Green Ideas is a not an official work of the Victorian or Australian Greens, or any of the other state bodies, however it has restricted its content to current and former Greens members by decree of the substack owner Andrew Conley. These former members who left over their transphobic political positions being incompatible with state Greens rules regarding hate speech and have resorted to causing disunity and disarray in the party, and repeating falsehoods that benefit prominent transphobes in the Victorian Greens. Regardless, despite the Greens position of “no debate”, these transphobes are more than content to have it without us, working each other into a lather about our existence, and deciding our political beliefs for us. Were they to split from the party, you can be sure, as per Riley’s Law, it would be all they talk about.
“Once you post transphobia, you never post normally again.”
Riley Quinn, The TrashFuture Podcast
In Colin’s submission to Green Ideas, we get a new term for trans people: “trans idealists” which is a refreshing change from the “trans identity ideology” that we’re browbeaten with whether we’re openly political or simply mind our business. Of course he can’t keep it in his pants and lowers himself to “trans ideology” halfway down.
In much the same way that Nazi Germany identified the Jewish people as cultural Bolsheviks (a precursor to the antisemitic existing phrase cultural Marxist), Colin Long is happy to exercise his anti-trans blood libel in a new term, not devised or accepted by trans people, but a label for us from a reactionary, fascist, position. Politicising our existences makes us valid targets and dehumanises us, in a way that “trans people” does the opposite.
Colin goes on to presume our existence holds up the patriarchy, how though I am completely unsure, our existence undermines gender roles and exposes sex for the fiddly concept it is in a much more deliberate way than the poor intersex community caught in the crossfire. Surely if male and female were that different, like a class or species, feminising or masculinising hormones wouldn’t do anything. True equality would exist through breaking the biological determinism that Colin and his comrades-in-hatred rely on to bash trans people.
Many of us, including myself, are staunch feminists, who have been subject to sexual harassment, often by cis female transphobes who are ultimately just happy to express their own misogyny and enjoy the opportunity to be the patriarchal puppet for a change. Now I don’t know Colin, I don’t know what he looks like, but I think it’s safe to assume he hasn’t had women bullying him on his hair, his facial features, and publicly commenting on his anatomy. Stock standard deal of a transphobic pile-on.
Colin really wants to muddy the waters by aligning trans interests with those of nazis, the people at Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull’s hate rally invited in support of its aims to wipe out trans, and indeed, all queer people. Colin apparently doesn’t see a difference in trans people expressing their gender, and the rigid gender roles Nazis enforce through untold violence. Well, I’ll tell you, Colin, we want to live our lives, we want to be social, we want to be affirmed and respected as human beings. Fascists want the same rigid gender roles you do, drawn along biologically determined lines, as you do, and any deviancy wiped out, as you do. I cannot say that you just want to deny us access to our spaces, but ultimately you show your whole hand in calling us “men [who] self-identify as women”. I’ll note here that much like Paul Barry’s terrible Media Watch rhetoric, there is no acknowledgement of the hormonal or surgical changes involved in transition here, we are merely pretenders in Colin’s eyes, no amount of legal hoop jumping or social transition will ever remove our birth sex from his mind, so there goes his appeal to “good faith” discussion about our ability to exist in society. We’re constructed entirely into a strawman, emphasis on the man.
Ultimately, Colin is the one using Nazi rhetoric here, “the trans question” is literally rooted in “the Jewish Question”, this is an eliminationist position in and of itself. You betray your entire premise from the get go.