NZ Government made a range of new resources to help schools about sex and relationships. Educatgion Minister Jan Tinetti said she wants “schools in Aotearoa to be safe places for all students regardless of gender . Hence pushing ‘gender fluidity’ that does not exist. She referred to lessons on gender diversity and rainbow issues- creating policies to support trans people. These people are children from the start of primary schoool age to end of senior school. Jan Tinetti spoke of ‘rainbow inclusion’

Tabby Besley from rainbow charity InsideOUT, which developed some of the resources, says more young people are coming out in the school environment and need support. chools are looking for not just lessons on gender diversity and rainbow issues but help creating policies and support groups. “We hope schools will pick up those resources, particularly the one around policies and supporting our trans young people, because those are where we get the most requests from schools. A lot of the time they ask if we have policies about how to do that rainbow inclusion or when a trans student comes out in the school, what they should be doing to support them

Schools look out for rainbow policies

Connecting Diverse Communities Report on 2007/08 public engagement A report on 15 meetings held around New Zealand to discuss diversity and social cohesion and responses to a written questionnaire August 2008. The views documented in this report are the views of the people who attended the Connecting Diverse Communities meetings held around the country. They are not the views of the Government, government agencies, Ministry of Social Development, Office of Ethnic Affairs or their staff.

Purpose of the report.. This report summarises the findings of the ‘Connecting Diverse Communities’ public engagement process. This process involved fifteen meetings held throughout New Zealand between August and November 2007, followed by a written survey that was sent to relevant organisations and available publicly. The majority of this report summarises the feedback received at the community meetings, while the responses from the survey can be found at Appendix 4. The meetings were organised by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) and the Office of Ethnic Affairs (OEA) and were held in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Napier, Palmerston North, New Plymouth, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch and Dunedin. More than 500 people attended the meetings in total. The key objectives of the meetings were: • to engage with representatives of diverse communities around New Zealand (including ethnic and religious communities, iwi/hapū/Māori, Pākehā and Pacific Island peoples

Including in the content of this report was the following:-

Responses were subsequently transcribed and sent back to the meeting scribes for further comment and corrections, before being collated, analysed and used as material for this report. On four occasions, ie the Auckland Youth meeting, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender or Intersex (GLBTI) meeting and the two Otara meetings

To hold dialogues with different peoples, to continue to communicate in times of celebration and adversity, and to influence others to be comfortable with diversity. We need to have more ‘conversations’ about social cohesion. • The media has an important role in this process. Take advantage of and celebrate diversity.  The Treaty of Waitangi as a foundation for intercultural respect. The role of schools in preparing young children to accept diversity as a ‘norm’ was often raised in the Connecting Diverse Communities meetings

Responses from the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Intersex (GLBTI) meeting…The GBLTI meeting, held in Wellington, was designed to allow participants to respond in a safe environment where their range of views was more likely to be expressed than if they were part of the local meetings. The questions were worded slightly differently and the responses are recorded below

Question 1.1 What do you think would help you create, maintain or strengthen your sense of ethnic, cultural and/or religious identity and community belonging in New Zealand? Question 1.2 What role can government play to support this?

Participants responded to the notion of diversity, identity and community by including sexual orientation and gender identity rather than just focusing on matters of ethnicity, culture or religion. Critical issues for the GLBTI community revolve around increasing their visibility and the levels of tolerance of GLBTI people in all communities. Two clear positions were articulated by participants in answer to the above two questions. They were: • While the local and central governments have a powerful influencing role in protecting GLBTI communities, local community groups have much more capacity to practise behaviours and attitudes that lead to GLBTI safety. Therefore, creating, maintaining or strengthening one’s sense of ethnic, cultural and/or religious identity and community belonging in New Zealand greatly relies on local community groups being in a position to deal with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity first. This requires a sustained and far-reaching education campaign that starts with schools but involves all members of local communities, including parents and local leaders

• Government can play a critical role by increasing GLBTI visibility, rights and safety in the following ways: o Supporting the rights of GLBTI by enforcing their application in new policy development (such as developing ‘anti-hate-speech’ legislation), in current legislation (as expressed in the Human Rights Act) and in processes (such as GLBTI individuals being able to be counted in census data, household and crime and safety surveys). o Establishing a Ministry to deal with GLBTI issues, or at least a Ministerial portfolio for that purpose. o Establishing and funding a non-governmental body such as a Diversity Council to represent all minority groups. Such a body would be able to deal more readily with issues specific to GBLTI, such as assumptions about how different ethnicities respond to the GBLTI communities, their relationship to fundamentalist religious groups, or policy development involving their communities. o Resourcing, enforcing and monitoring programmes that support diversity (including sexual diversity) in schools (for example, through School Charters or by addressing cultural safety issues in curriculum delivery); in the media (for example, through TV and Radio Charters, or programming such as Māori TV’s Takataapui programme); and in the health sector (for example, through the Nursing Council’s cultural competencies – not just during training but also via in-service professional development – or by showing same-sex couples in health promotion TV ads). o Supporting student-led diversity initiatives in schools (e.g. against racism or gender bias). There are GLBTI groups in schools that focus on sexual and gender diversity issues through the ‘School’s Out’ forum. However, these groups need more ethnically diverse input. o Acknowledging that GLBTI people face discriminatory practices from members of mainstream ‘straight’ society, including parents, schools, employers and employees – no matter what ethnicity or socio-economic circumstance they are in. Government has a role in lessening tension by addressing stereotypical attitudes and behaviour, such as refuting the perception that all GBLTI people practise predatory behaviour or want to ‘recruit’ young people in schools, and by encouraging inclusive behaviour. o Establishing role modelling processes in government agencies so that there is an increasing awareness of cultural difference and safety in workplaces and in the health sector. o Supporting the development of more open leadership and providing more counselling information services for GLBTI people in cultural and ethnic communities. o Supporting celebrations like the Gay and Lesbian Fair ‘The Big Gay Out’ and the Hero Parade, that create awareness of GLBTI issues and carve a space for the GLBTI community within the wider community, by funding or underwriting them in the same way that they might support ethnic festival development. o Supporting festivals that celebrate other cultures. Film festivals in particular, encourage the coming together of diverse groups (for example, the GLBTI ‘Out Takes’ film festival).

GLBTI meeting responses Group question 2 was modified slightly to reflect the needs of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transexual and Intersex participants. While many of the above summary responses apply to the GLBTI group, the responses below reflect other insights specific to these participants. Specific responses have been put into table form below

Question 2.1 – How well do you think people from diverse ethnic, religious and cultural communities interact with each other, for example in your neighbourhood, in GLBTI spaces, at work or through school? Question 2.2 – What do you think are the barriers to people mixing?

Question 2.2 Barriers include: • The lack of identifiable spaces where it is safe to be GLBTI. • The visibility of GLBTI members is met by fearful and negative attitudes, non-acceptance and ignorance. • Migrants are not aware that New Zealand legally protects minority groups such as members of the GLBTI community. • There is a lack of opportunity to meet and discuss GLBTI issues. • There is a lack of opportunity to work on common tasks. • People don’t know how to discuss GLBTI matters in a frank, open and informative way. When there is an opportunity to do so, people do not recognise common ground as a starting point for interacting. The increasing pace of social change makes it harder to get to know people as people first. • Attacks on GLBTI members by fundamentalist religious groups are a barrier. Some religious leaders want to eliminate GLBTI people altogether. The increasing diversity of the population and resulting increase in fundamentalism is a threat to GLBTI communities. Newcomers need to know New Zealand is first and foremost a secular country where there is freedom to worship. • Marches and protests against GLBTI communities. • The use of derogatory terms and hate speech against GLBTI communities. • That the focus on sexual and gender diversity in schools tends to be Pākehā-dominated and needs to be more inclusive of other ethnic groups

https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/research/connecting-diverse-communities/cdc-public-engagement-2007.pdf

Most of David Reimer’s tragedies have been well-documented: how his penis was burned off during a botched circumcision, how doctors tried surgery and hormones to make him a girl and how the experiment went horribly wrong. But only his friends knew the 38-year-old Winnipegger was agonizing over yet another personal catastrophe in the months before he committed suicide last week.

Mr. Reimer was distraught after losing at least $65,000 in an investment scheme last year, friends say. “He was crying on my shoulder, because he said they’re not worth the paper they’re written on,” one said. The Manitoba Securities Commission issued a warning in November about Gary Perch, who ran the shop where Mr. Reimer worked. “Gary Perch has been soliciting money from the public to invest in his Winnipeg-based pro golf shop,” the statement said. “If you have invested your money with him, your money may be at risk.”

Mr. Reimer’s wife recently hired a lawyer to recover about $65,000 that seems to have gone missing, said author John Colapinto, whose book about Mr. Reimer’s bizarre medical ordeal made him famous. “What an absolute horror,” Mr. Colapinto said. “One has to wonder if this didn’t contribute to his despair.”  Mr. Colapinto had believed that Mr. Reimer was financially comfortable, because he gave him half the proceeds from his book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised A Girl. “David made a wad of money on the book and movie options,” Mr. Colapinto said.

But people who knew Mr. Reimer from his days at the Transcona Golf Club in the eastern suburbs of Winnipeg said the boyish handyman was often short of cash. The club kept him busy washing windows, changing light bulbs and scrubbing the bathrooms, they said, but he often talked about hunting for a weekend job to supplement his income. “He didn’t have money to feed the family,” said Brian Andrews, a member of the golf club’s board of directors. “So what the members did was we put together $800, I think it was, for food.”

Mary Mogg, 64, remembers giving him leftovers after she finished her shift at the clubhouse. “He’d have a pot of soup if we made it, and at the end of the day he’d take it home,” she said. “I think he appreciated it.” The indignity of poverty was just one of many cruelties Mr. Reimer endured. The trouble started eight months after he was born in 1965, when he went for a routine circumcision at a hospital in Winnipeg. The regular surgeon wasn’t available that day, so a general practitioner tried the operation herself. Something went wrong while she was using an electric cauterizing machine, which produced a puff of smoke around Mr. Reimer’s genitals. “I heard a sound,” said a witness quoted in Mr. Colapinto’s book, “just like steak being seared.” The boy’s penis was so badly burned that it dried up and fell off. His family eventually asked for advice from John Money, a well-known sex researcher at Johns Hopkins University hospital in Baltimore, Md.

Dr. Money had theorized that gender depends on how a child grows up rather than genetic coding, and the burned child with a twin brother offered a chance to prove it. The doctor oversaw a series of procedures that cut away the boy’s remaining genitalia and gave him female hormones. His parents started calling him Brenda. But Mr. Reimer never felt comfortable being female, and when he learned about the accident at age 15 he rebelled against the experiment and began acting like a young man. He renamed himself David, after the Bible story, and began more surgery to remove his breasts and create an artificial penis from muscle and cartilage. For years, he quietly tried to live a normal life in Winnipeg. He worked a series of menial jobs and got married to a woman named Jane. His hobbies included fishing, camping, antiques and collecting old coins. “He absolutely loved Elvis,” his eulogy stated. When he went public with his story in the mid-90s, it forced sexologists to re-evaluate their practices, said Ken Zucker, psychologist-in-chief at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. “His legacy is that his case has encouraged a lot more research,” Dr. Zucker said.

Mr. Reimer committed suicide May 4. His family has not released the cause of death. At his funeral yesterday, his father, Ron, just shook his head when asked whether he wanted to talk. His mother, Janet, leaned forward with tears in her eyes and whispered: “He was a hero. He showed the doctors. He was a worldwide hero.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/boy-raised-as-a-girl-suffered-final-indignity/article18264922/

David Reimer, the Canadian man raised as a girl for most of the first 14 years of his life in a highly touted medical experiment that seemed to resolve the debate over the cultural and biological determinants of gender, has died at 38. He committed suicide May 4 in his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. At 8 months of age, Reimer became the unwitting subject of “sex reassignment,” a treatment method embraced by his parents after his penis was all but obliterated during a botched circumcision. The American doctor whose advice they sought recommended that their son be castrated, given hormone treatments and raised as a girl. The physician, Dr. John Money, supervised the case for several years and eventually wrote a paper declaring the success of the gender conversion. Known as the “John/Joan” case, it was widely publicized and gave credence to arguments presented in the 1970s by feminists and others that humans are sexually neutral at birth and that sex roles are largely the product of social conditioning.

But, in fact, the gender conversion was far from successful. Money’s experiment was a disaster for Reimer that created psychological scars he ultimately could not overcome. Reimer’s story was told in the 2000 book “As Nature Made Him,” by journalist John Colapinto. Reimer said he cooperated with Colapinto in the hope that other children could be spared the miseries he experienced.

Reimer was born on Aug. 22, 1965, 12 minutes before his identical twin brother. His working-class parents named him Bruce and his brother Brian. Both babies were healthy and developed normally until they were seven months old, when they were discovered to have a condition called phimosis, a defect in the foreskin of the penis that makes urination difficult. The Reimers were told that the problem was easily remedied with circumcision. During the procedure at the hospital, a doctor who did not usually perform such operations was assigned to the Reimer babies. She chose to use an electric cautery machine with a sharp cutting needle to sever the foreskin. But something went terribly awry. Exactly where the error lay — in the machine, or in the user — was never determined. What quickly became clear was that baby Bruce had been irreparably maimed. (The doctors decided not to try the operation on his brother Brian, whose phimosis later disappeared without treatment.)

The Reimers were distraught. Told that phallic reconstruction was a crude option that would never result in a fully functioning organ, they were without hope until one Sunday evening after the twins’ first birthday when they happened to tune in to an interview with Money on a television talk show. He was describing his successes at Johns Hopkins University in changing the sex of babies born with incomplete or ambiguous genitalia. He said that through surgeries and hormone treatments he could turn a child into whichever sex seemed most appropriate, and that such reassignments were resulting in happy, healthy children.

Money, a Harvard-educated native of New Zealand, had already established a reputation as one of the world’s leading sex researchers, known for his brilliance and his arrogance. He was credited with coining the term “gender identity” to describe a person’s innate sense of maleness or femaleness. The Reimers went to see Money, who with unwavering confidence told them that raising Bruce as a girl was the best course, and that they should never say a word to the child about ever having been a boy. About six weeks before his second birthday, Bruce became Brenda on an operating table at Johns Hopkins. After bringing the toddler home, the Reimers began dressing her like a girl and giving her dolls. She was, on the surface, an appealing little girl, with round cheeks, curly locks and large, brown eyes. But Brenda rebelled at her imposed identity from the start. She tried to rip off the first dress that her mother sewed for her. When she saw her father shaving, she wanted a razor, too. She favored toy guns and trucks over sewing machines and Barbies. When she fought with her brother, it was clear that she was the stronger of the two. “I recognized Brenda as my sister,” Brian was quoted as saying in the Colapinto book. “But she never, ever acted the part.”

Money continued to perform annual checkups on Brenda, and despite the signs that Brenda was rejecting her feminized self, Money insisted that continuing on the path to womanhood was the proper course for her. In 1972, when Brenda was 7, Money touted his success with her gender conversion in a speech to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., and in the book, “Man & Woman, Boy & Girl,” released the same day. The scientists in attendance recognized the significance of the case as readily as Money had years earlier. Because Brenda had an identical male twin, they offered the perfect test of the theory that gender is learned, not inborn. Money already was the darling of radical feminists such as Kate Millett, who in her bestselling “Sexual Politics” two years earlier had cited Money’s writings from the 1950s as proof that “psychosexual personality is therefore postnatal and learned.”

Now his “success” was written up in Time magazine, which, in reporting on his speech, wrote that Money’s research provided “strong support for a major contention of women’s liberationists: that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered.” In other words, nurture had trumped nature. The Reimer case quickly was written into textbooks on pediatrics, psychiatry and sexuality as evidence that anatomy was not destiny, that sexual identity was far more malleable than anyone had thought possible. Money’s claims provided powerful support for those seeking medical or social remedies for gender-based ills.

What went unreported until decades later, however, was that Money’s experiment actually proved the opposite — the immutability of one’s inborn sense of gender. Money stopped commenting publicly on the case in 1980 and never acknowledged that the experiment was anything but a glowing success. Dr. Milton Diamond, a sexologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, had long been suspicious of Money’s claims. He was finally able to locate Reimer through a Canadian psychiatrist who had seen Reimer as a patient.

In an article published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in 1997, Diamond and the psychiatrist, Dr. H. Keith Sigmundson, showed how Brenda had steadily rejected her reassignment from male to female. In early adolescence, she refused to continue receiving the estrogen treatments that had helped her grow breasts. She stopped seeing Money. Finally, at 14, she refused to continue living as a girl. When she confronted her father, he broke down in tears and told her what had happened shortly after her birth. Instead of being angry, Brenda was relieved. “For the first time everything made sense,” the article by Diamond and Sigmundson quoted her as saying, “and I understood who and what I was.” She decided to reclaim the identity she was born with by taking male hormone shots and undergoing a double mastectomy and operations to build a penis with skin grafts. She changed her name to David, identifying with the Biblical David who fought Goliath. “It reminded me,” David told Colapinto, “of courage.”

David developed into a muscular, handsome young man. But the grueling surgeries spun him into periods of depression and twice caused him to attempt suicide. He spent months living alone in a cabin in the woods. At 22, he prayed to God for the first time in his life, begging for the chance to be a husband and father. When he was 25, he married a woman and adopted her three children. Diamond reported that while the phallic reconstruction was only partially successful, David could have sexual intercourse and experience orgasm. He worked in a slaughterhouse and said he was happily adjusted to life as a man.

In interviews for Colapinto’s book, however, he acknowledged a deep well of wrenching anger that would never go away.  “You can never escape the past,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000. “I had parts of my body cut away and thrown in a wastepaper basket. I’ve had my mind ripped away.” His life began to unravel with the suicide of his brother two years ago. Brian Reimer had been treated for schizophrenia and took his life by overdosing on drugs. David visited his brother’s grave every day. He lost his job, separated from his wife and was deeply in debt after a failed investment. He is survived by his wife, Jane; his parents, and his children.

Despite the hardships he experienced, he said he did not blame his parents for their decision to raise him as a girl. As he told Colapinto, “Mom and Dad wanted this to work so I’d be happy. That’s every parent’s dream for their child. But I couldn’t be happy for my parents. I had to be happy for me. You can’t be something that you’re not. You have to be you.”

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-may-13-me-reimer13-story.html