The Tiny, Noisy, Taxpayer-Funded Lobby Fighting NZ First’s Definitions Bill
Critical Analysis: NZ First’s Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill - the backlash, their funding, and who they are actually representing
NZ First’s Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill has triggered a loud and coordinated backlash from rainbow non-governmental organisations (NGOs), activist hubs, political parties and allied professional bodies.
But when you strip away the slogans, two things stand out:
Many of the loudest opponents sit inside taxpayer-funded advocacy networks, and
The group whose ideology is really at stake is far smaller than the campaign language suggests.
Just some of the groups who are lobbying hard to reject this bill…
The bill itself is simple
It would insert default definitions into the Legislation Act so that “woman” means “an adult human biological female” and “man” means “an adult human biological male.” Its supporters say this restores clarity in law; its critics say it is harmful and discriminatory. But the real story is not just the bill. It is the machinery mobilised to kill it.
Numbers and noise
Opponents routinely frame this as an attack on the whole “rainbow community.” But Stats NZ’s 2023 Census data shows that 4.9% of adults belong to the broader “LGBTIQ+” population, while 4.1% reported a minority sexual identity and just 0.7% were counted as transgender and non-binary. That means the “gender identity” constituency driving this campaign is a fraction of the population, not “New Zealand” and not even the whole “rainbow” population.
Gay and lesbian New Zealanders are not “erased” by defining man and woman in biological terms. The real pressure is coming from “gender-identity” activists and the institutions aligned with them, who wrap a much narrower ideological demand inside the moral authority of the wider “rainbow” label.
Read what Lesbian Resistance say about this bill…
Who is funding the opposition to this bill?
This campaign AGAINST this bill is presented as grassroots outrage, but many of its central players are embedded in publicly funded systems. InsideOUT describes itself as “the national provider of government-funded rainbow competency training for mental health and addiction services”, and government announcements show millions of dollars in rainbow wellbeing support flowing to organisations in this space. RainbowYOUTH has also received ministry funding and grants, alongside wider philanthropic support.
“The now $4.6-million package consists of; $3.2 million for primary mental health and addiction services for Rainbow young people across the motu – awarded to RainbowYOUTH and InsideOUT Kōaro”… “RainbowYOUTH can now extend its peer support service nationwide, and InsideOUT can expand its support service from 200 to 300 schools.” - Andrew Little, 2021
Around them are regional and specialist groups such as Qtopia, Rainbow Hub Waikato, Intersex Aotearoa and others, which then plug into shared campaign resources, submission guides and events. These groups too receive a share of tax and rate-payer funding, along with grants from some of NZ’s largest buckets of available money. Money that groups like Let Kids Be Kids wouldn’t have a hope of accessing. (Yet Let Kids Be Kids represents families - mums, dads, grandparents - the majority of New Zealand and the body of people who are the engine room of our nation - our economy).
The effect is that what looks like many separate voices is often one coordinated ecosystem, amplified through taxpayer-supported organisations, parliamentary parties and publicly resourced professionals.
A global, coordinated strategy
If you want to see how this local campaign plugs into a much bigger machine, watch my recent conversation with Rhonda Miller while I was in Texas recently, The Global Trans Activist Network, where we walk through ILGA World’s United Nations connections, its global dashboard tracking every country’s laws, and the way media, data, funding and NGOs are used to drive the same gender‑identity agenda through schools, surveys and “rainbow” charities in New Zealand and around the world:
The coordinated script
The messaging from these anti-woman/anti-man groups is strikingly uniform. Across campaign sites, NGO statements and submission guides, the same phrases repeat: the bill is “harmful”, “discriminatory”, “dangerous”, “erasing” people, or “writing people out of the law.” What is often missing is any serious engagement with the legal question itself: can Parliament define man and woman by biological sex?
The strategy is clear. Shift the debate away from statutory language and onto identity, harm and victimhood. Present a bill about legal definitions as though it were an assault on human existence. Then mobilise a network of organisations to repeat the same emotional and legal claims until they sound like common sense.
Read also about the ‘Gay Manifesto’ strategy in my recent article EXPOSÉ: Who’s Making You Sweat - And Why? which was written in the 1980’s and is clearly the playbook being so liberally applied to all ‘gender identity’ arguments today:
Desensitisation
Jamming
Conversion
Why the history of “gender identity” matters
There is no stable legal definition in New Zealand statute of “transgender” or “trans person.” Instead, activists rely on the phrase “gender identity” to push their claims into law and policy. That phrase is not neutral. It comes with an ideological history shaped by the Yogyakarta Principles (read an analysis of these principles here), which have been highly influential in the international push to entrench “gender identity” in law.
Under the Yogyakarta Principles, “gender identity” is defined as: “…each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech and mannerisms.”
I explained the activists definition of ‘gender identity’ at the NZ First convention last year (video starts at ‘gender identity’ definition)…
That is what activists mean when they ask for “gender identity” to be recognised in law: not a narrow administrative category, but a subjective and elastic concept capable of competing with sex itself.
That is why the wording in this bill matters. The phrase “regardless of gender identity” appears in the draft bill itself. Even though the bill is trying to anchor law back in biology, it still introduces “gender identity” into the Legislation Act. That is significant, because activists have long used that phrase as the vehicle through which an undefined internal identity is advanced against the objective category of sex. My filing will include reasons why “gender identity” must be removed from this bill.
The deeper issue
The backlash to this bill is not about compassion or inclusion. It is about defending a legal and political strategy that depends on keeping “sex” blurred and “identity” an ever-evolving category of undefined descriptors. The NGOs, campaign hubs and political actors opposing this bill are not merely expressing concern. They are defending an ideological framework that has already been threaded through education, health, human-rights discourse and public administration.
That is also why this debate matters beyond NZ First’s bill. If sex remains the organising principle of law, then categories like man and woman remain anchored in reality. If “gender identity” is allowed to sit alongside or above sex, then every sex-based boundary becomes contestable.
What you can do
Public submissions on the bill are open until July 2 11:59pm. If this matters to you, make a submission and put your view on the record through Parliament’s official page.
This bill may be limited, and it may not fix the deeper legal architecture that embedded gender ideology into New Zealand law. But the backlash against it has already exposed something bigger: a small, well-funded, tightly coordinated activist network is determined to stop even the most modest attempt to restore biological reality to legislation.
Recommended read
While the noise about this bill is taking up a lot of space online on both sides of the fence, the PUBLIC SERVICE AMENDMENT ACT came into force on June 3. It’s an important change that was missed by almost everybody - I recommend you read my recent article explaining it....
Penny Marie
Penny Marie is an independent researcher and investigative reporter, and the Founder of Let Kids Be Kids NZ.
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Good job exposing the rot within....all paid for by the taxpayer.