Are we there yet?

A very long road trip with Erica Stanford

Many of us are feeling like kids in the back seat on a very long road trip perpetually pleading, “Are we there yet?” while the promised changes to the RSE curriculum stay frustratingly out of sight.

The passengers on this convoluted journey are getting restless and incorrect information is spreading, including that the coalition promise is going to be broken and there will be no change to RSE.

Few people noticed when we passed two milestones in recent weeks, indicating that we are slowly getting closer to our destination.

The first was in mid-February, when Erica Stanford (Minister of Education) released a Cabinet Paper, dated 9 December 2024, that confirmed, “The current RSE guidelines will be removed in Term 1, 2025 and replaced with a draft framework/strand of RSE teaching and learning. This will be refined as part of work in 2025 to develop a knowledge-rich health and physical education learning area. Feedback on this content strand will be called for from the Ministry during the consultation window by both the education sector and the public.”

The second is the removal of the RSE Guide from the MOE Curriculum website.

Although we are getting closer to our destination, what we will find there is still very much up in the air. The Cabinet Paper doesn’t engender much confidence in a good outcome when we learn the “…draft curriculum content for these areas will be developed by curriculum writing groups led by the Ministry and quality assured by ERO, with national and international expert feedback and consultation with expert teachers practitioners and the sector.

Writers will specifically focus on ensuring the content is age-appropriate, responds to recommendations from the ERO report, is evidence-informed and clear about what to teach and when from Years 0 to 13.

Are the curriculum experts the same ones who wrote the previous disastrous RSE Guide?

How can ERO be trusted with quality assurance when its review of RSE unerringly used the language of gender ideology?

Does instructing the writers to focus on age-appropriateness and the ERO report mean that they too will ignore parents’ actual concerns and continue to present the minority belief in gender identity to children as an indisputable and universally accepted truth?

We will be no better off if the new curriculum continues to teach the belief that everyone has a gender identity separate from their sexed bodies. In fact, we may be worse off if the Minister adopts one of ERO’s recommendations that the new RSE curriculum becomes mandatory in all schools. Although parents will retain the right to withdraw their children, if they don’t know that the school is teaching children that humans have swappable body parts, how will they know they need to opt out?

The coalition agreement in November 2023 made a commitment to “Refocus the curriculum on academic achievement and not ideology, including the removal and replacement of the gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines.”

Now would be a good time to write to Winston Peters (w.peters@ ministers.govt.nz) to impress on him the importance of purging gender identity from the RSE and that nothing less is acceptable.

“Are we there yet?” Unfortunately not and, apart from an ETA of the end of Term One (April 11), we still have no idea how this very long road trip might end.

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Counting Ourselves is unreliable

“One in five trans and non-binary people threatened with physical violence” shouted the RNZ headline in a report about Counting Ourselves, the just-released 2022 follow up to the 2018 online survey of LGBTQI+ people.

This survey has repeated all the same mistakes as the one from 2018:

• The participants are self-selected meaning they can not be representative of the whole community.

• Leading questions and limited answer choices invalidate many of the responses.

• Definitions (eg what constitutes ‘violence’?) are not specified.

• There is a conflict of interest with the survey leaders who are transgender people, not impartial researchers.*

Even the researchers themselves admit that “our use of nonprobability sampling means that the generalizability of our results to the wider transgender population in Aotearoa/New Zealand and beyond should be interpreted with caution”. (2018 report.)

These many question marks about the quality of the Counting Ourselves survey mean that it is not a reliable source of data about the community or its needs but that won’t stop the media and trans activists from making the usual melodramatic claims.

“The data suggests we're now in an "emergency situation", Gender Minorities Aotearoa executive director Ahi Wi-Hongi says. Public consultation on puberty blockers, proposed new guidelines preventing men from encroaching into women’s sports, and the rewrite of the RSE curriculum are all framed as “targeting trans people”.

The report champions access to “gender affirming healthcare based on informed consent through the public health system”. No mention of an age limit to protect children. According to Josh McNally, a trans activist, “…my hope is really that people will acknowledge that trans kids know themselves. We need to trust in our rangatahi, they know themselves."

Why do we restrict alcohol, tattoos, hire purchase agreements, and many other things to over 18s if they know themselves so well?

Prepare yourselves for these dodgy “statistics” to be rolled out for years to come whenever trans ideology is questioned, as has happened with the previous Counting Ourselves survey results.

*Counting Ourselves is an anonymous health survey designed by and for trans and non-binary people, led by Dr Jaimie Veale, Principal Investigator and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Waikato. The first survey was carried out in 2018. The latest report is based on responses to the second survey in 2022 of 2631 trans and non-binary people.

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Drag for children drags on

Although Pride month has thankfully ended, drag performances for children will continue to be promoted until parents stop taking their children to these inappropriate events or government agencies and libraries stop funding them.

Bob McCoskrie of Family First has followed the money and you may be astonished to learn that Hugo Grrrl has received over $1.7 million since 2023 from the public purse to present “lessons about being your best self” to children.

In this schedule of more than 150 (!) Pride events in Auckland there are at least 20 events that are aimed directly at children.

The New Conservatives have launched a petition, asking for Drag Queen Story Times to be outlawed. You can sign the petition via this link.

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Lawyer’s letter creates a kerfuffle

Prominent lawyer, Stephen Franks (former ACT MP and member of the governing Council of the FSU) sent a letter to medical practitioners on behalf of Inflection Point, the group that held a summit about transgender ideology in Wellington in May last year. In response, Franks has received threats, calls for a picket outside his office, and at least one complaint to the Law Society.

The letter has not yet been released to the public, but here is what Franks had to say about it on X:

The letters from my firm that have generated the hysteria reported by @rnz_news set out legal implications in New Zealand of the UK Cass Report that resulted in prompt decisions by numerous overseas authorities, to stop or to restrict puberty blocker drug treatment for minors.

The letters were also informed by a recent New Zealand Ministry of Health evidence brief. We highlighted risks for health practitioners providing what is called ‘gender affirming care’ if they do not ensure they have an up to date understanding of the evidence on the balance between the benefit and the harm of such treatment.

As lawyers we take seriously our duties to: - Accept work in a field where we profess to be competent to practice (the ‘cab rank rule’); and - To not misinform or misdirect as to the legal basis for the statements we make on behalf of our clients. It would be unethical for us to withdraw from acting for a client due to threats or criticisms of their views by others. The hostile attention to this client service is peculiar.

The New Zealand Government has been consulting on exactly the issues raised by our correspondence. Having outlined the known risks and the poor information supporting previous claims of safety, it is considering restrictions of the kind our client advocates to reduce the risk of irreversible harms.

Our client asked us to research the liability that might accrue from the odd delay in changing practice in New Zealand. We were then asked to write to practitioners in the area because our client believes that some of them have their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the now well established absence of the normally required evidence of net benefit to justify the use of harmful drugs.

The hysterical criticism of this firm seems to confirm our client’s concerns. In our opinion Te Whatu Ora and/or the Health and Disability Commissioner and/or the Ministry of Health should have written exactly the kind of letter our client instructed us to write. It might have helped to reduce the risk of avoidable and irreversible harm to minors who believe they are gender-dysphoric, accumulating while the New Zealand government decides whether to follow the UK government lead. It might have also helped to reduce the liability risk to practitioners.

We watch with interest to see what happens next…

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March 12 - Detransition Awareness Day

This is a Genspect initiative. “Since its inception in 2021, Detrans Awareness Day has played a crucial role in raising international awareness about detransition. Thanks in large part to the courageous personal testimonies of detransitioners, important discussions around medical ethics, legal protections, and medical and cultural support are finally gaining momentum in the United States.”

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International News

For international news please read the excellent coverage on Bernard Lane’s substack Gender Clinic News. Recent posts include:

• Why the proposed puberty blocker trial in the UK is unethical

• Pushback against the puberty blocker reviews in Australia

• Argentina moves to prohibit gender medicalisation of minors.

To follow the latest updates on thelegislative challenges to President Trump’s executive orders go to: https://womensliberationfront.org/news/trumps-executive-orders-head-to-the-courts