Table of Contents
Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
American podcaster and writer Bridget Phetasy’s best-selling T-shirt merch on her website carries this slogan – Reality Remains Undefeated. Of course it does. These words ring truer and truer every day. No matter how loony the world gets, reality will eventually give it a blood nose.
For instance, how do you think the proposed ITV drama on Queen Elizabeth I will go given that the premise is that this great English monarch was really trans? Insulting much?
This is the Queen Elizabeth I who is reputed to have said:
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.
Words she delivered to her troops at Tilbury in 1588, while rallying English forces against the approaching Spanish Armada.
Apparently the proposed ITV version of her life was inspired by the theory that Elizabeth I was a male impostor, a concept often dismissed by historians as misogynistic folklore. Titled Majesty, the six-part series is due to start filming this year.
In the meantime ITV is searching for a young white transgender actor over 16 to play the leading role. The advertisement requests applications from actors who identify as transgender women. Could a woman identify as a transgender woman? Worth a shot in this nutso world. Otherwise the field is left open to pornofied men.
It’s hard to know whether this concept is the last gasp of an expiring, threadbare ideology or a sign that the British elite have lost touch with reality altogether. I suspect the latter.
Also untethered from reality is Kristi Noem’s husband. You might not remember that Kristi Noem was the US secretary of homeland security from 2025–26. During her short tenure the media was greatly exercised by her appearance. From her hair extensions and her make-up to her alleged cosmetic surgery, the New York Times published a number of stories focussing on how this woman politician chose to style herself.
Last month images of Noem’s husband wearing giant rubber breasts appeared in the Daily Mail. How did the New York Times cover this disturbing phenomenon? Their article carries the headline ‘In South Dakota, Neighbours Feel Sorry for Kristi Noem’s Husband’.
The original Daily Mail story exposed how Bryan Noem, a 56-year-old, successful crop-insurance salesman in South Dakota, allegedly racked up $25,000 paying women to talk to him online while he was wearing huge rubber breasts. He didn’t even make a huge effort to look like a woman. His pouty pose features an unshaven phizog.
Noem’s decidedly fruity behaviour and the media coverage tells us something about where we are with trans right now. Noem is apparently a fan of bimbofication, a fetish that revolves around cartoonishly exaggerated women’s bodies. That is, Noem is a man who gets sexually aroused by turning himself into a bimbo. Apparently there are sex shops and websites dedicated to selling outsize prosthetic boobs. Noem’s were so large he would have had to buy the rubber suit type that slipped over your head. Some have an attachment that allows the breasts to be inflated.
Critics have pointed out that for men like Noem, throwing on a pair of fake breasts is their way of expressing the same misogyny that pervades autogynephilia in general. Every autogynephile is, in effect, declaring that womanhood is a costume. Bimbofication amps up the misogyny even further by suggesting that comic body parts express the essence of being a woman.
Not that the media is willing to examine the world of fetishists and how they populate the trans lobby. Not one media outlet said a critical word about Rachel (Richard) Levine dressing up in an admiral’s uniform cosplay, even though he had never served a single day in the navy. Levine is, of course, the American paediatrician who served as the United States assistant secretary for health and the admiral in charge of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, from 2021–25 under the Biden administration.
He had left his post by the time the Trump administration took over but they did replace the nameplate under the official portrait of “Rachel Levine” with his birth name (“Richard Levine”). Critics said this was “deadnaming” but the department stated it was part of reversing “harmful policies” and prioritising “biological reality.” One more win for reality which remains undefeated.
The chance that reality may return to this part of the world was increased exponentially last week when the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, sponsored by New Zealand First (NZF) MP Jenny Marcroft, was drawn from the biscuit tin. The tin process is just a random ballot from an actual old biscuit tin that decides which members’ bills get a chance to be debated.
The aim of the bill is to restore biological reality as the legal meaning of sex in statutes, safeguarding sex-based rights and protections (for example, in areas like sports, prisons, shelters, bathrooms, and single-sex spaces). NZF leader Winston Peters has described it as focusing on “the facts of biology” and protecting the term woman in law, rather than being “anti-anyone”.
The bill proposes definitions that eluded Labour leader Chris Hipkins in 2023 when asked to define a woman. It proposes amending the Legislation Act 2019 by adding new sections that would provide a clear statutory definition across New Zealand law:
- Woman = “an adult human biological female”
- Man = “an adult human biological male”
Those of us who watched Hipkins squirm when asked this question by Sean Plunket of the Platform three years ago are looking forward to the reaction of Labour and their co-sex-denialist buddies, the Greens, when it comes time to debate this bill.
Remember what Hipkins said at the time?
“Um... to be honest this question has come slightly out of left field for me.”
“People define themselves, people define their own genders.” When pressed again, he added that people “identify for themselves”.
As a members’ bill from a minor coalition partner, its path forward depends on government support, numbers in the House, and the usual political horse-trading.
In an election year, the bill is manna from heaven for NZF, since it plays to their ‘common-sense’ base. The National Party generally does its best to avoid culture wars but given that 2025 polling showed solid support among National (around 64 per cent) and ACT voters (72 per cent) for the biological definition, neither party is likely to be deeply split.
This is despite the fact that all parties voted for self-sex ID in 2021, a bill which allows individuals to change the sex marker on their birth certificate.
Whatever happens, every sane person in the country knows the truth. There are only two sexes. You can’t change sex and you can’t be born in the wrong body.
Reality will always remain undefeated.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
