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Here in Australia we’ve seen the latest example of ideological purity movements devouring themselves. What I find interesting about this particular case is that, to me, it accurately represents what seems to have happened in a lot of left wing movements over the last 20+ years.
Co-founder and former Queensland state leader of The Greens party, Drew Hutton, has failed in his appeal to his own party to reverse the revocation of his life membership. Hutton helped found the Greens with Bob Brown, both in Queensland (1990) and federally (1991), the initial ideological basis was for creating a party with “a historic mission to try to push the world to a more sustainable footing”. The parties platform that I recall, growing up as an Australian in the 90’s, was for combatting climate change, stopping deforestation, protecting fisheries, reefs and banning live export of cattle and other stock.
But both Bob Brown and Drew Hutton have long since departed from the front lines of the parties political battles. In their place we have seen a succession of leaders that promote environmentalism, but increasingly campaign on social justice issues. A party that (until the recent federal election) were making the majority of their electoral ground in inner city electorates (inner Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane).
Hutton was embroiled in drama from a twitter post (what else could cause so much drama) made over a year ago, which led to him being labelled a trans-phobe and promptly to the revocation of his life membership after he refused demands to delete the post and the comments below it. Today it was announced that the year long appeal process has not landed in his favour, but is in fact keeping with the original revocation. But if he’s espousing hatred and division online while somewhat representing his political party that he cofounded, then surely that’s a just result?
My initial thoughts were along the lines of “grandpa didn’t keep up to date with the terminology and unknowingly crossed the line”, however, after a bit of research it becomes clear that Hutton didn’t even make the hurtful comments, rather that he “provided a platform for others to do so”. Which after further research, revealed that he had publicly questioned his Party in their actions of removing membership from a different member for voicing concerns over a proposed amendment from the NSW Greens to change “pregnant people” from “pregnant women” in an upcoming act.
Interesting. I’ve run out of steam now, it’s a been a long day on site, but I wanted to post this and hear what other thoughts The Motte have - Australian and International.
Links:
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Note: reposted to this weeks thread as I foolishly did not check the day of the week.
What did he say?
Well, nothing really. It sounds insane but it was the fact that he criticised a previous move by the party of booting a female member of parliament for what they perceived as transphobic.
There is definitely not a slope, and were there a slope, it definitely would not be slippery.
I'm a social conservative, and the new orthodox faith of the One, True, Catholic Church of Trans Rights is not convincing me to shift on that. All the former gay rights activism that successfully sold the line "if you're not gay, this will have no effect on your life" to the mainstream and the trans activism that piggy-backed on this ("why are those bigoted conservatives so obsessed with bathrooms? no trans person has ever said anything about bathrooms, it's all them!") couldn't maintain the facade. Never mind "bake the cake, bigot", we're now in "um, aren't pregnant people women?/die, heretic! leper outcast unclean!" territory.
Yes, you too can be barred for life from the party you co-founded because you questioned a previous banning for life for not being 200% onboard with "we need this inclusive terminology so trans men and non-binary persons won't feel all oppressed and persecuted when turning up for their pre-natal appointments. Sure, maybe they're only 1% if that of people who turn up to maternity hospitals, but won't the 99% who are women be just overjoyed to make this teeny little change in being referred to not as a mother but a 'pregnant person'? And if they're not thrilled, too bad for them. They better know to keep their mouths shut, the transphobic bigots!"
Believe it or not, I want to be charitable to people who are unhappy with their bodies. I don't want to kick up a fuss about the changes. I'm not even that outraged about bathrooms. But when we're getting to the point of witch-burning someone for just being in the general vicinity of a witch, tell me how this makes society better for us all?
One of the things that has struck me about the trans backlash, which I think is real, has been its unwillingness to extend the slightest charity to social conservatives qua social conservatives. To put it bluntly and perhaps uncharitably: if the social conservatives warned you that this would happen, and now this has happened, perhaps you ought to consider whether or not they had a point.
So, for instance, I see worries that opposing such-and-such trans issues might overspill into opposing same-sex marriage. But social conservatives at the time said clearly that one of the issues with same-sex marriage was that it would undermine the gender binary. They were right, on facts. They have in fact, regularly been right on the facts. So now that the thing they warned would happen as a result of gay marriage has happened... shouldn't that make their judgement of gay marriage more credible, not less?
The thing is, the push for gay marriage included a number of predictive arguments that have since proven to be incorrect. "Gay marriage will have no effect on your life" was untrue. "Gay marriage is not a stepping stone to more radical activism" was untrue. "The normalisation of and acceptance of homosexuality will not lead more people to identify as homosexual" (deployed in gotchas like "gay marriage won't make you turn gay, why do you care?") was untrue. I suppose you could quibble causation and correlation, but the course seems pretty intuitive. Yet I still see this quite determined hostility to re-evaluating.
Not only did the bad things social conservatives predicted about gay marriage come to pass, a lot of the stuff social conservatives were jeered at (truly or falsely) for predicting about gay marriage came to pass. The gay marriage pie chart meme is over 15 years old now; since then the terrorists won in Afghanistan, schools have been teaching kids how to have gay sex, various plagues (monkeypox, COVID) have erupted (though no locusts or frogs), and we've got a war in Ukraine (OK this is weak sauce because the meme specified WWIII).
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