The Trans People We Love Are Enemies of the State
In the week where Posie Parker was touring Australia and then New Zealand, Aotearoa felt like it was having a sea change on transphobia. Suddenly the public was waking up to what some of us had been talking about for years—that the anti-trans movement is a fascist cause. Over the past decade, the anti-trans movement’s conservative core has become ever more apparent. Where once the movement could attract certain left-wing lesbian feminists, it is increasingly the province of heterosexual, middle-class right-wingers. Our protests against Parker did not stop the anti-trans menace; there will be more hate speech rallies, and we will have to turn out again to oppose them. But one of our great victories was to make the battle lines here very clear: trans rights on one side, Nazis on the other.
A lot of people also started to notice how uninterested the state was in protecting trans rights. Where Immigration New Zealand had denied visas to the black hip hop group Odd Future in 2014, based on their sexually violent lyrics, they argued that Parker did not represent a threat to public order. In the same week, Newsroom’s Marc Daalder reported that the Ministry of Health had scrubbed advice on trans healthcare from its website, despite knowing it was accurate, because of constant complaints from transphobes.
People were furious—I spoke to people who wouldn’t have come to the protest if Parker had been kept out, but were certainly coming down now. Labour MPs tried to salvage their reputations with platitudinous social media posts, but for once these were recognised as the token gestures they were. This may be a moment to help teach more people what’s actually going on here.
Anti-trans extremism is the acute end of an ongoing crisis of transphobia. Researchers of the far right are reporting a ramping up of anti-trans, anti-queer rhetoric in far right communication channels like Telegram, with one warning that we’re seeing a similar climate to that which preceded the March 15th attacks. However, in Aotearoa, we’re not currently in the middle of an anti-trans genocide like the US, and we don’t have as many TERFs in the government or the media as the UK. This will, of course, change if we switch to a National-ACT-New Zealand First government. But at a chronic level, even now, the biggest attack on trans wellbeing is not from demagogues like Parker, local TERF groups like Speak Up For Women, or noted woman’s rights supporters like Sean Plunket or Bomber Bradbury. The major threat, the primary overseer of trans misery and degradation, is the nation-state.
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By the nation-state, I don’t mean the government, although that is a function of it. I mean what a state really is: a geopolitical territory whose population is controlled by armed forces on the outside (the defence force, border control) and on the inside (the police and prison systems). In Aotearoa, the New Zealand state was first formed by violently taking the land and lives of tangata whenua, who have an indigenous relationship to it. Once they had enough land under their control, settlers imposed their own buildings, farms and cultural norms in Aotearoa, displacing Te Ao Māori wherever they could. Indigenous theorists often say that colonisation is a structure, not an event; in Aotearoa, all the social and economic systems that enforce Pākehā ways of being and degrade Māori ones are still here.
This is what settlers do. Artist Hannah Black suggests that many English settlers first experienced a break from indigeneity in their own lands; when people started turning communally-held land into sheep farms or other sorts of value-producing land, the peasants became rootless and easily shifted into cities and factories. Once you are removed from a specific relationship to land in this way, it’s easier to treat the land—along with its nature, animals and people—not as gifts to treat with care and reciprocity, but as resources to be conquered and exploited. Once those ways of living were in place, Black suggests, it was easy for English people to go forth and colonise countless lands around the world.
To take and hold large pieces of land for your own, you have to be willing to commit extraordinary acts of violence against both the land and its people. And to have a decent-sized population of violent people to carry this out, the system needs these people to become extremely tightly-wound, with rigid ideas of right and wrong, how the world should be, who is human and who is deviant. In some ways, people become like the state: keeping away external threats (other people whose ways of being scare them) and policing internal threats (their own bodies and inner desires).
This is where gender fits in. One of the key social structures that colonisers brought over was the nuclear family: a small household built around a sexual relationship between one man and one woman. The nuclear family represents a division of labour: the man goes out to work (on the farm or in the factory) while the woman tends to the household, fulfills the man’s sexual and emotional needs to help make him ready for work again the next day, and most crucially gives birth and raises children. In the 21st century, this sort of nuclear family is almost impossible to maintain—divorce is more common, and costs of living are high enough that both parties in a relationship need to work outside the home. But the rigid roles of man and woman have, to an extent, remained: the man has a penis and does these social roles, the woman has a vagina and does these social roles.
Queer sexuality, transness and intersexuality cannot exist in this framework. They mess up the entire system of how the New Zealand state wants us to carry out work, childcare, social life, our desires and existence. So gender variance is treated not as something that anyone can experiment with if they want, but as an external threat to be shut down.
This is another colonial fiction. Māori scholars such as Ani Mikaere, Elizabeth Kerekere and Kim McBreen have shown how Māori, both before colonisation and now, have different ways of thinking about sex and gender to Pākehā. Wahine Māori have far more status and power in Te Ao Māori than any women have in Pākehā society, and gender and sexuality are much less binary, much less rigid. Bakla scholar b. binaohan outlined how in Filipino culture, transfeminine people were powerful figures in their societies; demonising and dehumanising them was yet another way for colonisers in the Philippines to gain power.
The state is built on colonial transmisogyny; not just the demonisation of trans women of colour, but white people of all other genders treating ourselves as safer, better, more deserving of resources and power. This is not something that can be undone unless you destroy the colonial state, give the land back to mana whenua and create entirely new ways of living in Aotearoa.
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Having laid that out, let’s return to the events of last week. It is unsurprising that the state has responded so badly to trans needs. To the state’s true believers, such as Chris Hipkins, Posie Parker’s views are just a storm in a teacup, with both sides of the debate being equally to blame. Green MP Marama Davidson’s crime of accurately pointing out who holds power, however, must be crushed. From the fiasco at the Ministry of Health, we can see that people who uphold the state are more committed to its bureaucratic process than to protecting trans people. After all, it would be easy enough to block emails from TERFs rather than meticulously answer them. But most people who have not seriously questioned colonial gender roles are unlikely to spot these queries as nonsense, let alone think it worthwhile to break their loyalty to state bureaucracy or risk controversy at their jobs.
Readers may object that the state isn’t just about violent land theft and policing, as I have outlined. The state also organises and provides services; healthcare, housing, public transport, schools, water supplies. Yet we all know how minimal each of these systems are, how underfunded and under-supplied. In Aotearoa, state health systems are severely underequipped, overloaded with patients, healthcare workers work long hours with unsafe staffing levels for much lower pay than in Australia, and wait times for even emergency care are far too long. Moreover, as Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, state systems are also used to shape people and turn them into good little citizens. They may help people at times, but there is always a dual purpose at work.
The state health system is designed to produce cis and endosex people, and consequently has a long history—and present—of pathologising trans and intersex people. A fun fact about conversion therapy: under the new law, it’s still legal if you do it in a doctor’s office (Section 5 (2) (a)). The Counting Ourselves survey collected disturbing information that trans people and allies already know: the years-long wait times for treatment, the ignorance, gaslighting and disgust from doctors, the sexual assaults, the outright refusal of care. Intersex people suffer from similar indignities, and are often victims of surgical mutilation as babies for having the ‘wrong’ genitalia. Even when our health system isn’t overtly hostile, resources are kept scanty; there are limited hormone options available through PHARMAC, and there is currently only one surgeon who does bottom surgery. If we get a National government this year, fragile gains within the system may diminish or disappear to pacify the wealthy architects of the current moral panic.
I could detail the myriad other failings of the New Zealand state: the poor housing policies, the refusal to help close vast pay gaps between cis people and gender minorities, state broadcaster Radio New Zealand currently interviewing a bewildering number of anti-trans extremists. The point is that the colonial system is not safe for anyone who questions their own gender or sex—not in theory, nor in practice. I will not brook one more MP pretending to be supportive, self-satisfied that they know how to say “trans women are women”, as they indifferently supervise structural transphobic violence and death.
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What can trans people and our allies do, then, if we cannot rely on the state to protect us?
Across the board, I am a fan of activism that has both a low threshold for entry and a direct relationship between doing the activism and affecting the outcome. This means broadening our activism beyond that which involves politely urging politicians to implement certain laws or funding or to show up for us. Grassroots activism often involves smaller projects than major law changes, but can be more successful. Certainly its existence is more reliable than relationships with politicians who move in and out of power, or government Ministries that switch around accordingly. Below are a few tactics that could be useful starts.
Stop allowing politicians to attend Pride events
A few years ago, we managed to mostly make police, the defence force, and Corrections feel unwelcome at Pride. But most politicians do not deserve to attend either; obviously none on the Right, but not Labour ones either. If Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall is willing to oversee the misery of trans and intersex healthcare without promoting major changes, all the little trans flag hearts she posts online will not make her an ally. As both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King noted, the greater danger sometimes comes from the liberal and the moderate, with a smile on their face and a deep commitment to blocking real progress in their hearts. They are more insidious than your standard rude uncle who hates pronouns, but their deeds should count for more than their polite mannerisms.
We can try appealing to queer event organisers to un-invite politicians. But if that doesn’t work, anyone can walk up to Labour MPs and ask why they are here. Ask why they haven’t protected gender minorities. Tell them to go. Mask up to protect yourself from subsequent threats, and hassle them until they leave. If people’s feelings get hurt, too fucking bad. Attending Pride is for those who truly celebrate queer, trans and intersex existence, not a human right.
Start thinking about DIY trans healthcare collectives
At a recent trans rights rally in Ōtepoti, the anarchist collective called Yours announced plans for a trans healthcare mutual aid fund, providing crucial assistance for people’s survival. Almost the entire history of trans health care has not come from the state, but from trans people doing it themselves. As historian Jules Gill-Peterson notes, this history is often difficult to trace, as it is most often done by poor people, black people, those who have plenty of reasons to not leave evidence behind. But in the face of long waitlists and unhelpful endocrinologists, many trans people today are still DIYing their own hormones. Forming collectives to arrange safe hormone supplies—including established doctors and endocrinologists willing to go rogue—is how most trans healthcare starts in the first place. There are even histories of DIY surgeries, such as these two trans women in Washington performed underground orchiectomies at low cost.
People may decry these practices as unsafe. But since the current health system is not safe either, we may as well exert some control over the situation. DIY care also changes how we perceive trans healthcare. The cis system treats hormones as a last resort for people who are deeply suffering, but they should be available for anyone who wants to experiment with their gender or sex. Why jump through a billion arbitrary and invasive hoops to satisfy cis healthcare workers that you’re “really” trans, when you could just try out HRT for fun? And if it’s a mistake, then gender affirming care from the same collectives can help you transition again. Like abortion rights, a closely-linked struggle, DIY trans healthcare is all about giving people full bodily autonomy.
Oppose anyone involved in mutilating intersex babies
Many people can accept harassing public figures like politicians, but draw the line at doing it to private citizens. But when you are involved in surgical violence against intersex children—the real scandal, not the TERF scaremongering about helpful treatment for trans youth—you lose the right to be “just doing your job”. Anyone wanting to know how far this goes should look up the horrific work of New Zealand sexologist John Money, who, among other things, pushed for genital surgery on a baby and later repeatedly forced the child to have sex with his brother. (Both siblings later killed themselves.) Find out who does this sort of work, write vexatious emails to them, criticise them if you see them socially. Do not let them pose as respectable members of society.
Remember that All Cops Are Bastards
The other week, the police in Melbourne protected the Nazis and punished the trans rights protesters. Same as it ever was. Institutions like the police and prisons are more violently transphobic than most TERFs. Being a prison guard involves conducting daily sexual assaults on prisoners, via strip searches that almost never uncover contraband. The purpose of this is ritual humiliation and trauma, and it’s worse for anyone who is not cis or endosex. It’s telling that TERFs often defend prison as a “woman’s space”; they do not care about cis women prisoners, they just want to see trans women punished as violently as possible. No prisons are safe. No prison guards or other officers are safe people, even if they are trans or intersex themselves.
Back each other up in public
The woman who spilled tomato juice on Posie Parker has had to flee the country, both from death threats from the Right and an arrest warrant from the New Zealand Police. Marama Davidson and others were clipped by motorcycles from Destiny Church, who were in town beating up trans people from the Auckland rally. Yet we exist in a strange situation where gender minorities keep dying from structural oppression, and yet lightly shoving one of our oppressors is somehow treated as worse. It’s bad enough when the Right puts this forward, but it’s worse to see leftists agreeing to these terms of debate.
When questioned about violence at protests, the classic response is to reiterate that our side is non-violent, and that violent person is an outlier. But this fucks up our messaging and divides us from our allies. Even if someone does punch an anti-trans extremist, that is nothing compared to the structural violence of our enemies. Nothing. We just want them to stop being transphobic; they want us to die. If transphobes raise the spectre of trans violence (almost always invoking a real or imagined trans woman), do not bother to refute it. They will not thank you for it; they will not view you as the Good Trans or the Good Cis in any meaningful way. We can discuss and criticise each other’s tactics in private, but you cannot appease people who see trans women’s very existence as violent.
So stay on message. Draw bystanders’ attention back to how violent transphobes are, and to the specific violence of cis white women who have driven so much of the anti-trans panic. When Marama Davidson was ambushed by Counterspin, she simply put across her message of love for trans whānau and didn’t give in to their framing. In the long-term, this is the only approach that works.
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These are just some rough ideas for what people can do. But I hope the past week has made it clear that trans people and our allies are the ones who will keep us safe. The Wellington rally, which I attended, was a euphoric experience. The speakers were mostly open communists, and talked about the pain and violence they had undergone, but also raised up the love and support of our communities. It was a strange honour to see thousands upon thousands of people treating our rights not as a niche issue, not an optional extra, but as front and centre of a movement.
Some trans people, of course, believe in the state and want to be part of it themselves. There are always such fights within groups of marginalised people. But for the most part, trans people are integral parts of grassroots movements, as most of us are broke motherfuckers with a lot of unmet needs. We know that being able to participate in your own liberation is the key to our survival. Many state systems we take for granted today are pale imitations of grassroots community work. In parts of the US, the state only started providing ambulances after the Black Panther Party made their own. In New Zealand, the Tenancy Tribunal was created in response to the Polynesian Panthers’ work to protect Pasifika renters. If the state only dimly copies our progress at best and blocks it at worst, it’s time to put any hope for it aside and take the lead on trans liberation once again.
Ari Wilson is an activist and writer based in Aotearoa. To read more of their writing, visit https://medium.com/@swiftcamels