Woke Kills

News that adherence to an ideology was more important that the life of a young woman is not welcomed by the wokescolds.

In New Zealand the story of an anorexic, autistic teenager who starved to death while under the care of various government agencies was aired by state media (RNZ) this week, and then promptly ignored.

Why? Because the teen also thought she was trans and trans is the topic that must not be discussed in this country. All things trans are beyond criticism in a nation that promotes gender affirmation. Like the obedient wokescold enforcers they are, her school and the agencies (Health, Education, Work & Income, Oranga Tamariki and ACC) affirmed her delusion. This led to her estrangement from her poor distraught parents. She was 17, alone in a motel, when she starved to death.

The girl’s parents believe the teenager’s death was the result of the removal of the protections of the Compulsory Treatment Order nine months previously.

The mother said it appeared there was “wilful blindness” on the part of those professionals, who were so focused on affirming Vanessa’s gender identity, but did not pay the same attention to the eating disorder which would kill her.

The story was well-written by Ruth Hill of RNZ so there’s no need to traverse the sad details again here. What interests me is the aftermath to the teen’s death, most especially the reaction of the agents of the state.

Not only had state wokescolds insisted on affirming the girl’s gender identity in life, in death they were still determined to ‘educate’ the parents. Even at the point of the discovery of their daughter’s body, wokescold police proffered their wisdom to the distraught parents.

This from the RNZ story (the young girl has been given the name Vanessa, the mother called Catherine).

“When they (the parents) arrived at the motel, there was a stench.

Vanessa was lying in bed with her laptop propped up on her lap, dead two days.

“At the scene, the Police corrected us when we used Vanessa’s name and insisted on using a male name and pronouns,” remembers Catherine.

“I was so distressed by this.”

This was two years ago. After the initial overwhelming grief, the parents approached Resist Gender Education (RGE) wanting to share their story. RGE’s Fern Hickson explained on The Platform that they struggled to find media willing to tell the story. Eventually they found Ruth Hill at RNZ.

Hill does a great job but unfortunately her thorough account is put through the gender mincer. In the story the young girl is variously referred to as ‘they’ or ‘he’ depending on the person being interviewed and how that person described her. State broadcaster, RNZ, highly attuned to woke sensibilities, explains their policy thus:

* Under RNZ’s Rainbow Communities Reporting and Content Guidelines, we use the name and pronouns that people tell us they use. As this story deals with a deceased person, they are not able to communicate their wishes, and RNZ has opted to identify them variously as V and Vanessa, according to the differing perspectives of the people who knew them.

Not only is it jarring when you read the story, but it’s an insult to the parents who lost a daughter, not a son or a non-binary person. The parents say she had been rethinking her gender identity in the last weeks.

It’s only been a day since the story broke but already gender wokescold-in-chief Paul Thistoll has written to the chief coroner complaining that the media attention to the story “creates a charged atmosphere that could impact the perceived independence of the coronial process.”

As head of a group called Rights Aotearoa, Thistoll writes that he has lodged formal complaints with Radio New Zealand, the Broadcasting Standards Authority, and the Human Rights Commission regarding the content of the article and the circumstances surrounding its publication.

Our complaint to the Human Rights Commission specifically addresses the discriminatory misgendering of V and the potential influence of anti-transgender activism on RNZ's reporting.

Oh, and in breaking news, Thistoll adds that he’s just become aware of up to “6000 messages made by V that completely contradict the false narrative advanced in the RNZ article.” He will now write a separate letter to the court with this information and the contact details of the person with the material.

Thistoll has already written to Fern Hickson to inform her he will file police complaints regarding her actions as well as that of Ruth Hill and RNZ since “it appears they have attempted to obstruct or pervert the course of justice.”

So far, The Platform has been the only media to dig into the story following publication, that is, interview Fern Hickson and allow listeners to share their reactions. RNZ ran the story but turned off comments on their page while the NZ Herald limited comments. Stuff also republished the RNZ story but did not allow comments and The Spinoff ran an opinion piece by two transactivists titled “Stop Conflating Transgender with Being Sick.”

Thistoll is unlikely to be successful since RNZ had the story legally checked before publication.

In one of those curious and perverse twists of fate, he may find his complaints result in the Streisand effect, that is, expand coverage that the story might otherwise not have received. We can but hope.