RODNEY HIDE: Christchurch City Council Has Lost Its Mind

The elected councillors and staff at Christchurch City Council have officially taken leave of their senses.

I was alerted to this particular madness by the wonderful Katrina Biggs on X, who posted the flyer for the council’s “Women’s Swimming Sessions.” I didn’t believe it at first. Surely this was satire. So I went to the official Christchurch City Council website to check. It gets worse.

Here is what they actually say:

 “Women’s swimming sessions provide an environment for all women and girls to feel good and enjoy themselves in the water. The entire pool area has windows covered for privacy and only women staff poolside. This provides a friendly, safe, and secure space for women.”

Sounds reasonable so far. Then comes the punchline:

“All women, girls, and boys (up to and including the age of five), can enjoy these weekly sessions at Matatiki Hornby Centre and Te Pou Toetoe Linwood Pool in a safe and private pool space. Transgender women, and people who identify as being a woman, are welcome.”

Let that sink in.

A six-year-old boy is banned. Too dangerous. Too male. But a grown biological male in a bikini, some lipstick, and a declaration that he “identifies as a woman”? Come right on in. The council has rolled out the red carpet.

This is not compassion. This is institutional insanity.

Christchurch City Council has created a policy that excludes little boys on the basis of their sex while explicitly welcoming adult men who claim to be women. They have declared that the privacy, dignity and safety of women and girls matters — except when it conflicts with gender ideology. Then biology is thrown overboard and common sense is drowned in the shallow end.

The sheer stupidity is breathtaking. A six-year-old boy is apparently a threat to women’s privacy, but a 45-year-old man with male anatomy prancing about as a woman is not. This is the logical endpoint of the nonsense we’ve been tolerating for years. When you abandon biological reality, you end up with councils writing rules that protect feelings at the expense of actual women and girls.

Local government was never meant to be the enforcement arm of radical gender theory. It was meant to fix the roads, empty the bins, and run the pools without turning them into ideological battlegrounds. Instead, Christchurch ratepayers are funding this grotesque farce.

The people responsible for this policy have lost the plot. They should be ashamed. Every councillor who voted for or tolerated this should be asked one simple question: would you be comfortable with your wife, daughter or mother sharing that private space with any man who says he is a woman?

This is not kindness. It is madness. And it is time for Christchurch residents to demand their council stops indulging it. Biological reality is not bigotry. Women’s single-sex spaces exist for a reason. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you progressive — it makes you a fool.

And Katrina says Christchurch City Council is not the only council that can't tell what a woman is.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT leader