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 a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore. This column was first published at The Platform