Under Glass

There is no credible evidence that it is happening.

Journalists and fact-checkers around the world have chased this story for years, and none have found a single verified case of a school accommodating a child who identifies as an animal, or providing a litter box. The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact and Snopes have each investigated and found nothing to support it.

The rumour has traceable origins, it spread through social media and political speeches, but it survives because it is a good story, not a true one.

There is a dark irony to it. The only well-documented use of cat litter in American schools has been as part of emergency "go buckets" in some districts, including Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado. The litter is there to absorb waste if students are forced to remain in classrooms for hours during a lockdown, such as an active shooter incident, not to accommodate students identifying as animals. A real safety measure, born of a real horror, twisted into a punchline about trans kids.

That makes it a useful test. If this claim reached you and felt true, it is worth asking how many of the other things you have been told about trans people arrived the same way: unverified, unchecked, and passed along because they were frightening rather than because they were real.

Sources: Associated Press fact check, Reuters fact check, PolitiFact, Snopes

Nobody disputes that males and females exist, or that most people are clearly one or the other. But describing sex as a clean binary overstates the biology.

Freemartinism is well known in cattle farming. When a heifer calf shares a placenta and blood supply with a bull calf twin, the exchange of cells and developmental signals before birth often results in an intersex condition and infertility. Around 90–97% of female calves with a male co-twin are affected, making freemartinism the most common intersex condition in cattle.

Biology is diverse in other ways too. Most flowering plant species have flowers containing both male and female reproductive structures rather than being exclusively male or female.

Intersex people are also a natural part of human biology. Laws that define everyone as fitting into only one of two sex categories may not reflect the diversity of naturally occurring variations in sex characteristics. That is why Intersex Aotearoa has opposed proposals to write a strict sex binary into law.

Biology in the real world is more complex than a slogan, and freemartin cattle are one well-known example.

Sources: Veterinary literature on freemartinism, Intersex Aotearoa submission

Grooming is real, and that is exactly why the word matters.

It is the specific process by which an abuser builds trust with a child in order to exploit them. It has a victim, a perpetrator, and a pattern.

The overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse is committed by people the child already knows and trusts: family members, family friends, people in positions of authority. Not a book. Not a performer. Not a stranger who looks unusual.

When "grooming" is stretched to cover a picture book or a person existing visibly, it protects no child. It points parents away from where the real danger is, and it weakens the one word that describes an actual crime.

Sources: Child protection research on offender and victim relationships

Where this has actually been studied, it doesn't hold up. Research from the Williams Institute comparing places with and without trans-inclusive policies found no rise in safety or privacy incidents, which were rare to begin with.

Assault and voyeurism are already crimes, for everyone, and a predator has never needed to identify as trans to walk through a door. A "men here, women there" rule is a social convention, not a lock.

A strict biological-sex rule actually backfires. It would send trans men, people born female who now live as men, often with beards and years of testosterone, into the women's room. A masculine-looking person there stops being a red flag and becomes what the law expects, which removes the one barrier a would-be predator used to face. He no longer has to pass as a woman at all.

Trans men are not the danger. The point is that the rule's own logic makes an impostor's cover easier, not harder.

Sources: Williams Institute, Sexuality Research and Social Policy

You do not identify a predator by their identity or their appearance. You identify them by their behaviour, and predatory behaviour is already a crime, for everyone.

"They are all men" is not a description of a danger. It is a decision to stop seeing a group of people as individuals, and it is the same move that has been used against every minority that ever asked to be left alone.

And the evidence on who is actually harmed is stark. New Zealand's own Counting Ourselves research found trans and non-binary people are two to three times more likely than women in general, and seven to twelve times more likely than men, to experience sexual violence.

They are overwhelmingly the ones being harmed, not the threat.

Sources: Counting Ourselves, University of Waikato

Rights are not a fixed pie, and dignity is not zero-sum. One group having recognition does not subtract it from another.

Trans people were not latecomers who hijacked a finished movement. They were there at its start, at Stonewall and long after. Gay men were not diminished when lesbians stood beside them, and gay and lesbian people are not diminished by trans people standing beside them.

The "they stole our rights" framing is designed to split a coalition that has always been stronger together. It is worth recognising it for what it is.

Sources: Historical record of LGBTQ movements

It does the opposite of what it claims, on the record.

The government's own Minister for Women said she was not convinced the bill would improve the lives of women and girls in any way. The Attorney-General reported that it breaches the Bill of Rights, creating unjustified discrimination.

It does not raise a single woman's pay, fund a refuge, or shorten a surgery wait. Women-only services are already lawful under the Human Rights Act where genuinely justified, and this bill adds no protection for them.

It writes a definition into an interpretation statute and, by its own government's admission, does nothing for the women it names.

Sources: Attorney-General's Bill of Rights report, Minister for Women, first-reading debate (Hansard)

It is true that only some bodies can gestate. It is also beside the point.

Womanhood has never been defined by the ability to give birth. If it were, we would be telling infertile women, women past menopause, and women born without a uterus that they are not women.

No one is claiming a trans woman can become pregnant. Recognising a trans woman as a woman does not require believing anything untrue about reproduction.

The argument proves far more than its makers intend, and none of what it proves is something they actually believe.

A person existing, loving who they love, living as themselves, asks nothing of anyone else. You do not have to attend, approve, or join in. That is not force. It is coexistence.

The record of actually forcing a way of life on strangers runs the other way.

Homosexuality was a crime in this country within living memory, because a moral belief was written into law. Marriage was withheld from same-sex couples until 2013. Contraception, divorce, and shop trading hours were all dictated for generations by one set of beliefs, to people who never shared them.

That is what forcing a lifestyle on people looks like, and it has never run in the direction this claim points.

Sources: Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986, Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Act 2013