"Helen Joyce - a visitor from Terf Island" said the headline from the one and only mainstream media article about her visit to NZ.

NZ's mainstream media still largely avoids writing anything with a whiff of sex realism about it.

On the second-to-last day of her speaking tour in New Zealand, Helen Joyce – Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters UK, but touring Australia and NZ independently – was interviewed by a mainstream media journo. By then, Helen had been interviewed 13 times during the two weeks she was in NZ by reputable alternative media and podcasters. The aforementioned interview conducted by mainstream media journo, Philip Matthews - a senior journo at The Press which is owned by Stuff - was published close to a week after she left the country.

From what I understand, it’s more normal to publish interviews with noteworthy visitors while they’re still in the country, and while she or he is still a ‘hot’ topic. Also, if there are tickets available, readers or listeners who mightn’t have been aware of the visitor’s presence beforehand, get the chance to go along to hear what they have to say in full.

It could be that an article about Helen Joyce, as the author of ‘Trans: the new battle for women’s rights’ (the subtitle was previously promoted as ‘when ideology meets reality’) was too hot for notoriously pro-trans Stuff to handle while she remained here. An audit of Stuff’s pro-trans articles versus sex-realist/gender critical articles for the four years between June 2020 and June 2024, done by Fern Hickson of Resist Gender Education, unearthed something that won’t shock any of us very much.

During that four-year period, Stuff published 91 pro-trans pieces; 13 with some attempt at neutrality; and only 2 which raised questions about gender beliefs.¹ As I said, none of us will be shocked much at this blatant bias, especially when one considers the mainstream media’s meltdown as a whole over Kellie-Jay Keen’s visit in 2023, with 158 (at a superficial count) hit pieces in just seven days.

To give Philip Matthews’ his due, whatever his motivations, he was the only mainstream media journo who had the bollox to interview Helen. However, there’s little to celebrate over and above that, as the article has the same pro-trans ‘flavour’ about it that Philip demonstrates on social media, albeit a little less aggressively than there.

In my opinion, although the headline for the article, Helen Joyce – a visitor from ‘Terf island’, was provocative, as headlines can be, the article itself started off in not too bad a vein. I was even thinking that it sounded fairly reasonable, coming from Philip. Then it went downhill.

I made a post on X with a small summary of what I thought was wrong with it, which Philip came in and vigorously denied and defended. Not unexpected.

Just so you know, I’ve already been told I shouldn’t have used the word ‘segway’, but used ‘segue’ instead. I won’t try and explain why I used ‘segway’, but suffice to say it’s a gone-burger from future use in this manner.

However, Fern Hickson comes to the fore again by writing a much more comprehensive critique of Philip’s article on the Resist Gender Education Substack. Among the points she lists, number 3 says -

3. Matthews quotes the Qtopia [Christchurch’s transactivist lobby group] activist Jennifer Shields as dismissive of Joyce’s views because she “has no qualifications relating to gender diversity or medicine” but fails to report that Shields also has no medical qualifications. Shields is the president of PATHA (the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa) but that is an advocacy group, not a medical association. PATHA endorses the “Standards of Care” from its parent organisation, WPATH, which have been internationally discredited for including a chapter that asserts being a eunuch is a valid ‘gender identity’ that should be medically affirmed. Another relevant fact that Matthews forgot to mention is that Shields is transgender - a man who claims to be a woman.

Added to that, I would opine that surely a person such as Helen Joyce, who has a PhD in mathematics, would be eminently capable of comprehensively researching other subjects. I have no idea how Shields compares with Helen’s level of competence, but his main claims to fame that I can see are to endorse puberty blockers for gender distressed kids; and in being a man who says he’s a woman, and who pushes for any man who says the same to be allowed in female spaces. I have no time for the ‘poor trans’ rhetoric, as what other group of men have we ever allowed into female spaces because they have a sad story? Of the two, I know who considers women’s and children’s safety, dignity, health, and wellbeing more, and it ain’t the bloke.

Read the rest of Fern’s excellent critique here –

Stuff breaks its silence with bias, hypocrisy and misinformation

I believe that Philip Matthews is going to write a response to that. This should be interesting.

Fern also had a short interview on The Platform about her rebuttal to Philip’s article –

Fern Hickson - Media Bias On Trans/Gender Reporting

Helen Joyce will eventually do a write-up of her time and impressions whilst visiting Australia and New Zealand, but one thing she’s already said about New Zealand is that she’s impressed with the thriving alternative media here, and the quality of it. In her view, it’s better than what the UK and Ireland have.