Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT party leader.
It’s official.
In a New Zealand courtroom, a rapist’s penis is to be referred to as “her penis”.
Four years ago, Ricky Gervais made that exact line a punchline in his *Armageddon* special. The audience laughed at the absurdity. Today it is written into the courts of New Zealand’s “Guidelines for Courtroom Conduct for Counsel”, dated July 2026.
Paragraph 38 tells counsel it is their responsibility to know “the titles and pronouns” their clients and witnesses use, and to convey that information to the registrar in advance. Paragraph 54 requires that witnesses be referred to using their formal name, title, “and their pronouns should be used”.
The practical effect is clear. Biological reality is subordinated to preferred identity. A male offender who declares himself female is to be spoken of with female pronouns, even when the evidence concerns his male anatomy. The court is instructed to participate in the fiction.
We would not know this from the mainstream media. They are preoccupied with their ongoing campaign against Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the usual diet of celebrity gossip. Luxon is fortunate that the press is as incompetent at coups as it is at reporting news. I learnt of the guidelines from a post by Jan Rivers on X. That is how news now travels – past the newspapers that once claimed to hold power to account.
This is not a trivial matter of courtesy. Courts exist to establish facts. When the rules of address require participants to deny observable reality, the institution itself is compromised. A justice system that cannot say “his penis” when the evidence is a male body has already decided that ideology outranks evidence.
New Zealand has a conservative government. The guidelines still appeared under its watch. That should give every citizen pause. The capture of language is not limited to one political tribe. It has become institutional habit.
Gervais’s joke was funny because it described something that still felt impossible. In July 2026 the impossible became policy. The distance between the two is measured in the quiet surrender of institutions that once insisted on truth. God help us all.
This article was originally published by Brash and Mitchell.
