A devastating story of total public system failure

Why did no one want to talk about it?

This is a short piece as I would prefer you read the full article or head over to

Resist Gender Education

who have been supporting the family this story concerns. But I just had to make sure that as many people as possible learn about how the ideological rot in our public service resulted in the senseless death of a teenager. Everyone should feel sickness in the pit of their stomach and rage on behalf of her parents. This happened because of human stupidity and cowardice.

Total system failure resulted in teen’s death and no one wanted to talk about it.

You should have heard this story long before now, but the process of finding a journalist in New Zealand willing to write it proved arduous in the extreme. Once upon a time journos would have clamoured over each other to be the first to report a story like this. It would have been front page news.

Feminist Fern Hickson deserves kudos for the way she has tenaciously taken the story to journalist after journalist on behalf of the family. Finally, she found Ruth Hill who, despite working for Radio New Zealand which is one of the most ideologically compromised media platforms, was willing to tell the sorry tale. Of course, RNZ couldn’t help but be the latest in a long line of organisations to force the girl’s parents to play silly pronoun games. Read the article.

In January 2023, a 17-year-old girl died of starvation alone in emergency accommodation and wasn’t found for two days. When her distraught parents arrived to see her body a police officer scolded them for using her real name and female pronouns because she “identified as a boy”. This was the final insult to injury for parents who had fought New Zealand social services (government and NGOs) over their child for years.

Their daughter had both autism and anorexia. She had been receiving long term psychiatric care that was focused on keeping her alive. A few years before she died, the girl was taught about “gender diversity” at school and became “non-binary”. Soon she was identifying as a boy. Her parents, on the advice of her psychiatrist, resisted the new gender fixation. They were informed that it was a common manifestation in girls with autism and anorexia; that she would fixate for a while, but would grow out of it.

Her school had other ideas. Actually, teachers, deans, people working in the health system, Oranga Tamariki, Kāinga Ora, the Ministry of Social Development, and the parents of other students all thought they knew better. They all focused on her pronouns and demonised her parents as bigots. Eventually, she was alienated from her family to the point that she left home and moved in with a friend’s family, refusing contact with her devastated parents. The friend’s family eventually tired of her and she was placed in emergency housing.

Distracted by her gender identity, none of the public servants, service providers, nor meddling well-to-doers did anything as she wasted away to just 30 kilograms. She collapsed, could barely walk, and requested a hose so she could drink water from the tap without getting out of bed.

Her parents never gave up on their only child. They fought her school, the family who ‘took her in’, and every officious gatekeeper who prevented them from seeing their ill child. Not long before her short life ended, she was in contact with her mother and had said she was having second thoughts about the gender stuff. Her parents thought they were getting their daughter back. Instead they were to bury her.

For years, women have warned of this kind of thing. It is the very worst case of ‘we told you so’. A Government and social services system captured by gender ideology is compromised. Every service provider and government department that watched her die is complicit and there should be a full inquiry into what happened. This was total system failure; a cataclysmic disaster.

Shame on anyone who perpetuates this dangerous nonsense.

Read the report from Radio New Zealand.