Will we see a man-mermaid in women’s and girls’ swim sessions and changing rooms in NZ, too?
Nothing is off the cards for men who say they're women.
Who’d have thought we’d ever see the day when a man-mermaid would need to be told not to use the female changing room, because he’s a man, and slipping into a mermaid tail doesn’t make him a woman? I’ll tell you who - all the sex-realists in the world, who saw aberrant behaviour by men who say they’re women ramping up in public places as a result of sex self-ID.
The vast majority of the world knows that a man pretending to be a mermaid is acting out a fetish. Most of us don’t live in Queer Theory’s cloud cuckoo-land where the inhabitants would insist he’s just expressing his ’womanhood’. We live in the real world, where we absorb information about the world and the people in it on a continuous basis from the time we’re born. We clock dodgy men, because our minds haven’t been screwed up by an academic’s convoluted thesis which denies reality. Those who inhabit the real world know that a man pretending to be a mermaid has a very different motivation for doing so, than that which might motivate a woman or child. If he was doing merman stuff in male public spaces, I think the other men would still be keeping a watchful eye on him.
To my knowledge, New Zealand doesn’t yet have a man-mermaid swishing around in female spaces. Give it time, though, and one may surface here like he has in Sweden, because fetishes and men who say they’re women go hand in hand. Aggression often accompanies a fetish under the surface, too, ready to be brought and out brandished in the blink of a tantrum’s eye. The only people who don’t believe – or rather, pretend not to believe – that men with fetishes will use female spaces to act out their fetishes, given half the chance, are those who’ve put the ‘welcome’ sign out for those men, and now can’t go back on it.
A considerable number of town and city Councils, and private organisations, in NZ have done exactly this. They’re not interested in knowing how men who say they’re women, and swan around in female spaces, might negatively affect women and girls. If they do get some inconvenient feedback about men in female spaces, their response is to shut it down by citing policies they’ve created which allow it. To them, silence – even engineered silence - means there are no problems, whereas to women and girls, being silent when a man who says he’s a woman enters their space may be a strategy they employ for safety. They don’t have to be rocket scientists to deduce that a man who breaches the boundaries of decency in this manner might not be a man who’s safe for them to challenge, so they stay quiet and get out and away as fast as they can.
Gone are the days when, as much as possible, we pre-empted bad things happening to women and girls in female spaces, by having a blanket rule that kept ALL men out. Now, only a serious assault or gross act of perversion by a man who says he’s a woman in a female space is counted as sufficient reason to kick him out. But, with the policies Councils now have in place, it’s not certain that a man pretending to be a mermaid would count as sufficient reason, especially if he “genuinely identifies as female”, as the Selwyn District Council says. Notably, they don’t offer any enlightenment on how this is determined.
As much as we might wish the world was a fair and equal place, it’s not. Women and girls will always need some spaces which are female-only, and there is more than one reason for this. (Men may have reasons for male-only spaces, too, but men can speak for themselves about this.) Women and girls shouldn’t be forced to accommodate a man in female spaces just because he’s appropriated the word ‘woman’ for himself. Loosening boundaries in this way is not the social liberation of breaking gender norms it’s sold to be – that ‘sell’ is just women being scammed, again.
Today, Saturday 11 Oct, we had local body elections in NZ, and I’m pleased to say that the incumbent Mayor of Christchurch, Phil Mauger, was re-elected as Mayor. Phil Mauger may not give much of a rat’s arse about the Council’s policies which allow men who say they’re women in female spaces, but his main rival, Sara Templeton, has actually been a driving force in creating those policies. She’s on record as saying that “….transgender are some of the most vulnerable and victimised ….”¹ as a reason to not put obstacles in their way of accessing whichever spaces they desire. As far as men go, I don’t know when we have ever allowed any other group of men to have free and unfettered access to female spaces because they’re “vulnerable and victimised”.
So, whilst I don’t think Phil Mauger is a great mayor from the perspective of upholding our right to single-sex spaces, Sara Templeton would have been much worse with her undoubted cultivation of transactivists both inside and outside the Council. Men pretending to be mermaids would have been invited into female spaces in Council facilities under her Mayoralty, and told how stunning a brave they are.
¹ The councillor who opened up Christchurch’s female spaces to men is running for mayor.
I have seen ar least one male with his purple swimsuit (a women's one) stretched over his 'tennis ball' fake as boobs and with platters for hands and feet like paddles, teeny diamante earrings in his long lobes and blonde hair swept into a ponytail in the G Condon pool. I have more concerningly too seen another male in the women's general changing room for women when young girls have been in there by themselves. Walked one out with me. Sara is the kind of non- representative woman and zgreenie groupie who has emailed me her 'total support' for men in dresses reading to children behind closed library doors. I have heard her in committee supporting men and gender ideology without a qualm. Mauger now needs to get real. Women voted for him as the lesser of the 2 evils!
The authorities have been told again and again of the dangers posed to women and girls by opening up our changing rooms to whoever feels like using them. Under the policies of most councils (pushed by the Human Rights Commission), a man wearing a bikini or without changing his physical appearance in any way has access, simply by declaring himself ‘transgender’. In fact, those two scenarios have already happened in a pool and gym in Nelson in recent years. In both cases, the managers of the complexes were at a loss as to how to deal with them and gave preference to the ‘human rights’ of the males over the dignity and safety of women and girls. In the bikini-clad male’s case only the insistence of the women present got the man moved along (and he cried!) No-one is collecting the data on incidents like these, and then the authorities disingenuously claim there is no problem. Both of these incidents were reported to the council and to politicians, but the male-inclusive policies remain.