In December 2021, NZ on Air announced it would provide up to $237,573
to Jack Media to produce a 44-minute film about a heterosexual couple having a baby. Of course, that wasn’t the way the funding agency announced the grant. It claimed “Trans and Pregnant” — to be aired on TVNZ 1 — would track “two men on their journey to parenthood as they navigate societal roadblocks”.
The film was shown on TVNZ on Monday evening. Unfortunately for the public broadcaster, the story has been born into a much different world than the one in which it was conceived. Over the past three years, the public’s willingness to pretend a trans man is actually a man, and not a woman, has been sorely tested.
The stars of “Trans and Pregnant”, Frankie and Rāwā, are both engaging and sincere but when one of the pair has impregnated the other, who has given birth to their son, it is impossible for viewers not to conclude that the pregnant chap is, in fact, a woman. Indeed, a publicity photo for “Trans and Pregnant” shows that Frankie — beard notwithstanding — has a female’s body, with scars where her breasts once were. Giving birth naturally indicates the presence of a uterus and vagina. Testosterone and surgery can only do so much in reversing biological reality.
In late 2021, when the funding decision was announced, the suspension of disbelief about the possibility of men becoming women and vice versa was not only expected but strictly (and often viciously) enforced. Pointing out in public that Frankie is, in fact, a woman could have cost you your job, or opened you up to relentless vilification as a “transphobe”, “bigot” or “Nazi”. Predictably, public criticism of the funding decision was muted.
Times have changed. The Platform’s Sean Plunket last week described the programme about “a bloke and a sheila who pretends to be a bloke getting the sheila pregnant” as “a load of todge”. He thought the pair were “slightly bonkers” and that most New Zealanders would find them just as “crazy” as he did.
His colleague Michael Laws pulled no punches either. Referring to the publicity photo, he said: “Although Frankie is a trans man, she is clearly a woman. She’s a woman with a beard.” He compared his reaction to that of seeing a lamb with two heads or a chicken with four legs. He wondered if it would be a good idea “to pause the manipulation of genders [undertaken] to satisfy the mentally ill in our community”.
In late 2021 when TVNZ agreed to air the documentary, trans ideology was riding high. The Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill had passed its first reading in August that year. The bill’s advance had been propelled by a Green Party petition which amassed more than 100,000 signatures. It was passed in February 2022 with an overwhelming majority of 112-8.
Retribution came swiftly for those brave enough to criticise the bill’s intent, even if fleetingly. Stephen Rainbow, Auckland Transport’s head of community engagement and a long-time gay rights campaigner, was vilified for a comment he had made on a Rainbow Auckland Networking Group Facebook post asking people to sign the petition. “Be careful,” Rainbow wrote. “There’s some elements of the trans agenda being sneakily promoted through this campaign.”
His heresy was widely reported and one outraged colleague even refused to work in the same team as him. The Free Speech Union reported that a complainant “encouraged Twitter users to write to Auckland Transport’s HR manager about the so-called transphobia so that Dr Rainbow would be fired from his role”.
In fact, it was obvious that the gay conversion therapy bill was, indeed, a Trojan horse for enforcing trans ideology by promoting “gender-affirming care” that involves puberty blockers which can lead to infertility and encourages young women to mutilate their bodies by lopping off their breasts. It had very little to do with the gay conversion therapy most people believed it was aimed at suppressing. It was just very difficult to say so publicly, as Dr Rainbow found.
In an encouraging sign that the government isn’t willing to be entirely cowed by trans activists, he has been appointed to the role of Chief Human Rights Commissioner.
Nevertheless, after his appointment was announced in August, a NZ Herald journalist predictably asked whether his comment in 2021 had been “transphobic”.
Just as predictably, The Spinoff — the house magazine for the terminally woke — took Rainbow to task over his three-year-old comment too. Editor Madeleine Chapman, who is obviously highly experienced in social media archaeology, asked: “Can you be a human rights commissioner and transphobic at the same time?”.
While the mainstream media will still cry “transphobia” or “racism” at the dropof a hat to maintain their longstanding dedication to identity politics, their audiences have become far less indulgent of their mission. Trans ideology has taken a beating here and around the Western world as more and more people refuse to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears. Certainly, the sight on Monday evening of Frankie giving birth in a hot tub must have created enormous cognitive dissonance for anyone determined to believe, against reason, that she is a man. The fact the couple happily assigned sex to their son at birth raised eyebrows as well.
The widespread antipathy to gender doctrine was obvious to Donald Trump, whose campaign reportedly spent $US215 million on ads aired during football games that focused on transgender issues in the final weeks before the US election. The slogan “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you” proved to be devastatingly effective.
Popular opinion has changed dramatically for a variety of reasons. Most people don’t care what adults (including Frankie) do to their own bodies, but they do object to being obliged to indulge trans fantasies — including their children being taught that being male or female is a state of mind and that they can choose between the sexes (or among dozens of imagined “genders”) at will.
Some people have been particularly outraged that men are allowed to compete in women’s sports while masquerading as women; others have focused on the use of puberty blockers for minors as a dangerous medical experiment.
Perhaps no one event, however, radicalised more New Zealanders than the co-ordinated media and political pile-on against women’s rights activist Posie Parker and her followers in March 2023 — and the subsequent violence by trans activists in Auckland’s Albert Park while police watched on. The footage of women trying to inch their way from the park rotunda to safety amidst an enraged mob made a mockery of the claims by the likes of Shaneel Lal that trans people feared for their lives.
Then in March this year, the WPATH Files were leaked, exposing a shocking lack of ethics and medical integrity among proponents of gender transitioning. And in April, the Cass Review, written by eminent paediatrician Hilary Cass, heavily criticised the use of puberty blockers, concluding the existing evidence for prescribing gender medicine had been built on “shaky foundations”.
What continues to reliably alienate a broad cross-section of society is the commandeering of language to bolster trans activists’ rejection of the self- evident truth that only women can give birth. Instead, official advice — including from health agencies — regularly refers to “pregnant people” and “people with cervixes” rather than “women”. In the documentary, Frankie recommends replacing the phrase “maternity services” with “people who give birth services”.
Perhaps most extraordinarily, the Midwifery Council is in thrall to trans ideology to the extent that it has tried to remove any mention in its Scope of Practice to women, mothers, babies, or breastfeeding.
After withering criticism, it responded with a revised document that gender- critical feminist Katrina Biggs has described as a “hastily applied bandaid… in the form of ignominiously squeezing in the words ‘woman’ and ‘baby’ — once each”.
Last week, Biggs asked on her Substack (“A B’Old Woman”): “Ten years ago, who’d have ever thought we’d be fighting to force the Midwifery Council to retain the words ‘woman’, ‘mother’, and ‘baby’? And for what? For the sake of a very occasional sick chick with an artificially-induced beard and (electively) chopped-off breasts, who is uncomfortable with those words? Which is all perfectly normal and nothing to see here, we’re told.”
TVNZ commissioning editor Jude Callen is happy to bend reality out of shape too. Last week, she told the Listener: “Trans and Pregnant was chosen to lead [the channel’s Documentary NZ series] as it is a beautifully made, heart- warming human story about a Kiwi couple who wanted to start a family. The couple happen to be two men.”
The documentary’s producer, Nicola Smith, was quoted in Stuff similarly contorting reality by pretending there’s nothing unusual to see here: “It blows people’s minds in a lot of ways, but actually, it’s quite simple. It’s just two men that are in love and one of them is physically able to have a baby.”
Bizarrely, Callen justified choosing “Trans and Pregnant” to open the documentary season as an example of “a contemporary New Zealand story… relatable to a broad, diverse range of New Zealanders and to have relevance to their lives, whether the subject matter was directly within their own life experience or the lives of those around them”.
On what planet is a story about a bearded woman who takes testosterone in the hope of becoming a male and then has to stop taking it to begin menstruating again in order to become pregnant “relatable to a broad, diverse range of New Zealanders”?
If TVNZ management really wants to know why it is bleeding millions of dollars in losses, it could do worse than taking a close look at just how out of touch its “progressive” programming is with most New Zealanders’ views and preoccupations.
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
The stars of “Trans and Pregnant”, Frankie and Rāwā, are both engaging and sincere but when one of the pair has impregnated the other, who has given birth to their son, it is impossible for viewers not to conclude that the pregnant chap is, in fact, a woman. Indeed, a publicity photo for “Trans and Pregnant” shows that Frankie — beard notwithstanding — has a female’s body, with scars where her breasts once were. Giving birth naturally indicates the presence of a uterus and vagina. Testosterone and surgery can only do so much in reversing biological reality.
In late 2021, when the funding decision was announced, the suspension of disbelief about the possibility of men becoming women and vice versa was not only expected but strictly (and often viciously) enforced. Pointing out in public that Frankie is, in fact, a woman could have cost you your job, or opened you up to relentless vilification as a “transphobe”, “bigot” or “Nazi”. Predictably, public criticism of the funding decision was muted.
Times have changed. The Platform’s Sean Plunket last week described the programme about “a bloke and a sheila who pretends to be a bloke getting the sheila pregnant” as “a load of todge”. He thought the pair were “slightly bonkers” and that most New Zealanders would find them just as “crazy” as he did.
His colleague Michael Laws pulled no punches either. Referring to the publicity photo, he said: “Although Frankie is a trans man, she is clearly a woman. She’s a woman with a beard.” He compared his reaction to that of seeing a lamb with two heads or a chicken with four legs. He wondered if it would be a good idea “to pause the manipulation of genders [undertaken] to satisfy the mentally ill in our community”.
In late 2021 when TVNZ agreed to air the documentary, trans ideology was riding high. The Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill had passed its first reading in August that year. The bill’s advance had been propelled by a Green Party petition which amassed more than 100,000 signatures. It was passed in February 2022 with an overwhelming majority of 112-8.
Retribution came swiftly for those brave enough to criticise the bill’s intent, even if fleetingly. Stephen Rainbow, Auckland Transport’s head of community engagement and a long-time gay rights campaigner, was vilified for a comment he had made on a Rainbow Auckland Networking Group Facebook post asking people to sign the petition. “Be careful,” Rainbow wrote. “There’s some elements of the trans agenda being sneakily promoted through this campaign.”
His heresy was widely reported and one outraged colleague even refused to work in the same team as him. The Free Speech Union reported that a complainant “encouraged Twitter users to write to Auckland Transport’s HR manager about the so-called transphobia so that Dr Rainbow would be fired from his role”.
In fact, it was obvious that the gay conversion therapy bill was, indeed, a Trojan horse for enforcing trans ideology by promoting “gender-affirming care” that involves puberty blockers which can lead to infertility and encourages young women to mutilate their bodies by lopping off their breasts. It had very little to do with the gay conversion therapy most people believed it was aimed at suppressing. It was just very difficult to say so publicly, as Dr Rainbow found.
In an encouraging sign that the government isn’t willing to be entirely cowed by trans activists, he has been appointed to the role of Chief Human Rights Commissioner.
Nevertheless, after his appointment was announced in August, a NZ Herald journalist predictably asked whether his comment in 2021 had been “transphobic”.
Just as predictably, The Spinoff — the house magazine for the terminally woke — took Rainbow to task over his three-year-old comment too. Editor Madeleine Chapman, who is obviously highly experienced in social media archaeology, asked: “Can you be a human rights commissioner and transphobic at the same time?”.
While the mainstream media will still cry “transphobia” or “racism” at the dropof a hat to maintain their longstanding dedication to identity politics, their audiences have become far less indulgent of their mission. Trans ideology has taken a beating here and around the Western world as more and more people refuse to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears. Certainly, the sight on Monday evening of Frankie giving birth in a hot tub must have created enormous cognitive dissonance for anyone determined to believe, against reason, that she is a man. The fact the couple happily assigned sex to their son at birth raised eyebrows as well.
The widespread antipathy to gender doctrine was obvious to Donald Trump, whose campaign reportedly spent $US215 million on ads aired during football games that focused on transgender issues in the final weeks before the US election. The slogan “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you” proved to be devastatingly effective.
Popular opinion has changed dramatically for a variety of reasons. Most people don’t care what adults (including Frankie) do to their own bodies, but they do object to being obliged to indulge trans fantasies — including their children being taught that being male or female is a state of mind and that they can choose between the sexes (or among dozens of imagined “genders”) at will.
Some people have been particularly outraged that men are allowed to compete in women’s sports while masquerading as women; others have focused on the use of puberty blockers for minors as a dangerous medical experiment.
Perhaps no one event, however, radicalised more New Zealanders than the co-ordinated media and political pile-on against women’s rights activist Posie Parker and her followers in March 2023 — and the subsequent violence by trans activists in Auckland’s Albert Park while police watched on. The footage of women trying to inch their way from the park rotunda to safety amidst an enraged mob made a mockery of the claims by the likes of Shaneel Lal that trans people feared for their lives.
Then in March this year, the WPATH Files were leaked, exposing a shocking lack of ethics and medical integrity among proponents of gender transitioning. And in April, the Cass Review, written by eminent paediatrician Hilary Cass, heavily criticised the use of puberty blockers, concluding the existing evidence for prescribing gender medicine had been built on “shaky foundations”.
What continues to reliably alienate a broad cross-section of society is the commandeering of language to bolster trans activists’ rejection of the self- evident truth that only women can give birth. Instead, official advice — including from health agencies — regularly refers to “pregnant people” and “people with cervixes” rather than “women”. In the documentary, Frankie recommends replacing the phrase “maternity services” with “people who give birth services”.
Perhaps most extraordinarily, the Midwifery Council is in thrall to trans ideology to the extent that it has tried to remove any mention in its Scope of Practice to women, mothers, babies, or breastfeeding.
After withering criticism, it responded with a revised document that gender- critical feminist Katrina Biggs has described as a “hastily applied bandaid… in the form of ignominiously squeezing in the words ‘woman’ and ‘baby’ — once each”.
Last week, Biggs asked on her Substack (“A B’Old Woman”): “Ten years ago, who’d have ever thought we’d be fighting to force the Midwifery Council to retain the words ‘woman’, ‘mother’, and ‘baby’? And for what? For the sake of a very occasional sick chick with an artificially-induced beard and (electively) chopped-off breasts, who is uncomfortable with those words? Which is all perfectly normal and nothing to see here, we’re told.”
TVNZ commissioning editor Jude Callen is happy to bend reality out of shape too. Last week, she told the Listener: “Trans and Pregnant was chosen to lead [the channel’s Documentary NZ series] as it is a beautifully made, heart- warming human story about a Kiwi couple who wanted to start a family. The couple happen to be two men.”
The documentary’s producer, Nicola Smith, was quoted in Stuff similarly contorting reality by pretending there’s nothing unusual to see here: “It blows people’s minds in a lot of ways, but actually, it’s quite simple. It’s just two men that are in love and one of them is physically able to have a baby.”
Bizarrely, Callen justified choosing “Trans and Pregnant” to open the documentary season as an example of “a contemporary New Zealand story… relatable to a broad, diverse range of New Zealanders and to have relevance to their lives, whether the subject matter was directly within their own life experience or the lives of those around them”.
On what planet is a story about a bearded woman who takes testosterone in the hope of becoming a male and then has to stop taking it to begin menstruating again in order to become pregnant “relatable to a broad, diverse range of New Zealanders”?
If TVNZ management really wants to know why it is bleeding millions of dollars in losses, it could do worse than taking a close look at just how out of touch its “progressive” programming is with most New Zealanders’ views and preoccupations.
Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.
13 comments:
Indeed, just recently one of the original founders of the La Leche (breastfeeding) organisation resigned from it stating they had lost their way by indulging in other peoples fantasys........Sadly in NZ it seems the public are not well served by the 'bad actors' who also indulge in said fantasy.
>"It’s just two men that are in love and one of them is physically able to have a baby"
So much for BIOL100.
Genetics 100 will have to be rewritten too.
Isn't progress wonderful.
Poor baby. Cannot breastfeed. Essential protective nutrients in the MOTHER"S colostrum milk will not be available. That is abuse. I would be willing to bet the child will have significant health issues.So ignorant.
Just another nail in TVNZ'S coffin. But it's a frightening insight into the Orewellian nature of management who see the programme as "relatable to a broad, diverse range of New Zealanders". More like they're living in a Tui ad if you ask me. And that's precisely why they are bleeding viewers.
Excellent!!
Even more TVNZ job losses on the way.
As for the Midwifery Council - what a complete disgrace.
Tolerating this garbage feels like something we’ll pay for in biblical proportions. First in line will be the handmaidens like Nicole Smith & Jude Callen.
Frankly, it should be against the law for our taxes to be used to propagandise such absurd lies that are about as disconnected from reality as you can get. It’s a grotesque misuse of our funds.
Further, this mentally ill woman & her perverse partner are child abusers & should be treated as such. The only thing worse than these 2 people would be a man trying to feed his baby from his chest with a chemically induced liquid. This child has zero chance of growing up with a firm grasp of reality.
On this issue, NZ needs a Pete Hegseth & Megyn Kelly to root out this perversion from all our institutions, media & school. It is one thing for consenting adults to live their lives, quite another to demand we not only believe their delusions, but that we enable them indoctrinating children with impunity.
The real question is why are so many so determined to force us to go along with the lies of a minuscule minority? It makes no sense, especially when these lies will harm them & their kids too.
Woops, Anon 10:55, that's no 'mentally ill woman' but a 'mentally ill man pretending to be a woman'.......... easy mistake to make when every reporter refers to him as 'she'!
Barend at 11.54 - nope, it’s the opposite! She is a she pretending to be a he…..because apparently biological facts, such as only women can get pregnant & give birth, are just a suggestion!!
Grotesque, bizarre and perverse. Belongs in a circus along with the chicken with no head which apparently in a US circus survived for two years fed with an eyedropper.
You may be right, Anon 12:58. My head is swimming............ I give up!
'it was obvious hat the gay conversion therapy bill was, indeed, a Trojan horse' Yes...
From one gay conversion therapy to another, and a Trojan horse.
To do this to kids is appalling.
Let's be honest, it is perverted, and desperately sick. Normally these sad sacks wouldn't see daylight, yet here they are being sort of 'glorified'. It is wrong on so many levels; best we brace ourselves, because as BTO used to sing, "We ain't seen nothin yet".
The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislatin Act 2022 is hugely harmful law. In practice, it allows conversion therapy in only one direction, towards transgender ideology. Counsellors and health practitioners are required to affirm enthusiastically a person's delusions about 'being in the wrong body' and to encourage them on their way to removing perfectly healthy body parts and becoming lifelong customers of Big Pharma while they waste much of their valuable lives focused on ways to seem more convincing as the faked opposite sex. Any questioning, searching for other possible causes of their discomfort with their bodies and gender roles, or advice against diving into the transgender cult and delusion-affirming 'care' will risk a complaint by the client or associated activists then disciplinary action by the professional board and possible criminal prosecution for breaking that law. It was justified to make a law against exorcisms and punitive 'therapy' procedures to try to make homosexuals straight, and perhaps a law might have banned violent and abusive procedures against self-identified trans people too. However, transgender identification is not the same as homosexual orientation because people will often move on from transgender beliefs and become comfortable with their biological sex whereas homosexuals rarely transform into heterosexuals.
Given the impossibility of providing proper expert service due to the Conversion Practices Act, many helping professionals will refuse to see people about gender dysphoria. The only advisers left to influence those people will be transgender activisits many of whom work in 'gender clinics' where unfortunate parents are referred to take their children regarding sexual maladjustment only to find that if they don't support the trans cult in capturing their child, that child will be turned against them. This law needs to be changed urgently to exclude transgender self-identity or to apply only to violent or abusive conversion practices.
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