Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has appointed Dr Stephen Rainbow as head of the anti-discrimination Human Rights Commission. Craig Young assesses what the appointment of a centre-right gay man, means for the commission.
At sixty-three, Rainbow has had a broad spectrum of political affiliations, starting with Labour in the eighties and the Greens in the nineties, but he left the latter because he expressed concern at their coalition with the other constituent parties of Jim Anderton’s Alliance. In the late nineties, he formed his own fiscally responsible environmentalist party, the Progressive Greens, before finally joining the National Party in 1999.
He was also a Wellington City Councillor during the nineties, was re-elected twice and stood unsuccessfully for Wellington mayor twice. In 1999, he stood as a party list candidate for National, but this was during Labour’s Clark era, so given his list placement (51), he was unsuccessful.
After leaving the Wellington City Council in 1998, Rainbow shifted to Auckland, where he was involved with Outline and the NZ AIDS Foundation (now the Burnett Foundation) as well as campaigning for marriage equality in 2012-13. Now, none of this would be a problem were it not for an unfortunate incident in 2021.
By then, Rainbow had moved on to a management role within Auckland Transport. He is reported to have responded to a request to back the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill with the words ‘Be careful… there’s some elements of the trans agenda being sneakily promoted through this campaign.’ These sentiments stirred up some understandable disquiet amongst his Auckland Transport. AT’s senior Communications Interface Manager John Nottage and North Shore ward councillor Richard Hills were among those who condemned the statement.
Similar concerns have been voiced in the Spinoff about Melissa Derby (Ngati Ranginui), the new Race Relations Conciliator. Derby has been closely associated with the anti-transgender pseudofeminist Speak Up for Women group in the past, and at one such event, questioned why one “wasn’t allowed to question anything Maori,” and then went on to object to trans women’s presence in women’s sporting activities, misgendering them. Of course, this occurred in 2020, she may have moderated her views since then, as Rainbow seems to have done.
On August 18, Rainbow responded to concerns expressed about his views during his Auckland Transport tenure on Radio New Zealand news. He stated that he would be “professional and proactive” in his new role, and encourage dialogue and discussion around the critical issues that New Zealand is currently facing.
There are indeed a variety of viewpoints about transgender rights, but when it comes to public policy, it is prudent and logical to base that on cumulative, replicable and verifiable scientific evidence. When it comes to issues like puberty blocker medication for trans children and adolescents, many prominent figures with senior professional expertise in the relevant fields of endocrinology, developmental psychology and clinical paediatrics have strongly questioned the profound methodological flaws in the execution of the questionable UK Cass Report. Senior Canadian, American and Australian academic authorities have drawn attention to this, which may explain why its recommendations have not been adopted outside the United Kingdom. I am not opposed to anti-transgender pseudofeminists having the right to freedom of expression, but there appears to be a paucity of robust scientific evidence that undermines the credibility of their argument.
One certainly hopes that Dr Rainbow will undertake his duties with that imperative. The alternative would be to have the Human Rights Commission deteriorate into something akin to the distorted mockery of human rights practice that characterised the UK Human Rights and Equalities Commission (HREOC) under Baroness Kishwar Faulkner. HREOC repeatedly and actively attacked transgender rights at the behest of Boris Johnson and Richie Sunak’s Conservative administrations, to the exclusion of all else. It would be most helpful if Dr Rainbow repudiates that troubling precedent as soon as possible.
This would be particularly inappropriate for the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, which has repeatedly called for the direct and concrete inclusion of gender identity and intersex status within the Human Rights Act. Given the direct inclusion of gender identity in British, Irish, Australian and Canadian anti-discrimination laws, New Zealand’s backwardness in this context has become embarrassing and needs to be urgently rectified. Like many LGBTQ+ inhabitants of Aotearoa/New Zealand, I have long supported transgender equality as well as specific transgender rights issues. To reiterate, cumulative, replicable and abundant evidence supports the public policy case for comprehensive trans-inclusive and anti-discrimination laws. That is quite different from granting its opponents the right to free speech.
