The continuing groan of 'queer' puffery in NZ's mainstream media.

Is this kind of puffery in our media on borrowed time, though?

I took one for the team, and watched ‘Queer Aotearoa [New Zealand]’. Well, more specifically, I watched episode four, which was about ‘poor trans’. But I know someone who said they watched all six episodes (they have my admiration), and found some snippets interesting.

Personally, I can’t drum up enough endurance to watch all the episodes, although I once might have. The behaviour of transactivists in recent years has soured anything that has a whiff of TQ+ about it. But, when I was alerted to how scenes from the mob violence in Auckland at the Let Women Speak rally in March 2023 were used to prop up the ‘poor trans’ narrative in episode four, Beyond the Binary: Trans Stories, I checked out that episode.

Needless to say, the entire episode was a puff-piece. I doubt that money and airtime would have been forthcoming to produce anything but that. Neither is the New Zealand mainstream media known for its desire to report the ugly side of how the TQ+ can behave towards women who object to men, in any guise, being allowed in our spaces and sports. I suspect something like the ‘she asked for it’ excuse is used as a reason to gloss over that behaviour. A faint glimmer of a breakthrough from that determinedly biased thinking was recently detected, though, in an article by Emily Simpson of 1News. I don’t want to get excited yet, but in that article, she actually asked terf journo, Yvonne van Dongen, for her opinion on Trump’s Executive Orders which reassert biological reality over gender ideology, instead of just filling the article with gripes from transactivists about those orders.

Anyway, getting back to episode four, it starts off with a brief scene of the mob violence at the Let Women Speak rally in Auckland in March 2023. Far from explaining this, though, the voice-over narrative was about ‘trans’ bullying reportedly being 300% higher (since the Let Women Speak rally?), with half of ‘trans’ students saying they’re afraid they’ll get bullied at school. No mention of how these figures were obtained, but if I was to take a punt, it would be in the usual shonky way most ‘trans’ data is collected.

The episode went onto ‘trans-wash’ history by claiming “the Stonewall riots in 1969 were a galvanising force in LGBT political activism”, and “members of the trans community were instrumental in the fight for gay liberation”. I’m pretty sure there was no T on the LGB back then, nor were ‘trans’ particularly present in the fight for gay liberation. It’s not the first time I’ve heard history being rewritten like this, and eventually it will be taken as truth, due to the dishonesty of those determined to put the T where it doesn’t belong.

The episode also featured some older film footage of NZ transvestites and transsexuals from the 1960’s to 1980’s, including the two favourites who are always trotted out, Carmen Rupe and Georgina Beyer. Both were lauded in the episode for their achievements, with Georgina Beyer getting credit for her part in decriminalising prostitution in 2003, after she became an MP. This gets touted as NZ leading the world, but aforementioned journo Yvonne van Dongen discovers it’s not really going all that well, as has the group Wahine Toa Rising.

The ‘trans’ interviewees were all nicely packaged and nicely spoken, with nary a nasty word crossing their lips. Not quite the reality experienced by many of us, but good optics for the uninitiated, or TQ+ devotees. One of the nicely made-up and dressed men being interviewed, who says he’s a woman, said how going into a public toilet now was fraught with anxiety for him. I expect he meant he no longer feels as free to walz on into female public toilets as he used to, irrespective of how any woman might feel who was also in there; and that as a man in a dress, he doesn’t like going into the men’s. This makes him not want to go out of his house, even though many buildings, especially newer ones, have at least one separate all-purpose unisex toilet. He didn’t seem to be aware that a self-imposed urinary leash, due to a preference of facilities, is not the same thing as the real urinary leash women once experienced.

No show about the TQ+ plus would be complete without the man highly instrumental in whipping up the worst mob violence against women in NZ’s history, Shaneel Lal. Sure enough, he gets trotted out, too, to give his opinion. Forgive me for not remembering what he said, and not wanting to go back to check. I did note, however, that he was somewhat more soberly dressed for this documentary, than his previous flamboyance. He’s not a stupid man, and perhaps he worked out very quickly that being rewarded with a job in the Labour Party for being a woman-hating prick, would get him even more rewards if he presented as a soberly dressed woman-hating prick.

So, all in all, the episode was nothing short of what we’d expect a mainstream media production about the TQ+ to be. However, the tide’s turning on this kind of one-sided dated dishonest puffery and misrepresentation, but I’m not sure if our mainstream media is capable of learning new tricks anytime soon. Or learning how to read the room and sense a changing vibe, like the journos and media hacks of old were attuned to, and it will continue to haemorrhage jobs. Granted, there’s more than one reason why mainstream media is struggling, but will TQ+ puff pieces survive without it, or have they had their heyday?