Progressive New Zealand?

[thatdamnwoman]

I'm just back from several weeks visiting friends and family in Australia and New Zealand, where I was struck by the number of socially conservative people who seemed to want to demonstrate how progressive they are by citing their understanding of/ sympathy with trans people.

One of my Kiwi relatives, in her 50s and the equivalent of Tory Woman, talked very supportively of her daughter's friend who was just about to have a double mastectomy and was identifying as a man. Instead of being horrified at young women volunteering to be mutilated, she and everyone else involved in the conversation were proud of themselves for being so cool about trans. What she wasn't at all cool about was the fact that her daughter — expensively privately educated and just about to start a PhD — doesn't yet have a serious boyfriend. Or even a non-serious boyfriend. 'Perhaps we went wrong, sending her to an all-girls school and prioritising her academic education', my relative said. 'She's 24 and she doesn't know how to flirt with men. How's she going to meet a guy and get married?' Several of the women I met had the same concern: why weren't their educated, independent daughters interested in getting married and having children?

It struck me as bizarre that they are so at home with the idea of girls and young women mutilating themselves to become a rough approximation of a man, but not comfortable at all with the idea of their daughters choosing to pursue careers instead of a man and children. Or, horror of horrors, being lesbian. I heard so much supportive trans talk while I was there but not a word about LGB.

One day, on a walk down a beautiful and remote valley, we came across a naked woman suspended from a tree with two men watching and filming. 'Each to their own,' said my conservative, church-going cousin as he herded us in the opposite direction. 'Shouldn't we check that she's okay and not being abused?' I asked. 'She'll be the driving force behind it,' he said.

I began to find New Zealand very weird. Top of the Lake suddenly began to seem like a documentary rather than a dystopian drama. The conservative middle class, in love with the idea of being progressive, seem to have bought the idea that identity politics is liberating. They don't link it with porn, with the appallingly high incidence of domestic violence in their country, with mental health issues and so on.

Possibly it's just my extended family and their friends. Anyone else have any experience of New Zealand?

Not me I’m afraid but that sounds very interesting in a deeply disturbing sort of way.

There certainly sounds to be a very weird dynamic at play over there.

I’m a kiwi living in the uk. NZ has the highest DV rate in the western world ( and homeless rate ). It is far more sexist IMO than the UK. I started a thread about DV and rugby recently with a couple of recent stories. NZ is not progressive at all. It’s an illusion.

Conservative people feeling better about mutilating women than they do about independent women or even lesbians, is perfectly common.

Surely not just your relatives.

There's a place, I think it is Iran, where lesbians and gays are executed, unless they agree to have surgery to become a bad imitation of the other sex.

Just as long as the price to be paid is high enough not everyone wants to do it, and as long as they get to keep their neat little boxes, conservative people are pretty find with trans. It is less of a revolutionary concept than equality of the sexes or homosexuality.

Thanks: so I wasn't imagining it and my family and the people I met were probably quite typical.

Yes, the high rates of DV and child abuse were in the news because of Grace Millane's murder, which just added to the growing sense of unease I experienced while there.

So how did it happen? How did the trans agenda position itself as progressive and appeal to the kind of people who'd struggle with a gay or lesbian child?

I spent six months there. It is a strange place. Some very old fashioned attitudes and stereotypes. The culture in schools was like something out of the 1950s (poor ds had a shock!)
But yes then there was the desperation to portray themselves as so progressive and inclusive. I kept thinking who do you think you are kidding?!
Lovely for a holiday but I couldn’t live there!

So how did it happen? How did the trans agenda position itself as progressive and appeal to the kind of people who'd struggle with a gay or lesbian child?

I think the appeal is that it is easier to live in denial if people pretend to fit into those neat little gender boxes.

A lesbian couple is a lesbian couple, there's no denying that, especially if they don't make any effort to divide gender roles between them.

But if one of the lesbians has a beard and a deep voice, then you can pretend they are a hetero couple and that their children were fathered by the transed lesbian and not by sperm donor.

Same with gays. TiMs tend not to pass as well as TiFs, (unless transed as children ...) but if the big bloke is wearing a flowery dress and lots of makeup, if you are just stubborn enough, you can still pretend that he's a woman and the man he's with is hetero.

Then there's nothing that could encourage girls to think that there could be more to life than being a housewife, unless they are so strongly opposed to it that they are ready to mutilate themselves.

What I don't know is how conservatives deal with TiMs who call themselves lesbians. I suppose they just remind themselves that those are actually male and hetero.

To see how conservativism and transgenderism intersect, google Sworn Virgins. That's a concept that arose from a deeply patriarchal culture, and has lots of parallels to trans.

New Zealand, and Christchurch in particular, starting losing-the-plot with the Peter Ellis scandal. A City Possessed (2002) remains one of the best accounts of a modern witchcraft allegation.

The Peter Ellis case shows how far homophobia can go in a place like Canterbury. The Deep South is no place for gay people, Māori & Polynesian or women. There was a recent case at the end of November of a rugby guy who terrorised his wife and children with a rifle, ran over a policeman when they arrived and was killed by police. Canterbury rugby CEO said he was a ‘sad loss for Canterbury rugby’. They also just signed a guy who dragged and beat his partner on a public street. He did miss a whole game of rugby though... honestly I could go on and on. I think to counter this kind of crap, we have a large group on the far left who are championing self ID and legalising prostitution ( which led to higher trafficking and abuse ) among other things. It’s isolated, so extreme views on both sides do tend to thrive. There are areas where we do better than a lot of countries because we are small, but that can be a weakness too

Also note there’s a myth Polynesia has always accepted a ‘third gender’. The Samoan Fa Afafaine is given as evidence. The origins of Fa afafine are in homophobia, they preferred a transgirl than a gay son. They also used to designate one son as fa afafine if they didn’t have girls, as housework was only for girls and they tend to have larger families. I am Māori and I have had people claim we have always had a third gender, I can’t recall the term but it is a modern word not a traditional Maori word and it comes from the Cook Islands. I’ve seen Māori Green MP’s fully embrace transgenderism to the extent they are speaking to trans prisoners wishing to be moved to women’s prisons. 8 of the 12 trans prisoners in NZ are sex offenders.

Perhaps one of the reasons trans ideology is accepted there is because of a white liberal desire to appear culturally aware and sensitive/accepting.

A so called progressive MP here in N Z said she didn't want any "fuckin t*rfs at a March for women's Reproductive Rights. Just a couple of weeks ago.
And yes A City Possessed is a fantastic read about a modern day witch Hunt.
And yes, NZ likes to be seen as progressive and isn't once you scratch the surface.
The same as it likes to be seen as clean, green and pure, yet our rivers are toxic and some are dying due to big business interests.
But there are some awesome people there. 😊

Perhaps it's simply that trans ideology and misogyny are not world's apart.

@pennydrew142 Do you mean takatāpui? That used to mean lesbian or gay but apparently now covers trans /gender fluid etc too.

Are women now allowed to speak at a marae?
How would that work with self-ID?

Eketahuna No, I’m familiar with that term but this was another one I have only seen online used by TRA’s

I've seen it too. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%27afafine
Perhaps if you know better penny you could edit the wikipedia entry, it's not a part of the world I know anything about. It'll turn into an edit war though.

Men are just desperate. And yes, isn't it always the case that the 'female' identity is deemed the lesser and not allowed to have a voice. That's how they're defining 'female'. But TRAs are not misogynistic at all and women are just terrible for not going along nicely.

NZ is progressive In terms of women getting the votes, but as others have said domestic violence is shocking and violence toward women and children is shocking.

Also as a small nation it seems ideas can be tried out there whether it is banking innovations or say wholesale trans terminology with trans people ruining women's sports.

Yes it winds me up when Samoan trans girls are being presented as something that was always in place in their culture, for example the trans girl I knew of came from a family of five boys and was expected to help grandparents do housework from a young age almost like some kind of instance policy to keep their family going when the mum died or got sick.

Then I also remembering growing up you also had Samoan girls being chaperoned by elders like some throw back to Victorian or missionary culture.

If you google it, there’s personal stories shared from older gay Samoan men who were transed against their will. It’s quite shocking. I’m unfortunately used to the homophobia in Polynesia, even my mother was when we were young.