It’s official! Control of women's and girls' single-sex spaces in Christchurch, NZ, is no longer in the hands of women and girls.

 The Christchurch City Council in New Zealand has gradually been eroding women’s and girls’ rights to single-sex spaces over the last few years. Now, they have sealed it with their new Equity and Inclusion Policy, which replaces some older policies. The new policy fails to include ‘sex’ in the categories it serves, which are “age, gender, disability, ethnicity, culture, faiths, geographical location, sexual orientation, neurodiversity or socio-economic status”. The committee which put this policy together saw fit to have the word ‘gender’ amongst the categories, but not ‘sex’, even though gender is slippery to define. Despite several submissions to the committee requesting inclusion of the word ‘sex’, an open letter to the Council which made a judicious case for that, plus individual emails to all to the councillors, the word ‘sex’ was not included, and the policy was adopted by the Council without it on 6^th March this year.

So, now we women and girls in Christchurch have an “overarching” policy imposed on us, which “applies to the procurement, management, and delivery of Council services”, with no guarantee that our sex-based rights will be upheld, or even considered, within that scope. Without the word ‘sex’ in the policy, my legal advisor opines that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to apply s 46 of the Human Rights Act, which allows for the provision of single-sex spaces. I made all the councillors aware of this, both in my submission on the policy, and in the individual emails I sent to them. But women’s and girls’ rights to single-sex spaces appear to be of no importance.

I first started engaging with the Christchurch City Council when they opened a new swimming pool complex in the suburb of Linwood in October 2021. Prior to its opening, the Council received a huge number of requests for a women-only session amongst the feedback they sought from the community. The Women’s Wednesday swim session was subsequently created, and the then Mayor, Lianne Dalziel, declared at the opening ceremony that “Transgender women, and people who identify as being a woman, are welcome”. There was no prior consultation with the community about this, although the Council staff did consult with gender ideology-captured organisations such as the National Council of Women, and the Ministry for Women, who could be relied on to go along with the inclusion of men who say they’re women in women’s spaces.

The Council has remained obdurate in its stance that men who say they’re women are women, and have continuously disseminated dubious legal reasoning as to why they hold this stance. It has been pointed out to them more than once how contestable it is, but they hold to it.

The new Equity and Inclusion Policy has no protections for women and girls as a sex class. We are all – both women and men - a ‘gender’ of some sort under this policy, and it appears to be up to each of us to come up with our own definition of what that is. If a man decides his ‘gender’ is that of a woman, the Christchurch City Council agrees, and he gets entry into all women’s and girl’s spaces. There’s no requirement to have a fixed gender, though – he can take on a different gender identity at any time according to the occasion. Neither is it confined to having anything which relates to female or male in the description.

Take the recent occurrence at the Planet Fitness gym in Fairbanks, Alaska, where a man was observed shaving in the women’s locker room, while a 12(ish) year-old girl huddled under a towel in the corner. When challenged by a woman, the man said he was “queer LGB”. If you think Fairbanks, Alaska, isn’t comparable to Christchurch, you’re right. Christchurch’s population is a little over 400K, whereas Fairbanks’s is a little under 32K. If it can happen in place that is around twelve times smaller than Christchurch, it can happen here - especially with a shiny new policy that allows a man to have free and unfettered entry into all women’s and girls’ spaces, as long as the word ‘man’ or ‘male’ isn’t included in his gender identity.

It’s true that a man can be made to leave a female space in a Council-managed facility if he’s behaving badly. Women and girls can’t order him out, though – they have to go and find a staff member to do that. It’s possible they may be more comfortable doing that, anyway, but the option for women and girls themselves to demand a man leave their space has been taken away from them. When the staff member arrives, and if the man is still there and still behaving badly, they decide if it’s enough to evict him.

Some women and girls may go all their lives and not encounter a man in a female space, but no women or girl in the city of Christchurch can ever go into a female space again, whilst the Equity and Inclusion Policy is in place in its present form, confident there will not be a man in there with ‘gender impunity’.

It’s worth noting that this disempowerment coup against women and girls has been unforgivably aided and abetted by numerous other women, and no excuse from them will ever be acceptable for doing this.

Most men will not go into women’s and girls’ spaces under the cloak of a ‘non-male gender identity’ of any sort, but the decision whether or not to do that is in their hands. The Equity and Inclusion Policy has effectively taken control of women’s and girls’ spaces away from us, and given it to men.

And Christchurch may not be the only city in New Zealand which has done this, or plans to.