Add this to the litany of reasons I am excluded from any governance roles, the latest: I’m a Matheson. Seems there’s a limit, a maximum, to the number of Matheson’s you can have at any one time in any one organisation. Remember – it’s important – management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right thing.
Will your legacy be doing the right thing?
CODA: I’m 79 years old.
Tonight, I was described by a friend as ‘polarizing’. It wasn’t meant as a compliment’.
So, what is ‘polarizing’?
‘Tending to divide people into sharply opposing factions.’
Yep, I do that. Most good leaders do. High achievers invariably do. Transwomen certainly do. We don’t set out to, but we do. We breakdance at inappropriate moments. We talk about teams of five million. We preach ‘be the sun, not the salt’, we applaud ‘kindness’, we celebrate difference. It’s what sport is, and politics, being in a family, education, the theatre, movies, TV, books.
Even work.
It’s the second opinion that we always crave and seek.
All polarized and polarising.
And once we’ve done all that, then we run polls – yeah, polls, ironic, eh – to ascertain just how polarized we are, in what direction, and whether our side is going to win. It’s just life, all day, everyday, until it’s not.
Sadly, in Aotearoa, while we celebrate all those opinions and everyone’s right to have one, and we encourage them all to ‘freedom of speech’ their opinion to death, when it comes to the governance of our community organisations, we’ve flipped the coin completely and turned sitting on the fence and not upsetting the neighbours into an art form, and then it’s only those who are negatively polarized, the ultra-conservatives, who get to determine who has a voice and who gets shut out of the game.
Consider Jacinda Ardern, loved and respected by the world, vilified and silenced at home. Feared, in fact. But we Kiwis know best, of course we do, so we exclude, sometimes violently, those in our communities who are positively polarizing and we make sure that, should they pop their tousled heads above the parapet, they will be cut down by the status quo armed with its AR ‘don’t rock the bloody boat’ calibre magnum whatever, and the tall poppies who we all claim to laud above all else, never get to grow alongside the poppies in the fields of our suffocated potential.
And we know about them, don’t we?
But we will remember them, of course we will, with the occasional ‘whatever happened to so and so’ in that divine moment just before the white, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class, man-of-a-certain-age chair of the committee calls to order the mainly white, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class, men-of-a-certain-age members of his team and asks ‘are there any apologies?’
The silence screams ‘Yes! I apologize for being different, I apologize that my différence makes you feel uncomfortable and that your discomfort makes me unacceptable, I apologize for being brown and therefore invisible to you, I apologize for being unashamedly queer and causing you, in your darkest moments, to think ‘what if my son … ‘,
I apologise for being old, for being disabled, for causing you embarrassment with my rainbow stickers, and I apologize for encouraging you to think about any of this at all, any of us at all, when all you really want to do is get on with your freaking meeting. But you did ask, and now you will never know what riches might have come your way if you had embraced difference and opened the door to the polarizing, and the polarised, who live on the other side of the fence. Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari kē he toa takitini.
(My friend isn’t really like the guy described above, nothing like him, but he is a pragmatist and he isn’t wrong – he knows that, if he’s going to make a difference, I’m one of the sacrifices he has to make. I think he’s wrong, but of course I would, wouldn’t I? He may ultimately be smarter than me politically, but then I’m one of those clowns who thinks that being a leader involves taking calculated and considered risks to bring about positive and lasting change. It’s called ‘having a vision’, and I don’t happen to be on his ‘road to Damascus’ – or Taupo, or Timaru, or wherever it is – this time around and so the moment is irretrievably lost.
I’m fortunate though, I’ve had my one big conversion so I know what it’s like when the light comes on and you make that life-changing decision to act on what you’ve discovered and to step out into an uncharted and poorly lit unknown, and I know just how much courage it takes to then ‘suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and to take arms against the ensuing sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them’ – apologies to the Shakespeare purists who will have either bristled at my linguistic audacity or, alternatively, applauded my undoubted smarts – and to stay the bloody course. So, respect, good luck, and stay the bloody course!
(The accoutrements are a rainbow flag pin, a transgender ribbon pin, the New Zealand Defense Service Medal and bar (RNZAMC 1966 to 1974) and my ONZM for services to human rights, education, and the performing arts. When? At the New Zealander of the Year awards in 2021 when I was runner up to Dame Margaret Sparrow for Senior New Zealander of the Year – and it might also be silently muttered, for 76 years of shameless polarising.) Weaponise difference. 
dykiegirl 