Thought for the day, 24 March 2023

Posie Parker.

I don't feel qualified to weigh in on the visa issue. I don't know what the rules are, whether they're reasonable, or whether they've been correctly applied.

I feel fully qualified to weigh in on the Nazism issue. The rules on this one are pretty clear to me.

Almost every headline I've read talks about Parker as an anti-trans activist. Yes, she is. And, actually, she's connected with Nazis. Real, literal Nazis. You know: the ones we went to war against in the late 1930s.

There's an extent to which the anti-trans bandwagon is being used as a Trojan horse for all the other hate. In this bizarre world we live, 'anti-trans activist with Nazi affiliations' sounds somehow more reasonable than 'Nazi affiliate who campaigns against trans folks'.

But isn't that telling us a couple of really important things?

The first thing is this.

If you pin your Nazism to whoever is the current target of hostility - and I don't need to remind you of all those who've suffered through history - then somehow, that takes the edge off, and you've found yourself a market. Now it's a 'debate'. Let's not judge before we've heard 'both sides'.

And the second thing is this.

When we allow any group, any group at all, to be sacrificed to the Trojan horse - when we throw them to the wolves, like so many other groups; only we tell ourselves it's a 'debate', just like everyone else whose courage has failed before ours - well, it's pretty clear whose interests we serve.

Hate grows only to the extent we offer it the ones we see, in whatever is our own time and place, as marginal, different, other.

A guy wrote a poem about this stuff. It was pretty damn good, and it went: First they came for the someone-or-other. You get my drift.

If you are trans, I offer you my aroha; whatever protection, nurturance or strength it can give. I believe in solidarity. I don't need to hear both sides. There's only one, and I've chosen it.

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