RODNEY HIDE: Transgenderism and the Attack on the Open Society

There was a moment when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon lost the

plot. During the last election campaign he declared that anyone

wanting to talk about women’s toilets was “on another planet.” He did

not need to make bathrooms the centre of the campaign. He needed only

to stand on a clear principle: that girls, women, daughters, sisters,

wives and mothers are entitled to private spaces for modesty and

safety. He could not do it.

That single comment revealed everything. Luxon is a manager. He sees

politics as the balancing of competing interests and the avoidance of

difficult ground. If defending single-sex spaces for females registers

as electorally inconvenient, the principle is not discarded. A

politician who cannot accept as foundational that biological females

require protected private spaces has no bottom line at all. He is

simply a kindly New Zealander, tolerant of everything and therefore

standing for nothing. He cannot distinguish between the liberal right

of a man to dress as he chooses and the illiberal demand that everyone

else must treat that man as a woman and grant him immediate access to

female spaces.

This is not an isolated cultural skirmish. It is another front in the

same conflict Karl Popper identified: the open society versus closed

systems that demand total affirmation. What began as a liberal project

— equal rights and non-discrimination for homosexuals — has

metastasised. The original claim was simple: people should be free to

live as they are without persecution. That liberal idea has been

replaced by an illiberal one. It is no longer enough to leave people

alone. We must now affirm their internal identity, adopt their

language, rewrite biological categories, and surrender female-only

spaces. Dissent is treated as harm. Dissent is already career-ending

and, indeed, criminal.

The alphabet activism that followed the genuine liberal gains of

earlier decades has become among the most intolerant forces in public

life. It does not seek coexistence. It seeks institutional capture and

the silencing of opposition. Once biological sex is treated as

optional and self-identification as decisive, the material reality

that protects women and girls is dissolved. Changing rooms, sports,

prisons and shelters become contested zones. The open society’s

commitment to evidence, equal citizenship and the protection of the

vulnerable is subordinated to a subjective claim that cannot be

questioned.

Luxon’s refusal to defend the principle was not mere tactical caution.

It was a symptom of a wider collapse. In our expansive tolerance we

have allowed an intolerant ideology to advance unchecked. The demand

is no longer “live and let live.” It is “accept my self-declaration as

reality and rearrange society accordingly.” That is the closed

society’s demand dressed in the language of inclusion.

A free society can protect the right of adults to dress and live as

they choose. It cannot surrender the objective categories that

safeguard women and children, nor the right to state biological fact

without fear. When a Prime Minister treats the defence of female

private space as planetary eccentricity, the open society is already

yielding ground. The cost is paid by the very girls and women the

liberal order was supposed to protect.

Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT party leader