Category: Media

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Laurel Hubbard is a trailblazer

Laurel Hubbard has qualified to represent New Zealand at the next Olympics (whenever or wherever those happen) in women’s weightlifting.

Virtually no one would have paid any attention to this – weightlifting not being one of the three sports (cricket, netball, league) New Zealanders actually care about – if it weren’t for the fact Laurel Hubbard is a trans woman. The first, in fact, to qualify to compete at the Olympics, despite trans athletes being technically allowed to compete, under certain restrictions, since 2003.

Keep that in the back of your mind, yeah?

This is a tremendous achievement for her and if she’s in serious contention for a medal it’s great for New Zealand, right?

Except this is a pretty bad time to be a visible trans woman, and especially a visible trans woman in sports. What generously gets called “a debate” about trans women’s (never trans men’s, keep that in the back of your mind) participation in sport is nothing more or less than the wedge issue for organised transphobic activism, right after stirring up baseless moral panic about public bathrooms.

The farcical “arguments” offered are like most transphobia: rooted in bog-standard, basic sexism. You have to accept the idea that men are inherently faster, stronger, taller and more powerful than women; that testosterone is a magical wonder drug that confers superhuman powers on anyone who gets enough of it during puberty; that the chromosomes or genitals you’re born with are the primary factors determining if you’re good at sports or not.

The transphobia is also basic. It’s simply about insinuating, inferring and outright stating, from behind an army of newborn Twitter sockpuppet accounts, that trans women “are men” and for a trans woman to compete against cis women is thus “unfair”.

A picture is painted of a terrible world in which no cis woman ever wins any medals because trans women (dogwhistle: “cis men pretending to be trans to win all the medals”) “dominate” all the sports. Except … remember how trans athletes have been able to qualify for the Olympics since 2003? And it’s 2021? And Laurel Hubbard is the first?

So … where are all these cis men lining up to win all the medals if it’s so simple?

There is literally no basis for this fearmongering beyond that primary-school level, “boys have testosterone and that’s why they’re strong; girls have estrogen and that’s why they love babies” understanding of human biology. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is pretty much the opposite of any credible feminism.

So Hubbard’s achievement has been immediately framed in the context of that “debate”, and that’s incredibly sad and concerning. She and other trans women – and cis women who look “too butch” because that is an obvious side consequence of transphobic gender-policing – are literally put in danger by this rhetoric, not just denied the ability to live their lives to the fullest.

She is a trailblazer. She deserves to be counted among all the other people we hold up as Kiwi heroes because they overcame tremendous odds to be The First In The World, without the shadow of nasty, petty sneers and abuse from cowards who want to reduce womanhood to a quivering pair of ovaries, crying for the patriarchy to protect them.

And you know that they don’t even really care about sports, right?

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Well, that blew up.

The Gillette ad is here (don’t read the comments):

A few more takes I liked from good tweeps:

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Recommended reading

A weekend roundup post-International Women’s Day.

Charlotte Graham-McLay: Why the #MeToo reckoning has so much further to go (Noted)

I want mine to be the last generation of women who have to wait until they can afford to fight back – for me, around the age of 30, for some women, older or younger or never – and then grieve that we want our 20s back. I want mine back as a time where all that was considered, when assigning the jobs or opportunities or respect I wanted, was whether I was good enough.

Alison Flood: Romantic fiction in the age of Trump (Guardian)

“I woke up on 9 November and I was like, ‘I can’t write another one of these rich entitled impenetrable alphas. I just can’t,” says the New York Times bestselling author. “It was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human, which is a thing we do a lot in romance. And I just couldn’t see a way in my head that he would ultimately not be a Trump voter.”

(As good a time as any to plug my side project, Op Shop Romance: for everyone who wants to see how far I can roll my eyes at trashy romance tropes.)

Golriz Ghahraman: The CPTPP deal undermines Kiwis’ best interests (NewShub)

The CPTPP is blatantly not all that much about trade at all. The overwhelming majority sets out the extra rights of these elite foreign investors to be free from government regulation. The e-commerce chapter effectively prevents public oversight of this century’s data driven economy. They get to store their data outside NZ to get around the Privacy Act for example. They get a guarantee that NZ will abstain from regulating all unknown future technologies. Who does that benefit? And how is it necessary to trade?

Dorothy Ann Lee: Who was Mary Magdalene? Debunking the myth of the penitent prostitute (The Conversation)

The tradition of the penitent prostitute has persisted in the Western tradition. Institutions that cared for prostitutes from the 18th century onwards were called “Magdalenes” to encourage amendment of life in the women who took refuge in them. The word came into English as “maudlin”, meaning a tearful sentimentality. It is not a flattering description.

Serena Cherry: Women of metal, I salute you (Atom Smasher)

Couldn’t not include this one!

No one compares the handsomeness of our male guitarist against say, Bruce Dickinson, because they realize how ABSURD and IRRELEVANT that is. They manage to discuss the boys’ vastly different musical merits without turning it into some kind of sexy Top Trumps trade off. But no, screw my guitar playing and Simone’s singing, when it comes to the great variety of women in metal – what matters is who is the most attractive? The last thing I’d expect from a metalhead is such a shallow, reductionist attitude.

Here’s Svalbard’s “Unpaid Intern”. If it’s not your cup of tea musically (Mum) then check out Cherry’s companion essay about class struggle.

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The gender politics are coming

There is a spectre haunting New Zealand men. The spectre of a #MeToo witchhunt, which is what happens when women act like witches, which isn’t sexist, it’s just a historic fact that women used to get together with their broomsticks and steal penises. People wrote about it in Latin, you know, and that makes it a serious record, because they still teach Latin at Auckland Boys Grammar and Wellington College and there’s no finer schools in the country.

Of course I’m not excusing harassment and sexual assault. I am offended you would suggest that. Those things, when they’ve actually happened, are terrible. It’s simply that I find it hard to believe they happen as often as women say, because women are known to blow things all out of proportion. One time I told a junior coworker that she’d be so much prettier if she smiled more and she absolutely went off on me, how weird is that? I was paying her a compliment. No surprise she ended up going into comms instead, she wasn’t a good fit for the fast-paced newsroom environment.

I am not sexist – I know and respect a lot of women journalists. When they’re investigating real stories, they can be just as competent as men. The problem is when you’ve got women journalists investigating other women’s stories about men. They’re naturally going to believe women who say they’ve been harassed. And it’s not journalistic to believe women. The proper, investigative thing to do is believe men.

All I’m asking for is balance. After all, if men were really doing these horrible things, for years and years, someone credible would have said something about it and we would have investigated it. Or rather, we wouldn’t have, because the appropriate organisation to pursue these allegations is the police. Don’t you ladies understand that journalism is a noble calling which is above challenging the status quo or questioning the integrity of law enforcement?

You should stick to real journalism, like Paula Penfold’s work on the Teina Pora case. That was impressive because it didn’t threaten my position in this industry, which I clearly earned through my own hard work and not making a fuss about minor things like being sent sexually suggestive text messages by my supervisor every night. That never happened to me so I just can’t believe it happened to anyone else. I would have heard about it from someone believable, over the water cooler or the urinal wall.

Think of the dangerous precedent we’re setting. If women are just going to believe other women and investigate their stories – hundreds of individual, one-off stories – what next? Are we going to give credence to the hundreds of individual stories of Māori incarcerated for longer, harsher prison sentences than individual Pākehā committing the same crimes? Should we be troubled by the thousands of individual, one-off stories of historic child abuse? Are we supposed to draw some kind of conclusion about our society’s values and power dynamics from the fact a lot of people have similar experiences?

Perish the thought!

The only reasonable conclusion to draw, based on my own rational assumptions and not any kind of conversation with the women journalists involved in this investigation (it’s only fair to them, they could hardly be objective about their own investigation) is there’s nothing to see here and the risks to innocent men massively outweigh any kind of justice or closure which might be delivered to unreliable women. People could lose their jobs over this investigation, and for what? Women who never progressed that far in the industry anyway.

I’m not saying women can’t hack it in journalism, I’m sure they all had their reasons for leaving and it would be rude to question them. If you can’t even ask a woman when she’s planning on having children you can hardly inquire about her career plans!

I’m just asking for balance. The solution to decades of alleged harassment and bullying cannot be turning the tables on people like me who did nothing wrong and certainly didn’t benefit from more talented people being driven out of the industry by systemic misogyny. Is it going to fix anything if the predators in our midst are unmasked and the power structures that support them are torn down? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make a living from journalism these days when all you have going for you is a pompous writing style and the unshakeable conviction that your every brainfart is worthy of publication?

If Alison Mau and Paula Penfold really want to help women, they should leave this investigation to male journalists who’ll do the job properly, and won’t just take some girl’s word for it that her boss was a creep or her coworker wasn’t just a clumsy flirt. And if a bit of reasonable doubt and objectivity means that no women feel comfortable sharing their personal stories of trauma and disillusionment with us, well. We can all draw a pretty clear conclusion from that.

~

With apologies to David Cohen and Bryce Edwards, who I didn’t contact before writing this piece because I’m not a real journalist.

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Recommended reading

A few damn fine bits and pieces for your Sunday.

Representation – Megan Whelan

I didn’t know how to be fat in the world, because even though I saw people who looked like me all the time, there was no instruction manual on how to look like me and be happy. All the women I looked up to – whether popular or powerful – were smaller than me. And even then, the ones who were bigger than a size 12 were the object of ridicule. I learned that if I did something wrong, the first thing people would comment on was my weight.

So I learned to hide.

Could New Zealand’s tough media laws silence our #metoo moment? – Tess McClure, Vice

In the United States, where much of the ‘Me Too’ reporting on sexual misconduct has occurred, the situation is very different. The First Amendment provides a fierce protection of free speech for journalists and citizens, and defamation cases are much more difficult to get over the line. If you’re a public figure, winning a suit generally requires proving the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly false or that it was published “with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not”.

Considering a case like Harvey Weinstein brings those differences into sharp relief. As a public figure in the USA, it would be up to Weinstein to prove the allegations published against him were false, or published with reckless disregard. In New Zealand, it would be down to the media outlet to prove every last claim. The nature of sexual harassment cases is that they’re often covert and occur without witnesses. It’s not unusual for sexual assault victims to wait several years before making an allegation. They tend to leave little in the way of a paper trail.

Related: The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment – Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell

Organizations that understand the Al Capone theory of sexual harassment have an advantage: they know that reports or rumors of sexual misconduct are a sign they need to investigate for other incidents of misconduct, sexual or otherwise. Sometimes sexual misconduct is hard to verify because a careful perpetrator will make sure there aren’t any additional witnesses or records beyond the target and the target’s memory (although with the increase in use of text messaging in the United States over the past decade, we are seeing more and more cases where victims have substantial written evidence). But one of the implications of the Al Capone theory is that even if an organization can’t prove allegations of sexual misconduct, the allegations themselves are sign to also urgently investigate a wide range of aspects of an employee’s conduct.

And finally, some happy news to see you through to Monday: Ditching Andrew Jackson for Mary Jackson – Marina Koren, The Atlantic

An elementary school in Utah has traded one Jackson for another in a change that many say was a long time coming.

Jackson Elementary School in Salt Lake City will no longer be named for Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, whose slave ownership and treatment of Native Americans are often cited in the debate over memorializing historical figures associated with racism.

Instead, the school will honor Mary Jackson, the first black female engineer at NASA whose story, and the stories of others like her at the space agency, was chronicled in Hidden Figures, a 2016 film based on a book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly.