I received a WhatsApp message from a usually reliable source this week which was an African National Congress graphic notice of a Mini-Rally on 22 March at the City Hall, Gqeberha. There would be laptops as prizes for the top three winners of a dialogue competition. Nothing unusual about that, you may say.
But you’d be wrong. The full strap announcement of the even I realized, on closer inspection, was Groom a Girl/Boy Child Dialogue & First Time Voters Mini Rally.
Hence my incredulous guffaw. The ANC may be 112 years old and full of nasty communists and corrupt cadres but sometimes it is as innocent as a new-born child. (Or is it just oblivious to anything outside its own narrow view of the world?)
I’m willing to admit this notice may prove to be a cunningly engineered parody doing the rounds. (WhatsApp is never to be completely trusted if the provenance is not fully known). I also did not have a Gqeberha correspondent on the ground to check it all out. If you were there let me know.
My guffaw was also, in part, prompted by the fact I was in the middle of writing on two news topics of some ‘intersectional’ relevance to this ANC event invite.
One of these news items I find encouraging. The other not so.
Puberty blockers
First item is the news that Britain’s once hallowed but lately, it seems, more hollowed out National Health Service will stop routinely prescribing puberty blockers to children at its gender clinics. I think the waves of outré transgender demands and pressure, followed by acquiescent pandering by officialdom or governments appear to have been pushed back a little, and all sanity around transitioning children is not yet lost.
I may not be a medical expert but I do know, deep down ‘in my waters’ as my grandmother would mysteriously phrase it, and which I now know is a polite way of saying ‘in my gut’, that this is a positive move for child well-being and protection.
Children suffering gender dysphoria (which is not classified as a medical condition) must now wait until puberty is over to change their bodies.
It is also encouraging that the NHS has not banned puberty blockers per se because these are used to treat several unpleasant or dangerous medical conditions including Endometriosis which affects one in 10 women and girls in South Africa.
I have mostly stayed out of the gender wars because I have been unable to take seriously the unscientific malarkey and idiocies being put about by the transgender lobby. Its contentions and arguments may have been headline manna for clickbait media and conspiracy theorists but made it even more pointless to engage. Transgender activist support for Hamas, the sheer Lemming lunacy of it, justified my silence.
As for the despicable hounding of JK Rowling by broadcaster India Willoughby and the simpering caricature of girlhood that is Dylan Mulvaney? Spare me.
My reticence to engage probably also stems from being a member of the West-influenced generation that lobbied for, and saw, increased opportunities and equality rights for women and then the right to marry granted to homosexuals.
Derogatory and offensive
I must note here, in the interest of reader safety, that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, GLAAD, has now declared the word homosexual to be outdated, derogatory, and offensive. I shall consult with gay friends but I doubt any of them here and now are contemplating suing or criminal charges. In Scotland however, after 1 April misgendering or using this word could be a crime that puts you in prison.
Watching the West’s culture wars from South Africa I am acutely aware that while we may have come a long way from where we were, our crime stats show, in the gender-based violence category, that many people care not a jot for the fact that our constitution, regards everyone, regardless of how they identify, to equality, safety, dignity, and the protection and benefit of the law.
South Africa is still, like Sisyphus and his rock, engaged in trying to simply internalise the constitution and simply deliver basic rights to women and men. Non-binary problems are also unlikely to top any traditional leaders’ agenda for a very long time.
My AI Microsoft Copilot (currently being cautiously tested) assures me cisgender is the correct term to use for ‘people who make up the majority of the population’ and are not transgender. It says that cis does not denote race or group it is simply the opposite of trans. It adds that if we are Assigned Female at Birth or AFB we can choose to call ourselves women. Thanks a lot, mate.
Alas, I fear new ‘gender friendly’ terms are already entrenched in officialdom in other countries and we may not win this particular nomenclature cultural battle.
Before criticising my surrender, however, a reminder: we have for many years had ‘chairs’ guiding meetings in this country. The initial resistance faded quite rapidly.
Preserving spaces
Forward fire is to be focused on the fight to preserving spaces women of my ilk see as ideal women only spaces: such as ladies’ lavatories which you may have noticed are customarily entered in pairs. That peculiar tradition may in future also be necessary for security. In women spaces we may not care what each of us does in our sex lives but will not tolerate intrusion by anyone with what James May, aka Mr Slow of the Grand Tour team, coyly calls ‘gentlemen’s vegetables’.
That little reference to the Grand Tour team could be seized on by those I think of as ‘prefects of the pigeonholes’, as evidence of my conservative tendencies or at least a place on the right of the political spectrum. It is true that I prefer to watch rather ‘manly’, unwoke, sometimes downright ‘insensitive’ entertainment, but please note that I self-identify more as an individual-freedom-embracing or centrist liberal, which is admittedly somewhat to the right of where I was in my student years when I first voted.
Which brings me to the not-so-encouraging news I found when going down the rabbit hole of in search of political spectrum + trends.
An X post by Australian journalist and founding editor of the digital journal Quillette Claire Lehman informed me of two new studies published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology that examined the prevalence of critical social justice attitudes (commonly called intersectionality, anti-racism, or wokeness), in different populations.
This is the ideology Tim Urban, author of What’s our problem? A self-help book for societies, distinguishes as distinct from liberal social justice which focuses on individual rights, and calls social justice fundamentalism, which, he describes as focusing on group identities and with a ‘more authoritarian flair’.
Gendered phenomenon
The two large studies showed critical social justice is definitely a gendered phenomenon with moderate support from women and little or no support from men.
[You can read the full report here: Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes – Lahtinen – Scandinavian Journal of Psychology – Wiley Online Library ]
Lehman was encouraged by the conclusion that support for this category of social justice was not across the board and only moderate from women. But I’m not so sanguine.
Never underestimate women. I recognise many among us have a propensity for romanticism of the Jacques Rousseau, Noble Savage school and emotion and feeling-driven choices. This can also develop into virulent virago fascism, capable of taking us down very bad roads. The abiding image of that for me is the tricoteuses in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, weaving in the names of future victims deserving of punishment as they sit knitting in front of the guillotine. One US senior year crib site I spotted says this represents ‘the coming together of women of all classes and backgrounds to stand in solidarity against the oppressive aristocracy’. So, you can see where we are already.
Look closely at media images of protesters and activists of the new religions and cults, or the majority of staff in any non-governmental organisation or lobby group.
In January John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times wrote of the increasing political gap between young women and men and the far more pronounced gap between the younger generation men and women than among men and women in their 30s and above in various countries.
He reported the key trigger for this widening of the gap between men and women was the #MeToo feminist movement that ignited seven years ago.
More progressive
Young women, in the US, the UK and Germany, he said, were also found to be more progressive on such issues as immigration and on racial justice than young men.
In Australia Intifar Chowdhury, a lecturer in government at Flinders University, analysed the latest Australian survey on elections from 1965 to 2022 in The Conversation. She found that Australian Millennial and Gen Z men are more conservative than their female counterparts, but more progressive than men of previous generations at the same stage of life.
In the US it’s reported more women are liberal than men are conservative.
I look forward to seeing if this global trend to a growing gender divide and a strong female tilt to the left will emerge from our own election result. We will also get a big picture of these trends and the direction the world is heading after many millions of people, who will all be going to the polls in their various countries this bumper election year, have voted.
Bonus for Daily Friend friends – A Curate’s Egg free gift for Easter:
If you wish to amuse yourself by finding out where some new voters you know may lie on the spectrum send them to Yohvote.com where they’ll have to answer some (too) simple questions to be ‘matched’ with a local South African party. Or find out your family’s political leanings and possible megalomaniac tendencies this Easter by playing a board game I recently discovered. It’s called You are the President – The Game of Big Decisions – Will you betray your principles for power?
Have fun.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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