Oh, boy. If you thought New Zealand’s good name in the world had taken almost as much of a battering as a granny in Albert Park, good ol’ Chippy is there to say, “Hold my, uh, y’know, just… idunno, the, uh, the thing. Yeah, the thing.”
It’s not enough that women are set upon by howling lynch mobs for daring to speak in public. Or that the creepy misogynist who incited the mob violence during a break from posting weird, sexually suggestive videos on the internet is honoured as “Young New Zealander of the Year”. It’s not enough that police stood back and let the mob attacks on women happen.
All that was enough to see Tourism New Zealand forced to lock its Twitter account under a barrage of negative commentary. It also saw #BoycottNZ, #NZDayOfShame and #NZHatesWomen trending for over a week. You’d think all that would be bad publicity enough.
Then along came Chippy — keeping New Zealand in the world media’s spotlight, for all the wrong reasons.
Chris Hipkins, New Zealand’s newly elected Prime Minister, refused to define the term “woman,” arguing that “people define themselves” when pressed by a reporter.
Hipkins’ discomfiture is all the more unusual because, courtesy of the Public Interest Journalism Fund, the Labour government have become all too used to being soft-soaped by a bought-and-paid-for legacy media. Bet Hipkins is wishing he’d played the “Jessica, then Tova” gambit.
During a press conference Sunday, New Zealand media company The Platform asked Hipkins how he, and the New Zealand government, define what a woman is.
“To be honest, that question has come out of left field for me. The biology, sex, gender,” he said before taking a long pause. “People define themselves, people define their own genders.”
When asked about the term again, Hipkins diverted the question and said that “people identity for themselves.”
If his rabbit-in-the-headlights act wasn’t bad enough already, he dug the hole just that little bit deeper by all-but admitting that he expects press conferences to be pre-scripted Dorothy Dixers that his spin team have pre-set answers ready to go with.
“I wasn’t expecting that question, so it wasn’t something I pre-formulated an answer on. But in terms of gender identify, people identity for themselves,” he said.
Hipkins’ floundering performance is all the more unintentionally hilarious for the fact that he replaced New Zealand’s previous PM whose only real claim to fame for the worlds media was that she was a woman who had a baby while in office.
Hipkins is just one of a series of public figures who been left red-faced by what should be a no-brainer question.
In April 2022, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., asked Biden nominated Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during her nomination hearing if she could provide a definition for the word woman. Jackson answered, “I cannot” […]
Despite celebrating International Women’s Day this year, the U.S. Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services and National Institutes of Heath was unable to definite the term when previously asked by Fox.
Before the 2022 midterm elections, Fox News Digital asked several Democratic candidates who were selling campaign merchandise for “women,” such as Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, to define the term, but they all refused to answer the question.
In July 2022, the Church of England was also asked the question and argued that “there is no official definition” for what a woman is.
Fox News
Perhaps the Established Church of England should have consulted the standard reference for the English language.
Woman: n. an adult female human
Oxford
