Why I Write

These days, not always, but sometimes, I sit down to write and I worry. About the fresh bout of targeting. The fresh round of abuse. The fresh set of complaints filed with my employer, and the messages that say they will kill me, end me in New Zealand, or have me deported. These anxieties are real, and they have a documented basis. Only the other day, a school venue where I was scheduled to give a talk was doxed by white supremacists, set on by a member of the Free Speech Union Council. As I get older, it honestly gets tiring. 

The writing must still be done.

The writing is often about things that are difficult to hold. The organised targeting of Muslims. The machinery of settler-colonial forgetting. A bill that arrives in Parliament carrying the language of definition and clarity while doing the work of erasure. I write, send the piece out, and then get on with the day, because the writing is only ever a small thing set against the size of the structures it names.

And then the letters arrive.

Over the past weeks, after I published a piece on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, my inbox filled with messages from people I have never met. I have removed the details that would identify the senders, and I have kept their words otherwise as they wrote them, because the shape of how people write when they are tired and hopeful at the same time is itself the evidence.

My doctoral research looks at queer pedagogy in [language teaching] classrooms, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are things that drive my research and also my life (that's also why I chose to come to NZ [a few years ago]). However, it's been a difficult time to hold onto that, seeing the global backlash against DEI has been extended to the peaceful Aotearoa. A lot of things are happening, the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill and the recent puberty blockers ban etc.. It's disappointing to see NZ choosing to follow the UK and US down this path.

I read your writing on the Legislation Amendment Bill on Massey website, and I just wanted to write and say thank you. It matters a lot to have scholars willing to speak up for and still commit to equity and inclusivity under the depressing global ideological turn. It really gives me hope in this seemingly hopeless world.

Read that letter closely and you will see what a piece of legislation actually does. It does not simply amend a statute. It reaches into the life of a doctoral researcher who moved across the world because this place promised something, and it tells her that the promise is being withdrawn. The bill is a communicative act before it is a legal one. It circulates a story about who belongs to the category of the human and who is to be argued over.

The second letter was shorter.

Thanks Prof. for your powerful writing. I read it today and honestly, found in myself the courage to speak up. Unless we speak up, and unless more of us do, we are in for trouble. So I was debating on whether to submit a response to the [Definitions of Woman and Man] bill. Reading your article, I know I will.

This is the whole theory of change I have been working with for more than two decades, arriving in three sentences from a stranger. Voice is not a private possession that a person either has or lacks. Voice is infrastructural. It depends on whether there is somewhere for it to land, whether someone has gone first, whether the cost of speaking has been made visible and survivable by someone else having paid it in public. When a person sees another person speak and does not see them destroyed, the calculation changes. A submission gets written. That is how the register of the possible expands, one person at a time, each of them lowering the threshold for the next.

The third letter carried the weight that I think about most.

Thank you for your Massey piece on the anti-trans bill Mohan. It is very tiring for those of us directly affected (either as trans people or families of trans people) and I see so many of my already exhausted [loved ones] feeling they need to speak up yet again, when they are already at peak burnout from it all. It is great to see others standing up for trans people too.

Here is the cruelty that sits underneath the polite proceduralism of a select committee process. The people whose lives are being legislated are required to keep making the case for their own existence, in submission after submission, hearing after hearing, on a timeline set by others, while carrying on with work and school and caregiving. Exhaustion is the point. Attrition is the strategy. A structure that can keep generating new demands for justification will eventually outlast the people it is demanding justification from, and when they finally fall silent the structure will call that silence consensus.

Which is why the labour has to be shared. If you are not the one being legislated about, your voice costs you less, and that difference in cost is exactly the resource you are obliged to spend.

I know what the spending looks like. Since 2019 I have been the target of sustained and coordinated harassment, some of it organised offshore, some of it comfortably local. There have been complaints designed to consume months of my life, screenshots doctored and circulated, threats that arrive at night, campaigns aimed at my employer and at my family. I have documented the pattern, analysed it, and published on it, because turning the attack into evidence is one of the few forms of power available to the person being attacked. The harassment is not a side effect of writing that questions power. It is the response of power to being questioned, and its purpose is to make the writing too expensive to continue.

So the calculation is honest and it is simple. On one side sits the cost, which is real and which my whānau carries alongside me. On the other side sits a doctoral researcher who found hope in a seemingly hopeless world, a colleague who decided to write a submission, and a family that felt for one afternoon that they were not carrying it alone. Set against each other, the outcome is never in doubt.

I write because the alternative is a public sphere in which only power narrates. I write because the structures that produce inequality do their most durable work through communication, through the quiet redefinition of a word, through the story that says some lives are a matter for debate. I write because the scholarship I have built with communities across seventeen countries taught me that the people at the margins already possess the analysis, and what they are denied is the infrastructure through which it can be heard. I write because a university that does not speak into these moments has already conceded what it exists for.

And I write because letters like these keep arriving, from people who then go and write their own.

The risk is the confirmation. Nobody works this hard to silence a voice that changes nothing.