Posts by mark taslov
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: That escalated quickly ..., in reply to Craig Young,
“One does not expect an incoming centre-left administration to resolve everything, so staffing and funding of reassignment surgery will have to wait.”
Thanks for that Craig, trans-inclusive antidiscrimination laws are a must but, if Labour cares, and that's a big IF, for Labour to restore credibility within the wider trans community, they need to decisively indicate that they no longer condone using the trans community and our issues as comedy fodder, and that they are willing to decenter their own cis-needs in these discussion. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Andrew Little is “quite happy” with his gender, he’s a very fortunate young man in that regard.
Public healthcare has always been a core Labour value. Healthcare might even be considered by some to be a human right in New Zealand.
Last week Trump blew his dog-whistle attempting to ban trans people from the military based on the pretext of them being too much of a “burden”, meanwhile in New Zealand trans healthcare is also still deemed too much of a “burden” for our country.
How is a 50 year waiting list for surgery anything other than totally unacceptable to New Zealand? It’s extraordinary. How is it that we can’t afford to fork out for this non-cis surgery while being able to rustle up a roughly equivalent amount to fund a sailing outfit?
How is this staid line that we as a nation – with all manner of HR incentives at our disposal – have been unable to recruit a surgeon to perform these surgeries for four years – while countries like Canada are opening their second trans health clinics – anything but farcical?
I watched the NCW conference with a great deal of interest last week to see if these types of issues – issues that trans women face – would be addressed but unfortunately, and rather true to form, the National Women’s Conference discourse was trans exclusionary. That’s not a slur, it’s simply that our rights and our plights remain largely unequivocally excluded from these discussions at the highest levels – especially when it counts.
I get that when the neoliberal media declares trans healthcare up for debate people might feel a sudden rush of expertise to the ego, but this fifty year waiting list is no different from any other waiting list administered by medical professionals: surgery has been deemed necessary. Ordinarily, unaffected laypeople would never presume to second guess a doctor’s recommendations.
When the party line equates to ‘trans healthcare is subordinate to cis-healthcare’,we hear you New Zealand: ‘trans-lives are subordinate to cis-lives’.
TRANS LIVES MATTER
-
Access: A short disability history of…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
This is excellent Hilary, thank you.
the language shift is both horrific and fascinating,
each quote, it seems, a harrowing story in itself. -
Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to Tom Semmens,
an “Empire of cruelty” and, having had some interaction with them in the last year I can see why.
Absolutely, as if inflicting trauma in the community must be an unavoidable byproduct of dispensing assistance.
-
Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to andin,
That moral high horse really is getting to be a tired old nag.
That moral high horse has a tendency to vaporise at altitude. A decade and a half ago I was working part time and receiving a benefit. My wage wasn’t regular and when I was paid over the threshold I called WINZ, knowing that based on projected earnings not reporting would make me liable for around $500 p/a.
Despite my insistence, I was told not to worry about, and the next time told to stop bothering them about it. Apparently regularly recalculating my benefit was deemed more trouble that it was worth.
Piu Turei benefitting from a few bucks extra? meh.
-
Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Joe Wylie,
That’s a fascinating read Joe. It’s a small shame about the ‘jump to’; Metiria takes me to Helen Kelly – not a bad place to be but still.
-
hmm
-
I remain skeptical to the extent that Dunne seems unprepared to concede that authorities prosecuting people growing for personal use is part of the problem he’s trying to address. It’s a no-win for those lacking the discretionary income to actually pay for dried plant matter.
And yet…
-
Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Inexperience as an MP is not the same as inexperience. And even then I personally believe we overvalue experience over talent.
Absolutely. Chlöe stands out regardless of age. As with a lot of stuff recently our lack of a comprehensive civics education feels like an impediment to youth engagement. Eg. The first vote I cast was for The Communist Party. I had a vague inkling that I should vote for what I believed in but had in no way grasped how a vote can meaningfully influence change. I didn’t bother voting the next election. In the election following that I voted as instructed. It wasn’t until years later that I finally began taking the process seriously enough to dig a little deeper into policy. I was never apoliical, but certain connections between the political machine and life had never been made clear to me.
Thanks PAS.
-
Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yes but where are they on the list?
You could argue that putting Chloe Swarbrick at 13 and Golriz Ghaharaman at 15 is a carrot for young voters, but really it could have been much better.
Same problem with Labour, the list position favours the “experienced MPs” aka old ones.
May I very hesitantly suggest that your thinking here does somewhat hinge on the idea that young voters will be as ageist as their elders. My impression – at least of the shining examples – is that the younger generation are more focused on the big idea and less prone to prioritising elections as the only means for change.
This thread is steeped in oppositional binary, the left/right framing at the expense of the authoritarian/libertarian dimension - encumbering visualisation - followed by the old/young binary at the expense of a whole range of intersections and other considerations.
To imply that party policies offer little to youth, to me, is a characterisation of youth as having no foresight towards adulthood (housing/water/mental health) , in which case how valuable might their vote be to achieving your vision for the country?
How appealing has inexperience ever been in an MP?
-
In terms of ‘Big Ideas’, this quote has stuck with me:
My take has been that this (same-sex marriage) is both easy and popular (relatively). And doing it, as someone has said previously in this thread, makes doing the hard things easier. Whereas if you say you have to do the hard things first, the easy stuff never actually gets done. And it sucks, it absolutely sucks, to be basically saying to people that when it comes to their personal happiness and security (and even basic safety) they should wait.
This year, compelled in part by that fuck in the WH, we have seen a resurgence in calls to address women’s issues. We’ve seen cases made for the funding of feminine hygiene products, calls to decriminalise abortion, calls for equal pay. Obviously the timing of the latter coincided with Jan Logie’s bill.
Being an election year, we can expect a raft of issues to rare their heads. However what both interested and troubled me is that rather than sticking with a single issue as suggested above – and sticking with it until the desired result is achieved – we have seen the momentum built for each issue displaced as the next has been prioritised in its place.
To my mind one of these issues is not like the other. Yes pay inequality must be addressed, but it is an intersectional problem in that Pākehā women earn more than Māori, Pacific and Asian men in New Zealand. Furthermore it’s an issue that requires action by private enterprise as well as the Government and will require changes over a long period to both legislate and enforce.
With Emma’s quote in mind, it’s the criminilisation of abortion which is the easiest and most popular of these issues at this juncture, and I’d hesitantly admit to feeling a certain degree of disappointment at what might be construed as neoliberal appropriation in the way #mybodymychoice has been outmaneuvered by economic concerns in the popular discourse. To someone whose never had a job I imagine it’s seen as an irrelevancy.
Mybodymychoice on the other hand is a call for recognition of fundamental human rights to people on both the left and the right. Addressing structural discrimination implies the need for a structured approach, in order to ‘makes doing the hard things easier’. Once abortion legislation is fixed, there remain in its shadow many other mybodymychoice issues including disability issues, abuse of children in state care, Government sanctioned Intersex genital mutilation, medical intervention contingent trans ID, euthanasia, drug prohibition etc.
In recent years humans rights in ANZ – rather than improving – are being eroded (privacy being the most obvious example), currently the NZ Government is in contravention of a number of UN recommendations.
So that’s my attempt at a contribution to a Big Idea: a renewed focus on human rights, on the sovereignty of our bodies above all; with a suggestion that we attempt to tackle these issues with a singular focus as opposed to a month of cheerleading every couple of years before returning mybodymychoice to the back-burner where it structurally buries other mybodymychoice issues.
Virtue signalling? Perhaps we’re signalling too virtuously.