Mick Hartley

Strange times in New Zealand, currently competing with Canada to see who's the wokest of them all.

First off, they're going full throttle on the gender ideology front:

Parliament has unanimously passed a sex self-identification law which will make it easier to amend a person’s sex on their birth certificates.

The Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill received support from all parties in the House during a final vote on the bill on Thursday afternoon.

Once law, it will mean transgender, intersex, gender diverse, and takatāpui people will no longer need proof of medical treatment or a Family Court declaration to change the sex listed on their birth certificate, but instead apply for it to be changed on the basis of how they identify.

“Today is a day about inclusion–having the right to have a birth certificate that reflects who you know yourself to be,” Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti said, during the third reading of the bill in the House.

Cue for lots of men who claim they know themselves to be women to get access to women-only spaces, women's jails (much nicer than those nasty men's jails) and women's sport. 

“This bill has had some controversy. It's been a tough journey for our trans- and non-binary community … there have been real people who have been hurt when they have been belittled, mocked, or discriminated against,” Tinetti said.

“A lot of the discussion has been aimed at our transwomen, who, as a cisgender woman, I am proud to stand alongside and call my sisters.”

Well isn't that nice?

Then there's the extraordinary move to teach indigenous Maori ways of knowing, called “mātauranga Māori”, as coequal with science in both high school and university science classes:

Matauranga means the knowledge system of the Maori. It includes reference to various gods e.g., Tane the god of the forest is said to be the creator of humans, and of all plants and creatures of the forest. Rain happens when the goddess Papatuanuku sheds tears. Maori try to claim that they have always been scientists. Their political demand is that Matauranga must be acknowledged as the equal of western (pakeha) science; that without this, Maori children will continue to fail in science at school.

Jerry Coyne has been covering this. His latest post on the subject, yesterday, features an e-mail sent by Richard Dawkins, in horrified response to the news that New Zealand's Royal Society seems to be backing this ridiculous position:

Since the subject of mātauranga Māori was raised through Letters in July, a global response has been building against the ludicrous move to incorporate Māori “ways of knowing” into New Zealand’s science curricula, and the frankly appalling failure of the Royal Society of New Zealand to stand up for science – which is, after all, what the society exists to do.

The Royal Society of New Zealand, like the Royal Society of which I have the honour to be a Fellow, is supposed to stand for science. Not “Western” science, not “European” science, not “White” science, not “Colonialist” science. Just science. Science is science is science, and it doesn’t matter who does it, or where, or what “tradition” they may have been brought up in. True science is evidence­based, not tradition-based; it incorporates safeguards such as peer review, repeated experimental testing of hypotheses, double-blind trials, instruments to sup­plement and validate fallible senses, etc.

If a “different” way of knowing worked, if it satisfied the above tests of being evidence-based, it wouldn’t be different, it would be science. Science works. It lands spacecraft on comets, develops vaccines against plagues, predicts eclipses to the nearest second, dates the origin of the universe, and reconstructs the lives of extinct species such as the tragically destroyed moa.

If New Zealand’s Royal Society won’t stand up for true science in your country, who will? What else is the society for? What else is the rationale for its existence? I hope you won’t think me presumptuous as an outsider (who actually rather wishes he was a New Zealander) if I encourage you to stand up against this nonsense and encourage others to do so.

Richard Dawkins, DSc, FRS
Emeritus Professor of the Public Under­standing of Science, University of Oxford