NZ genderish update, 15 May 2022

In which Kim Hill interviews Kathleen Stock, NZ Post chooses which people deserve respect, a stabber has a mystical overnight makeover and someone wants NZ kids to be taught facts not fluff.

Kim Hill interviews Kathleen Stock

Kathleen Stock: the professor who lost her career amid toxic gender debate, Radio NZ, 14 May 2022.

Yesterday Kim Hill interviewed Kathleen Stock on her RNZ¹ Saturday Morning magazine show. In a previous post I was grumpy at Kim for her seemingly uncritical absorption into gender woo when she played music with Max Tweedie. Tweedie has all the arrogance of a young man who thinks anyone who thinks differently to him (like let’s not give teens experimental hormones) is a bit simple. Others have been concerned with Kim’s seeming acquiescence to Judith-sex-is-entirely-and-at-all-times-just-a-construct-Butler in an earlier interview. And RNZ has seemed very taken with the claims of genderists, who believe saying penises are a male thing, is literally hateful.

However, jolly good, Kim Hill came through. Some gender critical people are saying Kim Hill was totally a TRA and seems not to believe certain well-established truths. Some gender ideologists, on the other hand, are saying she’s a total TERF and didn’t question any of the claims made by Dr. Stock, who is btw barely a philosopher. Other insist that the interview wasn't just platforming transmisogyny. It was basic journalistic malpractice...WTAF Kim?² There’s also a bunch of people saying generally, whoop, finally, a look in from someone sane.

I think it’s great that Kim Hill interviewed Kathleen Stock, and lots of New Zealanders got to hear someone who is branded as hateful being eminently mild, reasonable and smart. RNZ and Kim Hill will get a lot of flak for this. Apparently a petition is already circulating. I’ve seen a cheat sheet for those who want to lay a complaint saying Kathleen Stock was full of lies like “I don’t think you can change your sex”. Um clearly KS doesn’t think you can change your sex so it’s not really a lie is it?

As her job requires, Kim Hill asked lots of the questions that those who think Kathleen is hateful would ask. She also made a few of TRA’s gigantum leaps in logic—if you believe x you therefore believe y. Some of them seemed a bit random. Kathleen got to answer the questions and point out the fallacies when they were thrown at her.

I think some points that were crucial got buried which isn’t anyone’s fault. Like Kathleen’s fundamental point that what underlies seemingly disparate threads of the gender ideology is the belief that all of us have an inner gendered soul³. And the fact that Kathleen was hounded out of her job for simply believing biology was real and because she feared the implications for women’s safety of sex self-identification laws. Already NZ Twitter is spreading misinformation about Kathleen getting snowflakey about a few trans posters, as opposed to the truth that Kathleen faced aggressive picket lines with STOCK OUT banners and sustained harassment. I don’t think Kim Hill was particularly warm to Kathleen Stock but I don’t think it would have been very useful if she had been.

I’m interested that I can’t see a huge uprising against RNZ or Kim Hill. Sure there’s a few very angry people, but it does seem like a handful not a hailstorm. Perhaps the gender ideologists are busy organising. Perhaps, actually, most people are a bit confused and bewildered by it all and don’t understand what’s going on: women with penises, eh, what you on about? (See update.⁴)

NZ Post promotes respect (for some people)

This week someone tweeted the following:

The tweeter says it all really, but I am a bit shook by how sanctimonious this is. How utterly undermining this is of the intended audience — biological females who may feel uneasy sharing their bathrooms with other types of people. It is a stark example of how the rights of women-identified people are elevated above the rights of biological women. There is no acknowledgement that some women feel safer in a same-sex facility and that that too is a right that should be respected. It is clear from the poster that biological women are not entitled to respect for their privacy, identity and protection from harm. The tone is blatantly discriminatory. One group is more important than another.

Miraculous overnight sex change of man who stabbed his ex

Name suppression gone for accused in Cambridge restaurant triple stabbing, NZ Herald, 13 May 2022.

I mean really, NZ gender ideology community, including policy makers, do you really not want to challenge this? A man—living, presenting as and calling himself a man, with a male name—stabs his female ex-partner and a couple of other people. Turns up in court the day after the stabbing and calls himself a woman. Can you, rainbow woo NZ, not issue a decree saying, okay this is ridiculous. We’ll have a rethink about how to avoid this situation. This is clearly opportunistic and nothing to do with someone’s authentic self or anyone’s human rights.

Many of us who have worked for years on issues of violence against women, understand it as a systematic issue arising from sexism, assumptions about the rightful place of men and women in society, and a normalisation of male violence against females. We think we need to develop system-wide strategies to challenge the underlying causes. To create the kind of society where men don’t hurt women.

We think these issues are about biological sex, not the gender identity that someone assumes. When someone who is violent is male and identifies as a woman there are risks:

• We lose fact-based information about exactly who is causing harm and who is the recipient of harm. It makes it difficult to come up with strategies that will help prevent people getting raped, abused, murdered and otherwise harmed.

• Because male violence against women is normalised, women’s violence tends to get more attention in the media. While there may just be a handful of woman-identified men being violent, any stories of violent women skews the public narrative about violence.

• In NZ prisoners can choose to be put in the prison of the sex with which they identify. There may be some caveats around this in regards to violent men but it’s not clear. Identification is extremely loose, simply a declaration by a man that he is a woman, will do it. In the case of the stabber, he may be identifying as a woman in court in order to be put into a women’s prison. I‘m not a great fan of prisons at all, but I do know that some women prefer to be in a single-sex prison and that many women in prison are survivors of male violence. Having males in women’s prisons (regardless of how they identify) does introduce threats to women’s comfort in prison, their safety and their perceived safety.

New NZ website launched calling for non-gendery education

Resist Gender Education

Full of information about current policy, rights, rich with evidence-based takedowns of gender myths, and strongly in favour of teaching young people about biology as an actual real not made-up thing, the Resist Gender Education website got launched last week.

They had me at:

We do not support replacing the objective reality of biological sex with the subjective idea of ‘gender identity’ as the criteria for being a man or being a woman. ‘Gender identity’ ideology teaches children who don’t conform to masculine or feminine stereotypes that their personalities are ‘wrong’ for their sex, and their bodies are then ‘wrong’ for their gender identity.

1. NZ’s publicly owned national radio station

2. This is from a tweet, author unacknowledged, as I don’t want to inadvertently cause a pile on, but if the tweeter wants to be acknowledged happy to do that.

3. …from which can emanate the idea that children can be born in the wrong body, that women who want same-sex spaces in which to recover from other-sex induced violence or to have privacy are hateful, or that effeminate boys shouldn’t be celebrated as boys but should be affirmed as girls, and that it is a human right to compete in a sport (not any sport mind but only those sports designed explicitly to allow fair competition among people who are born different to you)

4. UPDATE: I have already sent this article out to subscribers but I now see that I may have quickly lost faith in RNZ again. Or I think they need to keep their web staff in check, my oh my, they have gone and scattered the online article with a bunch of links that are from a gender ideology perspective. Links to Stonewall’s explanation of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act (Stonewall is a gender ideologically driven organisation that thinks gay people are bigoted if they don’t like sleeping with other sex people); the Ministry of Health’s statement that puberty blockers are safe; links on the termTERF to a Vox article called on the definition of a TERF (Vox is very pro-gender ideology, the article is called The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminist explained). I am guessing this kind of link clutter is not common practice but I’ll check it out.