Are men in frocks featuring in International Women's Day again this year?

The International Women's Day organisation thinks men who say they're women are women. Is it making itself obsolete through wokery?

Last year, International Women’s Day (IWD) wanted us to go around making heart shapes with our hands, and profiled men who say they’re women as part of the worldwide girl gang. This year, the hearts have turned into strong arms, and a quick trek through the website isn’t unearthing any men who say they’re women. Neither do ‘trans’ or ‘queer’ get a mention in any of the blurb that I could see, but a more comprehensive search than what I can be faffed doing may find those words lurking somewhere. Countries which have their own personalised IWD websites may feel freer about featuring befrocked men.

New Zealand doesn’t appear to have its own International Women’s Day 2025 website, but it gets a few mentions and space on other sites. Sites like UN Women Aotearoa NZ and the National Council of Women of New Zealand talk it up a bit, whilst also being organisations which fully endorse the fiction that men can be women just upon their say-so. Finding a women’s organisation that doesn’t is like trying to find hen’s teeth, which makes the Women’s Rights Party NZ a rare gem amongst all the imitations.

The first International Women's Day was celebrated in 1911, in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland. The United Nations started marking the event in 1975. New Zealand, the first self-governing country in the world where women won the right to vote can barely bother its arse to mark either occasion in any significant way. Money and sponsorship gets thrown at Pride Month in March, though, and men in frocks - or whatever - can double-dip between Pride and being lauded on International Women’s Day on the 8th March simply by saying they’re women.

With the increasing threat to women’s rights from trans ideology and other madmen around the world, some groups are trying to reinvigorate International Women’s Day for women - i.e. true women in both body and name, not men appropriating the word. A newly-formed coalition for women’s groups fighting against the erosion of women’s sex-based rights called United Women (X:@UNWomenRights), is calling for a show of action on March 8th wherever we are. Although a groan did escape my lips at the group’s mention of ‘colonialism’ in what seemed like the currently fashionable way of it being a dirty word, it’s still good to see women decisively rising up against against trans ideology.

The Women’s Rights Party is having a bit of a gig on International Women’s Day, too, in Auckland, if you happen to be there on Saturday 8th March. They’ll be launching a petition to make NZ women’s Suffrage Day a public holiday. If that seems like one too many public holidays for businesses to swallow, I can suggest one or two we could ditch to make room for it.

The women who fought for women to get the vote were heroines. Today, there are still many everyday heroines around fighting for women’s rights, but I can only think of one heroine in the whole of our government and public service doing that - NZ First MP Tanya Unkovich. That’s it - just one amongst the thousands of women who work in this field. Do correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t remember hearing any other woman in a position of authority or power here stand up for women’s sex-based rights, not even our Minister for Women, National MP Nicola Grigg. The Minister for women before her, Labour MP Jan Tinetti, was even worse, and basically assassinated women’s sex-based rights in front of us. All three of these women are bound to say something gung-ho about women on International Women’s Day, but two of them will be speaking with forked tongues.

Back in 2021, we didn’t even have Tanya Unkovich. The landscape was barren of even a whisper of a woman in a position of authority or power who would stand up for women’s sex-based rights. So, when I heard that the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey UK, Lisa Townsend, made a stand for single-sex spaces, I was that bloody excited to hear a woman with some clout somewhere had done something for women, I emailed her -

Despite saying a reply wasn’t necessary, I got one -

I look forward to the day when I can send a similar email to a heroine here in NZ just doing her job for women and girls, and taking no nonsense about it.