Open Letter to Minister for Women Nicola Grigg

Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill

I sent the following letter to Minister for Women Nicola Grigg. If you would like to send your own letter or forward mine to her as well, you can reach her on N.Grigg@ministers.govt.nz

---

Dear Honourable Nicola Grigg,

I listened carefully to your speech on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, and I came away profoundly disappointed. Not because I expected unquestioning support for every part of the Bill as currently drafted, but because as Minister for Women you appeared more concerned with signalling your discomfort with the legislation than seriously engaging with the underlying issue it attempts to address. Women are increasingly being forced to deny obvious biological reality in public life, and your contribution was bereft of leadership and appeared to be self-conscious political distancing.

Women are living through a strange and regressive resurgence of misogyny. It looks different to the kinds of discrimination and prejudice that our mothers and grandmothers experienced as it is cloaked in the language of progress and inclusion.

For decades, feminism fought to free women from restrictive stereotypes. We challenged the idea that womanhood was reducible to lipstick, softness, fragility, submissiveness, prettiness, motherhood, or sexual availability. We argued, correctly, that women are full human beings with enormously varied personalities, ambitions, beliefs, talents, flaws, and experiences. Some women are feminine, but some are more masculine in presentation and personality. Some are mothers and some are not. Some are heterosexual, some are lesbians, and some are a bit of both. Nurturing, aggressive, timid, loud, serious, silly, creative, clinical. We can be everything and anything. None of these things determine whether we are women because womanhood itself is not a performance or aesthetic.

Yet under modern gender ideology, we are watching stereotypes reassembled and aggressively reinforced under the banner of liberation and inclusion.

Womanhood is increasingly conceptualised not as a biological reality but as a costume. A collection of signifiers like long hair, dresses., makeup, vocal affectations, fragility, submission, and hyper-femininity. These stereotypes are then treated as sufficient for entry into womanhood itself. It is difficult to overstate how insulting this is. Women are not a mood board assembled from sexist clichés. We are not an identity aesthetic constructed in the minds of men. And we are definitely not a fetish category. And yet, women like me who object to this reduction of our sex into a kind of performative theatre are treated as reactionary and hateful.

I think it is important to speak honestly and with nuance about the various groups that have been collapsed together under the umbrella of gender ideology. There are undoubtedly a small number of men who sincerely prefer to live in ways culturally associated with femininity. I do not believe such people deserve persecution, exclusion, or mistreatment. Liberal societies should allow adults broad freedom to organise their lives as they choose. But acknowledging that freedom does not require us to pretend they are female, nor does it erase the reasons sex-based boundaries exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, there is also another category of men that public discourse increasingly refuses to discuss honestly at all. Historically, society understood that some men derived sexual gratification from feminisation, humiliation, cross-dressing, or what is now commonly referred to as “sissification”. These men were understood as distinct from homosexual men (in fact, most are heterosexual) or gender-nonconforming males generallyand the collapse of all these categories into a single protected political identity has made honest public conversation about the unique dynamic of these sexually-motivated men almost impossible. Women are now expected to suppress discomfort, override instinct, and abandon boundaries in order to avoid accusations of cruelty.

But women should not be expected to reduce ourselves and the complex, wonderful, terrible, painful, vulnerable, and profound realities of being female to male fantasy.

Nor should women be expected to ignore the reality that sex-based spaces exist for a reason. The overwhelming majority of violent and sexual crime is committed by men. That does not mean every man is dangerous, but societies routinely organise institutions, safeguarding, and risk management around observable statistical realities. Prisons, changing rooms, refuges, hospital wards, and sports categories did not emerge arbitrarily. They emerged because biological sex matters materially in relation to privacy, safety, vulnerability, and physicality.

Women are constantly accused of irrationality for recognising patterns of risk that institutions themselves actually acknowledge behind closed doors. Publicly, we are told that biological sex is irrelevant, that safeguarding concerns are exaggerated, and that discussing statistical overrepresentation constitutes prejudice. Yet when correctional systems and criminologists conduct their own assessments, they continue to recognise sex-based behavioural patterns because they have no practical choice but to do so.

A recent Correctional Service of Canada research brief examining “gender-diverse” (male) offenders with sex offence histories found that these offenders had criminal histories very similar to offenders in men’s institutions and very different to women’s institutions. “Gender-diverse offenders” with sex offence histories were significantly more likely than female offenders to be classified maximum security at admission, more likely to have high static risk, more likely to have high dynamic need, and more likely to have low reintegration potential.

The figures may make some uncomfortable but they are reality and they are stark. Eighty-two percent of “gender-diverse offenders” with sex offence histories were assessed as high static risk offenders compared with 54% of female offenders and 76% of male offenders. Sixty-four percent were assessed as having low reintegration potential compared with 36% of women and 54% of men. These are not activist talking points nor am I intending to demonise every man who identifies as trans. They are simply risk assessments produced by a correctional system tasked with dealing with real world consequences. This is no different than when we quote how much more likely a man is to commit family violence than a woman is.

The UK evidence points in the same direction. Women’s organisation Fair Play For Women’s analysis of prison inspection reports and Ministry of Justice data found that at least 41% of known trans-identifying male prisoners in England and Wales were convicted sex offenders. The organisation acknowledged the limitations of incomplete prison data, but the conclusion remains that trans-identifying male offenders overwhelmingly exhibit male-pattern criminality rather than female-pattern criminality. And safeguarding policy is not built on pretending categories do not matter. It is built around risk assessment, probabilities, and patterns.

Women understand this instinctively because we have lived with the consequences and threat of male violence our entire lives. I focus on prison statistics for this reason. While I am concerned with the entire gamut of issues that emerge in this space, it was concern for women being trapped in prisons with violent males that brought me to this issue. Women in our prisons are uniquely vulnerable in that they have overwhelmingly experienced violence, sexual violence, head trauma, and mental ill health. They also don’t have a lot of people keen to stick up for them.

I could make this an even longer letter and get into the detail of other aspects of this wide-ranging issue as well, but instead I will encourage you to please engage with and listen to the following women (and others).

• Rowena Edge from Save Our Sport Australasia

• Jan Rivers and Genspect

• Marg Curnow and Hilary Oxley from Lesbian Action for Visibility in Aotearoa (LAVA)

• Suzanne Levy from Speak Up For Women

• Mana Wāhine Kōrero

The reality surrounding this issue is uncomfortable and often ugly. Talking about overrepresentation in negative statistics is never pleasant. But elected officials are not granted the privilege of governing in order to avoid difficult conversations. You are elected to confront reality honestly and to balance competing rights fairly. Too often women are told our boundaries are hateful, our instincts are irrational, and our objections are evidence of moral failure. Boundaries and reality are not hate, and recognising sex differences is not extremism. We all do it everyday unconsciously.

Part of the reason public trust is collapsing so rapidly around gender ideology is because the institutional apparatus underpinning it has been exposed as far less rigorous than the public was led to believe. For years, politicians, journalists, medical associations, and activists insisted that “the science is settled” and that only extremists questioned the emerging model of gender medicine. But the collapse in credibility surrounding WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) has fundamentally changed that landscape.

The Cass Review in the United Kingdom concluded that the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine was remarkably weak, while subsequent revelations exposed deeply political behaviour within WPATH itself. Internal communications and legal disclosures showed an organisation consulting activist lawyers, suppressing unfavourable evidence reviews, and allowing ideological pressure to shape supposedly evidence-based standards of care. What many ordinary people instinctively knew, that activist ideology had raced ahead of evidence and caution, increasingly appears to have been true.

Institutions spent years portraying dissent as ignorance or hatred rather than engaging honestly with uncertainty and risk. As that credibility collapses internationally, countries across Europe and North America are reassessing youth gender medicine, legal frameworks, and safeguarding standards. New Zealand does not need to wait another decade before admitting the obvious. We can recognise now that a society cannot build coherent laws or medical systems on the denial of biological reality. The world is already moving on this. It would be great if we could not be the ones living in the past for once.

Just across the Tasman, the Giggle v Tickle ruling this week has become a genuine political and cultural flashpoint. The Federal Court of Australia upheld a ruling against Sall Grover, founder of the female-only app Giggle for Girls, after she excluded a biological male from the platform. Women across Australia (and the world) watched a court effectively declare that a woman creating a female-only space could be punished for recognising a man as male. The backlash has been enormous because ordinary people instinctively understand how bonkers this is. Centre-right Australian politicians, including the Leader of the Opposition, are now openly calling for legal definitions of biological sex to be inserted into discrimination law following the ruling.

Everyone deserves rights protections and people should be free to live peacefully without harassment or discrimination. But we have drifted so far from the logical and well-intentioned human rights frameworks that emerged from the post-war twentieth century that we now treat objective reality itself as negotiable. It is not a human right for a male to literally become female any more than it is a human right for a 46 year old to claim he is 65 and entitled to a pension. Liberal societies function because freedom exists alongside boundaries, categories, and shared understandings of reality. The state cannot operate coherently if laws become subordinate to subjective identity claims.

Just as an aside, I loathe the constant invocation of “rainbow New Zealanders” as though homosexual and bisexual people uniformly support gender ideology. We do not. As a gay woman, I deeply resent politicians and activists speaking on my behalf without consent and lumping me in with people who have nothing in common with me.

Many lesbians and gay men are profoundly uncomfortable with what is being done in our name. After all, homosexual people understand the reality of biological sex acutely. Our sexual orientation is rooted in it; we are attracted to the same sex. Gender ideology activists, many of whom are not even gay themselves, attack lesbians and gay men for refusing attraction to opposite-sex individuals who stereotypically present as the same sex. That is homophobia, no matter how fashionable the rhetoric surrounding it sounds.

I also find the term “rainbow New Zealanders” infantilising and politically manipulative. We are not a decorative ideological coalition. We are individual human beings with vastly different beliefs and interests. Some of us even vote for the centre-right!

I want to acknowledge the political courage shown by Jenny Marcroft and New Zealand First in bringing this Bill forward. They have been steadfast in their advocacy for women’s rights. I also thought Karen Chhour delivered one of the strongest speeches in the debate. She was compassionate, grounded, and willing to engage honestly with reality rather than slogans.

Your speech, unfortunately, stood in stark contrast to that. Which is disappointing, because I had understood that you grasped these issues more clearly than your contribution suggested. I understood that you supported removing degrading language such as “pregnant people” from health communications. I understood that you recognised biological sex matters and that there are circumstances where the differences between men and women are significant and unavoidable. As a relatively new mother, I imagine you understand this viscerally.

Women should not be expected to diminish ourselves or surrender the language and boundaries that describe our experiences in order to accommodate activist demands or male feelings. If anyone should understand that it should be the Minister for Women.

I encourage you to look beyond Wellington’s political and media class. Forget the beltway and the press mob. Ordinary New Zealanders know what a woman is. They know what a man is. They do not want males in women’s prisons, changing rooms, refuges, or sports competitions. They are not hateful. A large chunk of them voted for you.

Most people want everyone treated fairly and free from violence or harassment. But they also understand instinctively that rights must be balanced and that societies cannot function coherently if objective reality becomes subordinate to ideology. The state must operate logically. It is the responsibility of elected leaders like yourself not to be swayed by activist trends, emotional coercion, and the pressure from whichever group threatens to harm themselves.

I hope sincerely that during the select committee process you reconsider your posture toward this issue. As Minister for Women, you are in a position to help improve this Bill rather than bide your time until you can vote against it. The very least you can do is engage in good faith.

Women need our elected leaders to be brave. So be brave or step aside so some willing to stand up for women can take the job.

Yours sincerely,

Ani O’Brien