Labour leader Chris Hipkins says the Government should “keep out” of sporting competitions after it revised its stance on transgender participation in community sports.
National’s coalition agreement with NZ First promised to “ensure publicly funded sporting bodies support fair competition that is not compromised by rules relating to gender”.
New Zealand First sport and recreation spokesperson Andy Foster told Newshub last year there would be no public funding for sports that don’t provide a “safe, fair competition for women”.
However, the NZ Herald revealed on Tuesday that the Government appears to have stepped back from any form of involvement in directing transgender participation in community sports after receiving advice on the matter from Sport NZ.
NZ First leader Winston Peters posted in response that the “Government is not backing down on anything”.
“It’s not difficult to understand that we want to protect fairness and safety in sport for women,” he posted on Twitter.
Appearing on his weekly AM slot, Hipkins said the Government should “keep out of it”.
“I also don’t think politicians should be determining the rules for sporting codes. I think sporting codes themselves should determine that,” he said.
“I think they should aim for inclusivity and they should aim for fairness, and I think the sports themselves can determine how best to achieve those things because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all here.”
A lot of sporting bodies already have policies in place. Sport NZ has developed a set of transgender guiding principles and the overarching principle is everyone can play grassroots sports.
Hipkins believes the Government should “never have gone there in the first place”.
Look, the woke dogma around the trans issues has generated a radioactive debate they have fuelled themselves which has been politically alienating to an enormous group of former Left wing supporters.
H-O-W-E-V-E-R.
We can dislike the Woke’s tactics and argue why pure temple identity politics will cost us, but let’s also be very clear that we as a society and community respect the Trans community’s right to exist and function with all the agency that every single one of us takes for granted.
That there are women who believe they are men and men who believe they are women and people who believe they are both and people who believe they are neither is as uncontroversial within the spectrum of our species as the range of hair, eye and skin colour.
Certainly there are issues around biological women’s spaces and those issues need discussion in a good faith environment, but threatening to remove public funding from community groups that have Trans players is fucking crazy and cruel.
Yes discussion about gender is triggering to everyone.
Yes new ideas about identity can rock people on their heels, but to purposely start erasing citizens from their public spaces by denying public funding is fucking unforgivable in a liberal progressive democracy like NZ!
We aren’t talking about professional sports, we are talking grass roots publicly funded community sport. The power of Sport to channel the inclusive energy of human beings is a vital cultural building block, banning people who don’t fit in to the binary would be such a terrible attack on them as individuals and a real shameful move by the rest of NZ.
Yes the Trans Community and their hysterical middle class woke wanker allies have made this debate radioactive, but to allow the State to put on its jackboot and kick the Trans community in the face is an utterly unacceptable move no matter the provocation.
This is an IDF level disproportionate response to the issue.
We can’t allow public funds to be withheld under these sorts of disgusting standards!
FFS – this is ugly and dangerous and I don’t believe I have to point that out!
Sport has more mana than this.
We as a people have more mana than this.
Feral culture war revenge fantasises are not who we should be.
This hard right racist Government is quickly becoming very authoritarian and willing to use its power against the people with every passing week.
New Zealand Aotearoa deserves a State that helps the people and builds the nation, not one that tears everything down and punishes those their voters despise.
We allow this hard right racist Government to hurt the gangs, then the prisoners, then the trans, then the beneficiaries, then the renters, then the workers, then the environment and then you.
There is a whiff of fascism here Comrades.
We should all be ashamed by this move.
Sport is bigger than this petty bigotry and so should we.
This move belittles us into being a more spiteful and nasty country than we really are.
“We allow this hard right racist Government to hurt the gangs” – They fucking deserve to be hurt.
James Brown – Amen to that
“We allow this hard right racist Government to hurt the gangs, then the prisoners,” I don’t think anybody on either side gives a fuck about these 2 issues
stephen – Hear, hear!
Peters isn’t above ‘belittling’ for a vote or a few dollars. He’s a shameless old fool.
OK so ‘Labour leader Chris Hipkins says Government should ‘keep out’ of sports in relation to transgender policy’.
What?! After the last government passed several laws wbich allowed men or women to be legally recognised as the opposite sex or neither.
How is that keeping the state out of the gender war?
Labour/Greens/MP got involved to allow men to become legal women.
It ignored the protests of women that this would make the concept of the material existence of women null and void to be filled by predatory penises.
It ignored the fact that the concept of women based on biology was now to become a ‘gender identity’ and had nothing to do with biology.
It ignored that this caricatured concept of gender was based on socially constructed traits first dreamed up by men a 100,000 years ago to justify women as domestic slaves.
In other words, gender is the result of the historic oppression of women by men and is oppressive and something to be destroyed not celebrated.
The reduction of biological sex to historical gender is a cultural war only in the sense that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and, backed by bourgeois state law.
Women’s struggle for liberation from gender oppression is targetted when women as an historic sex class whose labour has been exploited by men for 40,000 years is usurped by post modern ideology and legally enforced by the state.
By legally expunging this history of sex oppression, and women’s resistance, men can enter the spaces that women need to organise their sex-class solidarity and stage their social revolution.
Worse, under the ideology of inclusion and human rights, trans ideology attacks biological women, and it attacks young gays and lesbians, following the logic of the UK GRA in 2004 and the clerical fascist Iranian state, in promoting gender transition as a legal form of gay conversion.
The fact that the right wing patriarchal NACtNZF coalition wants to restore the sex definition of women and keep men out of women’s places in order to keep women in their place as an oppressed minority, is all the more reasons for the left to fight for these rights.
For it is a fact that no bourgeois government left or right can liberate women. Only women organised alongside their brother in support can overthrow the patriarchal capitalist system.
Capitalism is on its last legs, it can no longer exploit us to stay alive, it visits its crises, depressions and war on us and in desperation drags up the most vile filth from the past to divide and rule those who work to live, replacing science with superstition, drowing us in nihilism.
Women, who created human society by organising child care for 100,000s of years, only to be turned into domestic slaves, remain our only hope of restoring humanity back to nature before the extinction of our species.
Dave+Brown. Thank you. At grass roots level, school children being taught that they can choose or change their gender is wrong, confusing, and at times prematurely sexualising them. I party voted NZ First for the first time largely because Peters was the only politician with the gumption to address this issue pre- election. Once again New Zealand is leading the world on children’s “ well-being”, by prescribing puberty blockers at 10 times the rate which the UK does.
You don’t teach people to be transgender you teach people not to discriminate. It’s not like brain washing with religion. There are more human physiological issue’s involved. You don’t read a pamphlet and decide to change genders. Did you feel the same way about homosexual law reform? Do you think people were taught to be gay? I’d be more worried about voting for Winston Peters than people in skirts with suspiciously large Adams apples.
Dave+Brown
Thank you for articulating so beautifully and accurately how I see the whole gender issue
Hats off to you , you really do get it.
“After the last government passed several laws wbich allowed men or women to be legally recognised as the opposite sex or neither.
How is that keeping the state out of the gender war?” By not making, or persisting with it being, illegal you goose.
Hipkins is trying to remain relevant. Perhaps he could be mayor of Lower Hutt.
Another smoke screen from NZ first and the river of filth so they can carry out a kangaroo court on covid responses that kept the filth alive and allow them to take control of the national party as ACT did to labour in the 80s
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