Below 1) Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia, Māori Suffragette and the first woman to speak at the Kotahitanga Parliament, specifically to request that wāhine be extended the same right to vote as any man.
Below 2) Kate Sheppard, New Zealand's most well-known Suffragette, founder of the National Council of Women and the first women-owned newspaper in the country.
It is 127 years since these two women and many others won our right to vote; to participate in political debate and take action on issues that affect us and our children.
Their focus was different, then as now. Like us, Meri was fighting not just for universal women's suffrage and rights, but for the survival and protection of wāhine Māori and our culture; a culture which allows for powerful and commanding women, despite our clearly delineated sex roles.
It seems impossible - unreal - that we're here again, fighting this time not for the right to vote, but for the world to acknowledge that women exist as one half of the human species, that we are not men, that men cannot become us, and that men cannot give birth or breastfeed. It cuts the heart to know that Meri fought and won, only for a mental illness to sweep the West and rewrite our history into oblivion.
We cannot back down. We stand on their shoulders; Meri and Kate; the shoulders of great women, and we will not surrender our words, our culture or our rights.
Last week, the NZ Women's Right's Party and Mana Wāhine Kōrero came together and spoke the truth to the Law Commission about 'gender' and the Commission's determination to enshrine 'misgendering' into law as a 'hate crime'.
Below is what we said (read by Rex Landy):
Te ākina te mauri o te Wāhine
Tī ākina te māuri o te tamariki mea ngā mokopuna.
Hei tapu te whare tangata
Āmene
To:
The Law Commission of New Zealand
From:
Mana Wāhine Kōrero
National & International Rōpū of Tangata Whenua Wāhine & Whanaunga
Re: Our opposition to including ‘gender’ in our human rights legislation, effectively making ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ so-called ‘hate crimes’.
The situation is dire. The NZ Police are already intelligence-gathering for future suspected ‘hate crimes'.
You have stated that you have ‘experts’ working on this issue. Yet all the people that you do have working on it are all singers from the ‘gender affirmation-only’ model. A high number of your consultants are from universities - almost as if gender was promulgated there.
Wāhine have to make special times to speak to this issue, and limited times at that.
We are not afforded equal opportunity in the consultation process. For all your talk of ‘Te Tiriti’, you are saying the only indigenous tangata whenua rōpū don't get an equal say, which is deeply insulting. Gender ideology is a highly contested belief.
I am Rex Landy, speaking on behalf of Māna Wāhine Kōrero and an equal citizen under the law to every one of you.
Our Ropū was formed in opposition to the academic, critical social justice theories that are being forced onto our people, and into our language.
To suggest that we are now born in the wrong body is an insulting and disgraceful fresh attempt at undermining the very core of our culture.
Older words such as takatāpui (intimate companion of the same sex) have been redefined by the gender ideologues.
You are turning our historical Māori acceptance of homosexuality into something that promotes the sterilisation, lifelong medicalization, and surgical mutilation of our tamariki.
Māori living was always practiced in the sex roles. (Note that I say “sex” and not ‘gender’).
In te ao Māori there is a synergy between women and land, and that without one or the other or both, man will not survive. The representation of wāhine, therefore (sic), is a wider discussion about land and the continuation of whakapapa’ QUOTE BY M. Eria
He wāhine, he whenua ka ora te tangata
“It is by women and by land, that the people are given life”
Muriwai of Whakatāne fame did not want to be a man nor did she think she was a man…She was calling for the strength of a man.
Our expertise is that we are Māori Kuia.
Wāhine are not a feeling nor are we a costume.
Our Koro can not become our Kuia. That's preposterous.
There are 103 recognised iwi and you have less than a fair representation on behalf of all Iwi.
As we all know, Māori are not one size fits all. We are not united on many fronts.
Before the infiltration of gender ideologues, general sex roles were the common theme of all Māori iwi, irrespective of tribal differences.
We see your experts - Dr Elizabeth Kerekere of Pg. 82 fame, directly from her thesis where she clearly states there is no evidence of trans in whakapapa Maori.
There are no carvings, waiata, mōteatea, no known artifacts to prove gender ideology was practiced or existed.
Kerekere refuses to discuss this, pretending she never said it, while using her credentials to back up her lies since then.
A transvestite using our culture to add his fetishes to the core of what it means to be Māori. Using Māori concepts to insert his delusion as a cultural given.
Ahi Wi Hongi, who argues that simply asking the question, “What is a woman?”, is racist.
We firmly disagree. Where is the correlation? Wi-Hongi’s approach has the effect of further silencing people who wish to ask legitimate questions for fear of being labelled racist.
We suggest that this is a deliberate tactic, to discourage any questioning of gender ideology by the general public.
Today, the gender ideologues are stealing all our stories of our wāhine toa, crying fake tears about colonisation, at the same time that they are literally trying to recolonise us.
And the Māori elites in universities, media and government have sold us out for Rainbow blankets and thirty pieces of glitter — while our real problems go unaddressed.
We stress to the Crown and to everyone that the Treaty of Waitangi does not say, imply, suggest, encourage or permit the meddling of Government in our language, or the deletion and redefinition of any of our words.
In law, we Wāhine are legally afforded single-sex spaces, which we need and want.
Now we are on the verge of losing them legally for the sake of the vanity and luxury beliefs of the few.
Human beings cannot change sex.
Changing the law to suit feelings of mentally confused, preyed-upon people, harmed by mad beliefs on the internet, is beyond unbelievable.
Gender Dysphoria aka ‘Gender Identity disorder ’ is a categorised mental health condition in the DSM-5, and yet you’re willing to force wāhine to submit to their delusions, and you’re using our culture and a perverse interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi to do it.
People with a DSD and trans people already have every human right afforded all citizens of NZ. They share the same rights as you or I. They are demanding special privileges.
As sovereign women, we recognise He Whakaputanga as the primary Treaty of New Zealand, and we hold to those words.
Māna Wāhine Kōrero sees the trickery and sleight of hand happening before us.
We see you all.
This is a record of our public dissent.
Haumea hūi i tāiki e!
Rex Landy, for Mana Wāhine Kōrero
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