May 2024

Newsletter

700 signatories to our Open Letter

Thank you to everyone who signed our Open Letter which has now been sent to the Minister of Education as hard copy - extending to 11 pages of names.

Since the Open Letter was written, Minister Stanford has appeared on Q&A and confirmed again the government’s commitment to remove and rewrite the Relationship and Sexuality Education Guide. (Watch from 25.18 minutes.)

So we added a cover page to the Open Letter saying:

We agree with the Minister’s statement on Q&A that the Guide thwarts parental choice about sex education by recommending that RSE topics be embedded throughout the curriculum and we were heartened by her acknowledgement in the interview that some of the RSE content is not age appropriate.

As well as rewriting the Guide, we urge the Ministry of Education to sever its ties with InsideOUT and Gender Minorities Aotearoa (GMA). Both of these organisations provide advice to schools and individuals that is often not scientifically or legally accurate and is sometimes medically unsafe.

For example, on its website, GMA has a page advising teenage girls on how to bind their breasts “safely”. https://genderminorities.com/resources/transgender-health-directory/binders-2/binding-info/. Breast binding is a severe body dissociation disorder and, despite knowing it carries serious health risks, GMA displays a cavalier attitude towards it that will inevitably encourage more girls to adopt this dangerous fashion.  

The harmful practice of binding girls’ feet was widely condemned last century – where are the voices today condemning this new method of restricting and damaging girls’ bodies?  

Screenshot from GMA website May 2024

Minister Stanford, to prevent further harm to our children from gender beliefs, please prioritise removing the RSE Guide forthwith.  

Every day that the Guide stays in place is another day that children are being exposed to unscientific gender identity dogma and led down a path towards irreversible medicalisation.

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Grandparents Guarding Grandchildren 27 June

Parents or grandparents with concerns about Relationships and Sexuality Education in schools are invited by Parents Against Gender Education and Mana Wāhine Kōrero to come and add your dissent to the government imposing gender ideology on our children. Marg Curnow will speak at the event on behalf of Resist Gender Education.

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Meeting Tanya Unkovich

Tanya, a NZ First MP, is taking a particular interest in the effects of gender ideology on women and girls and children in schools. Two RGE members have discussed the issues with Tanya in Auckland and our spokesperson, Fern Hickson, recently met with her at Parliament, along with a mother who shared her horrific story of how trans ideology has affected her family. Tanya wants to hear more first hand accounts of what is happening in your school and community. Please share your experiences with Tanya via email: tanya.unkovich@parliament.govt.nz (Photo: Tanya and Fern)

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Fair Access to Bathrooms Bill

This bill is being introduced to Parliament by NZ First. It will require that all new non-domestic publicly accessible buildings provide separate, clearly demarcated, unisex and single sex bathrooms. It will also introduce a fine under the Summary Offences Act for anyone who uses a single-sex toilet and is not of the sex for which that toilet has been designated. “Every New Zealander is entitled to feel safe and have privacy in these public spaces, “ said Winston Peters in a statement.

Unisex school toilets are becoming common in NZ and we have anecdotal evidence that girls are ‘holding on’ all day and developing urinary tract infections, rather than use school toilets shared with boys.

As we have reported previously, MOE policy when refurbishing or building new school toilets is to make them all gender neutral. This means that each cubicle has full height walls and its own washbasin. However, although the MOE strongly recommends this style of toilet, it is not compulsory for them to be labelled as unisex, but many schools do not realise that.

The MOE guidelines say that schools can “allocate the use of toilets acknowledging gender balance, student age, and cultural considerations.” This means that toilet blocks can still be labelled as single sex as long as there is also an easily accessible unisex toilet.

In a parallel move, Kemi Badenoch, the UK Minister for Women and Equalities, has announced new regulations for single-sex toilets to become the default for non-domestic buildings, “ending the rise of so-called ‘gender-neutral’ mixed sex toilet spaces, which deny privacy and dignity to both men and women”.

Public support for single-sex spaces

Speak Up for Women commissioned a Curia poll in May that asked 1000 people:

Do you think that schools should ensure children have access to bathrooms and changing facilities that are categorised by biological sex?

A whopping 69% answered ‘Yes’.

Another startling revelation from the poll was that people in Wellington, where government policy is developed and implemented, are completely out of step with the rest of the country on this issue.

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FAQs answered by Dr Cass

The internet is awash with claims that the Cass Report is biased, unscientific, and ignored the views of transgender people. Frequently, it is clear that the critics have not read the report but are simply repeating unevidenced attempts to discredit this world-leading review. Dr Cass has responded here and in this Guardian article to the main criticisms.

A motion to implement the Cass Review in Scotland was debated in the Scottish Parliament on 8 May. Many excellent speeches are contained in this video of the debate. One MP, Murdo Fraser, said,

“We should not be permitting the mutilation of young bodies in the name of anti-science ideology. Those who committed those atrocities and those in the Parliament and elsewhere who stood by and let it happen - or worse still actively encouraged it - should not be forgiven.”

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New Guidance for UK Schools

The UK Government announced new draft guidelines for sex and gender education on 17 May. The updated guidance, which is open to consultation for nine weeks, makes clear schools "should not teach about the concept of gender identity", the government says. It said it was right to take a "cautious approach", adding teaching materials that "present contested views as fact - including the view that gender is a spectrum" should be avoided. The government is also strengthening rules to make it easier for parents to access teaching materials from schools, to see what their children are learning.

Helen Joyce of Sex Matters has commented about the upcoming snap election in the UK and how that might affect the momentum to rein in gender ideolgy in education:

“The consultation on the gender-questioning schools guidance has already closed, and surely at least the first analysis of the responses must be sitting in the Department for Education waiting for the next education secretary. No doubt the civil servants in one of the most captured departments in Whitehall will seek to lose it in a drawer somewhere, but this topic has engaged parents, and school leaders are desperate for something prescriptive and legally reliable. We just have to make sure it doesn’t disappear.

Sensible proposals for sex education – which includes materials on gender identity, and for which there are no national standards – are out for consultation too. There’s also a call for evidence under way asking for examples of official and quasi-official bodies getting the law on single-sex spaces wrong. All these things will keep running whatever happens, and although it’s tiresome that new ministers will have to be convinced of their importance, I think we have a decent shot at that…

I don’t know how it will shake out, but I do know the important ministries will be education and health, primarily, because this disaster has unfolded as a sort of relay race between the two, mediated by laws both real and de facto.”

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Unsilenced

A new organisation called Inflection Point organised a conference in Wellington on 18 May “for New Zelanders who want the Government to stop gender indoctrination and medicalisation of our children.” Attendees reported an invigorating afternoon with speakers as diverse as Jan Rivers, Ro Edge, Di Landy, Brian Tamaki and Bob McCoskrie from New Zealand, and Mia Hughes, Jennifer Bilek and Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull speaking via Zoom. All of the speeches are now online here.

In particular, we highly recommend the speeches of three of RGE’s supporters: Jan Rivers, Katherine Chua, and Ro Edge. Jan Rivers’ excellent speech is also on the Public Good website.

Bob McCoskrie from Family First gave a potted history of gender ideology in NZ schools that traced its origins back more than 11 years. No wonder we are fighting a rearguard action!

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Gender identity: the latest social contagion

In this YouTube video, Andrew Doyle, a UK journalist, describes historical examples of social contagion and draws the parallel with the current exponential growth of “girls identifying our of their femaleness either through claims they are trans or non-binary.”

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Two radio interviews

RGE’s spokesperson, Fern Hickson, has been interviewed this month by Leah Panapa on the Platform on 2 May (paywall) and Maree Buscke on Reality Check Radio on 29 May.