Germany joins NZ in legislating against women's safety

Some of the women protesting gender self-ID laws in Thorndon, Wellington, on Friday.

On Friday, I joined a group of women outside Germany's embassy in Thorndon to protest against that country's gender self-ID law (two men turned up to support us too).

We were part of an international protest organised from Germany.

As with New Zealand's gender self-ID law, which came into force in 2023, all a man needs to do to have the law regard him as female is to simply declare he is a woman and sign an official form.

Of course, any woman can also declare herself to be a man, but it isn't such women that make these laws so dangerous for women and children.

There are no other requirements, other than a declaration.

Germany's law is even worse than ours because it includes a fine of 10,000 euros (NZ$18,222) for “misgendering” somebody.

If a man says he's a woman, the law is attempting to compel you under duress to pretend he is a woman, even if our eyes tell us he is a man.

Two women turned up with placards to counter protest with placards reading “yes to trans rights,” and “feminists for trans rights.”

The women defending gender self-ID outside Germany’s embassy on Friday.

A few women from our side, including me, went over to talk to them.

I asked them if they thought it is a good idea to put rapists in women's prisons.

They declared that was a lie and that it would never happen.

Rapists are being housed in women's prisons

Speak up for Women, which organised our demonstration, has researched this and it is indeed happening.

Using the Official Information Act, the group elicited the following facts covering the years 2020 to 2024 from the Department of Corrections:

• an average of 86 trans-identifying males served a custodial sentence or were remanded in custody each year for the past five years

• total female prisoners at June 2024 were 649 while total male prisoners were 8,926

• about 14% of trans-identifying male offenders were charged with (on remand) or sentenced for sexual assault.

• About 14% of trans-identifying males were housed in a female prison.

SUFW did some sums using StatsNZ population data and found one in 3,975 women were in prison, one in 284 men were in prison and one in 140 trans-identifying men were.

“These are the men that women are told they should be comfortable sharing spaces with,” SWFU concluded.

They also noted the data clearly shows that men, regardless of how they identify, have similar offending patterns.

“The higher rate of incarceration among trans-identifying males compared to women underscores that these individuals do not shed male patterns of offending simply because they identify differently,” SWFU said.

“The presence of trans-identifying males, who offend at rates far higher than women, poses a direct challenge to the safety, dignity and well-being of female inmates.”

I don't claim to be an expert on women in prison but I do know they tend to be greatly disadvantaged and that many of them have suffered abuse.

One of the two women defending self-ID laws told me she is a researcher. If SUFW can get the data, why hasn't she?

I'd also observe that both women are, like me, likely well-off middle-class women who are highly unlikely to ever face prison.

A man named Barbie Kardashian

Women's groups around the world are documenting cases of truly evil men being housed in women's prisons everywhere from Britain and Germany to Canada and the US.

On Friday, Genspect, an international organisation which opposes what is euphemistically called “gender affirming healthcare” for children, reported on a 22-year-old man who calls himself Barbie Kardashian who has been housed in the women's section of Limerick Prison in Ireland since 2022.

It notes that “Kardashian, born Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile, suffered extreme abuse at the hands of his violent father, who, among other things, forced him to rape his own mother.”

What was new was that Kardashian was recently acquitted of threatening a female prisoner and a female corrections officer with rape and other violence.

Kardashian freely admitted he had made these threats.

Jurors were not told of his history and the judge informed them that they had to decide whether Kardashian really intended to carry out his threats.

Kardashian was referred to as “she” throughout the court proceedings, although the defence was unsuccessful in getting the judge to rule that the jury could not be told he was a “natal” man.

A minute's silence

After observing a minute's silence in front of Germany's embassy and chanting a few slogans, our group repaired to a courtyard in the neighbouring Thorndon garden for the blind opposite the embassy.

A number of speakers, including me, highlighted particular issues which were recorded to send to the German organisers.

My speech:

Trans rights are human rights.

I do mean that. I know what it's like to be denied basic rights. I don't wish that experience on anybody.

But no trans-identified man can ever be a woman, no matter how many laws are written trying to force us to pretend to accept that they can be.

It is basic biology that, in humans, sex is binary and it's immutable.

We all know this.

There is actually no difference between the word sex and the word gender. The trans ideologists would have you believe there is a difference, but they are interchangeable words that mean the same thing.

Sex is not just what's between our legs. It's in every cell of our bodies. Scientists can tell which sex we are from a simple mouth swab.

Archeologists can tell female bones from male bones.

Nobody is “assigned” sex at birth; our sex is determined at conception and, these days, is usually discovered long before birth.

Again, we all know this is part of the human condition.

Just pretending

No man can become a woman; the best he can achieve is to ape the appearance of a woman. We all know this.

By the way, I regard the term “cis” as in cisgender and ciswoman, as hate speech.

It is an attempt to categorise women as a subcategory of women. Real women stand in no need of such a qualifier and we are the only kind of women.

Trans “women” are actually men.

Self-ID laws, like the law in Germany that has just come into force, and like ours, which came into force in 2023, do not require somebody wishing to change their legal gender to make even an attempt to look like members of that gender.

A man can simply declare he is a woman, sign the form, and the law will deem him to indeed be a woman.

This is what our Department of Internal Affairs says on its website:

“A self-identification process for amending the sex on a birth certificate is a simple administrative process that requires a statutory declaration. It is based on how a person identifies, rather than eligibility criteria such as medical treatment.”

The politicians and lawmakers writing these laws, and the judges enforcing them, have forgotten, or pretend to have forgotten, why women and girls need sex-based rights in the first place.

Basic safety

It's a question of basic safety.

My generation of feminists achieved quite a lot in terms of women's demands for equality.

And these days, in most situations, it mostly doesn't matter what sex you are. But when it does matter, it matters a great deal.

Why is safety a particular concern of women and girls?

The statistics tell the story: men are overwhelmingly responsible for most violence; men are responsible for almost all rapes.

Predators are overwhelmingly men.

Almost every woman and girl in the world has experienced sexual harrassment – I do suspect the ones who say they haven't are telling fibs.

I'm not claiming all men are violent, or that all men are rapists.

The trouble is that we cannot tell whether they are or not just by looking at them.

Every woman understands the fear of a man following them on a dark street at night.

We fear them because they're men and we have no way of knowing whether they're one of the dangerous men or not.

Where it matters

Women-only spaces matter in changing rooms at gyms and swimming baths; it matters to lesbians wanting to hold women-only gatherings; it matters in women's prisons.

It matters in women's refuges – I was a member of the group of women in Auckland in the '70s who opened New Zealand's first feminist refuge for battered women.

It matters in rape crisis centres.

It matters in women's sports.

Germany's self-ID law, and New Zealand's self-ID law, and such laws around the world, are putting the safety of women and girls at risk.

Imagine, if you can, you're a convicted rapist and you know you're going to prison.

It's obvious there's a huge incentive to declare that you're a woman so you can be sent to a women's prison.

Some people deny this will happen; it is already happening.

It is precisely such men who will take advantage of self-ID laws.

It was a rapist in Scotland who changed his name to Isla Bryson and demanded to be housed in a women's prison that helped to bring Nicola Sturgeon's reign as first minister to an end.

How many rapists in women's prisons will society tolerate? I say just one is one too many.

It's time to call BS on such laws. It's time to say no.

The safety of women and girls matters and our rights must be paramount.