and sexuality; gaining skills for enhancing relationships; analysing representations of sex, sexuality and relationships.
Level 6 – examining how gender and sexual identities can change over time; gaining knowledge about consent and safe sexual practices; critiquing heteronormative messages or practices in the community.
Level 7 – understanding physical changes across people’s lifespans; identifying risks in intimate relationships, both online and offline.
Level 8 – reflecting on their personal identity; exploring things like desire and attraction as interpersonal and ethical concepts; critically analysing issues that affect relationships, gender identity and sexuality.
…it’s all gender identity, gender identity and more gender identity!
Surely consent is far larger an issue to NZ than gender identity?
The trans community represent less than 1% of the population, why has gender identity become a far larger issue than consent?
When you consider the unbelievably scathing Cas Report has been on puberty blockers why is gender identity being promoted Uber Alles?
First, do no harm” is the sacrosanct principle that is supposed to underpin modern medicine. But history is littered with examples of medics breaching this doctrine. Last week, the publication of Hilary Cass’s final report on healthcare for gender-questioning children laid bare the devastating scale of NHS failures of a vulnerable group of children and young people, buoyed by adult activists bullying anyone who dared question a treatment model so clearly based on ideology rather than evidence.
Cass is a renowned paediatrician and her painstakingly thorough review was four years in the making. She sets out how the now-closed NHS specialist gender clinic for children abandoned evidence-based medicine for a wing and a prayer. Significant numbers of gender-questioning children – it’s impossible to know exactly how many because the clinic did not keep records, itself a scandal – were put on an unevidenced medical pathway of puberty-blocking drugs and/or cross-sex hormones, despite risks of harm in relation to brain development, fertility, bone density, mental health and adult sexual functioning.
What drove this? The medical pathway is rooted in a belief that many, perhaps even most children questioning their gender will go on to have a fixed trans identity in adulthood, and that it is possible to discern them from those for whom it is a temporary phase. But studies suggest that gender dysphoria resolves itself naturally in many children. It is often associated with neurodiversity, mental health issues, childhood trauma, discomfort about puberty, particularly in girls, and children processing their emerging same-sex attraction; a large number of children referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) were gay. Putting these children on a medical pathway does not just come with health risks, it may also pathologise temporary distress into something more permanent. Cass is also clear that socially transitioning a child – treating them as though they are of the opposite sex – is a psychological intervention with potentially lasting consequences and an insufficient evidence base, that transitioning in stealth may be harmful, and says that for pre-pubertal children this decision should be informed by input from clinicians with appropriate training.
There is a conundrum at the heart of the report. Cass finds a childhood diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not predictive of a lasting trans identity and clinicians told the review they are unable to determine in which children gender dysphoria will last into adulthood. If this is indeed impossible, is it ever ethical to put a young person on a life-altering medical pathway? If there are no objective diagnostic criteria, on what basis would a clinician be taking this decision other than a professional hunch?
The report recommends a total overhaul in the NHS’s approach to caring for gender-questioning children and young people: holistic, multidisciplinary services grounded in mental health that assess the root causes of that questioning in the round and take a therapeutic-first approach. Puberty blockers will only be prescribed as part of an NHS research trial and she recommends “extreme caution” in relation to cross-sex hormones for 16- to 18-year-olds; one might expect this to be contingent on it being possible to develop diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria that will last into adulthood.
Cass’s vision is what gender-questioning children deserve: to be treated with the same level of care as everyone else, not as little projects for activists seeking validation for their own adult identities and belief systems. But it is going to be immensely challenging for the NHS to realise, and not just because of the parlous underfunding of child mental health services. There will be resistance among captured clinicians wedded to quasi-religious beliefs; it is astounding that six out of seven adult clinics refused to cooperate with the review on a study to shed more light on those the NHS treated as children. A senior NHS researcher at one trust told me the opposition to taking part in an uncontroversial methodology to inform better outcomes came not from the board but from some clinicians in their service, and this was unheard of in other parts of the NHS.
…that column is from The Guardian FFS, if they are as scathing of this woke dogma, you know it’s gone too far.
We have allowed middle class identity politic activists to trap the wider Left into these intellectual cul de sacs that only serve the political left.
Could the woke please stop handing political ammunition to the Right and can we focus on the common ground between us rather than the low hanging fruit of identity?
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You need to educate RNZ, They had something about a mother thinking that her child needs puberty blockers ( I did not read the article) today.
Bonnie And I skipped half of the above, not that I disagree with anybody’s misgivings about a non-scientific ideology being forced onto school children with teachers telling them that they may not be what they think they are.
Pre-school girls are taught to name their vulva so that if anyone interferes with them then they know the correct terminology to use. Boys told that having a penis doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a boy. Pity the poor third former’s mum, home from work, tired, cooking dinner while doing the laundry, making school lunches, helping with homework, and being told that she’s not gender fluid enough.
Little kids are being prematurely sexualised, unnecessarily, when they should be being children, and any problems arising from that addressed per se, instead of whole classes being brain washed en masse, and at the expense of acquiring the basic skills which they do need. The lunatics have captured the asylum. I was once an expert tree climber – today that could make me a boy – early menstruation a promiscuous hussy, instead of a damn nuisance.
You should move to Taliban controlled Afghanistan then.
Millsy, No, I thought it more pragmatic to vote NZ First. Pre-election Peters addressed this issue which mainstream politicians assiduously avoided, and MSM assiduously avoided him. Gotta wonder.
So you don’t deny that you want a biblical theocracy. You probably have been seething since homosexuality was decriminalized back in 1986
Homosexuality should never have been criminalised; it occupies its own place on the continuum of sexuality, and is no big deal. Telling children that they can choose their own gender is a totally different issue, and confusing the two is dumb.
Christ, you are such a fucking neurotic. Im in my 40’s and I knew when I was a kid that people changed my gender, I knew that there was a small amount of guys who would have an operation to become a woman, I just thought that was totally normal of some people to do it, Its only in the last 5 years or so that it ended up driving people like you up the wall.
Come on man… Scooch on on over to the right. The waters fine. LOL
This crap has eaten up way too much Left bandwidth. Rainbow is 3%. Trans is 1 in 30 000. No votes in it, and precious little social justice. The Left could shed this minority into its own made to measure political vehicle, and the only effect would be a poll bump.
So you would have a Christian theocracy imposed then?
Rainbow have nothing but hedonic values – Christians at least pretend to moral virtues. They are vulnerable to critiques when they fall short.
Rainbow have delivered nothing of value in my lifetime, and since they supported the trans nonsense I regret ever supporting them.
They are 3%, and that’s all I want to see of them. No rainbow crossings or drag story times or non-academic chancellors. Positions on merit, not identity.
Wow, never had you down as a homophobic prude Stuart. Next thing you will be railing against no fault divorce, abortion and birth control.
Let’s hope the post modernist nutcases have indeed passed peak woke.
Woke ABC meets reality:
https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103639808
“ On 27 March 2023, the ABC broadcast a 7.30 interview with Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto. That interview referred to the organisers of the “Let Women Speak” event held in Melbourne earlier that month and included a social media post by “Posie Parker”. Some viewers may have understood the interview to suggest that Kellie-Jay Keen, who was not named in the interview, who organised the Melbourne “Let Women Speak” event, has associations with Neo-Nazis. The ABC understands Ms Keen denies any association with Neo-Nazis and the ABC does not endorse any imputation that may have been conveyed to that effect. ”
Plus an out of court settlement.
No, sorry, you still need to look at the context in which the Cass Report was prepared.
It is at the tail end of a dying, dysfunctional British Conservative government and because of it that, it was deliberately designed to be a badly constructed moral panic against a vulnerable community. And frankly, even the quality British media have taken it at face value instead of engaging in due diligence and asking themselves why it is the case that most US, Canadian and Australian mainstream professional authorities in the fields of pediatrics, developmental psychology and endocrinology have undertaken peer-reviewed studies in relevant professional journals and come up with exactly the opposite findings about puberty blockers. The reason that the Cass Report ignored them was that it used a biased York University TERF researcher to illegitimately rule out a plethora of mainstream studies using a flawed evaluative tool that has been seriously questioned for its inapplicability to general medical research. If it was applied to cardiovascular or oncological research, it would call for the prohibition of statin medication or mammograms on the same basis.
So, no, I do not accept the Cass Report’s findings because they are methodologically flawed and politically biased. Given the Sunak regime and its predecessors manifold failures in areas like disability policy and its current repressive stance toward refugees and asylum seekers, why shouldn’t one engage in scepticism in this context as well? As for my own scepticism about the use of the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale, here’s a link to a critical medical article: http://bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2288-14-45
Carson Ka-Lok Ko, Domink Mertz and Mark Loeb: “Newcastle-Ottawa Scale: Comparing Reviewers to Authors Assessments” BMC Medical Research Methodology: 14: 45: 2014.
In short, what we have here is a cherry picked, inapplicable theoretical framework deliberately selected to eliminate most mainstream affirmative research from pediatrics, developmental psychology and endocrinology. It’s a stitch job. I have seen exactly the same thing happen repeatedly in US Christian Right attacks on same-sex parenting from subcultural luminaries with no relevant professional expertise, no relevant professional affiliation, no relevant peer-reviewed journal publications in the relevant discipline and serious methodological flaws.
I’m not a postmodernist. I base my political positions on replicable, cumulative and verifiable evidence-based research. Apart from the Cass Review, the overwhelming majority of evidence-based research in the relevant fields of pediatrics, developmental psychology and endocrinology supports the utility of puberty blockers.
And frankly, as a gay man, this alt-right anti-transgender moral panic is starting to smell an awful lot to me like the marxist-leninist left’s refusal to consider homosexuality anything more than ‘bourgeois decadence’ and blindly accepting the conservative bowdlerisation of Freud that occurred in the United States as an authoritative source for its own homophobia. Cuban imprisonment of gay men and PLWAs for ‘criminal and counter-revolutionary” activities wasn’t that long ago.
You have a detailed and lengthy study prepared by a highly qualified senior clinician in her field.
Your rejection of it puts you in with the antivaxxers.
Right, and I’m supposed to ignore the fact that most senior US professional associations in the fields of pediatrics, developmental psychology and endocrinology have cumulative, replicable and verifiable research that shows just the opposite- that puberty blockers are fit for purpose? And that the Cass Review failed to consult transgender and LGBTQIA+ advocacy organisations and the aforementioned professionals in the aforementioned disciplines? And frankly, Hillary Cass is one highly qualified senior clinician amongst a range of others whose evidence-based research shows exactly the opposite. Again, why is that outside the United Kingdom, most health ministries appear to have rejected the findings of this report? Because, unlike the Christian Right and anti-transgender pseudofeminists, they have clearly and independently assessed the whole range of evidence about the efficacy of puberty blockers and recognised that the Cass Review is an outlier?
If anyone deserves to be classed alongside the antivaxxers, it’s the anti-transgender lobby. And frankly, its apologists would impress me more if they bothered to leave the echo chamber once in a while and engage in some proper critical inquiry and consultation of the full range of appropriate evidence from professional sources instead of engaging in juvenile, ad hominem abuse and meaningless, unsubstantiated assertions.
Added to which, Cass isn’t the culpable figure in this context. She delegated authority in the context of the Cass Review’s research assessment segment to York University’s Tilly Langton, who is therefore responsible for the illegitimate Newcastle/Ottawa Scale filter methodology that eliminated most of the cumulative, replicable and verifiable evidence in support of puberty blocker prescriptions.
As for the pieces that I’ve cited above, you can read them for yourselves here:
1. Brief of amicus curiae of the American Academy of Pediatrics and additional national and state medical and mental health organizations in support of plaintiffs motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the state of Alabama: https://downloads.aap.org/DOFA/AmicusBriefARtransgenderlaw.pdf
2. A critical review of the the June 2022 Florida Medicaid Report on the Medical Treatment of Gender Dysphoria: https://medicine.yale.edu/lgbtqi/clinicalcare/gender-affirming-care/florida%20report%20final%20july%208%202022%20accessible_443048_284_55174_v3.pdf
And finally, as for the question about the relevance of my sexual orientation to all this… I’ve been in the LGBTQI+ activism field for many years and over time, I’ve turned into a research officer in several contexts. When it comes to anti-lesbian/gay research, here’s what the antis usually get wrong (deep breath)… small sample size, biased population samples, short duration studies, publication in non peer reviewed publications, publication that cites conservative Christian figures in its literature review or bibliography in place of recognised authorities, use of data subsets from studies that show the opposite results overall, illegitimate criteria exported from disciplines other than those involved in specific mainstream research findings, inferential jumps from the available data. It’s no surprise whatsoever to see that the Cass Review manifests the illegitimate criteria and biased subcultural “authorities” flaw in its findings. The more things change, the more they stay the same.