Reprint: Queer Endurance / Defiance’s statement on the 2023 general election
This is a reprinted press statement from Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington-based group Queer Endurance / Defiance (QED).
This year’s election campaign has been dismal for marginalised communities. The ACT Party’s leader joked about bombing the Ministry for Pacific Peoples and, far from facing consequences, saw his party’s support skyrocket. Meanwhile, New Zealand First’s leader, true to his decades-long form of jumping on whatever bandwagon of bigotry is currently trending, has brought overt transphobia into the election cycle for the first time. With the trans community already reeling from the spike in harassment we saw in autumn, it would be easy to lose hope.
We at Queer Endurance in Defiance refuse to despair. This is a critical moment in the struggle for trans rights, where the small momentum we’ve built to wrestle autonomy over our own bodies faces backlash from the same powers that would roll back the right to safe abortion and an education system that welcomes diversity.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has followed the lead of the far-right wing of the US Republican Party in threatening to ban trans women from accessing public bathrooms that are appropriate to our gender, and to remove funding from even non-competitive, community sports leagues which acknowledge trans women as women.
Neither policy has any legitimate basis in biology or in public safety. The Counting Ourselves survey demonstrated that trans people in Aotearoa are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cisgender people, and that 32 % of us have been raped, compared to 3% of cis men and 11% of cis women (1). We are not the threat here. Winston Peters might feel otherwise, but the facts do not support his feelings.
Act’s leader David Seymour has also pandered to anti-trans prejudice while trying to portray himself as a ‘free speech advocate’ who is ‘just asking questions’. In a public speech this year he described the tiny victories the trans community has gained as a “tyranny of the minority” that needs “a bit of rebalancing”. Our right to exist is apparently offensive to his supporters (so much for the party of liberty, huh?).
Seymour hemmed and hawed but essentially promoted the same policies as Peters, stating “there may be some facilities and some sports where actually people want to make a law – and it’s allowed under the Human Rights Act – that actually you can’t participate, or you can’t use this changing room, or whatever – if your birth sex is the opposite of that that it’s reserved for.”
Meanwhile, we have seen an organised effort by conservative leaders to target trans children and teenagers as an easy way to kickstart their culture war. At City Impact's "Christian Summit" event in Tāmaki Makaurau this June, representatives from various evangelical political groups, including the New Conservative party, Family First, and Destiny Church, met to coordinate tactics. Family First’s Bob McCoskrie urged the local far-right to learn from the US anti-abortion movement by focusing on small, winnable victories. With regard to gender identity, McCoskrie said: "We need to start with primary school, win that, then move on to secondary school." (2)
We've seen them use this tactic already with campaigns against Pride Week in schools. An alliance of anti-trans groups calling itself Resist Gender Education targets schools with progressive gender inclusion policies, subjecting these schools to mass email campaigns that are made to appear to come from concerned local parents and community members, when in fact they are the orchestrated work of well-funded evangelical churches.
Another part of this strategy is the misinformation campaign against puberty blockers. Puberty blockers are a compromise medication that allow trans teens to delay puberty so that they can decide whether to medically transition once turning 18. Te Whatu Ora (the Ministry of Health) found puberty blockers to be safe and their effects reversible, but removed this advice from their website. Not because it was incorrect, but because of the pressure put on them by repeated lobbying from anti-trans groups, a fact acknowledged by Te Whatu Ora. (3)
The misinformation campaign against puberty blockers has occasionally been hilarious, as when Brian Tamaki claimed The Warehouse were selling blockers over the counter. However, there is a real threat that political parties with actual weight in parliament will pander to this misinformation, and deny young trans people access to already gate-kept life-saving medication.
So, what do we do about this?
We know that the state will not protect us. In 2021 New Zealand police confiscated the firearm stash of transphobic pundit Rachel Stewart after she tweeted a threat to lynch someone who disagreed with her. However, then-National Party leader Judith Collins complained to the cops and Stewart got her guns back.
Collins’ support for violent transphobia is unsurprising, given that her Senior Media Advisor was a spokesperson for the anti-trans hate group SUFW, which has collaborated with Stewart. So we know that the police will turn a blind eye to anti-trans groups accumulating weapons and threatening to kill people, as long as they have powerful backers.
And this year, after we saw in Melbourne that the English anti-trans speaker Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who calls herself Posie Parker, was willing to use a neo-Nazi militia as her bodyguards and attack her opponents, Immigration nevertheless let her into Aotearoa, regardless of the risk she posed to the local trans community. This decision was reinforced by the High Court. Unsurprisingly, the Disinformation Project later found that anti-trans harassment in New Zealand spiked significantly during and immediately after Parker’s visit. (4)
Immigration can, and do, bar entry to people who pose a threat to the people of New Zealand; the fact Parker was allowed entry - and was going to be allowed entry again this month, in spite of what happened last time - demonstrates that the state does not believe trans people deserve the same rights and protections as others.
The state does not care for us. The state will not look after us. But this does not mean we need despair, or cower at home in fear. One of the most beautiful things about being trans is the love we have for one another. Transitioning means being part of the wider community of trans people. And we will look out for each other where the state won’t.
If you come to any QED event, we will have safety measures in place to protect you. And if you are struggling under the weight of the world’s bile and bigotry, there are a handful of queer-led groups and organisations that you can reach out to for support. None have significant funding, but all are driven by people who genuinely care. We will lift each other up and share this together.
This is not a call to despair. It is a call to political action. Aotearoa’s trans community has come a long way in the last few years. Increasing numbers of us have gained the confidence to come out and be ourselves. We have now reached a point where the fragile egos of the privileged are making a concerted effort to take our hard-won rights away. We cannot let this happen.
So we call on the trans community and our allies to be politically involved and politically active. This can mean many things. It can mean street action via protest and counter-protest. It can mean emailing schools under threat from anti-trans campaigners to let them know that they have community support to respect the diverse gender identities of their students. It can mean organising in your union or community group, building a foundation of solidarity in which disempowered groups stand up for one another. And it can mean voting and working with political parties to get legislative change and funding.
This is a call to queer action, to endure in our defiance of the powers that would hold us down. Kia kaha Aotearoa. Solidarity forever.
References:
(1) https://www.renews.co.nz/toilet-politics-trans-people-more-likely-to-be-victims-not-perpetrators/
(2) https://95bfm.com/bcast/the-wire-w-spike-15-june-2023
(3) https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/300838494/trans-health-advice-scrubbed-following-complaints