Even today the UK leads the way in overt anti LGBT rhetoric and the most vile transphobia.
In Aotearoa we hear a lot of blah blah blah about equity but below the level at which it’s easy to ‘say the right thing’, not much, if anything, changes.
Just as ‘Intersectionality’ has become the buzzword for comfortable, middle class, white feminists who know bugger all about oppression let alone the multiplicity of fronts on which this works, so the voices of those directly affected become drowned out by a well-meaning majority who seem to think we can’t speak for ourselves.
Lady Phyll is absolutely right and so, of course, was Archbishop Tutu when he mused ‘when the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.’
Sound familiar?
Of course it does, because the same happened in the Pacific but, for us, the gifts of alcohol and disease came too. The impact of those white evangelists from Britain can still be felt here in Aotearoa today.
It’s been my misfortune this year to have been profoundly affected by the insidious silence that surrounds transphobia and homophobia but, in hindsight, that’s actually been the case every year bloody since I finally came out in the mid 90s. So many instances when you know there is an issue with transphobia, and you know that they know, and you know that they know that you know, but nothing is said. They’re never going to own it and you won’t call them on it because that’s not what this about.
I have, it seems, two choices: I can live exclusively in the relative safety of the queer community or I can live in the warts-and-all ‘real’ world which is, in reality, neither real nor safe.
Having chosen the latter I guess it’s obvious that I’ll be taking a lot on the chin. I get that … and I certainly get that, but I also get confronted by a blancmange of gutlessness and cowardice that says, in private, ‘I’ve got your back’ but in public says less than nothing – that explains apologetically ‘I’m kicking the shit out of you right now but it’s for your own good, I’m actually an ally, I’m really on your side’.
No you’re not.
You’re not on my side as a transgender woman, you’re actually a closet violent transphobe who knows the right words to say to appear ‘good’, ‘woke’ and ‘liberal’ but the opposite is actually true – and jealousy is at the root of your problem. So you know how to write ‘transwomen are women’ but you have no idea at all how manifest this in practical terms. Instead, you use this an excuse to explain the shit you pile on us.
So where does most of this track back to in modern, white New Zealand?
It seems obvious to me that it has its genesis in our Calvinist British roots, roots that still celebrate racial and cultural superiority with a Bible in one hand, a whip in the other, and God on its side.
Did I mention privilege and an inbred sense of entitlement?
I meant to.
Happy new year and Rule Britannia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyll_Opoku-Gyimah
dykiegirl 