Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Sometimes I’m just too kind.
Following my previous gender villains post, ace women’s rights Substacker Katrina Biggs remarked that I’d been very restrained when it came to Lexie Matheson (above) and Caitlin Spice.
Spice disagreed. He weighed in with his own views on my Substack. His comments require no further explanation.
Biggs then sent me a link to an excellent article about Lexie Matheson published in January 2024 by Reduxx and written by Reduxx co-founder and writer Genevieve Gluck. You can read it here.
The Reduxx story reveals much that is disturbing about this credentialed and celebrated cross-dresser. From his fetish content on social media (Reduxx provides images), to his role promoting ‘transgender-friendly policies’ within the education system and sporting bodies, his admission that he has been using women’s bathrooms for the past 20 years, and his part as a leader in Auckland Pride organising the protest that turned violent against British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull in Auckland in 2023, it’s clear Matheson has been campaigning behind the scenes against women’s interests in New Zealand for a long time.
So far he’s been rewarded for his anti-women activism. Not only has Matheson won sporting trophies in women’s competitions, in 2016 he was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his LGBTQ advocacy.
Biggs was right. I had been ridiculously lenient to this man larping as a woman. I should have remembered that there is research that suggests a correlation between adult males pretending to be women and sexual fetishes. Transvestic fetishism aka autogynephilia (AGP) refers to sexual arousal that occurs when a person wears clothing associated with the other sex. Admittedly this is a highly contested area of psychological research but my money is on a robust link between AGP and many male-to-female transitions.
Meanwhile, others accuse me of being too harsh. That criticism was made after I condemned the surgeon Dr Alexander Brown at Wakefield Hospital, Wellington, filmed in a story for Re:News for his role in removing healthy breasts from a gender dysphoric young woman.
Critics argue policy makers and campaigners are the real villains in this culture war. Medical professionals may simply be caught up in the propaganda cross-fire, believing activist’s claims that surgery and medication improves lives for gender dysphoric youth.
But this overlooks the not unreasonable expectation that a medical professional should be operating from a foundation of evidence, to value truth and not to be captured by a cult that peddles biological gibberish such as ‘assigned at birth’ and ‘born in the wrong body’. Every medical professional should be intellectually, morally and emotionally strong enough to reject such an obviously daft ideology. I wouldn’t have thought that was a high bar.
Let’s not forget, there is currently no shortage of research calling the entire gender-affirming racket into question. The 2024 Cass Review and subsequent research such as this 2025 paper in Springer Nature, “Pediatric Gender-Affirming Care Is Not Evidence-Based”, are clear. The case for gender affirming care is weak. No one in the medical profession can honestly say there was no evidence that these treatments were ill-advised.
Anyone who continues to promote and practice gender affirming care deserves condemnation. As a comparison, consider people who suffer from Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID aka apotemnophilia). This is the notion that the individual is supposed to be disabled, the feeling that a part of their body – often a limb – doesn’t belong to them, and they desire amputation or paralysis to feel ‘whole’.
Ask yourself – would we allow surgeons to remove healthy limbs because the patient suffers from BIID? ChatGPT tells me there is no evidence that any public health provider in New Zealand engages in performing amputations or other irreversible procedures for BIID. Both medical ethics and public policy strongly oppose removing healthy limbs. Great. So why give a free pass to those permanently damaging gender dysphoric young people?
Yet cast around online and you will find evidence of highly educated, highly qualified, medical professionals talking about trans as if it was the next identity cab off the rank after the normalisation of homosexuality.
In this April 2024 podcast by Psych Matters put out by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, a New Zealand psychiatrist, psychologist and two specialist general practitioners discuss transgenderism as if it were truly possible to be born in the wrong body and how to treat such folk.
It is a podcast that will not age well. All the dismal tropes and justifications for gender affirming care are canvassed in an irritatingly ingratiating tone. So pleased with their ignorance are these delulu medics.
Herewith a selection of their key ‘insights’:
*Trans people exist.
*Acknowledge people are their own experts.
*Our job is not to say yes or no but to talk about the benefits and side effects of medication.
*Life was so binary before. Femininity and masculinity was a model designed by cis people telling them what they should move towards.
* The number of older people who have come out and approached primary care for hormones. The case of an 83-year-old requesting hormones as well as a number of 50, 60 and 70-year-olds, people who previously felt stigmatised.
*Why do I have to see a psychologist or psychiatrist? That’s pathologising. Not much that needs to be discussed.
•Others want to stop hormones. That doesn’t mean they are not trans. We should respect that. That is the maturity of clinicians now.
•It is disrespectful to ask our clients to educate us. There is good material out there. Recommend Storm Clouds and Rainbows – publication on their website around young people and whānau support. Recommend WPATH standards of care 8. Easy to read.
• Every human being can change their names in the system as many times as they like.
•Think outside the box – having the freedom to try a half dose of hormones.
• How can a three-year-old know they are trans? It’s okay. Let them explore it. Research is clear that supporting your child is the best thing to do even if they change their mind. Parents say why can’t we just wait? Because there will be worse mental health outcomes than if we do something.
•Used to be that we had to have a second opinion to put them on puberty blockers. New standards from WPATH don’t need to have a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists should have the smallest role possible. Stigmatising. I don’t have a mental health problem. I’m just gender questioning, like being gay was. We’re catching up with that. What is the role of the psychiatrist now? Some suicidal people happen to be trans or gender diverse, not the cause.
And of course the importance of using correct pronouns is discussed at length.
Let me introduce you to the people involved in this discussion and my latest entrants into the gender villains gallery.
Dr Jamie Speeden is the most highly credentialed of all those listed today. He is described as a dual-trained child and adolescent psychiatrist and paediatrician working as part of a busy Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service and private practice in Auckland. His bio says that for many years he worked in a community youth clinic who saw primarily trans and gender-diverse young people and that he “is passionate about working from a youth development model and not just a medical diagnostic framework”.
Dr Caitlyn Drinkwater is a clinical psychologist based in Auckland. She has extensive experience working with trans people since she previously worked for the regional transgender health services in both Auckland and the Bay of Plenty, and has provided this care both to adults and to youth. Her doctoral thesis explored the experiences of people with non-binary gender identities.
Dr Rebecca Nicholls is a specialist general practitioner who works in
Christchurch “providing gender affirming care to all ages using an informed-consent model”. She also works for Te Whatu Ora Waitaha and Pegasus Health as the Clinical Lead for Transgender health and was a co-author of the Primary Care Gender Affirming Guidelines, 2023. She talks to male-to-female director of Qtopia, Jennifer Shields, on how parents should deal with gender-questioning children in this video here.
Dr Elizabeth McElrea is a general practitioner with a special interest in gender affirming care who has been working in this area since 2015. She helped set up the Gender Care Service at Tamatea Medical Centre (Napier, Hawkes Bay). Beth sits on the executive committee of the Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare Aotearoa (PATHA) and is a member of the Ministry of Health advisory panel for projects supporting gender-affirming care.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
