Women having to meet in secrecy and hire security guards to avoid extremist protesters

Last week the BBC was in the news for its “systemic bias” in reporting unfairly on gender ideology issues as well as other topics. Its use of activist language, one-sided reporting, and the routine censorship of gender-critical stories was described in detail in a damning dossier and in a subsequent letter to the BBC from the UK registered charity Sex Matters.

In an article on the Resist Gender Education substack, Stuff breaks its silence with bias, hypocrisy and misinformation, Fern Hickson points out that the legacy media in New Zealand has been playing the same game for years. She says, “Its relegation of Helen Joyce to the black hole of silence during her more than two weeks in the country is just the latest iteration of its biased coverage.”

Ms Joyce, a best-selling author, journalist, and director of Sex Matters, recently toured New Zealand with the Women’s Rights Party and then with the Free Speech Union. Hundreds of New Zealanders attended the events and were impressed by Ms Joyce’s clear and reasonable positions on women’s rights, free speech, and child safeguarding.

Of the 13 media interviews while Ms Joyce was in New Zealand, only one was with the legacy media – an article run in Stuff’s newspapers across the country by journalist Philip Matthews, titled “Helen Joyce – a visitor from Terf Island”.

Although Matthews’ article was badly flawed, Ms Hickson says at least it has broken that silence. “If NZ’s legacy media wants to save itself from the huge embarrassment currently swirling around the BBC, it will start addressing both sides of the transgender issue, honestly and even-handedly.”

She suggests that a good place to start could be a story about the lengths women have to go to when meeting, to protect themselves from out-of-control trans activists.

The Women’s Rights Party has previously written about the lengths the Party has to go to ensure women are safe to meet without disruption from protesters. Misogyny behind attacks on women’s rights campaigners and women politicians - Women's Rights Party

Co-leader Jill Ovens described how in July last year, anti-women protesters entered Victoria University’s Rutherford House where they planned to shut down a seminar organised by the Women’s Rights Party with Australian women’s rights advocate Sall Grover.

Ms Grover was at the time the defendant in the “Tickle v Giggle” case that hinged on the question of whether men, including men who identify as women, can be excluded from women-only on-line spaces. The Judge ruled that the complainant, who goes by the name Roxanne Tickle and identifies as a ‘transwoman’, was “unimpeachably a woman” under the Australian Sex Discrimination Act 2013. Ms Grover has since appealed the lower Court Judge’s decision to the Australian Federal Court.

Ms Ovens says the Women’s Rights Party got wind of the plan to shut down the meeting at Rutherford House and three hours before the meeting she emailed attendees of an alternative venue with an earlier start time. She also advised Wellington Police of the change of venue.

“We had a spy at Rutherford House who saw the protesters enter the venue with their loud hailers and whistles. Eventually they realised we were not going to meet there and they set about hunting us down.

“By that time, we were safely ensconced in the alternative venue where the doors had been locked and the heaters on. We turned the volume up on our speakers, and after about 20 minutes in the freezing cold outside, the protesters gave up and left.”

There was no sign of the Police.

Ms Ovens said the experience was very scary to many of the women who were attending the meeting as the memory of Auckland’s Albert Park was still fresh. Hundreds of angry protesters had pushed down barriers separating the protesters from those who came to Albert Park to hear women’s rights advocate Kellie-Jay Keen speak about threats to women’s rights.

No one was able to speak because protesters used very loud noise and mayhem to shut down the event. In the violence that followed, Ms Keen and her supporters had to physically force their way through the baying mob to exit via Princes Street where Police bundled her into a car. Later that night, Ms Keen left the country fearing for her life after death threats had been delivered to her hotel room. Police told her they couldn’t guarantee Ms Keen’s safety.

Ms Keen said on Twitter that day: “My activism is simple, we #LetWomenSpeak. Why does that make anyone so angry? We showed the world what happens to women when they try to speak. No one can pretend they don’t see the salivating misogyny.”

As a result of past experiences with anti-women protesters and women feeling unsafe to attend meetings because of this, the Women's Rights Party spent more than $1300 on security at two of the Helen Joyce events during her recent tour of New Zealand.

“This time we kept the venues of our events secret, and only advised ticket holders early on the day where the meetings were to be held,” Ms Ovens says. “We also told attendees they could come earlier than the advertised time so they could avoid potential protesters.”

This is especially an issue in Wellington where many of those attending are employed by the public service and fear their jobs could be threatened if protesters took their photos and publicised these on social media.

“This is despite the fact that employees and indeed all New Zealanders are protected by the Bill of Rights Act to free assembly and free speech,” Ms Ovens says.

She recently attended a conference at the Brighton Events Centre in the UK where the self-styled trans resistance group ‘Bash Back’, which has adherents here in New Zealand, caused hundreds of pounds in damage when they smashed four plate glass windows and spray painted the front of the venue.

“We arrived to a motley group of 21 protesters trying to intimidate the 2500 women on the first day of the FiLiA Conference,” Ms Ovens says. “They had the usual loud hailers and crude placards, which many of the women found upsetting, but their main aim was to send a message to organisations not to hire their venues to women's organisations or else there would be similar vandalism.”

As it happened, there were no protesters at the events organised by the Women’s Rights Party during the Helen Joyce tour because of the lengths the Party went through to protect women. She says the Party does not oppose peaceful protest, but there is a line where protesters incite violence and engage in vandalism to shut down women.