New Zealand’s Chief Science Advisor, who once stated that “sex isn’t binary”, is coming to the end of her three-year term.

Luckily, New Zealand’s new coalition government won’t be re-appointing the present Chief Science Advisor, Juliet Gerrard, who believes that sex isn’t binary, for another three years in the role, as she won’t be seeking another term. Unfortunately, though, it's likely she'll stay in the science field. There’s no replacement for her announced as of yet, but with ex-Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt, not re-appointed for another five-year term, there’s a faint glimmer of hope that gender-identity ideologists may not be as popular a choice for high-level Public Service roles as they were under the previous two governments.

Professor Dame Juliet Gerrard FRSNZ, who is currently in the role of Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, has held the position since 2018. The role has a three-year term attached to it, which has been renewed once for Ms Gerrard, and runs until 30^th June this year. The central focus of the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor is “advising the Prime Minister about how science can inform good decision making in Aotearoa New Zealand”.

That statement appears a little at odds with her tweet made in response to Speak Up for Women’s post on X (formerly Twitter) in March 2019 -

Yes, NZ’s Chief Science Advisor stated that sex isn’t binary, and referred us to a Wikipedia article on the intersex condition by Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist and science communicator in NZ. For the record, the intersex condition is not an in-between sex, a third sex, or evidence that sex isn’t binary, but a difference of sexual development (DSD). Despite the misnomer ‘intersex’ – not often medically used now – those who have this complex condition are still either genetically female or male. Our sex is defined by whether we produce big gametes (eggs = female) or small gametes (sperm = male).

Admittedly, I missed that initial tweet by Ms Gerrard, and the (then) Twitter-roasting she reportedly got for it. When I did become aware, I decided to email her and ask about it. More about that in a wee while.

Getting back to Ms Gerrard, when the Prime Minister at the time, Jacinda Ardern, reappointed her, she did the usual gush over Ms Gerrard’s abilities and accomplishments, finishing off by referring to her past role as Chair, Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Council. The Marsden Council is responsible for the Marsden Fund, which was established by the New Zealand Government in 1994. It distributes grants for research in both science and humanities. Of the three grants given in 2023 which had the word ‘gender’ in the description of the research to be undertaken, only one grant recipient appears to consider that sex and gender may be different. Who knows what the other two are actually researching when they refer to ‘gender’, but the Marsden Fund seems to be fine with this fuzziness.

The Marsden Fund is administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand, an independent national academy of sciences, which in 2021 got itself embroiled in a messy woke-motivated controversy kicked off by Auckland University epidemiologists Professor Shaun Hendy and the afore-mentioned Associate-Professor Siouxsie Wiles. It’s too long and messy to go into in this particular blog-piece, but some may remember the fiasco which was given the informal moniker of the ‘Listener Seven’. The story about it has been written here, for those who’d like to read about it. Suffice to say that at the time the Royal Society of NZ decided that blurring the lines of wokery and science was worth risking its reputation for. Its reputation didn’t come out of that particularly well. I don’t know if it has since had a change of thinking.

So, we can begin to see that the tweet about sex not being binary, which Ms Gerrard made in her capacity as Chief Science Advisor, was not an individual’s momentary aberration in isolation.

As far as I know, Ms Gerrard has never backtracked on that tweet, and she certainly never explained it to me when I emailed her 38 times between Nov 2020 and Dec 2021 asking her if she could do so. Have you guessed what a persistent bugger I can be? The reality is that I didn’t really know what else to do when she kept ignoring me. Should I just give up, as she clearly wanted – or persist in asking her for answers, as I wanted? I wasn’t rude, threatening, or abusive in my emails to her, although I admit that some of them got a bit snarky out of frustration at her continued ‘ghosting’ of me. In truth, I felt that she was the one being rude to me. I also phoned her three times and left messages, but never got a return phone call.

To put this in some context, a little while back I emailed our mayor on another matter, and got a reply from his office giving their answer to the issue I had raised, which finished with: “We believe your requests regarding this issue have been sufficiently addressed, and we will no longer be corresponding regarding this matter”¹. I acknowledged the email and that they had closed correspondence on the matter, but also advised that I considered it still open. I haven’t emailed the mayor back about it since then, and will only do so if something arises which casts a different or new light on it.

Why couldn’t Juliet Gerrard have done a similar thing, which is in all likelihood a standard Public Service procedure, instead of ignoring me? Could it be that ignoring emails which she considers a bit tricky is her standard modus operandi? And then when that fails to get the desired result, she does this –

With Ms Gerrard’s three-year term as Chief Science Advisor coming to its end in June this year, I am hoping that our new coalition government is already looking for a more science-sensible person for the position. Fingers crossed.

• ¹ The Christchurch City Council has policies which allow any man who says he’s a woman into women’s and girls’ spaces. They give easily dismantled reasons for this, but still refuse to budge on their stance. This stance is in the process of being exacerbated by a Draft Equity and Inclusion Policy which doesn’t have the word ‘sex’ in it, and thereby giving the Council a potential ‘out’ for not providing single-sex spaces, and only providing spaces based on one’s self-declared ‘gender’. I have composed an open letter to the Council about this, kindly hosted on the Women’s Rights Party NZ website, which is available for anyone to sign who is a current, or potential, resident or visitor to Christchurch NZ.

• Tell the Christchurch City Council to keep female-only services and facilities (womensrightsparty.nz)