Protecting Women’s and Children’s Spaces and Safety

POLICY – Protecting women’s and children’s spaces and safety

Women and girls have the right to single-sex gatherings for any purpose, including the right to women-only social media groups.

Single-sex spaces preserve women’s and girls’ safety and dignity. These include, but are not limited to toilets, changing rooms, prisons, refuges, rape crisis centres, saunas, swimming facilities, hospital wards and other facilities.

In particular, school policies should guarantee that all children in schools have the right to privacy from the opposite sex in single-sex spaces, such as toilets and changing rooms.

The Women’s Rights Party opposes the housing of biological males in women’s prisons.[1] The human rights of all women prisoners must be fully respected. In addition to the right to single-sex spaces to preserve women prisoner’s safety and dignity, women prisoners must have humane, health promoting, and supportive conditions for pregnancy, birth, and caring for babies.

We are committed to increasing resources to help women leave situations where they are experiencing or at risk of domestic violence. We support public funding of refuges providing women-only services, public funding for services to support ‘detransitioners’, and exit services for women wishing to leave gangs or religious cults, including financial and structural support to help them build new lives.

The Women’s Rights Party promotes changes in the Justice system to protect women and children. For example, protection orders should be enforced and applications for protection orders should be accessible and affordable.

[1] Women’s Rights Party submission on men in women’s prisons, 1 April 2025. https://womensrightsparty.nz/submission-consultation-on-options-for-more-transparent-management-of-extreme-threat-prisoners/

Detransitioners

We see a gap in Aotearoa NZ in support for detransitioners who are likely to become more in number as young people caught up in the current trend of social transitioning and medicalisation of gender-related distress.

Guidelines for professionals need to ensure that detransitioners receive the same supportive care given to young people presenting with gender-related distress. This should include professional education.

Detransitioners should also receive the same practical and emotional support as others leaving a cult.

The situation for those adolescents and young people captured by “gender ideology” has many of the same elements as those of a cult.

These include:

1. Control communication (e.g. “Transwomen are women”, “TERFs must die”)

2. Mystical manipulation (e.g. “being born in the wrong body”)

3. Demand for purity (e.g. “black and white thinking”, ignoring reality)

4. Confessional (e.g. calling out non-believers or cancel culture)

5. Loading the language (e.g. “misgendering”, “dead naming”, ‘using the wrong pronouns”,  women as “cervix havers”, “birthing people”, “menstruators”, etc)

6. Truth lies in the doctrine (e.g. being “saved”, “finding their authentic self”)

7. Any criticism of the doctrine is interpreted as an act of violence on the believers’ very existence (e.g. “TERFs are denying we exist”, not using pronouns is “literal violence”)

8. Emotional control (e.g. telling parents “do you want a live child or a dead one?”; shunning detransitioners, piling on anyone who questions trans cult on social media)

9. Separation from other support (e.g. parents who don’t along with this) Many detransitioners report that “transitioning” did not improve their mental health problems. They also report a lack of understanding by medical professionals and on-line abuse from the “trans” community.