"Dear Lee, thank you for standing up for women, when none of the women did."

The other evening in the land of ‘What the Heck is Going on Here?’ – i.e. the land called New Zealand in the old language, when people knew (mostly) what the heck was going on – TVNZ aired a programme called ‘Young Voters Debate’. There is a general election due to be held in this land on 14^th October, and these sorts of programmes start hitting our screens as the big day gets closer.

I’m guessing that, as per its name, this programme is geared towards the issues that young voters are deemed to be more interested in, but, full confession, I only watched part of the video below. There were no ‘crusties’ on this panel to answer the questions important to young voters, only the young and young-ish political party candidates made the cut, as would be expected.

Between 6.00 and 9.00 in the video the question was asked about men who identify as women being in women's spaces and sports. Four out of the five women on the panel said "wah, wah, wah - poor trans" in response to the question, with Green Party MP, Chloe Swarbrick, doing her usual thing of practically bleeding all over the floor about it, whilst Erica Stanford from the National Party said there was nothing to see here. Only the man, Lee Donoghue, from the NZ First Party stuck up for women. That prompted the moderator, Anna Harcourt, to ask - with a voice that, to say it as kindly as possible, would benefit from a voice coach - the stupidest question on the planet about checking genitals at the entrance to women’s and girls’ spaces to sort the women from the men. Lee told her that was a “ridiculous question” in a way that conveyed he had no idea it was supposed to be a big ‘gotcha’. So, what could I do after that, but write Lee a letter -

"Dear Lee, thank you for standing up for women in the recent ‘Young Voters Debate’.

How almost unbelievable it was you, the sole man, standing up for women. Except that right now, brutally, it’s not unbelievable. I realise that the opposition’s argument is that any man who identifies as a woman is one, but I and many, many others refute that words and feelings are all it takes to be a woman. A woman is an adult human female, and any attempted redefining of the word ‘woman’ is just a game of clever semantics for an ideological agenda. Sex is binary, but chromosomal variations do occur within that binary, and that can influence how we outwardly express ourselves. However, the binary remains.

I’d like to touch on a couple of topics which came up during the debate -

1) The demand for “evidence” that men who identify as women are a risk to women in women’s spaces. They pose that risk simply because they are in the group – i.e. men – who mostly do so. All police records as far back as they go will verify this, and because we seldom know who those men are before they commit an offence, we exclude all men of any stripe from all single-sex spaces for women and girls as a safeguard. This is the best good-purpose blanket rule to safeguard women and girls, and it has worked very well for us for a very long time. That’s not to say it has never been breached, but find me any rule that hasn’t, and I’ll buy you a beer 

It’s notable that no factual, hard statistical, or data-driven “evidence” of harm done to men who identify as women was required before they were allowed access to women’s spaces. The only evidence provided and accepted, seemingly without question, were their stories, or the results of self-selecting surveys. Platforms and forums were provided for these men and those who lobbied for them to tell their stories, and they were lapped up, although admittedly, the stories were expertly executed. However, nothing similar has been provided for women to tell our stories about how allowing men who identify as women into our spaces and sports is affecting us. Instead, we are vilified for wanting to tell these stories.

2) “Inspecting genitals” – omg, is there a more stupid argument presented for how we tell the difference between women and men? Unless someone’s been living in a box, we spend our entire lives from the moment we’re born absorbing clues and cues about our environment, and that includes the multiple differences between women and men. I would put money on it that none of the women who were in that debate with you needs to inspect the genitals of every person they interact with before they can know whether they’re a woman or man. We collate clues about people we encounter in a nanosecond, and get it right about which sex they are the vast, vast majority of time within that nanosecond. If we are wrong at first glance on the very rare occasion, it usually takes only seconds to realise the mistake. Yes, there are the even rarer occasions when a man has had enough surgery or other interventions to ‘pass’, but are we going to scrap the good-purpose blanket rule of excluding all men from women’s single-sex spaces, a rule which serves women so well, for a fraction of a percentage of men who manage to pass as women?

It is gut-wrenching to see so many women buying into the bill of goods we’ve been sold that somehow men who identify as women deserve entry into all the spaces and sports women lobbied long and hard to get, just because those men are a “marginalised minority”. What other men in marginalised minorities do we do that for? Unfortunately, in the respect of men who identify as women, we women have had our natural tendency for empathy to be royally played with a superb, and ongoing, piece of brilliantly crafted propaganda.

For the record, I agree that gender nonconforming people should have the ability to participate in public life free from discrimination and harm, and accommodations should be made to enable that. The pushback only comes, rightfully, when it is enabled for men who identify as women at the expense of women’s own rights and wellbeing.

Once again, thank you.

If unable to open on the ‘Watch on YouTube’ link above, go to:  YouTube, 1News - Highlights: Young Voters Debate/1News Election 2023 Recap.