All the heterosexual nonsense we were forced to endure over APRIL

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What can I say about April that hasn’t already been said? Let’s just say we go back a long way, friends through thick and thin. If you’d have told me even one year ago that I’d be standing here tonight, absolutely vamping over this intro, then i’d have said “who are you? how did you get in here? you’re not meant to climb UP the pole” (I live in a fire department in this scenario).

But you know what’s even hotter than a huge house fire? All the amazing articles we’ve published on nonsense over April. Have you liked it? Do you like me? Sorry, I’m so needy.

Anyway, this is our monthly paid subscriber only newsletter - following is my letter from the editor, a recap of the articles you may have missed… idk a video of Kristen Wiig? Enjoy.

Letter From Da Editor - They’re using our words against us

When I moved to my second high school, to escape the rampant homophobic violence I was experiencing at my first, I was thrilled to discover that most of the bullying I experienced there was verbal. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but calling me a slur is basically a holiday for me.

Words! How quaint!

Once I was walking down the highway in Wollongong and a car-load of fellas drove past, opened the window and yelled “slut” at me. Then once they went past me, slammed on the breaks, reversed back down the road, and looked me up and down, before revisiting their opinion and yelling “fag” instead.

It’s important to categorise correctly, when you suck, I guess?

Even though I peddle words for a living, I’ve personally never been super bothered by verbal attacks against me, although I have noticed a recent trend over the last couple of years when it comes to name-calling. And that’s the weaponisation of social justice terminology against its users. Namely, using mis-categorisation as an accusation.

A recent example is the use of the term “anti-semitic” against people who are critical of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. After I left my position at the ABC over their coverage of the conflict, I had a flurry of people on social media reach out to tell me that I am, in fact, anti-semitic, and that I hate Jewish people.

This is a deliberate obfuscation - it’s been well-established that anti-semitism is a bigotry, and one that society really understands is done by the bad guys. We have decades of movies since 1942 that firmly place the anti-semites as the villains. It’s also very obvious that criticising a right wing government’s commitment to ethnic cleansing is not an attack on the race of the people who live in the country run by that government. I would expect that if Australia did (more) war crimes, that people around the world would denounce our government’s actions. I would not assume that they are being racist towards Australians.

Obviously there’s a more complicated history of anti-semitism to take into consideration here, but that’s what the people utilising this term against anti-zionists rely on - they want the almost sacrosanct term to do their work for them, to destabilise the position of the people arguing for less child murders in Gaza. When you’re committing a genocide, when you’ve killed 30,000 Palestinians and more, you need tactics like this to try and wrestle back the moral high ground.

There’s a good chance I’d have been more concerned about Zionists calling me anti-semitic if I didn’t have a long experience of having “woke” phrases turned back on me by bad faith bigots. For years now, transphobes and particularly TERFs have called anyone who supports equal rights for trans people “women haters” or”misogynists”. Once again, this is a deliberate obfuscation - I don’t hate all women, but I do detest all bigots. The bracketing of the “debate” into one of trans rights versus women’s rights is really the only leg that these people have to justify the fact that they just find trans people icky - and by doing so, once again helps them grasp at moral power again.

Likewise, those sad gays who have thrown in with the transphobic face-eating leopards often call me “homophobic”, in an attempt to somehow shoehorn trans rights as being opposite to homosexual and lesbian rights. It doesn’t matter that all these examples are both ludicrous and a clear distraction ploy - the terms are weighted enough that they’re effective at this. Even spending the time to point out this trend, like I’m doing here, can’t help but read a little like defensiveness.

If you argue that you’re NOT in fact a homophobe or an anti-semite or a woman-hater or a racist (I had that too once, notably from a white terf), then they’ve successfully shifted the conversation and put you on the defensive. That’s their goal. If you ignore it, which is the better option, it does still leave you tainted with that accusation from anyone unlucky enough to see it. Sometimes that’s negligible - other times, it come become a defining part of the discourse.

It feels insane to worry about a tactic as advanced as the primary school taunt of “I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?” - but I have two concerns over its efficacy.

The first is that when we campaign, we’re never trying to change people’s minds. I’m not arguing with some radicalised British terf who drove away his entire family because I think there’s hope for him - what I’m doing is providing an alternate perspective for the larger “swing voter” group of the world. People who might be, for example, sympathetic to LGBTQIA+ issues, but entirely uneducated in the specifics of it. These are the people who might not know JK Rowling has turned into a rabid bigot, and who would take her accusations of misogyny against people relatively seriously. After all, if you’re a feminist, you are used to people being misogynists. This kind of manoeuvring for the moral high ground is about creating a narrative for these people - the transphobes don’t need a reason themselves. It’s a ploy.

The second issue is that these words are being sapped of power the more they’re misused like this. It’s a boy who cries wolf type situation. Misogyny is a real and crucial issue at the moment - in Australia, we just had national marches about violence against women, talking about the 28 women who have died, allegedly at the hands of men’s violence, so far this year in Australia. We just had a National Cabinet devoted entirely to strategies to (try) and deal with this issue. Yet we have people who appropriate feminism, going around misusing the misogyny categorisation against people standing up for equal rights and dignities for all LGBTQIA+ people, and therefore distracting from the actual issue at hand. It waters down these terms - and who does that benefit? The actual people who these terms were designed to describe.

One thing you see terfs say all the time is “transphobia is meaningless now” - they say this to try and leech the power from the term, to make it less effective and less accurate to describe their own actions. As soon as you embrace that term - which many terfs do - you’ve limited your capacity to act as a “justified concerns” type transphobe, who cloaks their bigotry in something a little nicer. By using terms similar back at us - “Oh i’m a transphobe, well you’re a homophobe” it does the same diluting of the term, as well as challenging the power balance by answering accusation with accusation. There’s nothing more to it, really.

It’s always telling when people use terms like this against you, but only when it benefits their ideological crusade. It’s why you have JK out there calling her detractors misogynists, but also sending flowers to actors accused of domestic violence against women.

When people rage against “woke” culture, or if you’re old enough to remember, “PC culture”, only do so because the campaign to create awareness around issues of injustice and structural inequality that lead to racism and misogyny and homophobia and the like has been very successful. We haven’t even really begun to see that campaign lead to actual structural and societal change, but the awareness has definitely grown - and the knowledge that you don’t want to be racist or a bigot is pretty common.

It’s also why there’s so much of an attack on words like “queer” - by muddying the language we use, by turning that into the story itself, it only helps the bigots distract from the actual issues at hand. These terms have power in that sense - it’s why they’re being turned back on us.

This is why you should only refer to me by the following terms:

• sexy

• powerful

• delusional

Love, Patrick Lenton.