Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
The gender medicine house of cards is collapsing all around the world.
This was the observation of well-known Irish writer and sex rights campaigner Graham Linehan in his regular report last week. He listed the US Supreme Court ruling upholding the right of states to protect children from gender medicalisation, the damning of evidence by England’s Cass review, Finland saying it was “experimental” and Sweden deciding the risks outweigh the benefits. Linehan noted that countries are backing away based on actual evidence.
“This is a big moment,” he declared.
Big everywhere, except in New Zealand. In the same week Linehan made these heartening observations, New Zealanders learned about the tragic story of Vanessa, an anorexic teen who starved to death two years ago while under the care of authorities more concerned about her trans ideation than her most serious mental illness.
To the surprise of many, mainstream media covered the story, and to the surprise of no one who has followed the issue, the usual suspects piped up with the usual nonsense about dead-naming, misgendering and risk of suicide.
Meanwhile, the public continues to wait for the Ministry of Health’s determination on gender medicine for minors, so the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continues apace. New Zealand’s per capita rate of puberty blocker prescription is considerably higher than most Western nations by a considerable margin. In fact, by all accounts we are the highest in the world. Our prescription rate is 1.7 x higher than the Netherlands, 3.9x higher than Denmark and 3.5-6.9x higher than England and Wales. These figures come from a 2024 NZMJ study that observed no country surpassed New Zealand within those comparisons. Also it’s worth remembering that almost 100 per cent of children on puberty blockers go on to use cross-sex hormones.
New Zealand's special place in the gender firmament was cemented in 2023 by British sex-based rights campaigner, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka Posie Parker) after she was mobbed by thousands of aggressive trans activists in Albert Park, Auckland while the police stood by. In a tweet she called the country “the worst place for women she has ever visited”.
At this rate, New Zealand risks becoming the equivalent of the last Japanese soldiers who continued fighting long after World War II had ended. The redoubtable Irish writer and sex rights campaigner Helen Joyce used this metaphor to describe parents clinging to gender ideology because what could be worse than thinking you’d damaged your child? As Joyce put it: “The people who have transitioned their own children and irrevocably harmed them have got to fight forever…”
All this is at odds, of course, with the way New Zealanders like to think of themselves. One of New Zealand’s favourite conceits is that we punch above our weight. The oft repeated list of national achievements is familiar to anyone who grew up here. First to give women the vote, first to reach the top of Everest, one of the first countries to legislate a nuclear-free zone, not to mention being home to the father of nuclear physics, a top rugby team and a world-famous film industry.
We are especially fond of considering ourselves as uniquely progressive and open-minded. Indeed this is the image Jacinda Ardern counts on as she mounts her global empathy leadership sales pitch. But if we are not careful our continued embrace of gender medicine for minors could end up staining this squeaky clean reputation.
With that in mind, I thought it might be instructive to list all the Kiwi individuals who have contributed, both positively and negatively, to this peculiar global phenomenon.
The most well-known, of course, has to be John Money (1921–2006). Like Jacinda Ardern, our erstwhile prime minister currently spruiking her memoir on the world stage, Money was born in Morrinsville, not into a Mormon family as Ardern was, but into a Plymouth Brethren family.
He studied psychology at Victoria University in Wellington before joining the psychology faculty at Otago University. Here he befriended the young writer Janet Frame. Money completed his PHD at Harvard and then joined John Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The New Zealand psychologist and sexologist had a profound impact on the development of gender theory and gender identity studies in the 20th century. It was Money who coined the terms ‘gender identity’ to describe the internal experience of sexuality and ‘gender role’ for the social expectations of male and female roles. Money made the distinction between sex and gender, that is, the biological and social and psychological influences on an individual. He emphasised that gender roles were not necessarily tied to biology.
But he went further. As a renowned specialist in transsexuals and sex reassignment, in 1966 Money advised that a boy, whose penis had been damaged, should be castrated and brought up as a girl. He believed that with the right upbringing, a child could be successfully socialized into any gender role. This was groundbreaking at the time and influenced medical protocols around intersex infants for decades.
The castrated boy later rejected his female identity and committed suicide. Colleagues defended Money saying he acted on the basis of what was known about sexuality at the time but there are many who vilify him today. Some, like Linehan, call him a ‘predatory paedophile’. If you look further into Money’s experiments, it’s hard to disagree.
Fast forward 70 years and Money’s ideas have metastasized into a mind virus infecting many of the world’s children, leading them to believe they were born in the wrong body and that only drugs and surgery will set them free. This delusion has been aided and abetted by medical professionals, academics, the media and a rainbow parade of dubious NGOs.
In 2019 the gender mind virus received a major setback when detransitioner Keira Bell filed a case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust’s Gender Identity Service in the UK. A year later the High Court ruled that children under 16 were “ highly unlikely” to be able to give informed consent to puberty blockers.
Three New Zealand men have links to this case. The first is our current Minister of Mental Health Matt Doocey who worked at the NHS in Britain from the late ’90s until 2013. This included time at the Tavistock Clinic. Although Doocey did not work in the gender medicine division of Tavistock, his public statements reveal he is a firm believer in gender medicine.
For instance he has consistently supported gender affirming care, made false statements about the higher suicide risk faced by rainbow youth and in February 2022 he shared this personal reflection in parliament:
“I also stand here as someone who’s a proud father of two young children, a boy and a girl, and I do look forward to celebrating their sexual orientation, their gender identity that they will decide…”
In the meantime the nation waits for Doocey to protect minors from gender medicine – and waits and waits and waits.
The second man with links to Tavistock is Professor Michael Biggs. The former Wellingtonian likes to say he has followed the career path of John Money, since they both studied at Victoria University and, later, attended Harvard. He is only half joking when he says he is trying to remedy the damage done by Money. Biggs currently specialises in social movements and collective protest at Oxford University and in this capacity has examined the trans movement closely.
In 2020 Biggs was a key witness in the case against the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service. The clinic has since been dismantled and replaced with a restructured, evidence-informed system.
The third New Zealand connection to Tavistock and English gender medicine is UK barrister Jolyon Maugham. Maugham was born in London but raised in Wellington, by his mother and stepfather. He attended Wellington High School before moving to the UK at age 17. However Maugham retains his New Zealand nationality.
In 2017, he founded the Good Law Project (GLP) – a legal non-profit championing democratic accountability, public law, and, notably, gender-affirming rights. Gender ideologues have fancifully suggested his NZ upbringing has contributed to his sense of being an outsider and understanding marginalized experiences – such as those of trans individuals.
Maugham has led GLP’s efforts supporting children’s access to puberty blockers, particularly legal challenges following the Bell v Tavistock decision with mixed success.
He has publicly labelled LGB Alliance a “transphobic hate group” and has also come to the attention of famous author and women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling, who mocked Maugham’s strident tone on social media:
Jolyon, calm down. You’re getting testerical… As a top‑notch legal brain … I assumed … my lawyers would be keeping a close eye out for comments that stray into defamation.
The son of a novelist, Maugham is a colourful character. Perhaps the most memorable anecdote featuring the KC relates to his tweet on Boxing Day 2019:
Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?
The post was later deleted but not before it went viral. A few days later he posted a pic of himself wearing a silk kimono, standing barefoot in his garden with the caption: “Trying to get some zen back.”
So that’s it for our gender ex-pat luminaries and thought criminals in the United Kingdom and the United States. Unless, of course, you count Austrian Karl Popper, the renowned philosopher of science who, some would have you believe, is the author of the source code for the mess we are in.
Popper was the University of Canterbury’s philosophy lecturer from 1937 to 1945. During his time he wrote his best-known philosophical work, The open society and its enemies (1945), a work intended to protect freedom and rational inquiry.
However, ‘new right’ thinkers, like American theologian, editor and cultural critic RR Reno, argue that his ideology of openness evolved into a force that undermines the moral, spiritual and communal commitments necessary for a flourishing society. For more on this, it’s worth reading Reno’s Return of the Strong Gods.
For more on gender luminaries and criminals closer to home, read my next post.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
