New Zealand's Forstater case?

[TheKhakiQuail]

Not sure if others have seen this already - NZ is having a court case to test whether GC beliefs are protected as political beliefs!

"In March 2021 LAVA (Lesbian Action for Visibility in Aotearoa) booked a stall at the annual Out in the City (OITC) fair in Wellington, to display a map of Wellington sites of historical, political, and social significance to lesbians.
Initially the booking was accepted, but four days before the event the organisers, Wellington Pride, emailed to say that because of the “nature” of LAVA, the booking did not fit with OITC kaupapa (principles), and there would not be a space for LAVA.
Pride claimed that LAVA was “trans-exclusionary”. The Pride Board Chair stated in an email that OITC participants should be standing side by side with “the most marginalised of the marginalised including our transgender whanau [family] and the marginalisation they face on the daily” (sic)."

"LAVA members, Hilary Oxley and Margaret Curnow, have brought a claim in the New Zealand Human Rights Review Tribunal, claiming that in inviting applications for stalls, Pride was offering a service, and that they unlawfully discriminated against LAVA on the basis of LAVA’s political opinions about trans issues and women’s rights, and because of LAVA’s views that sex and sexual orientation exclude trans women from being women, and lesbians. Pride denies that LAVA’s opinions are “political opinions”, and claims that LAVA’s support for known “anti-trans activists” such as J K Rowling and Julie Bindel is evidence of “transphobia”. Pride suggests that LAVA’s presence with our map would have made the OITC event “unsafe” for trans people, and that the map was based on an idea developed by LGB Alliance Australia, “a known anti-trans group”.
LAVA is represented by senior legal counsel Nicolette Levy KC. Ms. Levy, instructed by Franks Ogilvie lawyers of Wellington, acted for Speak Up for Women (SUFW) in 2021, securing a judgment requiring Palmerston North City Council to allow SUFW to hold a meeting to discuss the proposed self-ID amendments to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act.
Political philosopher Ramon Das of Victoria University of Wellington, has provided an expert opinion that LAVA’s views on trans issues are political opinions.
This case is important for everyone with gender critical or sex realist beliefs, because it has not been confirmed by a New Zealand Court that such opinions are a political belief protected under the Human Rights Act 1993. The debate over whether gender critical views such as LAVA's are "worthy of respect in a democratic society" has not been had yet in New Zealand.

Read more about the case and LAVA’s origins

They have a crowdfunder on their website - hard to raise funds in a country of 5 million

Good luck, LAVA!

I hope that common sense prevails and that LAVA win.

If MN allows the post there's a link here that should signpost the crowd fund

https://www.lava.nz/our-case

I suspect all the 'trans-exclusionary' guff is the same old story in which the person writing it has completely forgotten tm, female detransitioners and nb exist.

I wish them luck.

Any New Zealanders on here who might tell us more?

It sounds really important - and sad that they don't have a crowdfunder so we can see what they've raised to date, and people's comments along the way.

I'm keen to support - how about others??

Marg Curnow was on a youtube video WDI feminist question time 26th April, which is where I came across it - it does sound really important, given the impact of the Forstater decision in letting women speak up.

Most of the GC crowdfunding down under seems to be done this way - I think Sall Grover had a couple of crowdfunding sites drop her fundraiser and had to set up her own, the others just have bank details etc. Yes, a proper site is better but may not be an option I guess. Would be good to hear from kiwis who may know more about the case.

I’ve just donated via the link posted above. Let’s hope they are successful.

I did donate a small amount, unfortunately it turned out to be an even smaller amount in pounds, than it sounded in dollars. 😮
I'm just not use to this internationally stuff. 😒

Donated. Go LAVA 🌋

This is a photo from their site.
Ive redacted the friendly signage
This person is not the terrified specimen I was expecting. More terrifying….
I hope they take them to the cleaners

Please donate. It’s very difficult to raise $ in NZ because we have such a small population and very low pay rates. So most women especially have very little disposable income. We are really struggling over here because women dominate professions with registration authorities that are totally captured by trans ideology so we can’t speak publicly because we risk losing nursing, teaching, sports, lawyer, psychologist, social worker and any other medical practicing certification if we do. So we rely on older often retired women like these women from LAVA to fight GI. Our media are almost totally captured and don’t or wont make any effort to report in a balanced way about women’s concerns. We’ve lost all rights to single sex facilities and sports in NZ and we prescribe puberty blockers at some of the highest rates in the world. Our media recently totally allowed the Green Party to DARVO when one of their sitting male MPs, who is their early childhood education spokesperson and claims to be non binary, was found to have publicly posted a series of sexually suggestive photos of a child labelled with ‘Bussy galore’ . He is still in parliament with no sanction. Men openly use female changerooms in public pools where young girls are changing and women who complain risk their careers. Nothing is done. It seems there is no way out of the trans trap down here.

Donated. Good luck, LAVA. Forstater made all the difference here and I hope this case does the same for NZ.

For more information about the situation in NZ, we have a ‘Speak Up For Women’ private Facebook page, and a Women’s Rights Party who agitate politically. We also have a wonderful education focussed group called Resist Gender Education (RGE) which has done an immense mount of work with very little money - just sheer determination and input from mostly retired secondary school teachers who are worried about the stranglehold of GI in our schools. For sport we have Save Women’s Sport Australasia. A wonderful professor of epidemiology from Otago University- Charlotte Paul has been taking on the medical establishment with some useful academic studies on outlandishly high rates of PB prescription. We also have a NZ branch of Genspect. These are the groups roughly more on the political ‘Left’, GC end of the scale.

There are also some groups on the centre Right. One is Parents Against Gender Education (PAGE) which dables in conspiracy a bit much but they reach a certain audience. We also have a centrist populist political party - NZ First whose leader Winston Peters (also our Minister of Foreign Affairs), who have taken on TRA but are immediately shut down as nasty bigots by MSM. There is a risk in NZ that GI will radicalise many people here because anyone coming from the centre on this - especially the Left is immediately frightened into silence with outlandish accusations of bigotry. Our saving grace in this instance is that the public medical system has very little money for any type of elective surgery, let alone the mutilating surgeries of GI so the kids usually have time to change their minds before they are butchered. But as more and more kids and parents start to see the horrific effects of the hormones fed to them and as consternation grows around men in women’s sports and changing rooms, people’s anger - particularly at the Left and at our government institutions will grow, as it did (rightly and wrongly) explosively during Covid.

Many women Left of center have seen this coming for a long time - as you did in the UK and we are worried that this will ultimately take us in the direction of the US where the debate is totally polarised between Left and Right. But the Left just won’t listen to us and refuse to take our concerns seriously. We do hope that cases like the LAVA case will help us get some nuanced media attention on this so people start to engage with what’s at stake for women and girls.

Thank you for highlighting this. I have donated.

Donated too. I hope the LAVA ladies wake up this morning in NZ to find their fund has increased considerably.

Donated. Good luck to you xx

Gosh, that situation sounds awful. Donated

Donated. Love that a GBP is about 2.25 NZD. It made my donation look so much bigger .

Is there anyway we can get the Lava women on here to tell us how it's going and how much they've raised and still need? It would be great to hear from them - and I intend to keep bumping this thread so others on here learn more.

Thanks @Wetoldyousaurus for sharing so much about how things are in NZ ... it all sounds painfully familiar.

Is there anyway we can get the Lava women on here to tell us how it's going and how much they've raised and still need? It would be great to hear from them - and I intend to keep bumping this thread so others on here learn more.

Thanks @Wetoldyousaurus for sharing so much about how things are in NZ ... it all sounds painfully familiar.

Thanks Cake and Khaki, have donated and fingers crossed for those wonderful women down under.

From their website news update 2nd May, it looks like the current costs incurred are around $50,000 NZ, and they had raised $35,000 NZ.

A further $100,000 is expected to be incurred during the 4 weeks of hearings which are spread out over several months starting in July.

So they still need about $115,000 NZ or 51,000 GBP over the coming months (minus whatever the generous women of MN have contributed this week).

I will try to get them to post something here. We are all a bit new to Mumsnet over this way as we’ve seen it as more useful to UK context but it might work to gather more NZ voices together, at least to discuss anonymously. Facebook is too dangerous, prone to screen shotting etc.

If the amazing UK women didn't mind sharing MN, can you imagine how useful it would be internationally if we used it like they do? Lots of women don't get involved in groups or rallies because they don't have time / want to keep their anonymity / scared of the aggressive counter protesters, but could learn so much from watching what our UK sisters are up to and share what's going on locally and internationally.