Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Universities around the world have been identified as the breeding ground of the peculiar mind virus that currently afflicts us now. Call it woke, or call it progressive, if you prefer, this virus operates as a pseudo-religion, elevating perceived victims as sainted beings and accusing imagined perpetrators of all manner of sin.
While the spread of that virus appears to be in decline in many quarters (DEI being dismantled, trans identification in free fall, pronouns vanishing from bios), a cohort of the priestly class (lecturers) still preach this bankrupt ideology.
Last week I learned about an Auckland University sociology lecturer, Ciara Cremin, who is a man pretending to be a woman. Ciara, formerly known as Colin, is pictured above. Here is a NZ Herald’s story about him from July 2025.
Cremin has written several books. In 2021 The Future is Feminine: Capitalism and the Masculine Disorder hit the shelves. The cover alone hints at what femininity means to this man. It is typical of men who claim to be trans to conflate the hyper-sexualised presentation of women with femininity. We’ve all seen images of transwomen dressed in towering heels, fishnet tights and short, short, skirts. Basically, woman as whore.
Not that Cremin has anything positive to say about masculinity.
Look at how his publishers, Bloomsbury, describe The Future is Feminine:
Ciara Cremin courageously attacks the severe gender dysphoria of the androcentric capitalism that underpins our white supremacist society.
Also:
Masculinity, Cremin provocatively declares, is a generic disorder of a sick society that afflicts even the best of us. Neither a condition of being human nor even of male, it is a disorder, as she illustrates, of a capitalist society that depends and even thrives upon its very symptoms. From the perspective of a trans woman raised to be a man, the book maps the disorder and speculates on the possible means to overcome it.
The first two sentences in the book are:
Masculinity kills. Femininity saves lives.
In another essay he states “saying masculinity is toxic is like saying water is wet”.
Cremin describes masculinity, capitalism, and the nuclear family as systems of oppression and psychic “mutilation”.
But he is equally as damning of women who assert their sex-based rights.
TERFs are a death cult of the psychologically damaged. Typically white and middle class, they are women in need of a father to punish them …
(p 160) The Future is Feminine.
… Far from wanting to rid the world of the patriarch, they marshal every resource available in order to support it.
For daring to repudiate the demands of men like Cremin, sex realist women are cast as the “death cult of the psychologically damaged”. They are said to resent men who pretend to be women “for showing that change is possible”. Males-to-females like him “encounter joy in their femininity” in a way that apparently threatens the political identity of sex realist women.
ChatGPT assures me Cremin frames TERFs’ hostility in structural/psychoanalytic terms, not simply as “anger for anger’s sake”. Oh that’s alright then.
Other books by Cremin include: Man-made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing and Totalled: Salvaging the Future from the Wreckage of Capitalism.
His most recent book, published in October, is called The Spectral Woman: Transfemininity and the Abolition of Gender. In it is a chapter titled “Towards a Feminine Communism”. This suggests that Cremin’s project isn’t just theoretical. He envisages a political/social future.
As well as teaching a paper called Theories of Capitalism in Sociology at Auckland University, Cremin also teaches Gender 211 and 311 – Transgender and the Queering of Sexuality.
Sources tell me Cremin has an abrasive style and that since most of the students are young and impressionable, he encounters little resistance in class. It is to be hoped that those students who disagree with Cremin are marked on the quality of their arguments and not penalised for their heretical content. My understanding is that this is not always the case.
If that is so, then Cremin’s lectures are less of an exercise in testing new ideas and more of an indoctrination session into his world view, a world view utterly antithetical to masculinity, sex realist women, capitalism and the nuclear family.
Cremin came out as trans in 2015. He says of himself:
But in all honesty, neither gender or patriarchy were topics that I focused much on until coming out as a [trans] woman in 2015.
So that’s at least a decade teaching his hybrid Marxist-psychoanalytic-feminist theory. In that time Cremin must have faced hundreds of students. Just think – how many of them will have been infected with the woke mind virus courtesy of his instruction? How many will have gone on to employment in HR departments, social work, media, education or the public service, bringing their destructive views with them?
The woke mind virus may be on the back foot right now, but it pays to remember, that thanks to super spreaders like Cremin, there are likely to be plenty of sleeper cells out there. Woke could well rise up again, when its acolytes sense a more favourable climate.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
