Did you see the one about . . . ?

Sex lies and the census – Natasha Hamilton-Hart :

StatsNZ, the government’s official statistics agency, apparently thinks that humans can change sex. It tells us in its report on the new questions in the 2023 census that:

Sex is based on a person’s sex characteristics, such as their chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. While typically based upon the sex characteristics observed and recorded at birth or infancy, a person’s sex can change over the course of their lifetime and may differ from their sex recorded at birth.

The glaring error in this statement is of course the claim that a person’s sex can change. We all know humans cannot change sex. Our grandmothers knew it, and their grandmothers before them. I suspect the earliest humans knew this. A standard child development textbook will tell you that human children grasp the immutability of sex roughly by the time they reach primary school (page 535 of the eighth edition, if you are curious). If you are wondering whether ‘the science’ has changed, it has not. You don’t need to take my word for it. Here’s Professor Robert Winston, a specialist in human reproduction with an illustrious career: ‘I will say this categorically that you cannot change your sex.’

The other error by StatsNZ is to reduce sex to ‘sex characteristics.’ Not only is this circular, it opens the door to a misperception that chromosomes simply are sex: XX for female and XY for male. Taking this view would imply that people with nontypical chromosomes – XXX females for example, or XXY males – are some kind of ‘intersex’ or sex other than male or female. This is what StatsNZ gets close to implying, with its new question on ‘variations of sex characteristics.’ In fact, it is more accurate to say that, in humans, specific genes drive sex differentiation into one of two genetic developmental pathways that produce male or female reproductive systems. In particular, the presence of an SRY gene sets an embryo down a male developmental pathway. SRY stands for Sex-determining Region Y; this gene is almost always on the Y chromosome. So sex is a matter of what kind reproductive system an individual has.

It follows that people with nontypical chromosomes are all either male or female. A man with Klinefelter syndrome has XXY chromosomes. He is most definitely male. Similarly, a girl born with only one X chromosome has Turner syndrome. As Britain’s NHS notes, it is a female-only genetic disorder. Women with Turner syndrome will in almost all cases be infertile and most will need particular healthcare in order to live a healthy life. It is insulting and cruel, as well as inaccurate, to imply that people with such disorders or variations of sexual differentiation (often abbreviated as DSDs) are something other than male or female.

So, our government’s statistics agency is either lying to us or is inexcusably ignorant. Sure, most people probably get through life without knowing the details of DSDs or even the precise relationship between chromosomes and sex. But we all know that humans cannot change sex. And a government agency that has gone to great lengths to include questions on sex, gender identity and DSDs in its census questionnaire ­– but makes such elementary mistakes – is either grossly incompetent or worse.

Do the lies matter? Lies and damned statistics

I am going to call obvious false claims ‘lies’, even though probably nobody at StatsNZ consciously intends to deceive. Humans find ways to manage the cognitive dissonance that occurs when there is gap between what they know to be true and what they are actually saying – we can predict they will sustain illusions in order to avoid the negative feelings that come with consciously lying. But right now I am not so interested in how the officials at StatsNZ live with themselves, but rather with what happens when authorities make obviously false statements.

A lying government statistics agency is a problem. It matters, first, for the accuracy and usefulness of the statistics collected and disseminated. StatsNZ is introducing these new census questions as part of its ‘gender first’ reporting policy. This policy means that data on ‘males’ and ‘females’ will ordinarily be based on a person’s subjective gender identity rather than his or her sex. This is more than an irritation for people who don’t have a gender identity – who don’t particularly feel an affinity for gender stereotypes and regard themselves simply as being either male or female, regardless of dress, habits or feelings. I don’t have a gender identity any more than I have a species identity. I am human, regardless of how I think or feel about it.

The real problem, however, is not that people like me are irritated. The real problem is the loss of integrity in the census data and all the other official sources of data that either use census data or adopt the StatsNZ guidance on how to gather data. That includes data on male-female income gaps, educational achievement and any other type of data you can think of where there is a legitimate reason to report results by sex. As argued by Professor Alice Sullivan, a leading social scientist, conflating sex and gender in official statistics is a bad thing to do. Neglecting to gather sex-specific data, already a problem, is particularly harmful to women.

To be sure, the absolute numbers of those reporting a gender that differs from their sex will be small. In the UK’s most recent census, only 0.2% of the those responding to the gender identity question reported a ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman’ identity, and a minuscule 0.06% identified as non-binary. But in areas where sex ratios are hugely imbalanced – for example, male-female differences in the prison population or patterns of sexual offending – even small numbers will substantially distort official figures. Even when the numbers are small, deliberately introducing a policy that defines basic categories in misleading ways is still wrong.

StatsNZ might claim that, by asking about sex and gender, it is not conflating the two. But it is. First, by giving an inaccurate and misleading definition of sex, as something that can change over a person’s lifetime. Second, a gender-by-default reporting policy means that data relating to sex will end up mixed in the reported data on gender. Questions answered on basis of sex are going to be reported, in most cases, as referring to gender. StatsNZ will do this through matching census data with administrative data and by imputation, although they are still officially consulting on exactly how they will do this.

When the state lies: the erosion of trust

We lose trust in agencies that lie. We know they are lying and we also know that they must, at some level of consciousness, know they are lying. And the only possible reason for this insistence on lying is a decision to put political expedience or ideology ahead of the truth.

When public agencies chose to lie in this way, they invite something worse than ridicule: profound mistrust. Once a public authority is known to lie out of expedience or pressures for conformity, all of its claims potentially come under suspicion. Why believe a government agency or a public scientist about climate records, if they can’t even get sex in humans right? Why believe the health ministry about the safety of vaccines, if the same agency claims that men can get pregnant?

Once a public authority is known to lie out of expedience or pressures for conformity, all of its claims potentially come under suspicion.

Truth matters. The world’s climate either is or is not changing as a result of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Either vaccines save lives or they don’t. The sum of our knowledge on both of these things remains incomplete, of course, and will be added to and revised over time. And no doubt there are many complexities: room for caveats and nuances. But unless you are willing to abandon the idea of truth entirely, not all claims about climate change and vaccines can be equally true.

And for those who care about truth, trust matters. I think there is overwhelming evidence to conclude that the climate is changing as a result of human activity, but what I believe on this issue is entirely dependent on my trust in public authorities and the credibility of scientists. I am not any kind of atmospheric scientist, so I rely on these people to tell the truth. Just as I rely on the work of research scientists and statisticians in order to form a view on the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

Credible, trustworthy sources of information and analysis are vital for democracy and good public policy.

Credible, trustworthy sources of information and analysis are vital for democracy and good public policy. We’ve seen much handwringing about misinformation and disinformation, about how some people are disastrously ready to believe conspiracy theories and junk science. About how false and misleading information can be put to work to undermine attempts to solve real problems, from public health to climate change. About how extreme and deliberate lies can threaten democratic institutions.

There is no easy fix for these problems. Censoring misinformation is unlikely to work and will often in fact undermine trust, or even play into the hands of those responsible for deliberate disinformation.

Public agencies could at least avoid making things worse. They could stop lying.

We don’t like what you say or how you say it – Theodore Dalrymple:

Dr. Michael Joyner, an exercise physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, has been admonished by the clinic in part for having suggested in public that testosterone gives transgender women a lasting and unfair advantage when they compete in sports against ordinary women.

He has been threatened with dismissal if he doesn’t desist from making such remarks in public: He’s henceforth only to say what the “communications” department of the clinic permits him to say.

A few years ago, Joyner’s suggestion would have been regarded as so banal that it would have been regarded as not worth making. It would have been as if an astrophysicist had suggested that the world went round the sun. But we live in strange times: Obvious truths have become dangerous to those who utter them. If the truth doesn’t accord with “our values,” as the Mayo Clinic puts it, so much the worse for truth. . . 

Then, came the threat: “Failure to comply with the expectations outlined above or any additional validated complaints from any staff, including, but not limited to, the issues noted above, or any form of retaliation will result in termination of employment.”

This is the language of the true apparatchik who, in other times, and circumstances, would have risen high in the hierarchy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. What Mantilla meant was: We don’t like what you say or how you say it. From now on, say only what we permit you to say. If you disobey, we will sack you.

One of the “validated complaints” to which Mantilla refers seems to have come from the LGBT “community”—that is to say, some member of it who uses the taking of offense as a justification for suppressing the right to free speech. An LGBT “advocate” told a Rochester, Minnesota, television channel that Joyner’s language was “at best insensitive, at worst transphobic.”

The truth of a statement is a defense against an accusation of libel, but not, apparently, against an accusation of causing offense. The latter, of course, is in the mind of the offended: I am offended if I say I am, and I am the sole judge in my own case. Therefore, either all speech that could offend someone—which is to say all speech beyond good morning and goodnight—ought to be suppressed, or alternatively, some people, but not others, have the right to suppress the speech of those who offend them.

What, then, of equality under the law?

About 30 years ago, I wrote an article that offended a well-organized pressure group. This pressure group wrote an angry letter to the CEO of the hospital in which I was working (in Britain’s fundamentally socialist health care system, be it remembered), calling for my dismissal.

The executive wrote back that he was sorry that what I had written upset them, but it was a free country, and I could write what I liked.

This was an answer with no ifs and buts. It quite clearly terminated the correspondence and indicated that there was no point in continuing it. To do the complainants justice, they took the hint, and no more was heard of them. The CEO (who was of an age to remember the war against one of the worst dictatorships in history) didn’t go into the question of whether what I wrote was right or wrong. As far as he was concerned, I had the right to my opinion and to express it in public, and that was the end of the matter.

This was only 30 years ago. How the world has changed since then! I doubt that there’s a CEO in any hospital in the world now who would write with such clarity and concision in defense of freedom of opinion. A chief executive would more likely obfuscate, snivel, euphemize, soft-soap, grovel, dissemble, and otherwise mislead, rather than come straight out with it, as my CEO of the time did. . . 

Anyone who has read anything about the culture of denunciation that existed in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or Vichy France will recognize the atmosphere that Mantilla, consciously or not, seems to want to create or to serve at the Mayo Clinic. Mere tittle-tattle can now be the ruination of a person’s career.

Of course, Mantilla isn’t alone, far from it: Attachment to freedom of speech is very loose or inexistent in many institutions nowadays, strangely enough in institutions of the highly educated, in which one might have expected attachment to freedom to be the strongest.

But the granting of freedom to those with whom we disagree doesn’t come naturally: It requires self-control, for the inclination to suppress the opinion of others exists within most of us. It’s this inclination that must itself be suppressed if freedom is to survive, and unfortunately, it’s the well-educated who can, and now do, best rationalize arguments for not suppressing their own inclination to censor and suppress.

Schools need a reality check – Stephanie Davies-Arai :

A recorded conversation between a teacher and two pupils at a school in Rye has caused quite a stir in the national media after being posted on Twitter this week. The girls were called “despicable” for believing there are only two sexes and for refusing to believe that a girl is really a cat. The 13 year-olds were reprimanded for “questioning the child’s identity”.

Although it’s not clear whether there actually was a cat-identified girl in that school — the administration is denying it — a subsequent investigation by The Telegraph did reveal examples of children in schools identifying as “furries”, including one pupil who meows in answer to teachers’ questions rather than responding in English. In one school, pupils are allowed to flout uniform rules by wearing cat ears in order to express their “true self”.

We should not be surprised. It is alarming that teachers don’t seem to know how to deal with this issue when it arises, but the reasons are obvious. When identity politics is embedded in schools, how can you affirm one childhood “identity” but not another? When personal identity overrides reality for one characteristic (sex) how can it not override reality in another (species)? . . .

Denial of physical reality has been going on in schools for some time now. Once we disrupt reality for children, anything goes. How can we expect children to confidently distinguish between feelings and reality once they are told by teachers that a girl in their class is now a boy?

Schools have been led to believe “affirmation” is the only legitimate way to respond to the boy who identifies as a girl. However, “gender affirmation” just means “sex denial”. Calling a boy a girl is not “affirming his gender identity” but denying his biological sex. Whatever activists may claim, the definition of the word “girl” is not “a subjective identity”, but “a young female human being”. . .

The move away from objective reality and into the world of subjective identity is reflected in the ever expanding acronym that began with “LGB” and has since morphed into “LGBTQ+” and more. . .

Where gender identity ideology erases the distinction between the sexes, the Queer Theory on which it is based is about destabilising reality and disrupting all boundaries, including between adult and child. This is why we have seen the spread of drag queen story time and age-inappropriate Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) resources in schools, including adult fetish, kink and BDSM material. It is why we have external RSE providers whose aim is to “smash cis-heteronormativity” and “queer the primary classroom”.

It is the job of every other child in the school to socially transition a classmate

Adult men dressed in “human-pup” fetish gear have been a fixture at Pride parades for a good few years now (and have been photographed encouraging little children to join in their “play”), yet primary schools are falling over themselves to celebrate Pride Month with seemingly no idea what it has come to represent. Certainly it is not gay rights.

This is the world of Furry Fandom, one branch of the ever-expanding TQ+ “community” that children in schools are now identifying into. It’s the perfect marriage between adult male fetish and innocent childhood passion, the perfect boundary-breaker between adult and child. As happened when “transgender” expanded into non-binary gender identities, we can expect animal identities to spread through schools.

As is the case with “gender identity”, identifying as an animal could be an adolescent mask to cover up underlying anxieties, including not wanting to grow up. In both cases, it is the magic word “identity” that stymies teachers, who have been trained to believe they must validate a child’s identity above all. In her interim report on the Tavistock gender clinic, Dr Hilary Cass warned of “diagnostic overshadowing” where underlying problems are missed or ignored when clinicians rush to affirm a child’s identity. The same thing is happening in schools.

Teachers also have the words “Diversity and Inclusion” ringing in their ears whenever they are called on to respond to a child’s identity expression. The holy trio of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) has been elevated to such an extent in schools that it has effectively become a replacement for the Equality Act. No wonder teachers are afraid to do anything other than celebrate any new “diversity” in the classroom, when heaven forbid they fail to include it.

Leaked Department for Education (DfE) forthcoming draft trans guidance suggests that schools will still be able to socially transition children in cases where the parent agrees. This spectacularly misses the point. First, you might as well just hand all schools over to activist parents. Second, a child does not socially transition themselves, or use their own “preferred pronouns”. It is the job of every other child in the school to socially transition a classmate.

Hilary Cass called social transition an active intervention that could have significant effects on a child’s psychological development. It is not an appropriate task for children to actively intervene in the psychological treatment of another child, and no individual parent or school has the right to demand it. Likewise a doctor who recommends social transition for a child (as many “gender doctors” will) has no authority to proscribe the behaviour of children who are not his patients.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether the school is telling children that there is one boy in the school who is a girl or there are twenty; it is the denial of reality that children are learning. We are seeing the results of this destabilisation of reality for this generation in various manifestations, of which “furries” is only the most recent and most sensational. The long-term psychological harms we don’t yet know.

The DfE has one decision to make. Should schools teach children (through the RSE curriculum or by transitioning a child) that subjective identity is real and objective reality is false? If the answer is yes, we can expect many more confused children who can’t distinguish between feelings and reality, with many more different genders, nationalities and species proliferating in schools.

Why Pride lost the public – Bridget Phetasy :

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women. 

This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.

Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why? . . 

“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”

Glenn Greenwald largely agrees: “What destroyed the culture war consensus was their cynical and self-interested decision to transform the LGBT cause into one that no longer focused on the autonomy of adult Americans to live freely — which most people support — but instead to demand the right to influence and indoctrinate other people’s children.”

“They are calling them ‘trans kids’ and medicalizing them at an early age. Lying about puberty blockers. Lying about young girls getting irreversible surgery and so on,” says trans man Buck Angel.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages, and with bipartisan support it seemed there was a consensus on this one culture war issue, as well as broad support for the legal rights of trans adults to be free from discrimination. The war was largely won. But rather than shutting up shop or refocusing their efforts on parts of the world where gay and lesbian people faced serious discrimination, activists and NGOs moved onto the transgender issue. . . 

An average person will likely refer to this shift as “woke” and wonder how “the trans stuff” is suddenly everywhere, all at once. Parents are baffled when three out of four of their twelve-year-old daughter’s friend group “identify” as boys or, even more confusingly, nonbinary. People started putting pronouns in their social media bios, on their work résumés and in their email signatures. Biological men are competing in women’s sports and being placed in women’s prisons. In medical magazines and birthing classes, women are suddenly referred to by dehumanizing terms such as “birthing persons” and “uterus havers.”

“It’s like a new enforced public holiday thing and people smell a rat,” says Douglas Murray. “The wiser people realize that something weird is being smuggled in. This isn’t just like, ‘don’t beat up your gay neighbor.’ It’s like ‘there is no such thing as gender.’ ‘There is no such thing as sex.’”

We’ve arrived here thanks to a confluence of forces. Perpetual victimhood pushed by activist groups that need a reason to exist and continue collecting money. The corporatization of Pride. The hijacking of the movement by gender ideology.

“You can’t dress toddlers up in extreme political propaganda while lecturing the parents on committing child abuse for not transitioning their kids and expect everyone to keep quiet,” trans writer Chad Felix Greene tells me. . . 

“What changed is that LGBT activist groups could not afford to obtain victory,” Greenwald says. “When activist groups win, their reason for existing, and their large budgets and salaries, dry up. They always have to push debates into whatever places Americans resist. They also have to be losing, have a claim to victimhood, a reason to assert that they are righting the bigotry of Americans.”

“It’s so tragic because we’ve reached this moment when gay people have finally won mainstream acceptance for the first time in, like, 2,000 years of history,” Kirchick said. “It’s OK to be gay pretty much everywhere in America — and there are obviously pockets where it’s still a problem, I’m not gonna deny that — but majorities of Republicans support gay marriage. I’ve seen it in my own life as a thirty-nine-year-old gay man: it’s a lot easier to be gay now than it was six years ago. And just when we’ve reached this moment, these activists have decided, in our name as gay people, to just piss off America and to make them think that we are a threat to their children.” . . 

At the heart of the problem is the fact that LGBT was never the package deal that most people consider it to be. “LGBT people don’t exist,” says Sullivan. “We’re very different from each other.”

Generally speaking, it’s “the Ts and the Qs” that insist it’s all or nothing. Trans activists demand acquiescence to all their demands no matter how insane and pseudo-scientific, push to allow men in women’s shelters and allow kids to be put on puberty hormones or you’re committing genocide. People are are increasingly saying, “OK — it’s nothing then.”

“I think gays and women in general are bearing the brunt of the gender ideology nonsense,” Murray said. “And it has itself piggybacked like some kind of parasitic entity onto gay rights.”

“Gender identity ideology is essentially anti-gay,” said Doyle. “Gay rights were secured through the recognition that a minority of people are instinctively orientated towards members of their own sex. Gender identity ideology seeks to break down the very notion of biological sex and claim that it is unimportant.”

Underneath the rainbow facade are illiberal forces such as “queer theory” that have been eroding the classically liberal foundation of the original civil rights movement that won gay and trans folks the rights they have now. We’ve gone from “love is love” to trans women insisting if a lesbian doesn’t want to suck their lady dick, they’re a fascist. 

If you’re confused, that’s the point; confusion and contradiction are features, not bugs. In order to understand how this happened, and why, you need specialized knowledge. The average person can’t explain exactly what’s going on, because it’s nonsensical, you can only intuit it; but call it out and you’re dubbed a bigot — and so you retreat, keeping your head down while the gender borg marches on. . . 

“It was once ‘live-and-let-live’ said Sullivan, “Now it’s ‘embrace the ideology — or else.’”

Herein lies the problem with Pride. You can no longer opt out of the ideology. The trans activism changed everything. It is coercive. It is everywhere. Big Tech acts as an enforcer, in conjunction with the state, policing language, pronouns, exacting punishments for refusing to repeat the mantras “trans women are women” and “gender-affirming care is reproductive freedom.”

“I know many gay activists from yesteryear who are coming out of retirement to address this new anti-gay movement which has usurped Pride,” said Doyle. “It doesn’t help that all criticism of Pride is interpreted as homophobic or transphobic. These are important conversations. Like most culture-war issues, we need to stop thinking of this in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. These things are irrelevant. There are left-wing gay people and right-wing gay people — and all of them are harmed by Pride in its current form.” . . 

Yet the decoupling has begun and it seems to be the only way to navigate our way out of this moment without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. #LGBwithouttheTQ and the #LGB have been trending on Twitter almost every day in June. Even if people don’t understand the forces at work, I think most Americans are smart enough to make the distinction between their gay loved ones and friends and some of the more insane gender stuff.

Like most things, this requires nuance. “You have to say, ‘we respect the rights of adults to undergo a gender transition,’” says Kirchick. “And ‘we want full equality and non-discrimination for transgender people in society, but there are real live debates about at what age it’s appropriate to administer these sorts of medical treatment to kids.’”

“Keep biological sex as a central characteristic in the law and culture,” Sullivan says. “Gender can be added, but can’t replace.”

“I think many LGBT people see this mess but are scared to lose friends and community if they speak up,” said Angel. “But it’s our duty as LGBT members to call this out. To show the world that these people are not a representation of us.”

The witch trials of Davina McCall – Brendan O’Neill :

It was more often than not ‘loud and opinionated women’ who were targeted by witchfinders, wrote John Putnam Demos, the great Yale historian of America’s 17th-century meltdown over witches. And so it is today. Nothing riles the right-thinking mob of our own era more than a woman with an opinion, especially if it’s an opinion that runs dangerously counter to their own. Exhibit A: the flapping hysteria that followed Davina McCall’s mild, polite expression of a point of view at the weekend.

Ms McCall, TV host and menopause-awareness campaigner, caused Twitter to suffer a fit of the vapours not by telling an off-colour joke or posting an obscene image or engaging in ‘hate speech’, but by putting up an 11-word review of a podcast. Seriously. The transsexual adult-film actor Buck Angel tweeted a link to The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, a pod series hosted by the Westboro Baptist escapee turned voice of reason, Megan Phelps-Roper. And McCall chimed in. ‘This really is a very interesting and balanced podcast x highly recommend’, she said. Ready the torches, dust down the witch’s scold – a woman has expressed an unsanctioned thought.

For the speechcrime of describing a podcast as ‘balanced’, McCall was denounced as a TERF. ‘Christ, she’s one of them’, cried a thousand men who think they’re women. The witches of 17th-century New England were accused of ‘entertaining Satan’, said Putnam Demos; McCall’s offence is to entertain Joanne Rowling, the great she-devil of the woke era, the morally fallen woman about whom no favourable opinion may be expressed. The poor women of Salem were supposedly seen consorting with the devil. Davina made the moral error of consorting with Rowling, of failing to damn her as an unspeakable bigot in the fashion of the digital mob. . . 

You do wonder what goes through the minds of the Gen Z hacks who write this crap. One minute you’re at journalism school learning about the Pentagon Papers, the next you’re urgently filing copy because a woman called a podcast ‘balanced’.

Those ‘anti-trans pundits’ are the usual suspects, the kind of women who stalk the fever dreams of the alphabet bros at sites like Pink News. Kellie-Jay Keen, for instance, aka Posie Parker, who kindly tweeted in response to Ms McCall: ‘Do not back down… we’ll support you.’ First an unsanctioned opinion, now an unsanctioned act of solidarity? Is there no end to the brazenness of these errant women? The aim of the cynical lumping together of McCall’s intellectual curiosity with other people’s supposed ‘anti-trans’ activism was as clear as it was sinister – to signal to McCall that if she ever again expresses a positive thought about Ms Rowling, she will be unpersoned as thoroughly as Keen and other ‘loud and opinionated women’ have been. Davina has been put on notice. The guillotine of cancellation dangles precariously over her. Silence, witch.

Note the typically Orwellian abuse of language. ‘Anti-trans’, they say, about women who are actually ‘pro-women’. The rebranding of women’s rights campaigning as anti-trans agitation, and feminism as hate speech, and belief in biology as bigotry, is one of the grimmest achievements of the linguistic manipulators of the trans lobby. It creates a situation where anyone who says ‘I think women should have their own spaces’ can be instantly denounced as a destroyer of identities, eraser of souls. Where even saying a podcast is ‘balanced’ can become a suspect utterance, leading to a written warning from the self-styled guardians of correct-think. . . 

What’s going on here? Maybe ‘transwomen’ have so thoroughly imbibed the sexist, surface-driven idea of what a woman is that they think they have to behave like dainty, fainting wallflowers to prove their ‘womanhood’. ‘See how weak I am – told you I was a lady!’ There is a delicious irony in the fact that men who masquerade as women are wailing over an opinion they don’t like, while real women will just calmly read McCall’s tweet and think to themselves: ‘Interesting. I’ll have a listen to that pod.’ It’s almost as if the trans set’s caricature of womanhood is just that: a caricature. Fellas, no amount of Victorian-style hankie-sniffing will disguise the fact that you have more testosterone than sense.

Here’s what you couldn’t make up: a woman expresses interest in a podcast about the witch trials of JK Rowling, and then she herself is threatened with a witch trial. The demonisation of Ms McCall only proves she is right to be curious about the maltreatment of women who raise questions about aspects of the trans ideology. Maybe there’ll be a pod series in the future called ‘The Witch Trials of Davina McCall’. I hope it’s balanced.

Where are our universities heading ? – David Lillis, John Raine, Peter Schwerdtfeger :

A perfect storm is hitting our university sector right now. Current social-justice political activism is an aggravating factor in the present extreme financial difficulties our universities are experiencing. They will have welcomed the announcement on 27th June by the Minister of Education to inject $128 million into the tertiary education sector, but this is just a drop of water on a hot stone. A full review of the tertiary education sector funding model is long overdue. The current situation raises a long-term risk to the operational health and international reputation of our universities. This risk has in turn been intensified by the very slow post-Covid restart to international student business. What needs to be done to restore the sector to full health?

The USA Kalven Report of 1967 [1] noted that the university’s mission is the:  “discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge”, and that it has: “…..a great and unique role to play in fostering the development of social and political values in a society”. However, the Report emphasises the vital need for neutrality. “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic”.

The first of four fundamental principles in the 1988 European Bologna Accord on the role of universities [2] reaffirms: “The university is an autonomous institution at the heart of societies differently organised because of geography and historical heritage; it produces, examines, appraises, and hands down culture by research and teaching. To meet the need of the world around it, its research and teaching must be morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power.”

Unfortunately, New Zealand universities, while dependent on Government for funding, are losing sight of this need for intellectual independence of the institution itself from all political authority. 

Misplaced Social Justice Activism . . 

Social justice activism is potentially damaging to the New Zealand university system and society as a whole (see the recent article by Peter Winsley [3]). University students must, of course, be free to study and debate social justice issues, but it is the place of the State, the courts, and charities to deliver social justice, not the university itself. Universities should be places of open enquiry in the quest for evidence-based truth and of open debate on matters of controversy, but not institutions where subjective experience or an ideological view is presented as an unarguable truth and becomes indoctrination.

While the tertiary education sector should be supporting equity and diversity initiatives, for example, by bringing matauranga Māori into taught specialist programmes, either alone or where it complements other knowledge, universities now appear to be competing to be the most Te Tiriti-led, and without a clear definition of what such a position actually means. At the risk of being marginalised, academics are now also pressured not to criticise the adoption of Te Ao Māori (Māori language, respect and acknowledgement of Māori customs and protocols, and embracing the Māori story and identity).

We must also bring more Māori and Pasifika through our universities, and more ultimately into academic positions, although recent work by Lillis [4] has demonstrated that allegations of systemic bias and racism in university appointments and promotions are untrue and that minority groups (Māori and Pasifika) are employed in roughly similar percentages as predicted by doctoral completions.

Lillis [5] has also questioned whether it is wise expenditure of taxpayers’ money for universities to promote or mandate widespread use of Māori language when it is not used outside New Zealand and is spoken fluently by only 3% of New Zealanders. Moreover, the language cannot be easily adapted to many areas in the sciences.

Te Tiriti-led changes, along with wider social justice activism and identity politics, are leading to our universities to become politicised and losing their standing as trusted homes and protectors of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and impartial and objective discourse. These ideals are critical for international teaching and research credibility in a modern university, and social justice objectives must not dilute academic merit as the key criterion of student learning and research success.

A Decline in our International Standing?

In recent world rankings, New Zealand universities have all been in the top 500. It will be impossible to maintain this status in a climate where an ethnocentric or social justice activist culture has given rise to a narrower, inward focus. Under such a system our graduates would become less employable internationally. International students, particularly from our largest markets, China and India, would look elsewhere to find politically neutral universities with a broad curriculum unaffected by the adoption of a local indigenous cultural character, or a distinct political stance on gender and identity issues.

A further consequence of reduced international student interest in New Zealand would be a consequential loss to our research and high-technology industry sectors. International PhD students make up the majority of PhDs in science and engineering in several of our universities, and their loss for well over two years due to the Covid-19 border closure has meant a reduction in capability flowing to short or long-term employment in New Zealand, and a reduction in new intellectual property from research and technology transfer into start-up businesses.

Our universities have long enjoyed strong international research reputations but can ill afford to adopt a cultural position that reduces the breadth of their international appeal and, ultimately, their credibility. International research partners will look askance at changes that move New Zealand away from a key focus on international research collaboration, particularly in areas such as science, where Government ministries are promoting parity of matauranga Māori with modern world science; a move that is already well under way in our early childhood, primary and secondary education. An international group, including Schwerdtfeger [6], have documented ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology in science internationally, and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. Many academics are uncomfortable with the direction that is now being taken but are afraid to speak out for fear of loss of promotion prospects, disciplinary action, being labelled racist, or even finding their names on one of the current redundancy lists.

The Costs of Social Justice Compliance and a Falling Funding Base

Cultural reshaping of New Zealand universities will exacerbate current financial pressures through costs of additional staff appointed to dedicated roles, and courses that may not pay their way but meet a compliance goal. Universities have been funded partly through student fees since 1990, and since then have operated under increasing financial pressure as increases in Government funding have fallen around 40% below the cumulative CPI increase. Much student fee income has gone into greatly expanded central services such as marketing, communications, business and community outreach, student learning support and pastoral care, and equity and diversity staffing. Government control over student fee increases have also meant that these fees, despite being onerous on the students, have not kept pace with inflation. This problem has partly been the driver behind the pursuit of international fee-paying enrolments.

This situation is compounded by the much larger percentage of Government expenditure on tertiary education going into student support (44%), rather than university operations, in New Zealand, compared with the OECD average of 17% (dated figures, but likely still valid). In 2012, academic salaries were about 20% behind Australia, and employer superannuation contributions are far higher in Australia. It is hard to get most recent figures, but the situation will not have improved since then. Overall, the financial pressures are now sufficient to seriously compromise the ability of our universities to deliver a broad range of high-quality teaching and research programmes, and to attract top academic staff from overseas.

Universities are major contributors to their regional GDP, for example 2.4% in Auckland and 6.3% in Otago. Apart from the graduate capability launched into public and private sector employment each year, the wider economic benefits universities bring are vital for New Zealand. With just under 183,000 students in 2021 (14% international; 36% postgraduate), the university system is a large industry with a sector spend of $4.2Bn in 2019, and has grown to depend heavily on international students to meet both operating costs and the TEC annual 3% surplus target. It is no surprise that with domestic enrolments down in 2023, and international enrolments still painfully rebuilding, New Zealand’s eight universities are facing staff cuts in order to remain viable.

International Students – an Economic Imperative

In early 2020, there was a complete shutdown of all the country’s $1.5Bn ($5Bn if wider economic benefits are included) international student business, except for on-line enrolments and students already in New Zealand. The country has been slow to rebuild international enrolments towards the 19% of total enrolments figure in 2019, and was not fully open until late 2022. Government had no interest in permitting Covid-19 quarantine in student hostels 2020 – 2021, and was inattentive to possibilities offered by the creation of dedicated student quarantine facilities. The situation has been made worse by the loss of capability in Immigration New Zealand, which became a major bottleneck in processing student visas to enable us to compete more effectively with others ahead in the market such as the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia, all who opened up much more quickly and incentivised their international student operations post-Covid.

International enrolments are essential for the financial viability, cultural enrichment, and international connectedness of our universities, for business and professional connections built by international graduates, for our research efforts, and for the wider economy. These enrolments are now picking up again, but we must ensure they are a robust part of university business in the future.

Recommendations for Refocusing and Vitalising our Universities.

How do we turn all of this around? Possible actions are:

Incentivise freedom of speech and political neutrality. It is not the remit or responsibility of the university to be the kind and conscionable face of the State, or of any political party. For that we have the justice system and Government agencies. Government does not own our universities but, of course, is a major funder. It could influence internal policy by strong encouragement of freedom of speech, and by rewarding an absence of social justice politics driving programmes and staff behaviours. This could occur through, for example, targeted funding around best practice in the neutral role of “critic and conscience of society” and/or international teaching and research relevance. While social justice issues should be widely debated, a university’s operating culture should not be driven by social justice political agendas.

Carry out an internationally benchmarked review of university funding and reset base student funding levels, with a higher proportion of government funding supporting institutional operations. The level of student fees for the various programme categories will also have to be reviewed. Conversely, we would ideally deliver fees-free degree education, but if this is not possible, then access to university education could be ensured for students of limited means by funding targeted, need-based scholarships. Internally, universities should refocus a greater proportion of expenditure on core teaching and research.

Re-focus the Performance Based Research Fund back from its recently increased social justice focus to a renewed emphasis on research excellence and relevance.

Reboot Immigration New Zealand to ensure that ample, properly trained capability is present to deliver a speedy and effective international student visa service. Finance Education New Zealand and universities for an intensive and extended marketing campaign in key overseas source countries for international enrolments.

Generate an agreement between the eight universities around commitment to maintaining international standing. This initiative would require statements around adhering to the liberal epistemology in science, resisting moves to give equivalence in science studies to indigenous or minority “ways of knowing”, and removing unnecessary restrictions to teaching and research, thus ensuring international connectedness in research, and respect for multiple viewpoints while holding to a politically neutral position on all subjects.

Conclusions

New Zealand must not aspire to being an inward-looking Pacific ethnostate, a direction that seems to have been fostered by the present Government. It is vital that, for their future international credibility, our universities, on a viable financial footing, return to being completely apolitical and resist the changes that are being wrought by social justice activism. University decisions and actions in relation to teaching, research and outreach should be based on merit and not on identity.

The health, and international engagement and reputation, of our university sector are critical to the functioning of our society and economy. Universities must build a renewed focus on broad, non-politically aligned programme offerings, science teaching and research, reflecting the best of current international knowledge, and freedom of speech, protected so that opposing philosophical views are debated but proponents of a counterview are not cancelled.

In this article we have addressed only three issues. Several other factors are also critical to the future of our universities, including maintaining curriculum relevance and high academic standards, the presence of private sector tertiary education organisations, international on-line degree offerings, the increase in local on-line delivery of programmes, and related course assessment issues and the growing presence of artificial intelligence as research and writing tool. All of these actions require agile and forward-looking universities, free from the damaging diversion of radical post-modern social justice activism.