The Cost of Kindness – a White Camellia podcast

Personally, I don’t believe it was coincidence that trans activists started getting more of their requests for intrusion into women’s spaces and sports granted as women started gaining more positions of power and authority.

In general, women as a group are more wired for empathy and kindness than men are. That’s not to say that men don’t have these attributes, but in general women’s empathy and kindness tends to get activated more quickly. Think of when we were kids – who did we know was more likely between women and men to show us sympathy for our scrapes and bruises?

Empathy and kindness are not weaknesses. They are valuable attributes for the wellbeing and survival of our species, but they can be exploited. As more women got into higher education, public service, and the workforce, the previously masculine dynamics in those places softened. Trans activists spotted that, and came calling with their expertly-narrated sad stories in tow to take advantage. I don’t doubt that initially there may have been a genuineness in transpeople just wanting acceptance, to have a place in the world, and not to be discriminated against, but I also believe there soon arose a contingent who couldn’t stop themselves from preying on, and fully exploiting, the new pervading dynamic of kindness and empathy.

As we women get older and wiser in the ways of the world, we generally start tempering our empathy and kindness with pragmatism and a wider lens. Wisdom and life experience teach us that empathy and kindness are not only about giving those with the saddest stories, or those who enact the greatest amount of emotional drama, everything they want. The picture is always bigger than that which is in front of our nose, and there are always more people in it than the one/s sucking up the most attention. We’re not quite such a soft touch anymore for those who’ve previously counted on it from women. Often, we’re not much liked for this, but here’s another thing – we also have fewer effs to give about not being liked. Being an older woman is great (admittedly, being a younger woman wasn’t all bad, either – lol!).

But we didn’t fight for our rights back in the day just to see them get cleverly tricked out of us now by experts in emotional exploitation. Experts who are aided and abetted by a puzzling number of women and men who fail to see, or don’t want to see, the bigger picture of what the cost is to women and girls when men who identify as women are allowed free and unfettered entry into our spaces and sports.

This 12-minute episode of the White Camellia podcast below, ‘The Cost of Kindness’, hosted by Women’s Rights Party NZ co-leader, Chimene Del la Varis, focusses on what unthinking empathy and kindness for men who identify as women costs women and girls. The significance of the podcast’s name ‘White Camellia’ goes back to when New Zealand’s suffragists gave their supporters in Parliament a white camellia to wear during the passing of the Electoral Act 1893, when women got the right to vote.

Before I leave you to listen in peace, just a quick mention that the rousing segment of song towards the end of the podcast is taken from us women opening the Let Women Speak rally in Auckland on 20^th Sept.

White Camellia Episode Three: The Cost Of Kindness - Women's Rights Party (womensrightsparty.nz)