I just want you to ask, what kind of people would do this?

When I first started writing about this stuff, I was warned. 

That sounds histrionic; cloak and dagger, even.  But I took it seriously.  The warnings came from people with first hand experience.  

Sure enough, I soon understood why. 

One person had made a pro-trans comment under one of my posts.  They told me an anti-trans activist found out their employer and complained about them.  Another person contacted me and said their young trans kid had been outed by an anti-trans activist on social media; another said they'd been hounded by an anti-trans activist to the point of extreme mental distress.  I could go on. 

My posts were to do with Rachel Stewart, an ex-columnist who tweeted about stripping naked and hunting with guns a supporter of trans rights.  In response, the police confiscated her guns.  (She's since had them returned, with the backing of Judith Collins.)

What happened next was nothing short of bizarre. 

Members of Speak Up For Women (SUFW), a group that opposes trans people's right to self-identify and trans women's access to women's spaces, turned up on my blog.  SUFW features Stewart's writing on their website - something I questioned because, call me PC-gone-mad, but I'm not a fan of tweeting about shooting people.

There are a number of lowlights I could share, but I'll let you find some of them here.  We'll just say, I'm still waiting for SUFW to confirm that the holocaust denier and the person who called trans people 'sneaky disease spreading rodents' aren't associated with their group.  Waiting, right here.  Just patiently waiting. 

Why revisit this today?  

This week, intermediate and secondary schools have received an Official Information Act request from a 'women's rights' group at education.aotearoa@gmail.com.  Yes, a women's rights group with no web presence and a Gmail account.  We're off to a credible start.

The request asks each school, amongst other things, for:

• the number of students who are trans, non-binary or gender fluid
• the enrolment year of each of these students
• the ethnicity of each of these students
• what consultation occurred with the school community, when considering whether to enrol such students
• what forms of identification a school requires before enrolling students, including in relation to their sex

At any given school, there will be only a handful of trans, non-binary or gender fluid kids.  Especially if you knew their year of enrolment and their ethnicity, they'd be easy to identify. 

So I'm asking, why would adults want identifying and deeply personal information about tamariki and rangatahi all around New Zealand, many of whom already feel bullied and unsafe?  Why would adults try to force from schools information that the students themselves might not consent, may be afraid, to share? 

I'll let you draw your own conclusions about this, about the people who would do it, their ethics. As you do that, I’ll make some general remarks.

Kids need so very little from us.  Respect, safety, a bit of care.  Really, that's it.  Yet there are some adults who will not give it.  The ends justify the means more easily when both are repugnant.  

When you care more about a kid's genitals than their dignity, you've got a problem - only, from the depth of the hole into which you have fallen, you can no longer see it.