ANALYSIS
When Whitianga’s Terri Lipanovic heard Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull was heading to Australia, she asked the outspoken activist to tack New Zealand on to the tour.
For Lipanovic and other female veterans who fought for gay rights and women’s liberation, the Let Women Speak events that Parker organised provided a chance to give voice to an issue they believe cuts to the core of their identity.
“We are getting men coming into women’s spaces,” she says. “This has been going on for years. We have been losing our rights, our language, our safety.”
Who she is talking about are trans women, rather than men. And in that choice of words, Lipanovic marks out the frontline of a culture war that affects very few people in New Zealand but has suddenly increased in volume so as to make it impossible to miss.
The law in New Zealand says women are those who choose to be labelled as such.
As a lesbian woman, Lipanovic fought through the 1980s and onwards to allow women their own space to stand in a society largely controlled by men. She fought to end the criminalisation of male same-sex relationships. She fought against the homophobia that allowed society to punish her for loving a woman.
This was a time when those ostracised by society’s customs and laws were backed into a corner. Almost entirely, the focus was on gay men and the emergence of HIV and lesbians whose fight for acceptance was coupled with redefining women’s place in society.
The Homosexual Law Reform Act was passed in 1986, decriminalising sexual relations between men. While sex between women hadn’t been illegal, the lesbian community was a significant voice in the gay liberation movement through its engagement with broader discrimination and human rights issues.
And other laws followed. In 1993, the Human Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation. The 2005 Civil Unions Act allowed gay and lesbian couples to form a legal relationship - a law change which saw a resurgence of homophobic opposition. Then, in 2013, the law was changed again to allow same-sex couples to marry.
It’s a war not entirely won but these main battles fought and laws created by our Parliament allowed gay men and lesbians to increasingly step out of the corner into which they were backed.
And then in 2017, trans woman Allyson Hamblett signalled how those such as her remained backed into the corner. She gathered signatures on a petition asking that planned changes to the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Act include the right for trans people to change their gender without going through the Family Court.
Like the other laws, it was democracy in action. A parliamentary select committee heard evidence for and against. It went before Parliament. It was voted on and passed unanimously. In this campaign as in the earlier campaigns, those in opposition have lost in every comparable Western democracy.
If there was a difference when the name change issue emerged, it was that some of those who had campaigned so hard for their own rights in the past were now in opposition.
Those included people like Lipanovic - veterans of the war fought by those in feminist and lesbian movements. And not, they say, to deprive others of their rights. Instead, as they would have it, their opposition is again in defence of their rights - what they see as an erosion of that hard-won label of “woman”.
‘The times, they are a-changin’
In many ways, it is a generational shift. Dr Ella Ben Hagai, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, studied the changing nature of lesbian identity as social stigma decreased and a “fracturing” of specific sexual categories saw a trend towards fluid gender and sexuality.
In describing the shifting of the landscape, Ben Hagai describes the “radical lesbian feminism of the 20th century” as a community which bound activism and sexuality into identity.
It was a community that identified “the orientation of women to identify with other women and love them is a form of resistance” in a “patriarchal society in which women’s bodies and desires are surveilled and controlled”.
Then comes the 21st century in which the “gender binary … becomes undone” and “the meanings of womanhood and lesbian identity shift”. With the shift, Ben Hagai wrote, psychologists shifted the definition of lesbian to include “people who at some point in their lives identified as women attracted to other women”.
Ben Hagai found the change in the meaning of lesbian identity to have created a “schism” dividing women of different generations.
For older lesbians, some might see “gender as an oppressive category used to subjugate women” leading them to seek out cis women-only spaces.
“On the other hand, younger lesbians may understand gender as a felt internal experience; for these lesbians, women-only spaces are seen as exclusionary and transphobic.”
Lipanovic: “I think a lot of gays, lesbians, dropped the ball after gay marriage. We’ve got equality, we’ve got justice - we dropped the ball. We didn’t see this trans movement, this queer movement, coming.
“This country has become so woke. It has discarded women. Women don’t matter - that’s the message we get. We are being erased.”
Gender and the language of ‘genocide’
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull says she’s not anti-trans but a women’s rights activist. That only works if you accept her argument that people can’t change gender.
Neither courts nor Parliament accept that argument. In the pre-eminent New Zealand and British cases that have come before the courts, gender dysphoria - the feeling of a mismatch between biological sex and gender identity - is accepted.
Gender identity is our sense of who we are and how we see ourselves. Many people with gender dysphoria seek to balance the mismatch between the body into which they were born with their sense of self.
Some transition socially, meaning they adopt the dress and mannerisms of their identified gender. For others, that balance is found through hormone treatment which will allow body changes such as development of breasts for those taking oestrogen or facial hair for those on testosterone.
Of those people, there are those who seek out surgery that affirms their gender identity. That might be voice tweaking, changes to the face, removal of breasts. In far fewer cases trans people seek gender reassignment surgery. New Zealand-born doctor Harold Gillies carried out one of the world’s first such operations in 1946 in Ireland. By 1951, Gillies had carried out these surgeries on those born male and female. It is not new science.
For all that history, there remains scepticism about transition pathways. Academic research suggests between 1 per cent and 13 per cent of people detransition, depending on how wide the parameters are drawn. At its broadest, it includes those who had socially transitioned.
The government-operated Tavistock Clinic in the United Kingdom has become somewhat of a beacon to critics and opponents with a recent report highlighting significant issues with the service offered. Largely, the issues raised are administrative failings that undermined clinical practice.
These exceptions to the rule are highlighted by Keen-Minshull, who has described her political awakening as when she “peaked”. “And peak trans is when you understand what’s going on, a bit like a red pill,” she said in one interview.
What was apparently “going on”, according to Keen-Minshull, was an indefinite watering down of women’s rights through laws and practices that recognised trans women. In 2018, using the name “Posie Parker”, she paid for a billboard in Liverpool which stated: “Woman, wʊmən, noun, adult human female”.
The term “adult human female” was adopted by the gender critical feminist movement and became somewhat of a rallying cry. By definition, whether on an academic paper, billboard, T-shirt or poster, it excluded trans women in a way which brought its sharpest condemnation from the United States-based academic thinkthank, The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.
In a statement in November, it said parts of the gender critical movement were “furthering a specifically genocidal ideology”.
Such strong language shows the extreme positions some have in the debate over trans rights.
“Genocidal ideologies are ideologies that deny or seek to erase the existence of a specific group because of the supposed threat it poses to the holders of the ideology. The gender critical movement simultaneously denies that transgender identity is real and seeks to eradicate it completely from society,” the institute said.
In one interview, Keen-Minshull says: “Being born in the wrong body is such a ridiculous concept.” In another, it is a “fetish”. In another, she says: “I don’t think any parent that enables their child to transition, or any adult or parent who encourages any other children to transition, I don’t think they’re fit to be parents.”
It’s a sign of how polarised the debate is that Keen-Minshull also refers to Nazi Germany.
“If we look in history it doesn’t take that much to convince a population of something preposterous or evil,” she said during an interview.
“I’m not saying this is like Nazi Germany but perfectly reasonable people became tyrannical, evil humans that participated in something that is so vile. I don’t think it’s beyond the wit to look at history and think, ‘we’ve always been able to do this’.”
This is who Lipanovic invited to New Zealand to speak about women’s rights at Albert Park where both were confronted by angry protesters in scenes that served no one well.
How laws get changed
When Allyson Hamblett changed her birth certificate to reflect her transition, she was faced with going to the Family Court to present evidence supporting the move. Usually, that has included medical evidence showing the negative effects of being unable to live as the gender identified with.
“I wanted other people to benefit from an easier process than the one I went through,” she says.
It’s a change that would mean a great deal to a small community. The number of trans people in New Zealand is estimated to represent about 0.5 per cent of the population. In New Zealand, that’s about 25,000 people.
Those who have sought to legally change their gender through the Family Court are an even smaller number. In the past 10 years, from 2013 to the end of 2022, it adds up to 296 people.
Hamblett met with Green MP Jan Logie, talked about how to change the law and then set off to gather signatures. The Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill was live at the time but didn’t include the simplified gender change mechanism, recommended by the Human Rights Commission in 2007.
The petition made the difference. The select committee sought and received a report into the benefits, proposed the change and called for submissions.
The select committee was chaired by National MP Ian McElvie. When the fracas of Albert Park exploded with some violence and much noise, he thought back to the select committee. He couldn’t shake the feeling the protest was an echo of the unruly submissions process at the select committee.
McElvie, 70, is a retiring National Party MP who represents rural Rangitikei. He has worked as a farmer and in the motor industry, sat on boards and served four terms as Mayor of Palmerston North before arriving in Parliament.
His view is this: “Be who you want to be. I think we should let people be what they are because they will always lose if they are the minority.”
Yet McElvie found the proceedings disturbing, with questioning from some committee members antagonising those giving evidence. “I think it was provoked by one side of the debate. I don’t think they were looking for a fight. They were putting their point across and it wasn’t accepted.”
McElvie didn’t interpret the submissions against the Bill as “anti-trans”. He also didn’t find the approaches to the process as constructive as it should be.
“We don’t need to believe what we listen to but our job is to listen. I don’t think we need these very strong views against other people’s. I find it disappointing. I find it disappointing someone just can’t accept someone else’s view and let it go.”
McElvie is confident the process got the country to the right place, as he believes it did on other controversial issues such as abortion and euthanasia. “We passed the law and it was unanimously passed and that’s all there is about that. They had their say and can now move on.”
Labour MP Deborah Russell sat on the select committee, a process she says left her “exhausted”.
As expected those submitting came with their own strong opinions but with little or no give, as Russell saw it. She felt questioning from committee members was unwelcome. “We’re not just there to be receptacles for people’s views but we’re there to challenge views. We all tried to be polite but it was pretty hard at times.”
Russell saw much of the discussion and talking points as from overseas, which upset her perceptions of New Zealand’s tolerance. “It felt like a very foreign discourse was being imported.”
Among that discourse was talk of bathroom and changing room predators - “scaremongering”, says Russell - and the danger of sexual violence said to face women in prison serving time with trans women.
These are the same strawmen held up by Keen-Minshull who talks about the need for safety in “women’s spaces”, including changing rooms, public toilets and domestic violence refuges. It is rhetoric which includes talk of autogynephilia as a motivation - the largely-debunked idea that trans women were men sexually aroused at the idea of inhabiting a woman’s body.
Feeding fear
The arguments espoused most fervently come with the least evidence. They are monsters under the bed, feeding fear as long as they are believed.
Police here have no reported cases of women being assaulted in toilets or changing rooms by trans women. That matches with research done in the US after exclusionary bathroom laws were passed in some states. A 2018 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found no evidence supporting fears of privacy and safety violations involving trans people.
The claim autogynephilia provides motivation for trans women has also suffered strong, near terminal, challenges. The original theory was mooted in a paper written 30 years ago by academic Dr Ray Blanchard and is criticised for conflating sexuality with gender. A recent paper from Waikato University’s Dr Jaimie Veale, director of the Transgender Health Research Lab, was heavily critical of Blanchard’s methodology and conclusions.
The Department of Corrections reports no sexual violence involving the 16 trans women who have served time since 2018. Violence, too, is low with two non-serious assaults recorded since July 2020 in which a trans woman was identified as the perpetrator. Over the same period, there were 324 assaults in total in women’s prisons.
The claims surface whenever trans rights are raised. In Christchurch, plans in 2021 for women-only swim events at the Christchurch City Council’s Te Pou Toetoe-Linwood Pool complex brought dire warnings of a loss of privacy and safety for those born women attending. In the year the event has operated, no issues have been reported.
When the event was mooted, one campaigner’s complaint was accompanied by an overseas newspaper clipping about a trans woman raping a child in a bathroom. Inquiries by the Herald showed the bathroom was in a private house - an awful crime but not weight to the argument.
These claims have been heard again in the weeks after Keen-Minshull attempted to speak in Auckland, pushed by a different lobby than those traditionally attached to the issue.
This time, the rhetoric was coming from the alternate reality media. Conspiracy influencer Chantelle Baker posted video about trans women posing a threat to women’s prisons, saying she was standing for “biological women’s rights”. Voices for Freedom co-founder Alia Bland posted videos claiming “social contagion” was driving transitioning and an interview with a “Gays Against Grooming” spokesman who warned “children are at risk”.
The shift to this community has been tracked by The Disinformation Project which studies false and misleading information distributed in New Zealand. In a new report released today, director Kate Hannah and her team detailed the rise in commentary around trans issues and the presence of those who drove commentary - and false or misleading information - around the protest at Parliament last year.
The report described the shift as a “community bridging” process of those aligned with issues that motivated the protest at Parliament in February 2022.
Hannah told the Herald: “You build an online or networked community around a particular issue and that community is bridged across to different issues. That’s what’s been going on for the last 12-18 months - attempts to bridge to another community.”
At the time of and following Keen-Minshull’s visit, anti-trans commentary soared in what The Disinformation Project called “the Parker effect”. On Telegram, which was among social media channels studied, that commentary was particularly driven by neo-Nazi and far-right commentators. Green co-leader Marama Davidson became a target of “unprecedented” abuse - even at the levels former prime minister Jacinda Ardern faced - across Telegram and other social media channels by neo-Nazi and extreme far-right commentators but also through networks that had been “bridged” into New Zealand’s disinformation community.
“We suggest that community bridging is being tactically deployed to embed more extreme far-right and neo-Nazi content, producers, and ideologies into Aotearoa New Zealand-based disinformation channels and accounts,” the report said.
The “splintered realities” and developing misinformation ecosystems that had developed had “significant and growing implications for democracy and social cohesion”, which the report said was reflected in the recent AUT University study which showed “decreasing trust in the media”.
Transphobic insults were a feature of the landscape prior to the recent rise, says Hannah. They were previously directed at people who weren’t trans. An example of this was the speculative falsehood that former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was a man.
Hannah says the use of these insults against an individual already the focus of negative commentary from a section of our community embedded negative connotations amongst those who were the intended audience.
It meant those ad hominem attacks became almost codified, carrying meaning beyond the original slur.
So, as Covid-19 receded into the background, those weaponised attacks were directed at the trans community and its allies. And, says Hannah, it came with the skills developed over the three years of Covid-19 activism meaning targets also faced doxxing and the collection and weaponising of footage and other online material. And, she says, the influence of offshore disinformation leaders can be seen - and had been seen before when the anti-vax rhetoric shifted to being pro-Russian and now anti-trans rhetoric.
It was fertile ground. Much of the dialogue from the alternate reality movement has its roots in US religious conservatism. For Voices for Freedom, parents’ medical choices for children around vaccination was a regular theme while Baker talks up the perceived need for “strong men” in society.
There is also a connection around media reluctance to platform transphobic comments which then feeds into (false) narratives about government control and complaints that free speech is being cancelled.
The shift of the issue from its traditional base to other networks heightens the risk to trans people because of the new communities it connects with.
In the weeks after Keen-Minshull’s visit, the Disinformation Project’s monitoring of social media picked up plans to disrupt the women’s only swim event at Linwood’s pools. On social media, those engaging with an account associated with white supremacist views talked of men attending claiming to be women and one person suggested a bomb threat.
Jenny Shields from Canterbury’s Rainbow youth support organisation had also noted the connection to those groups who had opposed Covid-19 mitigation measures and the increased sharing of “outdated research or misleading articles”.
“People are more willing to believe what they read in these spaces than they were before.”
With the Linwood incident, she was heartened police turned out in numbers to ward off any chancers looking to disrupt the swim.
But she worries. When it comes to this year’s Pride Ball, there were increased security concerns around the 500 young people who would be attending.
At a meeting with police this month, Shields says she was struck by a significant attitude shift when officers unscored how important it was for any incidents to be reported.
“If the police are taking it this seriously, how bad must it actually be? I don’t want to catastrophise or be a fearmonger but there is a part of me that wouldn’t be surprised we don’t see a violent act in the next 3-6 months, especially with an election coming.”
Culture wars and collateral damage
So now we have a fresh front in a developing culture war - one of a number being elevated by the alternate reality ecosystem.
We’ve had almost three years of battles over Covid-19, whether it’s real, if masks work and whether the vaccine attributed to saving lives was actually an experimental death jab. There are cries of “cancel culture”, Julian Batchelor’s “stop co-governance” roadshow with its Treaty of Waitangi revisionism, claims the media has been co-opted by government and now trans issues.
In war, there is always collateral damage and in this conflict the likely victims are those facing stigma over their alignment to a state of being accepted by courts, governments and medical authorities.
In 2018, the Aotearoa New Zealand Trans & Non-Binary Health Survey “Counting Ourselves” asked questions of around 1100 trans people to receive answers similar to that which it had received in previous surveys.
It found stigmatising trans people or non-binary was linked to poor mental health while support from family and friends was associated with “better outcomes across all mental health measures”.
Those encountering stigma and feeling exposed had a 25 per cent chance of attempting suicide in the next 12 months. For those in a protective and supportive environment, that dropped to 3 per cent. This wasn’t a new finding. A handful of years earlier, a survey of high school students found trans teens five times more likely to attempt suicide than their cis gender peers.
The Counting Ourselves survey specifically asked about toilets and was told 43 per cent of trans or non-binary people had been told or asked if they were using the wrong bathroom, 20 per cent were verbally harassed, 15 per cent stopped from entering, 4 per cent physically attacked and 3 per cent sexually harassed. It saw 70 per cent of those surveyed avoiding a public bathroom in the last 12 months.
At school, 59 per cent of trans and non-binary students did not feel safe using facilities at school that line up with their gender.
The survey referenced research identifying trans people as among the most marginalised in the world.
“There is a narrative that says trans people are the most vulnerable and marginalised,” says Suzanne Levy, one of those who set up Stand Up For Women, the group formed to organise opposition against the BDMR Bill. Rather, says Levy, “that’s setting it up to say it can’t be discussed”.
“I’m a Jew. I don’t like being called a Nazi. I’m not a Nazi.”
In the wake of Keen-Minshull’s visit, Levy says inquiries to Stand Up For Women have rocketed in number. Lots of dissatisfied Green and Labour voters, feminists, lesbians, all aged mostly over 30.
“A lot of the women I talk to in the movement are women who say ‘we’ve already fought for this - why do we have to do it again?’.
In contrast, Shields saw the protest against Keen-Minshull as an indication of wide support for the trans community and an understanding of how much those in it were marginalised.
As a community, trans people are a “tiny, tiny minority”. “People in general really understand it’s a vulnerable community that needs more understanding and support.”
For Shields the collection of letters that makes up the LGBTQI+ community “still belong together because of shared battles” even though some of those signal sexuality and some signal gender.
“A lot of the conversations about trans people we’re hearing at the moment are the same conversations we had about gay people 40 years ago.
“Our understanding of gender has changed over the last 30-40 years. Some people may feel threatened by this idea that someone can be a woman.”
Trans activist and Young New Zealander of the year Shaneel Lal finds the uproar astonishing given the passage of time since trans woman Georgina Beyer served as mayor and then Member of Parliament.
“I don’t think a trans person could safely stand for Parliament [today].”
Lal sees the generational shift with - they say - about a quarter of their age group identifying as queer. It’s a dramatic shift from a generation ago.
“Next generation will have an even larger group identifying as queer.”
“I think my generation of people are far more open to allowing people to be themselves. I don’t think my generation has the idea we must limit people by the labels they choose.
“The tides are turning and the transphobes know the tides are turning and once it turns they will not stay afloat and so they are throwing everything at it to try and stay afloat.”