We lead sheltered lives out here in the provinces. Until
recently, for example, I’d never heard of a terf.
You hadn’t either? Allow me to explain. A terf is a
trans-exclusionary radical feminist.We have TVNZ’s excellent Q+A programme to
thank for bringing us up to speed with this latest acronym from the culture wars.
Q+A ran a fascinating item two Sundays ago about a
trans-gender person from Wellington who identifies as a woman but was denied
membership of a women-only gym because the gym insisted on proof of
gender re-assignment surgery.
According to Q+A, gym staff were subsequently abused online
and in person, presumably by supporters of the trans-gender cause. I felt sorry
for the trans person at the centre of the debate, who clearly didn’t relish
being implicated in such unpleasantness.
The bigger picture here is that society is suddenly expected
to remould itself to accommodate gender variations that were unheard of a few
years ago. In the process, a schism has opened up between trans-gender people
and orthodox feminists. This is what happens when society gets fragmented and
polarised by identity politics.
We got advance warning of this three years ago when the
doughty feminist warrior Germaine Greer caused an uproar by asserting that
trans people were only pretend women. Since then, hostilities have escalated.
In Britain, militant trans activists and terfs have angrily
confronted each over a proposed law change that would allow people to
“self-identify” their gender.
Trans people assert that if you regard yourself as a certain
gender, regardless of the bits you were born with, that’s it; end of story. The
trans activists don’t even like hearing reference to vaginas, because that
excludes “women” who don’t have them.
The terfs, meanwhile, are determined to protect the notion
of womanhood because they see it as underpinning all that feminists stand for.
They are also a bit iffy, perhaps understandably, about sharing women-only
spaces with people who may be biologically male.
It’s a deliciously exquisite socio-cultural-ideological war.
If you wanted to be mischievous you could characterise it as a contest over
which faction considers itself the more grievously discriminated against. But
that would be flippant, and flippancy is not permitted in the gender wars.
National Party leader Simon Bridges learned this to his cost
when he allowed himself to be lured into a trap during a chat on Radio Hauraki,
which specialises in blokey flippancy,about whether Jacinda Ardern’s baby
should be regarded as gender-fluid.
Predictably, Bridges was savaged in social media for playing
along with the joke. Humour, traditionally a safety valve for easing social
tensions, is suddenly verboten.
Fragile sensibilities are waiting to be bruised everywhere
you turn. Just by placing inverted commas around that word “women” earlier in
this column, and thereby highlighting the rather ambiguous status of some
people who use that term to describe themselves, I risk being branded as
transphobic.
You can add this hyperbolic word to the ever-growing list of
pejorative terms – homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist, misogynistic –
that are used to disparage anyone who isn’t nimble-footed enough to keep up
with the constantly shifting battle lines in the culture wars.
I tell you, it’s a minefield out there. Decline to make a
wedding cake for a lesbian couple because same-sex marriage is against your
beliefs, as the woman owner of a bakery in Warkworth did recently, and no
matter how painfully polite your refusal, you’ll be pilloried on social media.
Let me make a wild guess here and speculate that many of the
people who burned with rage over the baker’s refusal of service to the lesbian
couple would have deliriously applauded the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia for
humiliating Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, by asking
her to leave on a recent Friday night.
Am I missing something, or are there two different rules in
play here?
Fortunately, out here in the provinces, we’re largely
oblivious to the myriad anxieties and resentments that seem to beset
politically aware Wellington. Most of the people I meet strike me as being
inexplicably content with life in one the world’s most liberal and tolerant
democracies. The preoccupation with perceived injustices seems very much an
inner-city metropolitan phenomenon.
We can’t help but be aware of them, of course. Day after
day, the media bombard us with laments from a plethora of advocacy groups
listing the innumerable ways in which society is failing to satisfy the needs
of disadvantaged minorities. New categories of human rights pop up overnight
like mushrooms.
But the urban social justice crusaders will just have to be
patient and give us provincial yokels time. When age-old certainties are being
constantly subverted and the ideological ground keeps shifting under us like
tectonic plates, it can be hard to keep up.
Karl du Fresne blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz. First
published on Stuff.
1 comment:
There are more important things to focus on than joke people and their hilarious joke identities. We just don't care, call yourselves what you like, but don't expect others to engage with your pathetic fantasies.
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