Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
When Education Minister Erica Stanford announced the end of open-plan classrooms last week, the country collectively cheered. Wasn’t that a surprise? We didn’t even know we hated those classrooms that much. It was just one of many changes the government and education ideologues had introduced over the decades that anyone with a skerrick of commonsense knew wouldn’t work.
In the same week Sports NZ reported that the government required the end of inclusion guidelines for transgender athletes in community sports. We cheered again. For the same reason. Men in women’s sports made no sense, no matter how they identified, no matter how low grade and insignificant the sporting arena. Apart from delusional cultists, the rest of us have always known there are massive differences between men and women that necessitate separate sporting categories.
The trans inclusion ruling was only introduced in 2022. Open plan classrooms go back at least 40 years. Both stem from demented ideological positions: positions that could broadly be described as progressive.
Progressive is a great word. Who doesn’t want to be thought of as progressive? The opposite is regressive, which is hardly complimentary. No wonder most people prefer to think of themselves as progressive, to imagine they are the kind of person who always looks to the future, is open-minded, eager to break down barriers and shakes off the shackles of the past.
But sometimes being progressive means having to say you’re sorry. This week has been an abject lesson, if we needed it, that not all change is beneficial. Not all boundaries are bad. Not everything from the past is without merit. Sometimes we need to re-install the guard rails we’ve so gleefully taken down.
So it was with trans inclusion in sports and open-plan classrooms. So it is with many other changes that appeared to be progressive when first introduced, but in fact, are horribly regressive.
Here’s a few more I think need unwinding. The most obvious is self-sex ID. This refers to the ability for individuals to alter records of “sex” on official documents like birth certificates to reflect their self‑identified gender without needing medical intervention or a court order, using a statutory declaration instead. Prior to that individuals needed Family Court approval and medical evidence with a statutory declaration process to enable this process.
This amendment was passed in 2021 and came into force in 2023.
Even those who hadn’t been following the gender debate were astonished that a document of fact could become a document of fiction, that truth could be massaged to reflect a lie, that is, that an individual’s feelings became more important than the reality of their actual sex.
If this is possible, why not allow the alteration of the date of birth to reflect an individual’s feeling about their age or the location of their birth, if, say, they identify as a member of another group or nation?
The truth is the New Zealand birth certificate has ceased being a document of factual record for a while now. For about the last 20 years, the birth certificate has excluded the biological (egg or sperm) donor when a child is conceived through assisted reproductive technology (ART). The birth certificate records legal parents, not necessarily biological contributors.
So a birth certificate might record that the baby is born of two mothers or two fathers. As we all know, given divorce and separation rates, those people could well alter over a lifetime but the genetic heritage of the child will not. Facts, not feelings, are important in this instance.
The theory is that when the child reaches 18, they will be able to research their genetic heritage via the HART register (Human Assisted Reproductive Technology register), provided the donor used a clinic-regulated process.
The birth certificate has become a legal parenting record, not a genetic one. In my view, this weakens the credibility of a birth certificate. While it is commendable to want to register the people parenting the child, the birth certificate should remain a document of fact, that is, record the names of the biological father and mother. If necessary, an extra category could be added to reflect who will be parenting the child.
Let’s Make Birth Certificates Factual Again.
Last week, in another back to the future move, we also learned that Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters had personally intervened to stop New Zealand’s diplomatic posts around the world from posting about Pride Month on social media.
In the past New Zealand’s embassies and high commissions around the world regularly posted about Pride Month, claiming New Zealand milestones such as being the first country to grant women the vote (this is Pride?) and to have openly transgender MPs, as well as marriage equality. Facebook posts and other social media often included photos or footage of key diplomatic staff marching in Pride parades.
The change advised by Peters was couched in the language of ‘stick to your knitting’, that is, focus on advancing New Zealand’s positions on foreign and trade policy issues.
However, given a recent landmark ruling in the UK which found that past police participation in Pride parades was unlawful, I’m wondering if this case has any bearing on Peter’s stance. Foreign Affairs staff and others may not realise it, but by endorsing Pride, they are endorsing gender ideology: an ideology many gays and lesbians do not support.
In the UK, it was a gender critical lesbian who took the legal case arguing that the force would not have been able to remain impartial if a dispute between those with similar beliefs and transgender rights supporters had broken out.
“The impartiality of the police is vital in ensuring these events can take place in a way that does not restrict free speech,” she said.
The same could be said of Pride events everywhere and is a compelling reason why public servants should not participate in these events. I would go further and say it is well past time that Pride events were wound down altogether. Despite the lamentations of a few, gay people are not marginalised or victimised any more.
Pride in its current iteration supports gender ideology, that is, denies reality. Not one dollar of public money should go to supporting groups promoting this ideological position. Gender criticals do not promote an ideology: simply an acceptance of reality.
It is not progressive to promote Pride. In fact, the opposite is true. Pride supports an ideology that encourages gay children to believe they are born in the wrong body and allows men into women’s spaces. It manages to be both homophobic and misogynistic at the same time, which is quite some achievement.
Indeed there is a strong argument that public funding of all rainbow groups and NGOs is no longer required. They are well integrated and accepted in the community. People do not remain victims forever.
Let’s Say Goodbye to Pride and All Things Rainbow.
Last in this back-to-the-future wish list is my desire to re-pathologise transgender identities. The history of how transgender identities have been classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) reflects a broader shift in psychiatry – from pathologising gender variance to focusing on distress and dysphoria, rather than the identity itself.
Learning how this happened is a lesson in how the trans activists managed to normalise this mental disorder for their own purposes. They have engaged in a long, slow, stealthy exercise in shifting the goalposts.
Let’s begin. In the 1950s and ’60s, homosexuality and transvestism (cross-dressing) were categorised under “sexual deviations”.
In 1980 “transsexualism” was officially added as a mental disorder under “Psychosexual Disorders”. Criteria focused on a strong desire to live as the opposite sex, including persistent discomfort with one’s biological sex, and a desire for medical transition. This was the first time trans identity was formalised as a psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM. A separate category, “Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood” (GIDC), was also introduced.
This was not popular with trans activists who complained it framed them as mentally disordered for having a gender identity different from their sex. They also claimed it reinforced stigma and medical gatekeeping.
In the late ’90s and early 2000s, “transsexualism” was renamed “gender identity disorder”. It was still framed as a disorder but opened the door to medical transition (for insurance coverage). The gatekeeping model was maintained.
In 2013, the diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” was replaced with “gender dysphoria”. The aim was to foster the notion that being transgender is not a mental disorder, although the distress around gender incongruence can still require clinical care.
But this is false. Believing you are born into the wrong body has to be a sign of psychological disorder since the belief is a fantasy and often little more than a paraphilia.
I’ve just read a great Substack article I commend to you by Malcolm Richard Clark (The Secret Gender Files), a former BBC reporter who once filmed a man who dreamed of having a healthy leg removed. And succeeded. Clark writes persuasively that there is a link between the desire to become an amputee and trans identification.
Trans identification claims to be about high-blown notions of inner identity and authenticity. The truth is its agenda is and always has been an attempt to normalise pathological sadomasochism.
Reframing trans as dysphoric and not a disorder was a clever political move, but not one based in reality. A desire to reduce stigma and empathise with ‘vulnerable’ trans people led to the acceptance of this absurdity. No matter how we might wish to reduce their anguish, embracing falsehoods is not the answer.
It’s time we returned to the more accurate diagnosis of the ’90s – gender identity disorder. An honest diagnosis is required for anyone suffering a mental disorder. It would also give more leverage to the clinician who feels obliged to offer ‘gender affirming care’ under the previous model and to any woman who does not want a trans male-to-female in their space.
Let’s Make Transgender a Mental Disorder Again.
Is this unkind? Maybe, but kindness is over-rated when it puts women and children at risk.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
