Let’s travel back in time to the year 2000. Let's tell feminists and everyone else what’s happening now, 2026, in terms of the rights of women and girls and a few related things. Let’s not give them any context. Let’s not tell them how we got here, just where we’ve arrived.
So, it’s Aotearoa in 2026 and…
In many public spaces, workplaces and schools, girls and women are forced to share toilets, changing rooms and shower facilities with males. Complaints are deemed immoral and may lead to social ostracisation.
There are policy moves to remove all sex-segregated toilets and bathrooms despite known statistics about the increased risk of violence to girls and women in shared spaces.
Violent males can be placed in female prisons.
There are marches in Wellington streets demanding physically healthy kids have on demand access to growth-stunting drugs.
Breaking the healthy endocrine systems of males and females is funded through public healthcare.
Socially progressive people, ones who hate diet culture and worry about pressures on young women to conform to beauty standards, celebrate and donate to young women who hate their breasts and are raising money to chop them off.
Penis amputation is celebrated as authenticity.
The words women, girl, and mother have become taboo.
Family Planning Association, some government departments and some public health information no longer use sex-based language to describe male or female anatomy, pregnancy, puberty or other physical experiences.
Boys and men are lauded as heroes when they compete and win in female sports.
Women’s refuges and rape crisis centres accept males.
Women’s centres and events include males.
Women and girls can not advertise female-only events without getting harassed.
Legacy gay and lesbian groups block the participation of those who claim to be exclusively same-sex attracted.
When trying to meet to discuss the dismantling of their rights women are denied public meeting spaces.
Discussions about the erosion of female rights are subject to arguments about the definitions of the words woman and girl.
Those raising concerns about any of this are called bigots, fascists, far right or Nazis.
This is a veritable shit show. Many of the most prominent gender activists in New Zealand would never have accepted these consequences up-front. If they heard, back then that this was coming, they’d be rioting.
These inglorious ends were never used to justify the means. But now, as the end game crashes down around us, the means are used to justify the ends. The means, in this case, are a mind-boiling, one dimensional interpretation of the concepts of inclusion and kindness. It is of little importance to activists that women’s and girls’ rights have been sacrificed because, along the way, the activists were inclusive and kind, they were on the right side of history. But inclusion and kindness morphed into insatiably hungry gods, jealous and angry, demanding undivided loyalty.
The progressive, once feminist, left-wing activists who came to support gender ideology, have been caught in an intellectual trap. Gender ideology seemed so right, so new, so nuanced, so revolutionary, so liberating.
As it has become clear what was going to happen—to women and girls, to children, to children’s bodies, to lesbians and gays, to open discussion, to reason— the activists can not or will not find their way back. They can’t retract. They’re too far gone. They were so sure. All that has gone wrong, all of us, are collateral damage. The show must go on.
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