Defend Family Planning

Back when Christchurch anti-choice activist Andy Moore was still around (he’s gone and left us, and moved to Texas), he and a few others set up a campaign called Stop Family Planning (FP) – a campaign that looked a lot like the one in the U.S. against Planned Parenthood.

The campaign here was prompted by FP’s proposal, which began in 2009, to provide early medication abortion at its Hamilton clinic – which was to be a sort of a test clinic for possibly offering this option elsewhere. FP waited two long years for a decision from the Abortion Supervisory Committee, while the anti-choicers got busy whipping up a frenzy. Eventually, in 2011, FP withdrew the application, and last time I checked, women from the Waikato who wanted an early medication rather than a surgical abortion had to travel to Auckland for it. You can thank, in part, our backward laws for that – and for the fact that we’re way behind comparable nations in providing this early abortion option. But not helping the situation of course were the sterling efforts by Right to Life and Voice for Life and ProLife NZ and all those charities like Family First and Family Life International, who are only doing this because they care so much about the health and well-being of (certain) women.

Things had died down on the Stop Family Planning front since then. So much, in fact, that when I looked this past week, their old Web site (www.stopfamilyplanning.org.nz) was gone and the domain name was available. (If you feel brave, you can still look at the site using the Web archive/Wayback Machine.)

Family Planning has always been vulnerable to attack from conservatives, and the attacks always come. So I suppose it’s not surprising that the new year has brought a fresh round of invective being directed at FP, this time from Ken Orr of Right to Life. (The others will no doubt pile on at some point.) RTL just ended a 7-year-court case which it mostly lost aimed at ending abortion in New Zealand, so I suppose they have some time on their hands.

The latest attacks, which so far include a complaint to the Charities Commission about FP’s (and Women’s Health Action’s) charitable status (here’s Red Queen on that), a letter to the Minister of Health demanding FP be defunded (yes, following the U.S. ‘Defund Planned Parenthood’ playbook to the letter), and, on Saturday, one of the most – I don’t think I have the words – vile screeds I’ve had the misfortune to read in a long time. (I’m not linking to all this for various reasons, including its offensive nature, but if you want, you can hop over to the site. Just search “Right to Life New Zealand”. Don’t say you weren’t warned…)

That latest effort is titled, wait for it, “Family Planning Declares War on Women”.

Aside from the usual attacks on abortion and the “culture of death” etc. etc., this piece contains a lot of stuff that, as one person has already suggested, is quite likely defamatory and is most definitely highly offensive and insulting to, well, pretty much everyone. Everyone who isn’t in a heterosexual marriage and only having sex for procreative purposes, which means most straight men and women, and definitely all lesbians, gays, transgender people, questioning, queer… (trigger warning for misogyny, homophobia, transphobia over the jump)

Family First and Lily Allen

When Family First made it clear Rainbow Youth was in it's sights, it took precisely seven days for a story to appear in mainstream media about a parent not liking Rainbow Youth.  If that wasn't enough to make you wonder, how about the fact that the story appeared on Stuff, rather than the Herald?  Rainbow Youth deliver services in schools in Auckland, not the lower North Island which is Stuff's domain. This reporter didn't find the story in her local beat, someone fed it to her.

Let's deconstruct.  After a brief introduction about a father being concerned his son is being exposed to material he doesn't like, we get:

The teenage boy said two of the presenters introduced themselves to the class as lesbians, one who was attracted to transsexual girls, while the third said he had been a woman attracted to women but became a man "with a vagina".
The teenager said the first lesson was "OK" and the message was that there were multiple gender identities. But he felt the second lesson was "quite weird". It looked at homophobia and how society treated people labelled as "other".

It's fortunate we have the last sentence.  Because let's try this another way:

The student said two presenters introduced themselves as heterosexuals, one who was attracted to girls, while the other said he was a man "with a penis".

None of the Stuff paragraph works unless we're quite excited about lesbians and trans men, and really not sure if they should be in our classrooms.

But of course, both queer and trans identified people are already in our classrooms.  Studying, teaching and stuff.  There's other queer and trans identified people on television, making music, writing blogs, playing sport, having huge followings on social media, in our families.  Because we are everywhere.

And talking about people's genitals?  So brave for the Rainbow Youth presenter to put himself out there to help kids who are not sure why their body doesn't fit their sense of self realise there are a whole heap of gender fluid options available - but since when is talking about people's genitals in a newspaper article "in quotation marks" anything less than "othering"?

Then Stuff say:

"I think they were trying to say that being gay is all good but to me and quite a few of the people in my class, it came across like they were saying 'it's great and you guys should follow on with it'."
His father assumed, "rightly or wrongly", that sex education would be more generic and mainstream not "the weird and wonderful of the world's sexuality".
"I don't think that is the right thing to be exposing 14 and 15-year-old kids to."

Lesbians, gay men, bisexual people, transpeople and intersex people are not "weird and wonderful".  We are just people.  Rainbow Youth are helping queer and trans teenagers be safer and less likely to hate themselves by modelling our existence.  Rainbow Youth are helping heterosexual cis-gendered young people learn the world isn't as simple as homophobic and gender policing people would have you believe - and when that's your parents, the learning might take a little longer.

The father who's worried about "exposure" to queer narratives needs to get out more.  But the dog-whistling here is all about the fragility of heterosexuality and traditional gender norms.  What happens if our kids start wanting to change genders, or kiss genders other than the ones we want them to?  Is Rainbow Youth teaching our kids to be queer?

This is hatred, endorsed by a sleeping media.  Why is Stuff printing these views without investigating where they come from?  Why are they printing these views without pointing out what we know about queer youth experience - that it's hard being queer?

Family First have nothing to do with my beautiful queer and logical family, or my beautiful straight and biological family - and I wish they would stay the hell away from young New Zealanders learning how to make our world a more humane, caring and joyful place.

I'm not into dog whistling, I'm a little more, well, out there, so Family First this is for you:

Family First's new gateway drug

Last September there was a rash of "sex education in schools is bad" journalism over at the Herald.  At the time, I couldn't get too exercised about trying to paint teenagers learning about their bodies, pleasure and consent as morally wrong, it seemed like a sideshow.

But just last week, Family First paid for a Dr Miriam Grossman to rock up - complete with an all new flag for Aotearoa - to give us her views on sex education.

On Close Up, after explaining that oral sex causes throat cancer (I'd like to see how that "study" was carried out), she came up with the immortal line 

"The sexual urge is healthy and wonderful.  It’s when teens act on that urge that it’s not healthy.”

Family First immediately called for funding cuts to Rainbow Youth and Family Planning because of their work in sexual and reproductive health education.  In the same press release, Family First reminds us, in detail, of their earlier press releases covered in the Herald articles last year.

So Dr Miriam Grossman, the woman who sparked this all off?  She says in the good old days:

We understood that men and women are profoundly different, and weren't afraid to say so. It was clear that liaisons outside a committed relationship could be hazardous. A sexually transmitted infection was a serious matter. Traditional marriage and parenthood were valued milestones. Self-restraint built character, and character was something to strive for.

She's produced literature championed at the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute site Sense and Sexuality.  There we learn that a hook-up usually leads to regret, that mutual masturbation may cause HIV, and that the rectum is an exit, not an entrance.

I'm finding Grossman sex very confusing.  Aren't mouths "entrances"?  And vaginas "exits," at least some of the time?  Guess not.  It seems anything other than intercourse in a heterosexual marriage might lead to sexually transmitted infections.  All you sexually urgent teenagers, just wait for your heterosexual marriage, please, the intercourse will be worth it.

This isn't the first time Dr Grossman has been part of a campaign to seeking funding cuts for sexual and reproductive health care providers.  In the US, the "dangers" of sexuality education in getting us all sexed up were successfully mobilised to cut funding to Planned Parenthood.  One of their strategies was to focus attention on Planned Parenthood's website and publications out of context to suggest they create sex addicts:

This would all be funny - oh hell, masturbation as a gateway drug?  It is funny - but it would be even funnier if we didn't know that abstinence based education doesn't work - and actually, talking about sex openly with young people, teaching about pleasure and risk and consent, does work to both reduce stis and unwanted pregnancies.  There's some indications that a strengths based approach might reduce sexual violence too.

It would be funny if it wasn't so hate-inducing - of our beautiful bodies, however we like our exits and entrances; of sex, which is about as much fun as you can have with someone else for many of us; of exploring pleasure and fun consensually with someone else in a myriad ways; of women being active in our desires; and of anyone exploring desire in any way that isn't strictly heterosexual.

So next time I hear these rumblings from Family First or anyone else, I won't be treating them as a sideshow.  Family Planning and Rainbow Youth are clearly in the sights of sexual and moral conservatives in Aotearoa, aided and abetted by sexual and moral conservatives in the US.  I'll be defending my rights to my gateway drug and all the other ways I want to consensually express myself sexually, and I want all young people to have those very same rights - how about you?

UPDATE:  With thanks to Captiver in comments...and lo and behold, just days after Family First calls for Rainbow Youth's funding to be cut, Stuff run this article about a man worried about the sessions Rainbow Youth are giving in schools.  Let's be quite clear - queer youth are more likely self-harm, attempt and commit suicide, experience bullying and depression, and run away from home.  It's not an exaggeration to say Rainbow Youth education about sexuality and gender identity will be saving lives, as well as growing the capacity for non-queer identified kids to have compassion and kindness.  Come on media, wake up and ask some questions about where these stories are coming from - "have you had any relationship with Family First?" for a start....