Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, has sparked renewed debate over free speech and gender rights during her New Zealand visit. Photo / Getty Images
Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, has sparked renewed debate over free speech and gender rights during her New Zealand visit. Photo / Getty Images
THE FACTS
Helen Joyce’s speaking tour in Christchurch sparked protests and highlighted tensions between transgender rights and gender-critical views.
Joyce criticised the Human Rights Review Tribunal for barring her from taking notes, citing concerns about open justice.
The Law Commission’s Ia Tangata report recommends amending the Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination against transgender and intersex people.
Liberal democracy endures only when rights belong to people, not categories.
Helen Joyce, former international editor of The Economist, is back in the headlines, not for the first time bringing heat as well as light. The Irish journalist and author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality is inNew Zealand on a speaking tour organised by the Free Speech Union and will address its annual conference in Christchurch on Saturday.
Predictably, the usual choreography follows: protests, denunciations and the insistence that some conversations simply shouldn’t happen.
When Joyce tried to attend a case before the Human Rights Review Tribunal on Wednesday relating to the rights of individuals who hold gender-critical views, she was barred from sitting in the media gallery and told she couldn’t even take notes from the public gallery.
Joyce later said: “In my 17 years at The Economist, I’ve covered courts, tribunals and parliaments around the world, and I’ve never encountered anything like this. The New Zealand Human Rights Review Tribunal seems frightened of scrutiny. A body charged with defending human rights should stand up for the principle of open justice, which is crucial to a functioning democracy, rather than hiding behind bureaucracy to close reporting down.”
Her visit coincides not only with a perennially fraught subject, the clash between transgender rights and gender-critical perspectives, but also with a significant report. In September, the Law Commission released Ia Tangata, recommending that Parliament amend the Human Rights Act to make explicit that discrimination against transgender and intersex people is unlawful.
These two events, one cultural, the other legal, are linked by a deeper question: does liberal democracy protect identities, or individuals?
A Free Speech Union speaking tour is set to reignite debate on identity politics and human rights. Photo / Getty Images
The answer can only be the individual. Rights belong to people, not collectives, not “communities”, not categories. As Eleanor Roosevelt said in a 1958 UN address: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home… the world of the individual person.”
Identity politics dangerously reverses this order.
It treats group membership as the primary fact about a person and politics as a contest among blocs. Around the world, liberal democracy is in retreat and this inversion is central to understanding why. The liberal question, “What are your rights as a citizen?” has become, “Which group are you in, and what does it get you?”
It’s a sharp turn away from Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that people “be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. The liberal project extends that principle: every person, whatever their sex, faith, or identity, should be seen as an individual moral agent, not a delegate from a demographic. It rests on the idea of the imago Dei: that every human being bears equal moral worth.
To be fair, the Ia Tangata proposals are modest. They would add “gender identity” and “variations of sex characteristics” to the act’s list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. Few would argue that someone should lose a job or a flat because they are transgender. But why should any Kiwi endure this? The problem arises when identity politics colonises law, transforming universal principles into group entitlements.
When legislation is drafted through the lens of collective identity, its effect is to create new hierarchies of grievance. Instead of asking, “Was this individual treated unfairly?”, we start asking, “Does this speech, belief, or policy offend a protected category?” The first protects people; the second polices thought.
Helen Joyce’s New Zealand visit comes as the Law Commission urges Parliament to create new gender identity protections. Photo / Supplied
Joyce’s argument is precisely about that collision between biological reality and identity ideology. Her critics want her silenced on the grounds that her ideas “erase” a group identity. But the moment we accept that an idea is forbidden because it unsettles a collective, we abandon liberalism itself; along with the peace, prosperity and stability it offers. As Joyce puts it: “The only way we reach the truth about difficult and contested issues is by allowing people to speak – and to be challenged.”
Let’s remember, a democracy confident in its values doesn’t fear argument. It trusts citizens to test ideas in public rather than outsource that job to bureaucrats or tribunals.
Extending human-rights protections to transgender people isn’t inherently illiberal. Indeed, it should be a straightforward extension of the principle that individuals must be free from unjust treatment. What’s illiberal is using that principle as a weapon to silence disagreement or compel assent to contested beliefs. Laws written in the name of equality must still defend the equal right to differ.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says he won't act on the Ia Tangata report. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Paul Goldsmith, the Justice Minister responsible for Ia Tangata, has said he “won’t be doing anything” with it. This stance sounds decisive but is, in fact, evasive. He should do something: he should reject the report outright, not out of hostility to transgender people but out of loyalty to liberal democracy. The commission’s recommendations, however well-intentioned, import the assumptions of identity politics into the heart of our human-rights law, risking the conversion of a charter of individual freedom into a tool for collective conformity.
If Parliament believes the Human Rights Act needs updating, it should reaffirm that its purpose is to protect all people from unfair treatment, not to validate identities. Every New Zealander – gay or straight, trans or not, believer or sceptic – deserves the same shield: the right to live free from discrimination and the right to speak, question and disagree without fear.
Jonathan Ayling is a strategy consultant and professional director. He is the former-Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union (NZ), and has worked as a ministerial staffer and senior Parliamentary advisor in both Government and Opposition.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.
