Penn Raine: Give us a smile, darling.

Is the demand that women smile for men still a thing? Are females still instructed by strangers in the lift to ‘Cheer up, it might never happen,’? This pervasive requirement for women to display performative amiability had, I thought been largely swept away in the roiling waters of last century’s feminism.

That feminist struggle that today sees female students outnumbering men at our universities, notably at medical schools. That sees 38% of parliamentarians as women, the highest ever percentage since we were first admitted to the chamber in 1919. Ideally, I suppose this figure should be higher - if the job could be seen as estimable, which is moot.
Nevertheless the 2021 independent NZ Sport survey showed that professional female sports players earned 15% less than professional males. It wasn’t surprising that Sport NZ CEO Rayleen Castle subsequently said that the sector could ‘advance discussions around under-representation and jointly develop strategies to improve.’

Loud cheers from the Black and White Ferns.

But wait, it appears that Castle wasn’t talking gender pay gaps but about plans to ‘promote the importance of diversity and inclusion.’ And she wasted no time in challenging the initial position of the Coalition and Chris Bishop, Minister for Sport and Recreation, around ‘fairness’ in community competitions.

Simply put the Coalition initially took the view that in community sports 60 kg women rugby players would be disadvantaged in tackles and hand offs by 90kg trans women i.e. men. However, Castle, using the ever-useful mental health lever persuaded Bishop, to back off from applying the idea of ‘fairness’ to adult human females in most codes except, for example, boxing. She did this on the basis that sport elevated mood and wellbeing and was presumably important in reducing hurt feelings in men who sought to improve their sporting rankings by playing in women’s codes and were receiving pushback from unsmiling females.

Castle seems not to consider that her controversial appointment to Sport NZ after her ineffectual stint with Rugby Australia might have been a diversity not a merit appointment. Has it occurred to her that her position was a natural outcome of first wave feminism and that she might at least owe a nod to the sisterhood?

Well, apparently not, and the same might be said of the NZ Law Commission, three of whose four officials appear to identify as female.

The Law Commission has released a discussion paper to consider changes to the Human Rights Act 1993 that will look at tightening laws around the rights of transgender people not to be offended by ‘dead naming’, ‘misgendering’ and by statements that a woman is an ‘adult human female.’ While it is true that trans men i.e. biological females may feel slighted that New World doesn’t stock male tampons most of the current fuss is being made by chaps who by dint of self-identification feel entitled to use female only spaces- literal and figurative.

Of course, while the number of identifying males who commit crimes serious enough for prison and who then identify as a woman at sentencing are small, the fact that the judiciary then incarcerates them in women’s prisons is both stupid and dangerous. And while this situation is statistically rare the safety of women’s only spaces is now eroded by the very institutions that enshrined them in the first place, the courts and Parliament.

Even the term ‘biological man’ is apparently an abusive phrase in the trans community. I wonder if the Law Commission is going to scrutinise the impolite use of the words ‘xx and xy chromosomes’ as criminalising as well. Very possibly, if they take their cue from the Royal Society Te Aparangi who have determined, long story short, that Indigenous spiritual and cultural beliefs are to be accorded the same respect and status as Science. So why not therefore, make a law determining that the xx-chromosome pair identifying someone as a woman is just an opinion?

The belief that possessing xx chromosomes is definitively female is something that Australia’s Victorian Government is at odds with as they have this year funded a study on pain experienced by women who suffer from, for example endometriosis, and are inviting transgender women to take part. This is a new low in mental acuity even for Victoria.

Roughly estimated the trans community represents .08% of the population which raises the question why the NZ Law Commission, funded by you and me, plans to spend time and money on protecting the sensitivities of men who say they ‘feel like women’. Might it occur to commissioners, versed and trained in the meaning and nuance of language as they are, to ask why a human born only with male genitalia and an xy chromosome set knows what it ‘feels like’ to be a woman?

And failing that simple logic test might the three female officers of the Commission simply ask themselves why they are opening a legal door to dilute gains made for women that have taken centuries to achieve?

Data shows that between 60 and 70% of lawyers support progressive policies which suggests that most of our country’s practising lawyers, almost half of which are women, will support the direction of the ‘discussion paper’. The area of family law is the fifth most practised area out of twenty-four and we must suppose that the problem of family violence figures largely in this area. Would it be surprising if the safety of women in shelters became threatened if laws allowed female-identifying men freer access to these places because to refuse them would be a crime?

Back in the dark old days women who were labelled ‘nags’ or ‘shrews’ could be ordered by the magistrate (male) to wear the Scold’s Bridle, an iron mask that prevented non-compliant speech. It is ironical that members of our own sex would collaborate with those men who would like to see us submissive, polite and smiling as they pretend to be us.

It’s quite a trick they’ve pulled off, you have to admit!.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.