Instead of axing the HRC, ACT corruptly installed a racist, transphobic “Gay Human Rights Commissioner”.

Evidence of inappropriate appointments from the right continue to emerge.

Nov 13, 2024

On November 5th, the Spinoff published a very interesting article on Stephen Rainbow, the Human Rights Commission’s latest recruitment, and how he came to get the controversial appointment. Naturally because of the excitement of the US election, it’s flown a little below the radar. https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/05-11-2024/i-didnt-get-the-hrc-job-stephen-rainbows-human-rights-commission-appointment-just-got-weirder

The article details evidence of the selection process for the role being “weird”, although what they call weird is what I would describe as either “corrupt” or “a conspiracy to place an ideological plant in a key role despite him failing every step of the recruitment process”.

I won’t summarise the article for you as I usually would because, frankly, it needs to be read to be believed. It certainly makes clear where ACT sit on the ideological spectrum: gay people are fine, but you’d better be racist about it!

The article reveals that these appointments were an alternative to axing the Human Rights Comission altogether. This suggestion came most recently from Todd Stephenson, and for an example of how exactly ACT are taking human rights issues and turning them into left/right divisions, look no further than the statement he made in the press release used to justify it:

Pause for a second and appreciate the subtle undermining of the conventions of the state by trying to show the Human Rights Comission as antidemocratic — despite being set up by Parliament to advance the rights of defined minority groups in exactly the way it has been doing. It’s not that the HRC have undergone an ideological shift, it’s that ACT are so regressive that their ‘political views’ are not compatible with core human rights.

Obviously, getting rid of the Human Rights Commission would be a tad controversial and likely to attract some negative press. So they came up with a better idea — placing a guy there who shared their values exactly.

Yes, our Human Rights Commissioner shares the same values as ACT. Yikes.

Stephen Rainbow, Chief Human Rights Commissioner

Every accusation is a confession. This political appointment places a seemingly “politically neutral bureaucrat” who shares ACT’s views in a key role so they can advance that party’s political agenda. Which is exactly why ACT claim the other commissioner appointments have been inappropriate in the first place.

Of course, they weren’t. The previous appointments have been extremely qualified and undergone the proper recruitment process. They just happen to share “political ideology” with the left wing parties because the left wing parties have an ideology based in human rights. By using the word ‘ideology’, ACT seeks to shift our definition and understanding of the term “human rights”; to elevate their arguments and views so they are not being positioned as anti-human rights, but as alternative human rights.

This is not a new idea for the right, and they’ve been successful with it in their alliance with the TERF movement, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists who position trans people’s presence as breaching their rights as women. Consumed by bigotry and hatred towards a group they saw as their oppressors (originally men, now trans women who are supposedly just men muscling in on their girl space), their views, rhetoric and scholarship became so focussed on the “issue” of trans people that they neglected and rejected their political origins — radical feminism — to instead become proponents for the status quo exclusively obsessed with the existence of a minority group, above the actual structures and forces oppressing women.

The more their beliefs became incompatible with core feminism, and the more core feminism became interested in exploring gender, scientifically and sociologically, as an ever-changing construct informed by but not limited to base biology, and the more radfems became consumed with their “cause” of getting trans women out of their spaces and away from “LGB resources” (actual argument that used to get propagated), the further away TERFs pushed themselves from mainstream feminism until they found themselves on the same side as the groups to which they were once fundamentally opposed: anti-feminists, homophobes, conservative religious groups, anti-abortionists, and neo nazis. Thus, radical feminism is perhaps one of the few true demonstrations of the horseshoe theory, where a group became so radicalised it jumped the iron gap and travelled all around to the other end of the horseshoe.

TERFs were great boons to the cause, and came with a huge inbuilt advantage for the right: many of them are lesbians, giving them a rare LGBT ally and a demonstration of the ‘harm’ trans people were causing.

The reason why so many TERFs are lesbians is partly because of queer intracommunity politics, and partly because the academic and social roots of TERFism originate in the UK and from UK academic feminism, led by their universities and which was always particularly ‘anti-men’ in its approach, producing student movements back in the 80s and 90s that discouraged women from dating men, encouraging them to remain celibate or to date women instead, and it’s this separatist ideology where radical feminism finds its roots. If the concept sounds familiar, that’s because there is currently a South Korean feminist trend based on similar ideals making waves in the West.

In fundamental ways, radical feminists and the far right are well matched: they’ve always shared a particular lack of complex understanding of varying structures of oppression, as I remember very vividly from online discourse back before radical feminism devolved so much it fully segregated itself from the mainstream.

Radical feminists were obsessed with working out who had privilege over others, or who were less privileged, and this resulted in complicated and very flawed calculations of compounding oppressions. For example, does a gay black man have more or less privilege than a straight white woman?

Boiling this down to its essential premise of how much is a marginalisation “worth” is what aligns the mindset of radical feminists with that of the far right. Neither group truly includes a full variety of perspectives to contribute to demonstrating and explaining the complexities in the ways our society treats marginalised groups. Such transgressive thinking is antithetical to their worldview and contrary to the norms they are invested in enforcing.

You don’t have to be highly educated or culturally engaged to see the inherent issues of trying to so distinctly define people into categories. Common sense would also tell you different groups have different privileges, different concerns, and that these would reveal themselves in different ways and need addressing with different solutions. Both a black man and a woman may be disadvantaged in finding a job vs your average white man, but one would have more reason to be worried accepting a drink from a stranger in a bar while the other might be more worried being pulled over by the cops. These real-life concerns can’t be differentiated down into a finite value.

(Not that either of these situations aren’t a threat to the other individual — women have plenty of reasons to fear the power of cops, and gay men who are victims of hate crimes are regularly picked up in gay bars.)

Common sense also would make you wonder how much it matters. If you want to add up all the different ways people can be disenfranchised, you’ll soon end up with a checklist of -isms too long to be of any use and able to find ways to fit anyone inside at least one of them, which is sort of the whole point. And in checklisting everything you’ll still be managing to ignore any nuance and the entire concept of classism, probably.

This was roughly the outcome of discourse between the left and radical feminists: “Your math doesn’t work out.” And like a true ally of the right, the TERFs said, “Doesn’t matter, we believe it anyway.”

Comment

Like the right, radical feminists struggle to conceptualise and explain the effects of compounding marginalisation, usually because they themselves tend to be quite privileged. Radical feminism was born from those first generations of women able to attend universities, and their demographic reflects that. Most radical feminists (actual radical feminists and not just people jumping on the transphobia bandwagon) were white women, able-bodied, on the richer side of the poverty line — and in fact, the exclusion of black women in the UK from feminist studies in universities has become a recent subject of criticism from black feminists, as Western concepts of norms have been drastically affected by the narrowness of the perspective of the field, and so in this way, defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ as distinct categories with distinct traits particularly disenfranchises Black people and other people and cultures of colour who maintain different ideals and norms, who have different physical features, and who resultantly find themselves alienated from a conversation dominated by the white voice.

Although their views on how gender should be divided in society are transformative, TERF positions on gender themselves are regressive and conservative, leaning into anti-scientific understandings of sex, gender, and the wider world that have steadily put the movement more and more at odds with academia and also, sometimes, with reality. TERFs, both women and lesbians, are members of marginalised groups who feel their space is being encroached upon by people who, by their own rubric, are evaluated as more ‘privileged’ than they are, yet are seen as ‘more harshly oppressed’ by others within their community, threatening their status and position within established movements. Having quite literally been the subgroup of feminists attempting put a value on oppression in order to determine who is “most oppressed” or navigate oppression dynamics, anti-trans feminists were women who found their position threatened by new groups and by their transformative ideas around the structures upon which their shared oppression was based.

Thus, the response of TERFs became to deny trans people, and particularly trans women, a position within the rubric in an attempt to stymie the growth of a group and ideology who threatened their position, authority and, they felt, their identities.

Conservative branches of movements formed by attempting to uphold outdated, unscientific ideals were ever-branching offshoots in leftism at this time. In the 2010s, within the LGBT community, radical feminist lesbians found allyship with ‘Truscum’ — trans people who believed that only people who experience clinical levels of dysphoria can be transgender. This movement almost entirely died by the end of the decade, but those sparse people and ideals remaining from the movement too have become very valuable allies to the far right. Like detransitioners, these rare examples of trans people holding non-normative subversive beliefs around gender and transness are frequently referenced, presented and paraded by anti-science fringe groups like the Free Speech Union as examples that prove their points and that some minorities support their ideas.

Truscum groups too were a response to new ideas of gender and sex threatening established science, identities, and ‘power structures’. Truscum-identifying trans people were generally individuals with a personal belief in the gender binary, were deeply affected by self-directed transphobia, and invested in the medical model. Truscums upheld the medical model of transitioning (that would eventually leave them behind), the gender binary, and then positioned themselves as scientifically-verified “outsiders” relative to that binary, a position that became threatened by the growing self-identification of non-binary individuals who signified a shift in thinking within the trans community away from gender as immutable and based in science, and instead used science to further question the sociological underpinnings of our concepts of sex.

I explain this to give you a cause-and-effect, psychosocial explanation of how these reactionary movements and beliefs spring up within movements in an attempt to demonstrate where positions like Stephen Rainbow’s come from — people in a marginalised community who turn on what many of us would see as a fellow marginalised group and what some of us (and many more bigoted or distant perspectives) would see as the same marginalised group.

Lesbians and feminists were not the only groups to have conservative social elements that felt threatened by encroachments of new marginalised identities within their community of marginalisation; it was demonstrated by gay men as well, just more bluntly and without them really forming an identity or body of academia or psuedoscience around their discomfort. But it’s through this ostracisation from their own communities caused by their unfavourable perception of, and then bigotry towards, new-entrant groups threatening the status quo, that groups like TERFs and gay men like Stephen Rainbow are pushed towards the radical right.

I also explain this to so you can get a sense for the categorical thinking that underpins these shared philosophies, and the way both groups put ‘value’ on these distinct categories of marginalisation. Radical feminists do put value on oppression in pretty much the exact way the right believe the mainstream left put such value on oppressions, and this has morphed into TERF ideas of status that the right think dominate left-wing thought.

The right count the monetary value of affirmative action initiatives and reparations, note the attentiveness of the public to marginalised issues, confuse the raising of diverse voices with the raising of status, and hold that the effects of these actions are a sort of ‘privilege’. The actual reasons behind these groups getting different levels of money and attention at different times is complex and much more to do with equity or recompense than value, but in dismissing this complexity, the right are attempting to ‘solve’ an unsolvable equation asking which marginalisation is worth what value to the left, while using entirely the wrong variables.

Because the far right are very strong believers in the value these marginalised identities must hold, ACT see appointing a gay human rights commissioner as “justifying” itself through marginalisation “points”, expecting him to be more acceptable or palatable to the left and to the public. They believe his oppressions qualify him or make him suitable, or somehow shield him from scrutiny, and they believe they can select by marginalisation in the same way Clarence Thomas was a Black Republican placed on the Supreme Court. They fail to recognise the way the majority of the LGBT community has embraced and incorporated the social, scientific, and gender theory behind current demographics and understandings of trans people and that, for the vast majority of the LGBT community, this is a point of unity and understanding between groups and identities.

Right now, gay men are frequently targeted by homophobic hate crimes, but that is not necessarily going to make them any more grateful to see an anti-trans gay man as Human Rights Commissioner because while it doesn’t affect his ability to advocate for gay men per se, his advocacy for queer rights ad a whole is likely to be compromised due to not truly sharing the same perspective as the community he supposedly serves.

This will not stop some conservative, privileged gay men from viewing any attempts at Rainbow’s removal as further alienation from their own community by “the left”. Rainbow’s placement in this position is a victory for the right either way.

In appointing Rainbow, ACT entirely miss the irony of what they are doing; they are the ones appointing people to positions entirely because of identity. The left, the wider population even, genuinely see the value and perspective different relevant minority groups can bring to these positions, and that is the basis for which minority identities can “favour” applicants for such roles. It is the right who have themselves boiled someone down to what “label” they can bring the role in order to better disguise their corrupt, bigoted appointment implicitly placed to further their race war.