The low sun was peaking timidly over the Dunedin Town Hall, doing little to warm the crowd gathered in the Octagon.
Its main work on the shortest day of the year was to throw long shadows, so the protest signs carried by many of those who had rallied appeared to stretch out across the central carriageway towards the Regent Theatre quarter.
The signs themselves carried the usual mix of earnest politics and playful jibes. And also, as is now essential, worked in an internet meme or two. On this occasion that included several laying down the challenge to "Define Deez Nuts" — cue knowing smiles from the millennial crowd.
Another sign suggested an even longer shadow had extended its reach to lay across the heart of this southern community.
It read "No More American Culture Wars" because, for a change, the rally’s focus was not the military industrial complex, but rather the suspicion there had been an intervention of another kind.
The thousand-strong crowd had assembled on a cool June Sunday to protest against the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, which had recently passed its first reading in Parliament and will now head off to a select committee.
The members Bill, promoted by NZ First MP Jenny Marcroft, sets out to amend the Legislation Act 2019 by adding the definition of "woman" as "an adult human biological female" and of "man" as "an adult human biological male". Its claimed purpose is to "protect the integrity of sex-based rights, and ensure that language in law reflects biological reality".
If passed into law it will have implications across myriad contexts.
This, according to many, is the culture war writ large, a conservative take on human diversity, sketched in black and white, specifically designed to butt up against the fluid rainbow stylings of the 21st century.
There are various ways to frame the American part of it, but a shorthand would be the executive order signed by US President Donald Trump on the first day of his second term. In typically Trumpian language it was titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government".
By mandating that federal government departments define gender as an unchangeable male-female binary — from conception — it attempts to write transgender, non-binary and intersex people out of existence.
University of Otago political scientist Assoc Prof Brian Roper says Marcroft’s Definitions Bill clearly draws its inspiration from this sort of politics — the far right and specifically the far right in the US.
LGBTQI+ rights are very much a part of the culture wars in the US, he says, where the Trump agenda has rolled back the progress of recent decades, to the point of persecuting trans women and trans men within the US military.
Such measures help distract from the fact the Trump administration’s economic agenda has overwhelmingly benefited the billionaires, the top 1% of the American population, at a time when a cost-of-living crisis is being exacerbated by cuts to Medicare and other government supports.
"It provides a useful ideological and political smokescreen, which helps these governing parties to retain a degree of popularity while implementing other quite unpopular policies that are overwhelmingly beneficial to a small minority at the top of the heap."
What’s happening here in New Zealand is a smaller-scale version of that, he says, offering the example of the $2.9 billion in tax breaks property investors were handed in one of the coalition government’s first acts, and comparing it to the pay equity law amendment that cost working women up to $12.8 billion.
The polling clearly shows they are not popular policies, Prof Roper says, so the coalition will be looking for distractions.
"It’s a classic scapegoating, you know, scapegoat immigrants, scapegoat ethnic minorities, scapegoat Māori, scapegoat trans women and trans men."
One of Prof Roper’s principal concerns is the human consequences of it. It has been devastating for a trans woman he is supervising through postgraduate study, he says.
"You just multiply that across the tens of thousands of trans women and men in this country and, you know, it’s a piece of legislation that probably doesn’t matter that much to a lot of people, but for the minority who are impacted by it, it’s a really big deal. It’s having a major negative impact on their lives."
Which is where the university’s vice-chancellor stepped in and, it seems, the culture war followed.
In an email to staff and students, Grant Robertson shared his thoughts about the Bill.
"I know this Bill will be upsetting for many in our Otago community — particularly those who identify as, and love and support our trans, intersex, takatāpui, gender diverse and non-binary whānau," he wrote.
"At a personal level, I find this legislation to be unnecessary and disturbing. As a university we remain resolute in upholding our commitments to respect and inclusion".
Prof Roper thought it was precisely the right thing to say in that moment.
"I thought it was actually superb leadership on his part."
However, not everyone did. The Free Speech Union (FSU) were soon on the case, writing to the university council to suggest Robertson had overstepped the mark by making personal comments in an email from the vice-chancellor’s office.
It would inevitably work to silence members of the university community who held a contrary view, the FSU said.
Simply a frank exchange of views? Free speech in action?
Maybe. But maybe a further indication Marcroft is less a lone voice than a part of those same culture wars referenced in the protest sign.
Prof Mohan Dutta, the Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University, was an interested observer of the Robertson email controversy.
"So, the way it works in the free speech debate context is that you manufacture the crisis of free speech precisely as the basis to target institutions."
It’s a playbook scripted in the US and used there to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and attack the trans community.
For some years now the FSU has been ringing the alarm bells, saying universities and academia are gripped by such a free-speech crisis, he says.
"What it really is, is a strategy for imposing not just a right-wing but quite far-right definition of what freedom should look like within university spaces."
The goal is to fence universities into a constructed pen of "neutrality", defined by others and undermining of institutional autonomy.
Rather than promoting free speech, it shrinks the Overton window of what is acceptable. If you speak up, you are targeted and attacked.
Robertson’s email included just one personal comment, Prof Dutta says.
"If that is the cost or price you pay for writing that one line, and I see this consistently in the research work we have done with academics and interviewing them, that people feel scared to say anything lest they become the targets."
At the same time, the trans and gender diverse community, among the most marginalised in society, was effectively manufactured as posing a threat to the free speech of others, he says.
"The broader goal here is to shape the political landscape, the electoral landscape," he says.
After decades of neoliberal reforms, consolidation of wealth, wealth inequality and impoverishment of working communities, there is plenty of anxiety and anger just waiting to be weaponised, Prof Dutta says, all that’s required is to identify a target.
"If you think about the relevance of this man-woman Bill within this context, why is this even relevant? I mean, the thing to ask is whether producing that as a policy anchor at this juncture serves particular electoral politics."
Chief executive of the Free Speech Union, Jillaine Heather, rejects the suggestion it has played any part in promoting an anti-trans agenda or trying to shut down debate at the university.
In the latter case, quite the opposite, Heather says.
"We’re not at all saying that he can’t have private opinions," she says of Robertson.
But when he’s communicating from the vice-chancellor’s office, he needs to be careful and maintain a political neutrality.
"It reads as a very senior person in your university that is essentially telling people that he finds it distasteful if they don’t agree with him on something that’s before Parliament," Heather says.
People will read the email and self-censor.
"They’ll just not say anything, right?"
It’s not that the university should never express an opinion, but those occasions should be limited to advocating for the core functions of the institution.
Otherwise, the university’s job is to hold a space where its staff and students can disagree, Heather says.
In terms of gender issues, the FSU has no position, she says.
"I want everyone to have autonomy, privacy, security, live their best lives in any way that they can.
"It’s about free speech, and it’s about censorship of that free speech, and that absolutely is my position."
Nevertheless, it’s not the FSU’s first foray into gender debates.
When this month the Broadcasting Standards Authority reprimanded Barry Soper and NewstalkZB for harmful comments about former Green MP Benjamin Doyle, who is non-binary, the FSU waded in to say the BSA had it wrong.
It also submitted to the Law Commission’s Ia Tangata review of protections in the Human Rights Act for transgender, non-binary and intersex people, arguing its approach was elevating "particular ideologies" — a terminology that echoes President Trump’s executive order.
And back in 2023, it lobbied against a suggestion that school teachers should use pupils’ preferred pronouns.
The FSU can trace its origins to the visit of Canadian far-right speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux to New Zealand in 2018 — both of whom are known for polarising views on gender.
However, Heather says a case can’t be made from these "crumbs" that the FSU is targeting the trans and gender diverse communities.
"We are not — I’m not — aligned to an anti-trans position or cherry-picking what I weigh into depending on whether trans are involved or not," she says.
The FSU’s interest is free speech, so, similarly, they became involved when Speak Up For Women — who oppose self-identification of gender — were banned from Palmerston North facilities.
"So, if our press releases come out and it looks like we’re supporting one side, it’s because one side’s been silenced, unfortunately."
Neither is the FSU — which was spun out of the right-wing pressure group the Taxpayers Union and is chaired by former Act MP Stephen Franks — politically aligned to the right, she says.
They’ve criticised the arrest of Palestine Action protesters in the UK, critiqued the Queensland hate speech ban of the phrase "to the river to the sea" and come out in support of drag queen story hours.
"So those aren’t right issues, are they?" she says.
"I’ve voted left all my life."
Still, critics of the FSU’s arguments hear the organisation claiming to represent "Kiwis" and wonder who it is including, or excluding. Similarly, they question its claim that one side in the gender debate is being silenced, when it is the Definitions Bill that is in parliament — rather than a Bill protecting the human rights of the trans and gender diverse community, as was last year recommended by the Law Commission.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith parked the commission’s work, saying it wasn’t a priority.
So, the suspicion remains that all these manoeuvrings are part of a wider culture war.
That’s how it looks to gender studies scholar Dr Rosemary Overell, of the University of Otago.
The culture war is actually a political war, she says, in which cultural flashpoints or hot button topics are used to leverage populist support.
So, the Definitions Bill, with its talk of "sex-based rights" is not really about gender, because the science doesn’t support the neat binary it proposes.
Her contention is supported by the Law Commission’s work, which produced the Ia Tangata report.
The commission was looking at extending human rights protections based on gender, and considered including a definition of sex as part that, but ultimately rejected the idea, because it is not straightforward.
"Sex is a functional term," the commission said in the report, "that serves different purposes depending on the context".
Nevertheless, those behind the Definitions Bill present their arguments for a sex-based binary as "common sense", Dr Overell says.
Marcroft did so during the first reading of her Bill. It has been claimed for Trump’s executive order.
But such framings are really an attempt to limit the horizon and shut down the room for questions or critique, Dr Overell says.
Others have observed that such appeals to common sense, in other contexts, often leave sense at odds with science.
There were plenty of speeches at the Octagon rally, and they appeared to be freely given.
Neave Ashton, who was among the speakers, had been losing sleep over the Definitions Bill.
"Speaking from a personal perspective, seeing the government focus heavily on this has increased anxiety," Ashton, who is nonbinary, says.
"When you pass these laws, which are targeted towards marginalised communities, that is almost like a subtle thumbs up from the government to say, ‘yeah, these people are fair game’, right?" they say.
"You can target them more."
Sitting with Ashton, Dunedin bar owner and community advocate Josh Thomas says politicians who promote inflammatory issues like the Definitions Bill forget what it’s like to be at the coalface in the community.
"They forget the weight that their words, which are often very flippant, they forget the weight that those words carry. And I know here in my business, when those inflammatory, hateful words are bandied about by politicians, we see a direct increase in hateful language here on the streets."
Ashton also has concerns about the Definitions Bill’s potential to have snowballing consequences, posing new dangers for the rights of both cisgendered and trans people. As it stands, it could remove implicit protections for transgender people from the Human Rights Act and restrict access to health care.
It’s all been quite shocking, they say, but it has also fired a sense of defiance.
"We’re not going to disappear just because of one stupid bill or whatever other legislation they pass. We’re not going anywhere, right?"
Thomas is determined that if the culture war is here, the response will involve love.
"One of the big things . . . is letting trans, non-binary, intersex, letting people from the rainbow community who are affected by this legislation know that they are loved and valued and supported," he says.
"All we’re talking about is everyone having a decent life, living decent, fair lives, with the same rights as the rest of us."
The deadline for submissions on the Bill, he notes, is on Thursday.
