“Whoa!
A get your hands in the air, and get to clappin ‘em
And like, back and forth because ah
This is, what you thought it wasn’t “— Eminem, ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’
Were you to heave a great big sigh, and think on the 17th of April 2013, that it was all finally over for the gays and lesbians, our war won, our relationships and lives affirmed, at least legally, as much as heterosexual folk, and that we could rest. We didn’t have to fight any more, to live, to love, to fuck. I’d forgive you. I once agreed with you. I don’t, any more.
I remember that heady night myself. I was sitting in a pub with an entire bar oddly enraptured by Parliament Television. We watched John Banks apologize to the gays. Winston Peters and Tau Henare drunkenly arguing across the House. The mood was celebratory. We watched as the Marriage Equality Bill passed and the audience at Parliament spontaneously breaking out into Pokarekare Ana. It was a wonderful night.
Unfortunately, our war was not over. We had simply won a battle. For the enemy had merely reconfigured itself, and now came from within.
Now, it is 2018. I would now forgive you for assuming that ‘gay and lesbian’ has morphed into ‘queer and trans’, which is now the default descriptor. The great legal victory that is being fought for now is the right for people to change their sex on their birth certificates by self-declaration, and calling anyone who calls for any kind of assessment an evil bigot. Such evil bigots have included gays and lesbians, left-wing straight women, trade unionists, and surely as I write this, common sense will be inducted into the Bigot Hall Of Fame. Other priorities include ‘gender affirming healthcare’, where children as young as ten are put on off-label chemotherapy drugs like Lucrin to prevent ‘unwanted changes’.
Two major organizations are promoted heavily in the media for the movement these days. Those organizations are RainbowYOUTH and InsideOUT, which share employees and volunteers and are de facto function like a singular organization. They are consulted on news articles on the bathroom debate to recent lesbian protests at the 2018 Auckland Pride Parade. They receive government funding to further their aims.
At the same time, RainbowYOUTH, purporting to represent ‘LGBTQI+’ doesn’t even mention ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ on its website’s article about sexuality. InsideOUT’s education resources don’t even have a definition of ‘homosexual’. RainbowYOUTH’s former executive director works in the health sector, project managing ‘gender-affirming healthcare for the DHB’. Their former education director went on to promote transgenderism while employed at the Human Rights Commission.
What the hell is going on, you might ask? I’ll tell you what’s going on: these two organizations have strived to erase the homosexual from their own community and received government funding to do it. But it’s not just these two organizations — the entire transgender rights movement has hijacked gay and lesbian events and gay and lesbian organizations to further its aims. Like an unwelcome parasite, it leeches off our culture and community, and tries to establish itself as the core of our community. No better example would be No Pride in Prisons, which hijacked multiple Pride Parades for the rights of transgender sex offenders.
Does this sound like hyperbole? Nonsense? Perhaps even transphobic?
Let me show you the evidence before you dismiss me as a crank.
Trust me. You’ll love it.
TAXPAYER FUNDS!
InsideOUT and RainbowYOUTH receive donations from private charities and the Government. We’ll look at that money first, before I show you where it goes. Firstly, Rainbow Youth’s Performance Report to the Charities Register gives us a better idea of where the money is coming from. We’ll look at the financial statements first.
This is from the report ending March 2017, the latest available. Here we have Rainbow Youth’s general accounts and Statement of Financial Performance.
Where does that $386k in donations come from? We can find out from the ‘analysis of revenue’. This lists major donors.
With this analysis, we can see the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) paid Rainbow Youth $110,000 for ‘services’. What services?
That $110,000 paid Rainbow Youth to produce anti-bullying programmes, like the refresh of the resource. We’ll look at RainbowYOUTH’s website and figure what they stand for, first.
I started with their ‘useful words’ page, in order to figure out what they think they’re talking about. It’s useful to know your opponent’s language before you start fighting them. What are those ‘useful words’? Remember — Rainbow Youth advises the government, universities, high schools and businesses. Its employees and former employees have had a hand in government policy. These definitions are being used at governmental and corporate levels, as well as in the education sector. It’s important to know what they are.
For example, what does Rainbow Youth define gay as?
I mean, that’s okay. It acknowledges the reality of same-sex attraction. No ‘exclusive’ there though.
What about lesbianism?
We started off well I suppose, but all good things must come to an end. Lesbians are already erased: barely any RainbowYOUTH material mentions lesbians, and this is part of a constant pattern. Gay people are attracted to the same sex, yet ‘lesbian’ is a broad term. It’s not ‘women exclusively into other women’. Rainbow Youth is in schools telling lesbians their sexuality is a ‘broad term’ and an ‘identity’ that is ‘expressed in different ways’. The term may as well be meaningless.
But what is ‘attraction’ to Rainbow Youth anyway? Maybe I shouldn’t give up hope yet.
Spiritual attraction? Intellectual attraction? Are you serious? If you’re hoping for a definition of gender, there isn’t one in the entire thing. Sorry. Instead we have sexual attraction divided into five things. I mean, under these schemata, our Prime Minister is Fishing-show-host-sexual. It’s nonsensical.
Does ‘genderqueer’ mean anything? From what I’m reading from this, it means whatever you want. I’m going to use this word a lot — utterly nonsensical. Are all gender critical people genderqueer? I mean that whole definition sounds TERFY, Rainbow Youth!
Everyone is non-binary! Are non-binary and genderqueer the same thing? I mean, they look like the same thing. Maybe I am seeing things. Are gender critical feminists actually non-binary people in the closet? I mean, we’re criticizing the western model of gender? And how can it be both a political identity or a gender identity? What are the ‘separate definitions of male and female’. What does any of this mean? I figure myself not particularly stupid, and I can’t make heads or tails of this. Maybe I need more gender thetans.
Oh, and before we forget: some people have TWO GENDERS! Reminder: gender hasn’t been defined in this whole ‘useful words’ article. I mean how can you read this and go ‘yes, this is the correct way of thinking’. I’m half expecting someone to tell me about L Ron Hubbard and the gender thetans any minute now.
I left ‘Useful Words’ to try and find something more useful, as unfortunately those useful words turned out to be useless words. I need to know what ‘gender’ is to RainbowYOUTH. Maybe I’ll stop writing this article right here and now, because clearly that will provide the cipher to solve the code that was all those ‘useful words’. So, I went to the ‘gender identity’ page. Rainbow Youth defines sex and gender as the following:
Let’s unpack that. For starters, sex is defined as biology. That’s sensible — sex is biological. There are two biological sexes — males and females.
Gender identity is ‘a person’s own sense of identification as male, female, neither, both, or somewhere in between.’ Wait, how does someone identify as ‘male’ or ‘female’ if they’re the other biological sex?
I’ll relax. Surely this will be explained.
Oh wait, RainbowYOUTH says sex is biology, but also exists on a ‘spectrum’. Gender is ‘what is in your head and heart’. Wait, so being a woman or a man is all in your ‘head and heart’? I can’t wait for the hordes of women going to tell the Catholic Church they’re eligible to be priests because they’re men inside. Congratulations RainbowYOUTH, you solved sexism!
Yes, I’m being sarcastic. Moving on, RainbowYOUTH tells us how gender and gender identity are ‘influenced’:
“Gender identity can be influenced by culture, feelings, thoughts, clothing, people around us, and more. It can be helpful to think of gender as a continuum, with male and female at either end. Our ideas, and social constructs influence what male and female at either end of the spectrum look like, and you can identify anywhere in between.”
So, Rainbow Youth acknowledges the existence of social contagion! Nice work, Rainbow Youth! I mean, that sounds an awful lot like recent research into Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). What is ROGD? I’ll let Lisa Littman from that research describe it for me:
“In on-line forums, parents have been reporting that their children are experiencing what is described here as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion. The onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe. Parents also report that their children exhibited an increase in social media/internet use prior to disclosure of a transgender identity. The purpose of this study was to document and explore these observations and describe the resulting presentation of gender dysphoria, which is inconsistent with existing research literature.”
Of particular interest is Littman’s statistics:
“There were 256 parent-completed surveys that met study criteria. The adolescent and young adult (AYA) children described were predominantly female sex at birth (82.8%) with a mean age of 16.4 years. Forty-one percent of the AYAs had expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation before identifying as transgender. Many (62.5%) of the AYAs had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neurodevelopmental disability prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria (range of the number of pre-existing diagnoses 0–7). In 36.8% of the friendship groups described, the majority of the members became transgender-identified. The most likely outcomes were that AYA mental well-being and parent-child relationships became worse since AYAs “came out”. AYAs expressed a range of behaviors that included: expressing distrust of non-transgender people (22.7%); stopping spending time with non-transgender friends (25.0%); trying to isolate themselves from their families (49.4%), and only trusting information about gender dysphoria from transgender sources (46.6%).”
Why? Well, rapid onset gender dysphoria and social contagion are being blamed for a 4,440% increase in the number of referrals for teenage girls in the UK, an increase into which the Minster of Women and Equalities has launched an inquiry. A Wellington-based study found that there is a similar trend occurring in New Zealand. It is curious for RainbowYOUTH to acknowledge that gender identity can be ‘influenced by the people around us’. Littman’s stats are extremely interesting for another reason: they line up perfectly with the Youth’12 stats on gender. Like the fact that in Littman’s study, 41% expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation before identifying as transgender… the same as Youth ’12 where 41.1% of transgender youth report being same-sex attracted — sexually attracted to other members of their natal sex. Or that 41.3% of transgender youth reported significant depressive symptoms — similar to Littman’s report of mental illness predominance in her study. Youth’12 reports that over half (54.8%) of transgender youth in the survey first wondered about being transgender when over the age of 12.
Perhaps rapid onset gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon! I’m shocked.
I suppose it’s nice for RainbowYOUTH to perhaps give the game away, a little bit.
But for real, if you actually read this, Rainbow Youth acknowledges that sex is biological, gender is feelings, and the feelings need to be respected more because… reasons?? It is extremely disturbing. It never justifies why gender is paramount, it just assumes it is. I mean, look at this section in particular:
What this sentence is saying, underneath the feelgood claptrap, is ‘some people feeling like they don’t fit gender stereotypes, so they identify as the other sex and take medical steps to change their bodies to fit gender stereotypes’. That’s doesn’t sound fundamentally regressive in any way shape or form. Yup. It doesn’t sound like propaganda that could drive same-sex attracted, gender non-conforming into the comforting arms of the transgender lobby.
But Rainbow Youth promises that none of this transgender stuff cannot possibly be conversion therapy in disguise, despite any indications otherwise. Here, on the same page is ‘Some Things To Be Aware Of’ concerning gender identity. Nobody ever comes out as trans so ‘they can finally be straight’.
RainbowYOUTH and InsideOUT will defend or deflect from this element of their work, and do it repeatedly, as I will show you, even though the very same Youth ’12 stats they love to cite show that 40% of transgender youth are same-sex attracted, as mentioned above. That number in Youth ’12 is likely to be higher, given the confusing nature of the questions, and the likelihood of transgender youth who are same-sex attracted, identifying themselves as heterosexual.
It gets worse — if we scroll down the page we get this take on ‘surgeries and hormones’. What Rainbow Youth is saying below is that a man can identify as a woman, take no steps towards transition, and should be treated as a woman, including access to female-only spaces, all based on ‘feeling like a woman’.
I went to ‘Sexuality’ to see if it could get worse. Probably. I have low expectations at this point. It’s much shorter than ‘Gender Identity’.
Surprisingly enough, for a page on ‘sexuality’, ‘homosexuality’, ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ are mentioned nowhere. Instead those words are replaced with ‘queer and trans’. Homosexuals figure nowhere in this entire web page. RainbowYOUTH describes a somewhat odd-sounding coming out process. Hell, same-sex attraction and same-gender are conflated, which is contradictory under RainbowYOUTH’s own definitions: sex as biological, gender as feelings.
For those wondering: this is Rainbow Youth’s definition of ‘queer’:
If it’s ‘not the preferred term for everybody’ then why is it all over your sexuality page, Rainbow Youth? If it’s ‘reclaimed’ and ‘an umbrella term’, why can’t you go into specifics on what sexuality is, or discuss homosexuality?
If you’re starting to wonder about RainbowYOUTH’s priorities, we can see them clearly with their directory of ‘useful links’. It’s almost all about transgender youth — young homosexual youth barely get a look in.
What happened to the humble homosexual? Guess we’re not trendy enough anymore.
WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
Let’s talk about those government funded educational materials now. These materials are distributed to schools and promoted on the RainbowYouth and InsideOUT websites. You can find InsideOUT’s website here. These materials are intended for students from year 7–13 (middle to high school in the American parlance, for our foreign readers). What do they contain? Let’s take a deep dive. I promise you it’ll be good. Actually bad. Good in a bad way. To examine their materials, I downloaded the InsideOUT Resource Pack, which is available on their website. The materials consist of videos and associated resources, a pedagogy guide, and a glossary.
Firstly, I took a look at the InsideOUT Glossary that’s included. I was very disappointed to find that it’s not that much different from the RainbowYOUTH glossary that I already demolished above. There are some differences, and a few things that really need to be highlighted though. A reminder: this is being taught in schools, right now.
For our first example, let’s look at how InsideOUT defines gender — a reminder, an MSD funded definition of gender.
Gender is… feelings. So why do someone’s feelings take precedent over my rights to my own boundaries, InsideOUT? I mean, it’s a reasonable question: why does someone’s feelings take precedence over my boundaries?
What kids are being taught through this kind of material, is that someone’s feelings, and the right not to have those feelings hurt is paramount, and that they should forfeit their rights and boundaries in order to not hurt someone’s feelings. That’s not very healthy for something that supposedly fulfills health curriculum requirements!
Even worse, here’s the definition of ‘gender expression’.
Did anyone even read this material and take it to its logical conclusion? I’m starting to doubt it. This is literally the same analysis as those evil trans exclusionary radical feminists, only they decide that gender feelings aren’t sacred, they decide that they are products of patriarchy and need to be ditched. Gender is not only feelings, it’s the clothes someone wears, or their haircut, or ‘other forms of presentation’. That sounds more like fashion to me, not a discrete material class of disadvantaged people.
We haven’t reached the best part yet. I combed the glossary. I looked really hard. This whole glossary doesn’t even have a definition of the word ‘homosexual’, as you can see below. It’s got ‘heterosexual’, and ‘homophobia’ is all-inclusive of ‘other sexual orientations’ — the homosexuals can’t even have ‘homophobia’ to ourselves anymore, but this is a sexuality resource pack that doesn’t even define homosexuality.
That’s gay erasure.
Because it’s ridiculous. Like 100%.
Anyway, let’s move to the pedagogy guide, which contains this absolute gem.
I guess it’s true: those who can’t do, teach. Although that’s disturbing when it comes to concepts like ‘critical thinking’, because this material displays none of it. InsideOUT even claims its education resources cover ‘key’ parts of the health curriculum! Guess I don’t need biology class any more, we’ll just throw that out.
Oh, and people who think ‘gender’ is not only more important than physical sex, but also ‘gender’ is in one’s ‘head and heart’ will teach your children the differences between sex and gender. Taxpayer funded teaching, too!
This is ridiculous.
That’s not all. The pedagogy guide declares it wants to create ‘Freedom of expression’ — yes, like the way RainbowYOUTH employees and volunteers have harassed those who disagree with them and of course, ‘Critical thinking’, which we’ve already discussed, because I am applying critical thinking and found all of this material to so far be utterly nonsensical.
‘Managing self’ — does this translate into ‘toeing the party line’? I bet it does. I would bet you $10 it does.
I’ll remind you at this juncture: this is intended to be taught in schools. This is to guide teachers through the way they should teach the material.
Let’s move on. Here we have how to ‘create an ideal learning environment’. Kids are allowed an opinion on a divisive issue until it hurts someone’s feelings, then they should shut up and do what they’re told.
Is ‘increase empathy’ and ‘broaden student’s perspectives’ code for ‘they need to agree with the material we present uncritically’? It gets worse — what we see below in the pedagogy guide encourages other children to call out any disagreement with the material, and for the teacher to encourage or participate in it, and if that disagreement is really terrible consult a mental health professional.
No asking questions that could be relevant to the relevant students. Don’t ask about other people’s life experiences, or you could offend them! Just shut up and don’t ask questions is the entire theme of this ‘pedagogy guide’.
The resource even gives teachers and kids flat out misinformation. Gender identity isn’t in the Human Rights Act. Neither is ‘perceived sex’. They are not protected categories under New Zealand human rights law. ‘Sex’ is a protected category. So is ‘sexual orientation’. But not ‘perceived sex’ (whatever that may mean), or ‘gender identity’.
The InsideOUT materials focus heavily on norms and breaking them down. The pedagogy guide advises teachers to tell students that ‘certain norms’ encourage ‘bullying behaviour’ which ‘limits other students access to a positive education experience’ — and that religious students should ‘realize not everyone holds the same religious belief’ and should be quiet. No one is allowed to express any kind of thought that could ‘cause another student distress’ — even the religious.
Half of the pedagogy guide could be summed up as ‘shut kids up and let other kids pile on if they hurt someone’s feelings or disagree with the course content’. That’s not critical thinking or critical discussion. It’s rote learning a particular opinion that InsideOUT wants the users of the material to hold. I know Catholics who had more open Religious Education classes than this claptrap.
If the pedagogy guide was this horrendous, what’s actually being taught? I’ll go through the episode resources now, which are devoted to each video. There are five episodes in total, along with a separate episode for year seven and eight.
What are the first formers getting? Well, they’re learning about ‘masculine and feminine ways of being’, which I thought were called ‘gender stereotypes’, but I suppose I’ve got to catch up with the new-fangled language the kids are having imposed on them these days.
The first few questions apart from the linguistic contortion that brings us ‘masculine and feminine ways of being’ are relatively milquetoast compared to the following:
In this entire resource for intermediate school students, gays and lesbians aren’t even mentioned. The entire episode focuses on transgender issues. Students are encouraged to spread the message of the video, ‘stand up’ for ‘intersex and transgender friends and whanau’ — or call out anyone who disagrees with the ideology, and then encourages them to have a particular view on a political issue — transgender healthcare, and in this case, supporting it, despite a lack of evidence for its efficacy. It also features an advertisement for Rainbow Youth services — which is a feature of every single ‘episode guide’ and occasionally repeated multiple times in the same ‘episode guide’. Teachers are told to prompt students to suggest inviting RainbowYOUTH to school. It also encourages students to donate their time and money to a private charity organization.
Rainbow Youth charge for those services. It is advertising. Government funded advertising. I smell a rat.
Of particular note are these two sections, which tell students that they shouldn’t say ‘hey guys’ or ‘hey ladies’, in order to reduce ‘homophobic and transphobic bullying’ (note: homosexuality isn’t mentioned at all in this guide, and homophobic and transphobic bullying are conflated throughout the material):
Students are also encouraged, again — to ‘call out’ anyone who disagrees with the materials and make it school policy that people can’t disagree with this particular set of political positions on transgenderism. This is in every single piece of material — ‘call out’ anyone who could possibly disagree with this material.
Oh, and I wasn’t kidding about RainbowYOUTH advertising themselves multiple times in government funded education resources.
Having finished that resource guide, I moved onto Episode 1 of the main course, which is titled ‘Sex, Gender and Sexuality’
This time, InsideOUT doesn’t even give you a few questions to ease into the sheer insanity. Because we start out with this nonsense:
I’ll quote it for you, for emphasis:
“Traditionally, people assume that biological sex determines gender, which in turn determines sexual attraction. However, this is not always the case.”
Now, on the face of it, this is (and it mostly is) completely nonsensical. However, if we use the definition of gender that both Rainbow Youth, and those evil trans-exclusionary feminists use, which is ‘gender is sex stereotypes’, or even what we have here, which is “gender is how we feel in our head and heart”, we get some clarity. To translate this sentence into plain English:
‘Traditionally, people assume that biological sex determines which sex stereotype you subscribe to. ‘
This sex stereotype ‘determines sexual attraction’. Not biological sex. Your sex stereotype.
Now, think about this. We traditionally view homosexual sex as involving people who possess the same set of genitals, correct? InsideOUT is telling kids here that sexuality is actually determined by sex stereotypes. Implicitly, it is telling young homosexual people that they should be open to having heterosexual sex as long as a particular person subscribes to the same ‘sex stereotype’ rather than the same sex. It doesn’t matter if you’re a young lesbian and only interested in vagina, if a man in a dress tells you he is a woman, this way of thinking, a way of thinking that is being taught in schools, says you should be attracted to him, and you are implicitly a bigot that should be called out for saying no, because that might be ‘bullying behaviour’.
I meant it when I said these people were erasing homosexuals. Do you believe me yet?
Let’s keep going. One thing that critics of transgender ideology find difficult is getting them to define terms like ‘women’, or what it means to be a woman. Fortunately for us, InsideOUT have provided us what it means to be a ‘woman’:
What is ‘woman’? ‘Woman’ is a gender, to InsideOUT.
Now we already have a definition of ‘gender’ in this very guide. You can see it in a screenshot above. To InsideOUT, ‘gender’ is what is “in your head and heart”. In other words: feelings.
To InsideOUT, ‘woman’ isn’t a biological reality. It’s a feeling. Who knew you could erase women’s concerns, rights, and biological realities with a not particularly adept piece of linguistic contortionism?
But the material gets even more bone-headed as we go.
To InsideOUT, tomboys are ‘often perceived positively’. What planet are these people on? That’s just simply not true. That definitely explains the years and years of relentless bullying every butch woman I know experienced in school.
But the best part about this entire lesson plan on the ‘sexuality’ episode? The word lesbian isn’t even in the fucking glossary. That’s right: in government-funded sexuality education materials, no one discusses being a lesbian (or defines homosexuality).
Okay, what’s the lesson plan for episode 2, ‘Transgender and Intersex’?
The episode plan recommends this kind of discussion:
It’s not just you. It really does read like a RainbowYOUTH advertorial in parts.
I’m cutting a lot out because these lesson plans are lazy: I’ve seen the same suggested discussion questions repeated verbatim 3–4 times of a variety of different topics, and I’ve only gone through about a third of the material so far. It’s not high-quality learning material. Episode 2 doesn’t even include frames for discussion like the previous episodes.
It’s here, that we get a definition of ‘lesbian’.
To quote for emphasis:
“Lesbian is used to describe sexual or romantic attraction between women. It is a broad term, and those who identify as lesbian may express their identity in lots of different ways.”
Having it in the ‘transgender’ episode but not the sexuality episode? That’s not suspicious at all. Especially when it’s only mentioned once in the episode in the context of a lesbian transitioning into a man. Also, remember: in this material “gender is what is in your head and heart”, and ‘woman’ is a gender. Their definition of lesbian, is quite literally ‘two people who subscribe to the same ‘woman’ sex stereotype being attracted to one another’, which includes heterosexual sex. Its feelings being sexually attracted to other feelings, rather than two people attracted to one another’s biological sex.
That is an interpretation that certainly makes lesbian a ‘broad term’.
I’m just taking things to their logical conclusions here, which I sincerely doubt anyone at RainbowYOUTH or InsideOUT has actually done in the past few years, or they wouldn’t be producing material like this. With Episode 2 being quite thin, we can move onto Episode 3, ‘Diversity and Difference’.
For an example of how lazy these suggested lessons are: I’ve seen the screenshotted question with the same example, in every single teacher’s resource. I’m a layperson — but that does seem really lazy. There isn’t even variety in examples. I understand the ostensible purpose of this material is to ‘challenge norms’, but they don’t even word the question differently each time.
But let us look at the below screenshot, where we are again reminded that sexuality has nothing to do with gender identity at all! Despite the fact in the previous episode, we were told ‘gender’ determines sexual attraction. Surely ‘gender identity’ or what gender someone identifies with has something to do with it? Or did is that a contradiction?
Maybe I should give up trying to understand any of this.
More importantly — why is InsideOUT, and RainbowYOUTH so careful to repeatedly emphasize this point? It’s on the RainbowYOUTH website and it’s here. It’s not like you know, conversion therapy exists, or that ‘autogynephilia’ is a described and known paraphilia. Or even that transition is used as a ‘gay cure’ in Iran. Gender identity is simply completely unrelated. Yes sir!
Want to know how thin these episode guides are? We’re already up to Episode 4: ‘Bullying and Homophobia/Transphobia’, because those two things are interchangeable to InsideOUT.
Oh, every episode has mentioned ‘norms’ over and over again. ‘Breaking down norms’ is the central thrust of this material. Why? Who knows? I mean, ‘religion’ was already described as a ‘norm’: is InsideOUT trying to break down religion?
I wonder why people have firm ideas about who can use the woman’s bathroom? Notice in that context ‘gender’ has replaced sex. Remember: this material has already defined gender as feelings. Bathrooms are supposedly segregated by feelings — and letting people with the ‘wrong’ body for their feelings into whatever toilet they want, regardless of practical considerations, is what InsideOUT are pushing for.
If you thought I was stretching above by pointing out that InsideOUT’s definition of ‘homosexuality’ implicitly includes heterosexuality, take a look at the below screenshot.
It’s not about ‘sex’. Sexuality is explicitly about gender to InsideOUT. Biological sex has nothing to do with sexuality! Sexuality is about one’s attraction to a particular sex stereotype, or feelings.
Let’s look at the screenshot below.
Now here is where we have issues with ‘challenging norms’. This isn’t ‘challenging norms’. It’s establishing new ones: one where transgender ideology is king and boundaries don’t exist around sex-segregated spaces like prisons, linguistic changes, and creating a culture where if someone challenges transgender norms, they are peer pressured into ‘creating positive environments’.
That’s not bold or progressive. It’s actively regressive. This material doesn’t actually challenge sex stereotypes in the least, it just tells young people they can switch between which sex stereotype they subscribe to.
Let’s be real: ‘Peer pressure’ sounds a lot like ‘call-out culture’. I mean it doesn’t take a lot of Googling to find think-pieces and articles describing the toxicity of this culture, like this piece in The Atlantic. Creating that kind of culture isn’t healthy and is counterproductive to the stated aims of InsideOUT, which is ‘reducing bullying’. Reducing bullying should go for those with different opinions, or at least does in a sane world but not in this material. Here, disagreement is a ‘norm’ that needs ‘challenging’.
Worse yet: There isn’t really anything to these lesson plans — it’s all kind of weightless. The conversation is always directed in a particular way, which is agreeing with the material, and teachers are guided to forbid any in-classroom or outside dissent.
This kind of message just gets worse in Episode 5, ‘Respect and Responsibility’
Supposedly, the purpose of this episode is the following:
With a video presented by blue-haired uber activist Aych McArdle, who tells children that starting a ‘safe environment’ starts with them. What kind of discussion are teachers guided to have?
Again: ‘call out’ this behaviour. Given that a lesbian saying no to penis is ‘transphobic’ these days, are students calling that out? And what does ‘discerning when something is safe to call out’ mean?
I’m not kidding — this is the fourth or fifth time these plans have suggested bringing in RainbowYOUTH to talk to the school. I’ll remind you: they charge for that. Check their annual return.
Let us be blunt: this is advertising.
You might not believe us, but there’s very little to go through from this episode: the entire lesson plan is extremely thin and contains little to guide a teacher through the material. It’s also the last episode.
Having gone through all of this: how do you think the Government evaluated the success of the material? If I told you ‘ask the people who wrote it to collect data’, you wouldn’t believe me, would you?
Because if you don’t believe me, you’re very naive!
Inmates Evaluating the Asylum
First, let’s start with the funding of those InsideOUT education resources. We know they were government funded — but how much did this actually cost?
This didn’t require much combing — someone had already requested this information through an OIA from the MSD, and that request is on their site.
Here we have a funding breakdown:
A total of $300,000 was spent on the resources, including nearly $80,000 being spent on ‘evaluation’. $15,000 was spent on ‘launches’, which are likely parties to promote the material to the desired audience. We are also told that Rainbow Youth is ‘working in partnership with local organizations to provide training to ensure safe use of the Inside Out resource’. Does that translate into ‘making sure people who use the resource toe the party line’? I mean, ‘safe use’ of a teaching resource? It’s a teaching resource, not 1080 poison.
The MSD also believe that InsideOUT is supposed to provide sexuality education, despite having no workable definition of ‘homosexuality’ that doesn’t include heterosexual sex, or even including ‘homosexuality’ in it’s glossary:
Now we’ve look at that element, let’s look at the $80,000 evaluation.
I knew you didn’t believe me when I said someone who helped produce the resource assisted in gathering evaluation information but prepare to be shocked.
Because assisting in the evaluation was Aych McArdle, who contributed to the material and was a presenter in the InsideOUT videos. At the time the resources were produced, McArdle was the education director at Rainbow Youth, and is quoted as such in multiple news articles. McArdle left the position in 2016 to work at the Human Rights Commission, As you can see below, she:
‘provided invaluable assistance in supporting and organization collection of some of the data, literature review, and aspects of the final analysis’.
Because surely that couldn’t possibly bias the evaluation in any way, shape, or form. Surely. I’m not a legal beaver — but isn’t her employment, let alone her work on the resources, a conflict of interest? Yet no conflicts of interest are listed at all over her providing ‘invaluable assistance’. I smell a rat. I mean, this is the same thing as the teacher letting you help you mark your own homework.
Another thing to note about this evaluation? It doesn’t use the acronym ‘LGBT’ or even ‘LGBTQI+’ or the ‘LGBTQQQIIIASDFASFASDFNAEIVN’ even. It uses ‘SGSD’, or ‘sex, gender, or sexuality diverse’. The homosexuals come last in this acronym. With yet another linguistic contortion, homosexuals are completely obscured from their own community organizations when those organizations advise the Government on resources and policy. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single mention of ‘homosexuality’ in this entire evaluation. I even tried using the search tool and got a grand total of zero results.
Do you feel erased yet?
Calling it ‘SGSD’ really obliterates the distinction between LGB and trans students.
It also obscures the fact that this is using the statistics in Youth ’12 wrong. I mean, at this point I’m not really surprised, but let’s dish out some facts here: 40% of those ‘trans young people’ in Youth ‘12? Same-sex attracted. As we can see below, that doesn’t matter. We even get the great ‘LGBT couple’ which could include heterosexuals. Homosexuals have no room to define ourselves or discuss our unique experiences in this kind of framework, as you can see below:
There is no differentiation for those students. Using ‘SGSD’ complete obscures that the needs and desires of homosexual and transgender students are very different.
I mean, what we do know is that Youth ’12 stats for transgender and homosexual/bisexual students are almost identical, if not worse for homosexual and bisexual students.
Shall we look at how the resources were designed?
The ‘co-design workshops’ revealed that ‘focusing on gender diversity’ was needed for primary school students.
Yeah. Primary school students need to learn that ‘woman’ is a feeling and not a biological reality. Right.
This is ironic, given that InsideOUT doesn’t even define homosexuality in their resources. I’d say looking that your resources, InsideOUT, visibility of homosexual students is a real problem. Because they’re totally invisible in everything you produce. I mean, you didn’t even use the very common scenario of young gay and lesbian students being unable to take a same-sex partner to the school ball in your ‘anti-bullying’ and ‘positive environment’ creating education resource aimed at high school students.
How did the MSD evaluate the success of the resources? Thankfully, the evaluation includes detailed methodologies. I’m sure that those methodologies were very robust.
So, to evaluate ‘Educator Confidence and Perceptions of the resources’ They talked to 166 ‘educators’ who went to Rainbow Youth events. Those educators are teachers AND youth workers. And of course, asking ‘educators’ who went to RY youth events is a valid sample. No bias!
Of course, everyone is going to be positive if they turn up to your events! I would think people with common sense may have issues with the education resource, but clearly people with common sense don’t go to Rainbow Youth events or otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Of course, the results are clear: educators are ‘very positive’ about these resources! Like they’d be anything else.
How did they get student opinions? By going to schools that had ‘an external SGSD support organization’ delivering four consecutive workshops to Year Nines at a single secondary school.
(I’ll bet you $10 that this ‘external organization’ was RainbowYouth)
Everything is perfect! Eighty-nine percent of students loved the material.
Even better is how they got ‘educator perceptions of the resources’. They interviewed 11 teachers, a student teacher, four community health workers, and ‘two educators from two different rainbow support organizations’. I can’t see any room for bias, at all? Even with how incredibly small the ‘rainbow support organization’ list is.
What about ‘young people’s perceptions of the resources’? That was evaluated too. The study to evaluate it used fifty-five students in focus groups, who had ‘recently used the resources’ at school. So few schools were used in the study they had to anonymize their locations to protect the identities of the students.
Sounds viable.
So after this quick tour through methodological wonderland, what did the evaluators, which included a creator of the resources, find? That it’s all wonderful, flawless, and in fact we need to produce more resources and provide professional development! I wonder who would be providing that professional development? It couldn’t possibly be RainbowYOUTH, could it?
Want some highlights from the findings? Actually, I don’t care, you know I’m going to do that anyway.
More InsideOUT! More!
Oh, but even in the cherrypicked samples, some felt that the year 7&8 resources were inappropriate, so let’s give it to primary schoolers?
“What are you doing?”
“Managing my range of oppressions, you?”
Apparently, educators loved that the pedagogy guide encouraged kids to shut up if they had a dissenting opinion: even making them sign a contract!
‘Our resources are very repetitive, but they’re not garbage, we’re just REALLY engaging with students’
Fun sentence: “Assumptions that a particular voice would be matched with a particular body and gender”
End norms! Critical thinking (unless you critical think wrong, then you are a TERF)
Are we teaching kids about sexual health (Neat fact: lesbians have the fastest rising rate of STD contraction), or about disrupting oppressions? Which?
But you asked people who liked your resources!
Did they engage with anyone who might be critical at all?
ANYONE?
Nope.
That evaluation was back-patting garbage.
Oh, and they were evaluating money spent by the MSD, and Auckland University. Both are tax-payer funded. The evaluation was hosted on the Oranga Tamariki website.
Government money — taxpayer money — was spent on this.
And taxpayer money is being spent on trying to get laser hair removal for men with gender feelings.
And throughout the entire process…. gays and lesbians are erased from resources that should be helping them.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars went into this homosexual-erasing, back-patting garbage.
But what’s really fascinating is the Statement of Service Performance that InsideOUT gave the Government in 2017.
Or Rainbow Youth’s
A Statement Of Service Performance is required of charities in New Zealand to be filed every year. It is intended to give performance indicators to the Charities Commission on what a charity is actually doing.
As we can see, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars donated by banks, the Lotteries Commission, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funding, very few people actually use the services of Rainbow Youth and InsideOUT. There were only 11,000 hits on their ‘I’m Local’ website that’s supposed to find ‘queer and gender diverse youth’ community support groups. They actually printed less resources than last year. InsideOUT registered 21 schools to its ‘support network’ in 2016. There are 2,530 schools in New Zealand. Despite National Co-ordinator Tabby Besly being met by the Queen, her organization is propped up by Government money and has no organic demand for its services.
RainbowYOUTH does count it’s instances of ‘positive media presence’. After all, if you were only looking through the lens of the media, RainbowYOUTH does seem like a big organization. But figures like this demonstrate it’s a paper organization at best — and incredibly top heavy. They had an average of 9.8 people attending each support group, and only 1,731 total attendance over the year. The Blues have better attendance that Rainbow Youth. It’s attendance and number of ‘one on one support cases’ are actually declining.
While funded with hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Government to produce resources and support services, very few people actually use those services. Yet RainbowYOUTH is consulted by every media organization every time an issue involving lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues comes up in New Zealand. But they don’t actually speak for the community: because despite their charity status, and despite that Government money, yet they are unable to actually engage with LGBT young people.
So why is the Government giving these organizations money, when they don’t actually represent young gay and lesbian people, at all?
That’s a good question. Hopefully we can get an answer one day. Because right now, the whole thing is beginning to look very fishy.
What about that $110,000 that was spent on ‘You, Me, Us’ in 2017? You, Me, Us was a refresh of a programme originally produced in 2010. Despite the fact that very few people are actually engaging with Rainbow Youth from the community, it was still contracted to refresh ‘You, Me, Us’ which is yet another ‘anti-bulling resource’ with a focus on ‘queer and trans domestic violence’.
What does it look like? I decided to go through their website.
There is no mention of ‘gay and lesbian’ anywhere on this website, despite the fact that that segment of the community has high DV rates.
Let’s Segway into a wee bit of demolishing, shall we? This is their definition of queer: literally meaningless. It’s a ‘reclaimed word that represents sexuality and gender diversity’ — so transgender people get mentioned and included in all three sections. Even though it’s ‘appreciated that it is not the preferred term for everybody’ — Rainbow Youth keep using it (and reusing their useful word page definitions, which have been repeated verbatim across all of the resources they produce). There is no mention of ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ outside this definition of ‘queer’. Those distinct identities are erased by inclusion into a word with such a broad definition it may as well be meaningless.
Wait, same-sex relationships are different from queer? Or are you trying to It include the heterosexuals again, Rainbow Youth? Of course you are. It seems to be like, your job or something! This is the problem — ‘queer’ includes heterosexuals. This whole resource which is represented as including gays and lesbians, simply erases them as a distinct class of people. Homosexuals don’t get even get an inch of space to be treated as a distinct group. At this point it’s not a mistake — it is clear that RainbowYOUTH and InsideOUT don’t actually give a shit about gays and lesbians, at best, and at worst, are actively homophobic.
We even get handy tips from ‘Duncan’ in this resource. Who is Duncan? After all, if I scroll down the page, I see the link to a company called ‘Duncan Digital’ that designed the You, Me Us, portal. Maybe he’s related to that. Let’s Google him.
Duncan Matthews is the former general manager of Rainbow Youth. He left in October 2017 to take up a full-time position with the Waitemata District Health Board. This board covers 576,000 people in West and North Auckland. The position? Project manager for the transgender health programme. Matthews had already been working for the Waitemata District Health Board in a part-time role since January 2017. The conflict of interest between a pro-transgender charity director running a ‘transgender health project’ for a district health board didn’t occur to the district health board. He did however, appear in an article promoting its fundraising gala and either shortly before or after his January 2017 appointment, talking about ‘gender policing’ sex-segregated toilets. However, he does seem aware of the fact he might appear to have a conflict of interest, and the media appearances drop off precipitously for him after his January 2017 appointment, and there are few media comments by Rainbow Youth until the appointment of a new executive director. It smells.
But it does show a very clear conflict of interest — work for the DHB should be neutral and evidence based. Because it is very apparent that the project that Matthews managed was driven by his pro-transgender ideology rather than evidence-based medicine, to the point that DHB materials repeat verbatim RainbowYOUTH material.
Okay, what’s with this digression? Duncan Matthews is the ex-GM of Rainbow Youth. He has gone onto to give biased information to the health system and affecting the health decisions of gay children.
He’s made quite the career out of it.
Neat facts about me: I am friends with some little birdies.
These little birdies tell me things, like this Gay Express blind item in their April 2015 issue:
How do I know that’s about Duncan Matthews? Because my little birdies told me that RainbowYOUTH tried taking Express to the Press Council over it, saying it was targeting him, but couldn’t because that item doesn’t name any one or any organization. Not suspicious at all. My little birdie also told me that during their interactions with the organization, they noticed numerous butch women turning up to Rainbow Youth for services for lesbians and walking out six months later identifying as transgender.
DALLIANCES WITH DHBs
So what kind of project did Matthews manage at the DHB concerning ‘transgender healthcare’? What does ‘trans healthcare look like at the DHB with his influence.
I started with the Auckland District Health Boards’s page on it here.
Now the Auckland Region has transgender health services. ‘Hauora Tahine’. This is their description from their webpage:
I feel like the term ‘gender identity’ is so broad as to be completely meaningless. But even so, Hauora Tahine will work with me to ‘establish your transition related health goals’. I can even access specialist services like, uh, plastic surgery and voice training.
Wait a minute. Stop. ‘Puberty blockers’? Uh oh.
Yes, the Auckland district health boards are now offering transition to children. Gender non-conforming children that are overwhelmingly more likely to grow up gay than trans. There is plenty of evidence for this. Like this article ‘Gender Identity Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence’ which concludes:
“The types of modulating influences that are known from the fields of developmental psychology and family dynamics have therapeutic implications for GID. As children with GID only rarely go on to have permanent transsexualism, irreversible physical interventions are clearly not indicated until after the individual’s psychosexual development is complete. The identity-creating experiences of this phase of development should not be restricted by the use of LHRH analogues that prevent puberty.”
The article also contains this gem:
“Multiple longitudinal studies provide evidence that gender-atypical behavior in childhood often leads to a homosexual orientation in adulthood, but only in 2.5% to 20% of cases to a persistent gender identity disorder (3, 6, 22). Even among children who manifest a major degree of discomfort with their own sex, including an aversion to their own genitalia (GID in the strict sense), only a minority go on to an irreversible development of transsexualism (6). Irreversibility of the manifestations, however, is considered to be an indispensable requirement before the diagnosis of transsexualism can be made, or any body-altering treatments initiated. In England and Canada, in accordance with this view, hormonal treatment or surgery is not recommended until the patient’s somatic and psychosexual development is complete.
In fact, the evidence is fairly overwhelming that gender dysphoric children mostly deist and grow up to be healthy gay and lesbian adults. Here’s another article on the topic ‘Ethical Issues Raised by the Treatment of Gender‐Variant Prepubescent Children’
“In contrast to the relative lack of controversy about treating adolescents and adults, there is no expert clinical consensus regarding the treatment of prepubescent children who meet diagnostic criteria for what was referred to in both DSM‐IV‐TR and ICD‐10 as gender identity disorder in children and now in DSM‐5 as gender dysphoria. One reason for the differing attitudes has to do with the pervasive nature of gender dysphoria in older adolescents and adults: it rarely desists, and so the treatment of choice is gender or sex reassignment. On the subject of treating children, however, as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health notes in their latest Standards of Care, gender dysphoria in childhood does not inevitably continue into adulthood, and only 6 to 23 percent of boys and 12 to 27 percent of girls treated in gender clinics showed persistence of their gender dysphoria into adulthood. Further, most of the boys’ gender dysphoria desisted, and in adulthood, they identified as gay rather than as transgender.’
Why are Auckland District Health Boards transitioning children, a group of whom often grow up to have no gender dysphoria and often into homosexual adults?
Instead, transition is now being pushing, including puberty blockers, which will lead to sterilization.
Instead, the DHB’s are giving out misinformation aplenty. Like this lie. Not even the researchers cheerleading this stuff know what the long-term effects are. This is a big fat lie. The Health Board is lying to children. The DHB’s own consent letter, which I will discuss below acknowledges they don’t know if use of puberty blockers will lead to long term osteoporosis.
Want proof? Here is the consent form for ‘blocking female hormones’ for children. It contradicts itself and the information above — supposedly blockers are reversible, but three paragraphs down, the letter admits that it has no idea of the effects of Lupron (the brand name for the generic Lucrin) on the chances of osteoporosis. Those chances were the subject of an investigation in American medical newspaper Kaiser Health News, which reported numerous cases of adult women who had taken the drug to prevent precocious puberty subsequently having serious bone problems. The article reports over 10,000 adverse event reports were filed with the Federal Drug Administration in America, describing side effects such as brittle bones and faulty joints.
Oh, and I’ll quote this for emphasis.
“Being on blockers may lower your desire to have sex. It may cause your vagina to become drier. This increases the risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV if you are having any sexual contact with this part of the body. Condoms provide good protection against STIs and lubricant helps to prevent any discomfort”
Do you know the intended target of these letters? Pubescent children. That’s why they’re called ‘puberty blockers’. Most pubescent children are under the age of consent.
The Auckland DHBs are advising under sixteens to use lube if sex hurts. They’re under the age of consent — they shouldn’t be having sex.
But regardless of the risk of needing a hip replacement in your twenties from using these drugs, they can help children avoid the ‘unwanted physical changes’ of puberty and stop the ‘anxiety and depression’ that the distress of puberty may cause. And that is why children who would mostly turn out gay and bisexual need to take off-label chemotherapy drugs to stop puberty. Could we see cases like in the US, with Christian parents thanking the Lord that their son is really a girl, and not gay:
“Family members were flat-out asking me if this kid was gay. It made me nervous, and I was constantly worried about what people would think of me, of us and of my parenting. While family was questioning whether Kai was gay, a Christian friend of mine, who is also a child psychologist, asked me: “Have you noticed Kai’s feminine behavior?” It was such a gentle question, as opposed to the harsh accusations of others. I said, “I’ve noticed, but I figure she’ll just grow out of it.” I can laugh at that now. It’s so clear, in retrospect, that this was not a passing phase. But when my friend asked me that, I still wasn’t ready to accept it. As I continued to watch my child developing, my friend started pointing out red flags that there was something very real going on. She told me that Kai being transgender may be something I needed to consider”
Totally no chance of this being homophobia.
While we’re here, let’s look at the rest of the consent forms; they are just as bad as the above.
Maybe we’ll look at our first visit too:
A holistic, psychosocial consultation… what does this even mean?
This effectively the DHBs apologizing if it takes more than one appointment to set up a referral with hormone treatments. The DHB says people are their own experts on their ‘gender identity’ which translate into ‘no gatekeeping’ for this service.
Good God — ‘having mental health problems doesn’t stop you getting started’. A mental health problem could be causing your gender dysphoria — the DHB will prescribe you hormones and transition anyway.
The DHBs also offer an informative pamphlet on ‘fertility preservation information for those starting oestrogen’.
This advises the male-to-female patient that hormones will sterilize them. This includes children who have gone on puberty blockers.
And of course, trans women cannot carry babies, so you’ll need a ‘person’s uterus’. Nice dehumanization of women there, DHBs.
And children who are given puberty blockers don’t produce sperm, so are infertile. And even if some sperm was recoverable, the DHBs isn’t funding that (it’s too focused trying to get laser hair surgery funded).
This is from the consent form aspiring young trans men sign before they are prescribed transition:
Even though you’re a ‘trans man’, one still has to use contraception to stop yourself getting pregnant, if you’re having ‘sexual contact that puts you at risk of pregnancy’.
And repeats the advice to use lube. At least we’re not telling minors to use lube any more.
And this wonderful admission that no one really knows if it works for your mental health. It might make you angry! Note the inherent gender stereotypes associated with the hormones here.
Of course, the real meat is in the paragraph titled ‘potential risks of testosterone’.
The form admits that taking these hormones will increase your risks of things that can kill you, like liver problems, or heart attacks, or strokes.
But it’s worth it for ‘quality of life’.
If you want to destransition, too, you must come to the DHB, which has already told you that risking heart attacks is worth it to validate your gender identity. I wouldn’t put it past the DHB to try and convince people out of detransition.
The form for aspiring trans women really isn’t any better.
The consent form doesn’t know if oestrogen will increase the risk of breast cancer, but brushes that concern off.
Oh yes, and you’re infertile after taking this stuff, too.
The DHB will fix your penis if it’s not up to standards for ‘sexual pleasure’ while you’re trying to transition into becoming a woman. But I thought women didn’t have penises?
Oh, and here is some sexism — these hormones make someone ‘more emotional’. Right, because that’s not a gender stereotype in the least.
The potential risks of taking estrogen aren’t that great:
‘The full medical effects and safety of taking hormones are not fully known’. But they can give you blood clots, pulmonary embolisms, strokes, and heart attacks, along with the possibility of ‘benign pituitary tumors’.
I don’t think that’s safe at all.
That sounds safe and medically proven! Not.
Here’s a good question: Who can refer young people to Haora Tahine?
School counselors can refer young people for transition related treatment. Or the school nurse. Or a GP. I wonder if a parent’s permission is required before young people go on unnecessary, life-changing medication that could sterilize them. Probably not.
And don’t forget to plug RainbowYOUTH!
The DHB also wants more services to be available including providing ‘gender-affirming care’ that includes Government-funded laser hair surgery for trans women. Seriously. Don’t believe me? I have receipts! This is from the 2016 proposal on the services.
Want more receipts?! Here’s the 2017 Northern Region Transgender Health Work Plan on the issue.
Nurses are underpaid, and Middlemore is full of asbestos, but some men with gender dysphoria need better access to laser hair removal. That this is even being considered for DHB funding is an absolute scandal.
This is a contentious issue — have the DHBs talked to doctors who may not be keen on it? No. They hired the executive director of a pro-transgender charity to run their transgender health project. The conflict of interest was obvious. They clearly intended a particular direction for this project. A direction that is to the detriment of gay and lesbian people.
Miscounting Ourselves
Other health initiatives include the Counting Ourselves survey.
Looks open and left-wing and inclusionary, and accepting. Sigh.
Look at all these groups thinking they’re doing good! On an extremely twee website! SAVE ME
Survey objectives
Oh, so the included definition is so broad as to be meaningless and make the data useless
lol
Cookies aren’t anonymous.
Also, if I refresh my cache, or use an incognito window, I can fill out this survey multiple times. I tested this with an incognito window and was able to open numerous instances of the survey that let me complete it multiple times.
Now, Counting Ourselves acknowledges this flaw, and has a foolproof solution:
“We will collect your IP address, which is a unique number based on your internet connection. It does not identify you or your physical address. We will only use IP addresses to double check for multiple responses from the same person, and then we will delete all IP addresses”.
That’s not a foolproof solution — because IP Addresses not static. Most major ISPs in New Zealand do not use static IP addresses. For example Spark do not include Static IP’s on their broadband plans by default — the majority of their customers have dynamic IP addresses. To make new entries in the survey that couldn’t be detected would simply require someone to reset their router. It would be extremely easy, from a technical point of view, to manipulate the survey data, and make it useless. That’s not a good look. Similar instances of transgender surveys having flaws like this that bring into question their whole methodology and validity is the American National Transgender Survey, which had similar flaws where multiple people could take the survey over and over again. That hasn’t stopped that study being recited like it is gospel. With these kinds of flaws, it brings into question what these surveys actually aim to achieve.
The Curious Case Of The Hijacking Of Auckland Pride
Nowhere is hijacking more evident than at Auckland Pride. It primarily involves anti-law enforcement group People Against Prisoners Aotearoa, (PAPA), formerly known as No Pride In Prisons (NPIP).
In 2015, three protesters invaded the parade route to protest the New Zealand prison system, specifically the way trans women were treated in prisons and the presence of Police and Corrections in the Parade. They were dragged away from the route and an oncoming police motorcycle by security staff, with one of the protesters, trans woman Emmy Rakete, having their arm broken in the scuffle. The protest was criticized by onlookers, who shouted that the protest was ‘ruining the parade’. The protest at the parade occurred a day after the ANZ Bank rainbow-coloured ATMs called ‘GayTMs’ were vandalized. A group called ‘Queers Against Injustice’ widely believed to be the same group as ‘No Pride In Prisons’ took credit for the vandalism, claiming they were fighting ‘pinkwashing’, and fighting ‘homonormativity’ of the ‘queer subject’.
By renaming their ATM a GAYTM, ANZ reproduces the frequent sidelining of queer subjects who fall outside of the ‘gay’ sexual identification, and as a result are further marginalised by the politics of ‘tolerance’ practiced by institutions such as ANZ.
Secondly, we sought to draw attention to the way ANZ is using GAYTMs to distract attention from the treatment of their workers. The recent strikes by ANZ workers occurred in response to ANZ’s attempts to implement demands for ‘flexibility’, in the form of irregular rostering and frequently shifting labour demands. These proposed reforms attack workers’ rights to control their own time outside of their normal work hours, and constitute an assault on precious family time, time in the community, on religious or personal lifestyle choices, and the dignity of autonomy.
We understand that the political and theoretical discourse that foregrounds the intersectional basis of queer subjectivity, attending to the ways race, class and gender cooperate with and exacerbate queer oppression, is often overlooked in favour of a positive outlook. This outlook attempts to portray queer identity as purely fun, consumptive and nationalistic, and in doing so bars critique from within.
We can understand the media’s interpretation of this as a homophobic act, because being an angry queer subject who disagrees with the co-opting of our identity is irregular in the face of Pride’s projected homonormative and aforementioned presentation of the queer figure.”
Where did this group come from? Levi Joule, former Queer Rights Officer at the Auckland University Students Association wrote a controversial article in Express that discussed the groups emergence from Auckland University student politics. Joule states the group was formerly known as ‘Petty and Vindictive’ a ‘fringe collective responsible for the pride protests and paint splattering of Auckland’s GayTMs and police stations’.
Joule claims the group emerged from the inaugural university pride week in an attempt to ‘radicalize it’
“Petty and Vindictive’ originated, as a group set up to ‘radicalise’ the University of Auckland’s inaugural pride week held last year. Subsequently some members went on to form the ‘No Pride in Prisons’, the group that invaded this year’s Pride Parade and “Queers Against Injustice” who claimed responsibility for the GayTM and police station vandalism.”
Another person, Tessa Naden, then the University Queer Rights Officer, was quoted as saying the following, though my birdies tell me she later denied the quote on social media:
“University of Auckland Queer Rights Officer Tessa Naden who is responsible for Queerspace says, “this group have caused considerable emotional distress for a lot of people involved with rainbow activism.”
“They do nothing but cause trouble for organizations whom they’ve scarcely engaged with, perform melodramatic psychoanalysis of the various bigotries of their members, and then devote themselves to offensively flailing at anybody,” as highlighted by their recent protests.”
Joule even quotes a former member of the group:
“ Petty and Vindictive are quick to label anybody with a dissenting view to theirs as anti-trans. A former member of Petty and Vindictive (who spoke to express on the condition of anonymity) said the group did not tolerate dissent. She was booted from the group because of a differing view on the GayTM vandalism. She tells us, “after I expressed my disagreement with the vandalism of the GayTMs, they immediately claimed I was racist and transphobic. They had no evidence of me being either of those things besides me openly disagreeing with one person that is trans and not white, as well as a cis white girl over [attacking] a GayTM.”
No Pride In Prisons evolved quickly from the initial protest, again hijacking the Auckland Pride Parade in 2016 with a much larger protest. The parade was delayed over an hour as police dealt with a sit-in. Gathering on Karangahape Road before the protest, the protesters chanted ‘Police are violent, we won’t be silent’.
Lexie Matheson, the then former Pride board member and future Pride board chair, was quoted in the Herald on the protest:
“Lexie Matheson, an AUT lecturer in events management is an activist for transgender prison rights, is at the scene of the protest on K Rd.
She said the ‘No Pride in Prisons’ rally had begun as an hour of speeches and between 400 and 500 people were moving along K Rd towards Ponsonby Rd peacefully.
“Traffic is patient and largely supportive. The cops have arrived." She said the march was non-confrontational and protesters aimed to raise awareness of the mistreatment of trans women in men’s prisons and the Pride Parade’s allowing cops and Corrections to march in uniform.
She said it was unlikely that marchers and the Pride Parade would meet.”
Matheson estimated 400–500 people at the protest — the police estimate of the number was around 50. Rakete, the protestor who had their arm broken at the protest, is also quoted in the Herald.
“Spokeswoman for the protest group No Pride in Prisons, Emilie Rakete, said they were there to protest the involvement of Police and Corrections, which she said were “primarily racist, violent institutions”.
She said her group had been in contact with two trans women in the past four months who had been raped while in custody.
Rakete said this was a direct result of policies introduced by Judith Collins, namely double-bunking and over crowding.” When asked about Collins’ appearance at the Parade today, she said: “Yeah, she’s not our f*****g friend. She’s violent — these are violent institutions.”
“This is obviously going to be a really divisive issue because some people are happy with how things are at the moment. Some of us recognise that these institutions are extremely violent.
“So some people were less than happy to see us, and some people were really happy to see us.”
Things changed in 2017. There was no protest, and Corrections did not march in the Parade.
“Corrections staff were able to march in uniform for the annual Auckland Pride Parade last year and in 2015.
However, the Auckland Pride Festival Board said they had failed to live up to promises made about improving the support for prisoners who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, queer, and particularly those who are transgender.
Correction’s involvement with the parade has been marred in the last two years with protesters using it as a platform to challenge its treatment of LGBTQI prisoners.
Last year staff were allowed to march in uniform after the event’s Board and Corrections agreed to come up with ways to support transgender prisoners through 2016.
Why did this occur? How was a Government department no longer allowed to march in a Council-funded Pride Parade?
“Corrections staff were able to march in uniform for the annual Auckland Pride Parade last year and in 2015.
However, the Auckland Pride Festival Board said they had failed to live up to promises made about improving the support for prisoners who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, queer, and particularly those who are transgender.
Correction’s involvement with the parade has been marred in the last two years with protesters using it as a platform to challenge its treatment of LGBTQI prisoners.
Last year staff were allowed to march in uniform after the event’s Board and Corrections agreed to come up with ways to support transgender prisoners through 2016.
Festival Board chair Kirsten Sibbit said they had not seen that happen.
“For us it was important to see that some of those policies they talked about last year had been implemented and that those changes were being seen at the coal face in prisons,” she said.
“The information that they gave us didn’t convince us that has been the case and that the commitments they made last year have been followed through.”
Corrections was the only organisation to be refused participation, with around 55 groups — including police — set to parade on 25 February.”
“Staff would still be able to attend, but not in uniform, and had been offered the opportunity to march with other groups.
Okay, but where did these demands come from? We can see from news reports that the protesters weren’t well received.
Wait, there’s more to this news article. Maybe that will have the answer?
It was a move welcomed by activist group No Pride in Prisons, which protested against Corrections and the police being allowed to participate in the parade last year and in 2015.
Spokesperson Emilie Rakete said it was a symbolic victory but it needed to bring about actual change.
“It’s taken us two years of very public, very bitter, drawn out critique of the Department of Corrections and they still haven’t produced the transgender prisoner safety plan which they promised a year ago,” Ms Rakete said.
“If two years of desperately poor PR for Corrections is not enough to get them to implement the barest measures to protect trans prisoners’ safety and basic human rights nothing will do it. “
Oh, Pride capitulated. Or did it?
I mean, Corrections did what NPIP/PAPA wanted.
Corrections said it was disappointed with the decision.
About 15 staff marched last year after many were put off by protesters and the department had been hoping for a bigger representation this year, it said.
Acting Northern Region Commissioner Alastair Riach said over the past year the department had done “a lot” towards improving its policy around transgender prisoners and members of the rainbow community.
He said Corrections had been developing a plan along international best practice that would include developing a safety management plan for each trans prisoner; allowing trans prisoners to have personal items required to maintain their gender appearance; housing trans prisoners in single cells unless they consent to being placed in shared cells with other trans prisoners of the same biological sex.”
“Trans prisoners would also be searched in accordance with their gender identity — for example, a transwoman would be searched by female staff.
Some of those changes were already underway, Mr Riach said.
However, the changes were yet to go into official operating manuals and staff had not been trained.
“Our next step is to roll this out with our staff but we’ve got over 3000 staff in prisons — it’s quite an undertaking [and] we want to do it well.”
He believed Pride Parade organisers were aware of that “but their view was that we’ve taken too long”.
“I think running a big organisation like that, we’re actually running at a good pace,” he said.
At any one time, 12 to 20 prisoners out of the 10,000-strong prison population identified as transgender, Mr Riach said.
“Whilst they talk about training all of our staff, for some of them it’s a rare event so that’s why we just need to be careful to ensure our training is correct.””
What’s going on?
How did an organization of ‘neo-liberal gaystreamers’ capitulate to a ragtag band of protesters? That’s a good question.
Let me attempt to answer it.
Do you remember Lexie Matheson from the above news article? If not, let’s continue anyway. Matheson, an AUT lecturer on ‘event management’, and an out trans woman who identifies as a ‘lesbian’, is a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to theatre and ‘LGBTQI+ people’. Matheson has been on the Pride Board twice, resigning from the board initially in 2014 after disputes with other board members.
“Matheson has said that she resigned from the board because they had “grown apart, like a marriage really.”
“I just feel at odds with the way the board is going. I just feel like it is becoming too corporate.”
Matheson also says she feels that the board is no longer transparent and accountable in relation to the way appointments are made and the way the community is communicated to. “If you lose track in how you talk to your community and stakeholders, than there are serious issues.”
She expresses concerns around lack 0f transparency in board appointments as well. “The suggestion I made, which was that we restructure and go back to square one. That we deconstruct the three positions, end the contracts and start again.” That idea was rejected by the board, which in large part resulted in Matheson’s resignation.”
The divorce from the Pride Board didn’t take though, and Matheson was back in the board by August 2016, which met with criticism from former board member Phylesha Brown-Acton in (now sadly defunct) news website GayNZ in an article by Sarah Murphy (archive linked):
Advocate and community leader Phylesha Brown-Acton says Lexie Matheson, who has recently been re-appointed to the Auckland Pride Festival Board, has previously publicly “verbally attacked and slammed” members of the Board, including herself, with “racist, inappropriate and unforgiving statements” and that the community should be questioning the process of her re-appointment.”
Wait? What are these ‘racist, inappropriate and unforgiving statements’?
At the time she stated that she had been at odds with Board members regarding the direction and the decision it made not to speak out on important matters. “I have no ill-feelings about her”, says Phylesha, “I barely know the person, my issue is the process with her re-appointment considering she has verbally attacked and slammed many voluntary members of PRIDE publicly for reasons other than trying to place blame and speak untruthfully of others.” She is referring to comments Lexie made on Facebook during the time Phylesha was serving on the Auckland Pride Board.
The comments — which a member of the pubic took a screen shot of and sent to her at the time — were made publicly on Facebook and Lexie was in conversation with people Phylesha says she is not connected with. She believes the comments were made in reference to her as she was serving on the Board at the time they were made. The comments, that the screenshots show are written by Lexie, read “Me too, [name] Gutless. And the transwoman of colour on the board? What’s her agenda? Oh, that’s right. She’ll do whatever gets her the best deal.” “Yes, [name], my community has been cast adrift and the idea that there’s a transwoman on that board makes me want to vomit!”
Phylesha took issue with this because she doesn’t identify as a ‘trans woman’.
In regards to these comments, Phylesha says “The screenshots speak for themselves, they were obviously written when I was a APFI board member of recent, regardless whose Facebook page and protecting the anonymity of the persons, the context is they are public statements made by Lexie about me via social media, placing the colour of my skin into question as something inadequate, questioning my agenda which is obviously to represent Pasifika LGBTQI peoples and their families, attributing the colour of my skin as something that bastardises me to be a beggar that would take anything I can get the best deal for! The second screenshot sent to Phylesha during her time on the Auckland Pride Board. “And that her other statement clearly speaks for itself, She is a trans woman, that thinks I as a trans woman makes her want to vomit, ignorantly labelling me as a trans woman when I am firstly an indigenous person to Niue Island and the term I identify with is “Fakafifine”, so please stop forcing westernised labels on me, my body and being is not for you to further colonise and abuse!”
Brown-Acton also raises a valid point: Matheson does have a conflict of interest.
“APFI has over time been overwhelmed and bombarded with community politics and having to deal with that as a priority over the more important internal matters,” she says. She says she believes the community should be asking what the process of Lexie’s re-appointment has been. “A 360 peer evaluation process should have applied for her application and taking into consideration her previous unprofessional behaviour of publicly slamming others and now defaming a previous APFI board member via social media and taken into consideration her behaviour that misleads community, which are integrity and professional concerns for anyone in a governance role. Governance roles should never support the personal or ego agendas of anyone.” Lexie Matheson She says Lexie’s appointment to the Pride Board also raises the question as to whether this creates a conflict of interest as she is also a member of the Auckland Council Rainbow Advisory panel who fund, through ATEED, the festival.
“Firstly, her role on Pride is voluntary, there is a pecuniary conflict of interest here as her role on the Auckland City Council Rainbow Panel is a paid position by rate payers and Pride receives its core funding from ATEED, an Auckland City Council organisation. “Secondly, has she resigned from her role as an advisor to the Auckland Council Rainbow Panel? “It still poses the question of “power and influence” she has at decision making levels, considering the racist, inappropriate and unforgiving statements Lexie has made, highlighting also the purpose of the Auckland City Council Rainbow Communities Advisory Panel is to; Provide strategic advice to Auckland Council on issues of significance to Auckland’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, Intersex and Takataapui or Rainbow communities and to help the council engage effectively with these communities, this is about the safety of our Rainbow community and I do not feel safe having someone at the helm in decision making who holds such hatred towards another.
Indeed, at the time Matheson was chair of an organization that receives Council funding, they were also on the Rainbow Communities Panel of the Council — surely a conflict of interest? Matheson doesn’t seem to have cared, voting on Pride business as a Advisory Panel at least once, as we can see in the minutes of the panels July 2017 meeting
“2 Declaration of Interest
Members are reminded of the need to be vigilant to stand aside from decision making when a conflict arises between their role as a member and any private or other external interest they might have.
There were no declarations of interest.”
Those are some fairly reasonable conflict of interest guidelinees. Let us look at item number eleven:
“11 Consideration of Extraordinary Items
Pursuant to Standing Order 2.4.6, the Rainbow Communities Advisory Panel agreed to discuss its ability to formally support the Auckland Pride Festival Board.
Lexie Matheson, panel member and Auckland Pride Festival Board member, led the discussion. The following points from the discussion were noted:
· The support sought is non-monetary and could be in the form of a letter of support for the board and its activities.
· The panel agreed that any formal support for the board should come from the Liaison Councillor with the panel’s endorsement.”
I would think that’s a clear conflict of interest no? Yet it was undeclared. Matheson was paid to attend these meetings and promoted the business of an organization they were a board member of, on a Council Advisory Panel. That’s dodgy at best.
Despite the accusations of racism and not declaring conflicts of interest while conducting Council business, Matheson ploughed on as Chair. At the 2018 Festival, Matheson criticized the police for creating a rainbow-themed police car for the Pride Festival, saying:
““I’m queer 52 weeks of the year, their car is queer for only two weeks of the year, they will take the rainbow off, but I can’t,” Matheson said.”
The police should put its resources to better use like making a non-public donation to an organisation like Rainbow Youth, extend its school diversity programmes or contribute to the Pride Parade itself, she said.”
Even Emmy Rakete was consulted on the evil rainbow police car:
“People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA) spokeswoman Emmy Rakete said the car was nothing more than a feeble PR exercise in an attempt to make the police look more progressive it was.
“There is nothing easier than just chucking a coat of paint over something without addressing any of the fundamental problems with it,” Rakete said.
In 2016 and 2015 PAPA, formerly No Pride in Prisons, staged a blockade of the Pride Parade over the Department of Corrections and police’s involvement in the event.
PAPA had no plans to boycott the parade this year, she said.”
During their time as Chair of the Pride Board, Matheson was also subject of a glowing profile on the Auckland Pride website as a ‘change-maker’, which was included in the Pride Programme for 2017. Notably, Matheson says this:
“What achievement are you most proud of?
The work done by the Rainbow Communities Advisory Panel, Auckland Pride returning to its activist roots, having my work (and that of others) acknowledged when I was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.”
Activist roots, eh? Indeed, Matheson was involved with the No Pride In Prisons activist group. Matheson identified themselves as a No Pride In Prisons activist to the Herald in an interview. Oh, that’s behind the capitulation.
“11. You’re an activist with the group No Pride in Prisons. What’s that about?
We protested at last year’s Pride parade because they allowed gay Corrections Department staff to march in uniform. That was like a slap in the face for the trans community who are still routinely mistreated by the prison system. We’ve had instances of rape just last year after trans women were put in shared bunkrooms in male prisons. I’ve been beaten up by cops and put in a male prison cell full of bikers with one toilet in the corner.”
This is the second time ‘double-bunking of trans prisoners’ has been brought up by a No Pride in Prisons activist. While No Pride In Prisons insisted this was happening, a October 2016 Official Information Act Request that Rakete made on the website FYI.org , about double-bunking to Corrections revealed a comparatively mild truth. — transgender prisoners could only double bunk with each other, and there were 2 double-bunked transgender prisoners at the time Rakete was complaining. Despite Rakete’s grandstanding protest, I am guessing they felt like a deflated balloon when Corrections told them this:
“Transgender prisoners may continue to be considered for placement in a shared cell with another transgender prisoner (of the same identified gender transition), subject to their consent and in accordance with SACRA policy.”
Not so evil, after all.
Who is Emmy Rakete is another good question? The son of brown Wiggle Robert Rakete, Rakete was born Jackson Rakete and attended the prestigious and expensive Auckland high school ACG Senior College, where fees run into the tens of thousands of dollars, before attending the University of Auckland. Rakete also identifies as a ‘trans lesbian’ and as a prison activist as well as a communist, despite their origins.
Auckland Pride is not the only organization that No Pride in Prisons hijacked. During the 2015 Rainbow Youth AGM, NPIP attempted to get a majority on the Rainbow Youth board that consisted of its activists, as well as opposing a motion by RainbowYOUTH to declare itself formally apolitical. As you can see, in this set of minutes from July, they were partially successful, getting known NPIP activists Aayliah Zionov, Rakete themselves, and Justine Sachs onto the board. They proceeded to try and get RainbowYOUTH to focus on the corrections issue, as you can see in this screenshot of the agenda.
What does NPIP/PAPA stand for? Why did they hijack the Parade? The entryism strategy towards RainbowYOUTH? That’s a good question.
Why are trans women prisoners denied access to women’s prisons if they apply? Well, I decided to look at the website for Corrections and their transgender policy. It’s fairly black and white on the issue:
“M.03.05.02 Criteria to apply for review of initial determination
Prisoners are not eligible to apply for a review of the initial determination of their placement if they: are serving a sentence for serious sexual offence (refer POM M.03.05.Res.01 Schedule of serious sexual offences) against a person of the prisoner’s nominated sex, or are on remand for a serious sexual offence against a person of the prisoner’s nominated sex, or have previously served a sentence of imprisonment for a serious sexual offence: against a person of the prisoner’s nominated sex, and the sentence expiry date for that sentence was within 7 years ago or less.
If the prisoner requests to review the initial determination and is ineligible, staff must:advise the prisoner the reason they are not eligible (e.g. disqualifying offences), and update IOMS with “Placement review declined” Alert, and record in the Alert’s comment Box the reason the prisoner is ineligible.
PAPA, and its activists, and Pride Chair Lexie Matheson, who identified themselves as a PAPA activist, did all that protesting and banning Corrections from the Parade for the rights of a dozen serious sex offenders.
More disturbing is that Corrections will place people based on the legal sex of their birth certificate, and with recent proposed changes to law allowing self-declared legal sex change , prisoners, regardless of offending, will be placed in the prisons of their legal sex, not their biological sex.
“ Note: If staff have a copy of the birth certificate that specifies the prisoner’s sex, the prisoner must be placed in a prison that manages prisoners of the sex specified on the birth certificate”.
People Against Prisons Aotearoa and Lexie Matheson want male rapists who identify as women in women’s prisons, and hijacked Auckland Pride to do so.
I repeated: these two ‘trans lesbians’ hijacked Auckland Pride, barred a Government department from marching, all in the service of serious sexual offenders getting to self-identify into women’s prisons.
Want to know some more facts about PAPA? Of course you do.
PAPA also insists that the rate of trans women being assaulted in prisons in very high — this supposedly justifies having biologically male, serious sex offenders in a women’s prison based on gender feelings.
I decided to go through PAPA’s manifesto in order to find out where they get that factoid from. The manifesto was published before their name change to PAPA and was published under the name ‘No Pride In Prisons’. Regardless, it’s on their website here.
In their manifesto, we are told
“For incarcerated trans women, a constant threat of violence haunts
their every step. As demonstrated by a 2007 study in California prisons,
trans women are thirteen times more likely to be sexually assaulted in a men’s prison than the general population.”This data is consistent with the experiences of the trans women No Pride in Prisons has spoken to.
Every single formerly or currently incarcerated trans woman we have
spoken to, bar one, has been raped by either a guard or a fellow prisoner
while in prison. “
Anecdotes are not data, but I digress. Where does that 13 times figure come from? I looked into that 2007 California study. You can find it here. I also looked into its follow up study in 2009, which you can find here.
That thirteen times more likely to be assaulted figure? If you read the 2009 study, that follow-up was done because the 39 transgender prisoners in the 2007 study were a convenience sample mostly taken from a single prison.
To get the figure that trans women are assaulted thirteen times more than the general population, that convenience sample was compared to a random sample. You can’t do that! And you definitely can’t use that figure in policy discussions or to hijack Pride Parades with! It’s indicative only that there needs to be further research. It is not indicative that you should start shoving biologically male rapists into women’s prisons because those rapists identify as women.
The 2009 study that followed up on the 2007 study focused on every ‘transgender’ inmate in the California men’s prison system. The authors even admit they have issues decided who is transgender and can be part of their survey. That’s credible data!
Essentially, they interviewed every transgender woman in the California men’s prison system.
Ultimately, the 2009 study winds up with this conclusion:
“The interview team traveled to 27 prisons for adult men in California, met face-to face with over 500 inmates, and completed interviews with over 300 transgender inmates.”
Great. We can make some actual judgement on this data. Except it probably doesn’t show what the activists want it to show. 20.5% of those inmates were in for sex offending, compared to the general sample in the study which had a rate of 14.6%. 55% had a mental health problem. 17.2% of the compared male sample in the study had a mental health problem.32.1% were in Custody Level 4 (max security), compared to 22.8% of the general male population in California.40% were ‘sex workers’.
For comparisons sake, 2.2% of female prisoners in the US federal system are in for sex offenses.
That’s not the only thing NPIP demands. It is an extreme anti-law enforcement group that in their manifesto, also called for the NZ Police to be defunded, for ‘LGBTQI-positive literature’ in prisons, the removal of police tasters, and for people under the age of eighteen to not be charged with a crime for any reason.
The UK is also having this debate about the presence of transgender-identifying inmates in women’s prisons, after rapist Karen White identified his way into a woman’s prison, then committed multiple sexual assaults while there. He was later convicted and moved to a men’s prison. Half of trans prisoners in the UK are in for sex offenses
“A government survey has counted 125 transgender prisoners in England and Wales, which is likely to be an underestimate. According to MoJ figures released in response to a freedom of information request by the BBC, 60 of them have been convicted of one or more sexual offences”
Making one vulnerable population become more vulnerable to serve the needs of another is not progress. It’s misogyny. Despite being ‘vulnerable’ in men’s prisons, these are men with higher rates of predating on females. The stats show us this.
And the gay and lesbians have not only been erased from their movement — their movement’s largest event was hijacked in service of sex offenders.
Yet this meets with no condemnation, particularly compared to the way feminist protesters at Auckland Pride 2018 were treated. When Renee Gerlich and Charlie Montague gatecrashed the Auckland Parade in 2018, they were met with universal condemnation from Rainbow community groups.
What were those ‘evil’ feminists saying? Here is their press release, issued to Scoop by Montague.
“Feminist activists Charlie Montague and Renée Gerlich dropped a banner at the front of the Auckland Pride Parade. The banner read:
STOP GIVING KIDS SEX HORMONES — PROTECT LESBIAN YOUTH“Organisations like RainbowYouth and InsideOut, as well as the Pride Parade, must stop endorsing medical experimentation, child abuse, sexist stereotyping, and the destruction of female-only and lesbian spaces,” says Gerlich, who reached out to RainbowYouth and InsideOut with an open letter in 2016.
Montague adds that, “Lesbians around the world are trying to draw attention to the harm of gender identity on lesbians, and we are being silenced.”
Between 2009–16, the number of women and girls in Wellington being referred to endocrinologists for medical gender transition increased twelvefold: from three to forty-one referrals. Sex hormone prescriptions are forecast to continue rising and are not leading to decreasing suicide statistics or increased wellbeing. Studies also show that globally, disproportionate numbers of young women being medicated are lesbian.
Throughout the West, children as young as three are being encouraged to undergo gender transition. The prescription of puberty blockers to children as young as ten, followed by sex hormones in adolescence is sterilising children. Children as young as six are being given genital tuckers and prosthetic dildos, and RainbowYouth in New Zealand has been distributing free breast binders in schools. These apply pressure to women’s chests in order to damage tissue and inhibit breast growth, also causing lung damage.
“The New Zealand Herald reported the impacts of a course of testosterone treatment on a Northland lesbian teen in 2017,” says Gerlich. “She now recognises that she is female. Testosterone, prescribed to put her on the path of gender transition, has left her potentially infertile with a permanently lowered voice, increased body hair and worsened depression that has led to suicide attempts. The promotion of this kind of medicalised abuse is what we are protesting at Pride.”
“By distributing breast binders in schools, RainbowYouth promotes dysphoria and the mutilation of women’s bodies. It’s doublespeak for them to do this in the name of ‘Pride’.”
The physician who leads the gender transition programme at Auckland’s District Health Board, Jeannie Oliphant, says that she herself does not know what gender is. “What makes people transgender?” she says. “I don’t think we know any more than we know why I was born left-handed and my sister was born right-handed.” Young people in New Zealand cannot be making informed decisions around gender transition when the appointed experts are in the dark themselves, and this means medical experimentation and breach of medical ethics.
Montague says that “Gender is a system of “pink and blue” sex-based stereotyping. Without these gender stereotypes there are no “trans” children. We want to break down stereotypes so that youth can be whoever they want to be — without being medicalised for it.””
Two ‘trans lesbians’ can hijack the Pride Parade for the rights of serious sex offenders and be praised and given media coverage and have an entire organization and government departments capitulate to their desires.
Two feminists, one of them a lesbian and therefore a member of the community, raise issues with transgender ideology? Well, let’s look at what they get called. Here is the initial Pride Board response:
“At this year’s Auckland Pride Parade, two people encroached on the Parade route without permission to protest against access to hormone therapy for trans youth. Had these protesters submitted a Parade registration indicating what they were planning to do — and the transphobic message they were planning to communicate — their entry would have been declined by the Board of Auckland Pride.”
“As well as disrupting the Auckland Pride Parade, the protestors have targeted LGBTIQ+ youth organisations, RainbowYOUTH and InsideOUT. The Board of Auckland Pride wishes to express solidarity with these two charitable organisations who provide vital services for queer and gender diverse young people.
The Pride Board response included RainbowYOUTH in their response:
“At RainbowYOUTH, it’s incredibly important to us to uplift and support the agency of all young people over their bodies, their identities and their lives,” says Executive Director Frances Arns. “In a society that defaults towards questioning and challenging anything that falls outside of gender and sexuality ‘norms’, queer and gender diverse young people need a safe space where they can explore and develop their identities.”
And from InsideOUT
“InsideOUT was disappointed to see the protestors in the Auckland Pride Parade spreading harmful and false messages about the vital work being done to support young trans and gender diverse New Zealanders,” says National Coordinator Tabby Besley. “The process for anyone to get on hormones in New Zealand tends to be a lengthy and strenuous one, and organisations such as ours are in no position to give out medical treatment.”
Besly is lying here — and we know that, because all it now takes to get hormones in Auckland is a referral and a signed consent form.
Montague was a Greens member, so of course, they stepped in to condemn the political views of a member of their political party.
“Rainbow Greens have also released a public statement regarding the protest in which the co-convenors of the Rainbow Greens say they are “aware one of the trans-exclusionary radical feminists who protested at pride against the availability of hormone therapy for trans youth is a Green Party member.”
“Their actions do not align with the Green Party kaupapa of non-violence, or the Green Party kaupapa of responsible decision making by way of scientific accuracy,” they wrote.
“The Green Party stands with the transgender community.”
Montague and Gerlich were then harassed on social media for weeks on end. They were not acknowledged as ‘having a point’. They were tarred and feathered as ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’ for bringing up concerns that are perfectly reasonable and many are afraid to voice out of fear for being treated like they are.
What is the difference between Montague and Gerlich and Matheson and Rakete? They are both advocating for a particular political position, and using Pride to convey messages relevant to the LGBT community.
Well, Rakete and Matheson identify as ‘trans lesbians’. That’s mean they are biological males who are attracted to biological females. To use the scientific term for this sexual behaviour: they are heterosexual males. They identify as ‘women’ because ‘woman’ is a feeling under their ideology, then claim to be lesbians as a result of this. Matheson claimed to be the ‘lesbian’ Chair of the Board while the number of lesbian events at the Pride Festival dwindled into the single digits — there were five at the last festival. These two are biological males that are, to be necessarily crude, interested in sticking their penises into vaginas. They are heterosexual males by any definition. Allowing them to claim the word ‘lesbian’ and telling any lesbian in the community that if they disgaree, they are a hateful bigot, is erasure. Allowing what are heterosexual males to identify as lesbians erases lesbians as female homosexuals — biological females exclusively attracted to other biological females.
By ‘including’ them in ‘lesbian’ is to include heterosexuality into lesbianism. That’s offensive, homophobic pick-up line at best, extreme appropriation at worst. It’s erasure of the homosexual — again.
Why are we allowing two heterosexual males who identify as women to hijack the Auckland Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade in order to complain about the treatment of serious sex offenders?
Matheson resigned from the Pride Board in mid July 2018, Perhaps, that will give him more time to sexually harass Renee Gerlich on social media, like when he tweeted this ‘parody account’ that was harassing Gerlich.
That’s gross, Lexie.
Why does gay erasure matter?
While all this gay erasure is going on, life isn’t getting any better for the homosexual youth that these organizations are ignoring. These groups love citing the Youth’12 stats on transgender students.
I’ve decided to give you a tour of the Youth ’12 stats that these people don’t talk about. You never hear anyone talking about the stats from this study — Young People Attracted to the Same Sex or Both Sexes Findings from the Youth’12 national youth health and wellbeing survey.
This is important. Why? Well, we’ve all heard about the 19.1% attempted suicide rate reported by transgender young people. One in five, they say! This is why the homosexuals must capitulate to all their demands. Otherwise, trans youth might kill themselves. They won’t tell you that the rate for same-sex attracted youth in Youth’12 is extremely similar at 18.3% — one in five. Not very different from the 2000 survey. The suicide rate for young same-sex attracted youth hasn’t declined in twelve years.
I know I’ve mentioned this before but disproportionate number (41.1%) of transgender youth report being same-sex attracted — sexually attracted to other members of their natal sex. 54.6% report being attracted to the opposite sex. Due to the confusing question, and some transgender youth considering themselves ‘straight’ (and therefore ‘heterosexual’, even though they are actually homosexual in behavior), the number of bisexual or homosexual trans youth is probably higher. 7% of non-transgender young people identify as same-sex attracted, for compassion. Are we sure gender identity has nothing to do with sexuality, RainbowYOUTH? Are you sure???
Shall I keep going?
The Youth’12 says that 39% of transgender youth felt unable to access healthcare. The rate for same-sex attracted youth? 35%
Youth’12 says 53% of transgender students felt that someone at school would hurt or bother them. The rate for same-sex attracted students? 57.9%
I could go on. Plenty of stats for same-sex attracted youth are very similar or worse than transgender youth. Want some more?
- 17.6% of transgender youth were bullied at least weekly.
- 16.5% of same sex attracted youth were bullied at least weekly.
- 81.2% of transgender students felt safe in their neighbourhood.
- 45.3% of same sex attracted students felt safe in their neighbourhood.
- 45.5% of transgender students had self-harmed in the past 12 months.
- 59.4% of same sex attracted youth had self harmed in the past 12 months. (heterosexual, non-transgender youth reported a rate of 23%)
- 41.3% of transgender youth reported significant depressive symptoms. The stats for same-sex attracted youth on that one? Identical. 41.3%
40% of same-sex attracted youth reported binge alcohol drinking. 20% reported at least weekly drinking of alcohol (compared to 17.6% of transgender youth)
How much of those transgender stats comes from their massively disproportionate number of same-sex attracted youth identifying as transgender? Why do I never, ever see prominent LGBTQI+ groups talk about these statistics? Ever? It’s always ‘1 in 5 trans youth’. It’s like they forgot the LGB have a 1 in 5 rate for our youth. Almost like they’ve erased the homosexual from their remit in their laser-like focus on trans issues. Gay youth are being bullied in our schools, are being bullied , are self-harming at a rate of nearly 2 in 3, and, as a demographic, have issues with alcohol far worse than heterosexual youth and transgender youth. Maybe it’s time we talk about them too.
Because they actually have it worse. And the organizations that are supposed to help these young people are telling them they can ‘change gender’ and depriving them of the language to discuss their experiences.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
What has happened?
In essence, the Government over the past five years or so, during which both major parties were in power, decided to subsidize and fund a certain kind of politics in the gay and lesbian movement — queer politics. This is despite the representatives of queer politics having numerous conflicts of interest issues, and the way they have erased gay and lesbian people from their remits.
It is also clear that there is a ‘political class’ in the New Zealand LGBT community that represents itself as speaking for the broader community when it does not. The large swathe of the LGBT community in New Zealand is completely disengaged from these people. Yet the same people run organizations and sit on panels, boards, and run the Rainbow section of political parties. They then advise the government on decisions, while not representing any view outside of their small and incestuous social circles. They have built substantial careers out of this, moving between charities and the public sector, always promoting their views on transgenderism. This has led to the Government funding education materials produced by ‘Rainbow Organizations’ that don’t even discuss what ‘homosexuality’ means. This political class has queer politics at it’s core — and it is the ideology they wield against members of the community who dissent, or who believe lesbians aren’t interested in penises. Queer politics is dangerous.
Why?
Queer politics seeks to erase the homosexual and the distinct homosexual experience and replace the concept of ‘biological sex’ with ‘gender’. As I write enshrining this nonsense into law become closer, with the Second Reading of the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill soon to be on the cards at Parliament. This bill would allow people to change their legal sex by self-declaration, thus obliterating the legal concept of ‘biological sex’.
Many feminists have discussed why this is dangerous. Few gay and lesbian activists have. Let me put it this way: with this legislation, we would be completely unable to exclude heterosexuals from our spaces. We would no longer be able to discuss ourselves as ‘same-sex attracted’, because that would include heterosexual attractions. We would have to describe ourselves as ‘attracted exclusively to other people with penises’, or ‘other people with vaginas’, and even then, we would be attacked and called ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’. Lesbians who defend their boundaries receive relentless attacks, as you can see here. The transgender movement has also moved onto gay men, with Grindr now being open to heterosexual women identifying as gay men, and users threatened with being removed from the dating platform if they make it clear that they are not into heterosexual sex.
If we can’t discuss our issues, then nothing can be done. The statistics for same-sex attracted young people are as bad, if not worse than transgender youth, yet over the past few years, the gay and lesbian community in New Zealand has been hijacked to service this tiny minority of people, along with their homophobic ideology and homophobic desires. Homosexuals are being erased from their own movement. Even the Gay Auckland Business Association changed its name to ‘Rainbow Auckland’, in order to be more ‘inclusive’. At what point are homosexuals allowed to carve out our own spaces, to say that yes, we are gays and lesbians, and that this is just for us? Where can we say ‘homosexuals only’ and not be called ‘exclusionary’ for desiring even a small amount of linguistic space to be able to describe our experiences?
Entire organizations that represent themselves to the government as representing ‘gay and lesbian’ issues erase gay and lesbian people from the very pictures they paint — on their websites, in their education resources, even in the very events they run that were founded for and by gays and lesbians.
At what point do we stay stop? Because if we don’t, we are going to be erased as a class of people. Our hard-won rights will be washed away. The children that will grow up to be gay will be left with broken bodies and a DHB that told them that they signed an ‘informed consent’ form. It is time that gays, lesbians and bisexuals in New Zealand took back our movement.
Before we get eaten alive.
This material was adapted from a series of Twitter threads originally posted at @gckiwi, and includes additional research and material.
