The Christchurch City Council NZ opens up another women’s swim session to men if they say they’re women, but bar them if they don’t.

A man has laid a discrimination complaint with the Christchurch City Council about the women’s swim session in the new recreation centre in the suburb of Hornby. He claims the women’s swim session is in “breach of the rights of the male gender” and that “removing the male gender …. implied that males ….. were deemed to be creating an unsafe and indecent space” .¹

However, both the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and Human Rights Act allow segregation on the basis of sex for the right reasons - and if the Council had implemented a single-sex session, they would be in compliance with those Acts. It hasn’t done that, though. The women’s session includes men who say they’re women, so the session is not based on a person’s sex.

What the man might have had better luck doing is laying a complaint of discrimination against the Council due to their policy of not allowing men who don’t say they’re women into the women’s session, whilst allowing men who do say they are. What’s the difference between these men apart from the words they utter, and maybe (but rarely) some bodily modification? Like the Linwood Pool, the Council states that the women’s session at the Hornby pool welcomes “Transgender women, and people who identify as being a woman”. Only a man can ever be a ‘transgender’ woman or a person who identifies as being a woman, so are men who don’t identify as such being discriminated against here?

(Women's Sessions | Christchurch Recreation and Sport Centres (ccc.govt.nz))

I, and others, engaged with the Christchurch City Council extensively about their policy of allowing men who say they’re women into the women’s session at Linwood Pool after it was opened in October 2021, to no avail. Every reason or justification they gave for doing it was well refuted, but they remained obdurate about including certain men in the women’s session. To this day, they still trot out those same refuted reasons and justifications when questioned. One of those, as mentioned in the Stuff article¹, is that it aligns with the Ministry for Women policy, who say they say they represent all women “including transgender women, and we recognise the right of all people to self-identify”.

It has already been pointed out to the Christchurch City Council that what the Ministry for Women state on their website is not law. It’s just a policy position within the Ministry which can’t be imposed on anyone else. Plus, people do not have the “right” to self-identify in the manner of it being established in law, so the phrase “recognise the right” may be getting used in a way that potentially misinforms. I would also like to know if we can “self-identify” as anything or anyone, and the Ministry for Women will always “recognise” it? Even with badly written policy like this, the Christchurch City Council seems to think that the Ministry for Women is a credible source of information.

(As an aside, men would be allowed their own swim session, too, if enough of them wanted it. Community engagement showed an overwhelming request for women-only sessions, whilst very few men requested a men-only session.)

Gender ideology has permeated every organisation we rely on in New Zealand. Sports NZ are another public service determined to morph women into some sort of indistinct hybrid with men who say they’re women. It has egregious policies - which are still waiting to be dealt the promised death blow by the new(ish) coalition government - that allow men to say they’re women and compete in women’s sports. In the meantime, it carries on callously dumping women and girls into a melting pot with males who say they’re female. It even uses the term “self-identify as female” when advertising for board members for their Women in Play programme, so basically, blokes can apply, too. Whilst the words ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ are rich with understanding, meaning, relevance, and history, the term ‘self-identify as female’ only invokes images of blokes in dresses.

(This vacancy advert can only be viewed via login, but the ‘self-identified females’ term is also used on Sports NZ’s publicly accessible webpage.)

If women and girls get displaced for whatever reason from their spaces and sports by a bloke, where else do they go? A man who says he’s a woman still has the option of men’s spaces and sports, if he decides he’d rather be there than in the women’s. In some instances, it may just depend on how he feels on the day. Women and girls, on the other hand, only have the women’s and girls’ option on any day.

The mood is changing, though. There’s a growing desire to push back harder against these anti-women policies, and the cosy relationships our Councils, public service, organisations, and politicians have fostered with neo-rainbow lobby groups to perpetrate them. And could those same policies have a discriminatory element against men, too?

Ideas on how to harness this growing discontent are percolating. And that’s all I’ll say on that for now 😊

Before I go, however, a quick word about Christchurch’s neo-rainbow lobby group Qtopia, where the Christchurch City council is listed as a “proud partner”. The ‘Healthcare Lead’ at Qtopia is Jennifer Shields, a man who says he’s a woman, and who appears to have no qualifications in any field of health. Shields is also the current president of PATHA (Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare Aotearoa). Below is a picture of the founding members of PATHA taken in 2019, as shared on Fully Informed’s latest Substack publication. Shields is on the far right dressed in black.

¹Council defends women’s only swim sessions after equality complaint | Stuff