What is going on with NZ First MP Tanya Unkovich?

Who is she? And why does she want to police where you piss?

I didn’t know who Tanya Unkovich was until I was sent a chain of messages she sent* to a non-binary person who contacted her about her Fair Access to Bathrooms (members lol) Bill.

This member's bill would be funny if it wasn’t so scary. The aim of the bill is to mandate shared, single-sex bathrooms in all public buildings. And you’ll be fined if the bathroom you use doesn’t “match” your sex. Yeah, I know.

It's utterly unenforceable for a start. I can only assume the desire to share bathrooms instead of using unisex single stall options is some kind of piss fetish but anyway…. Back to Unkovich.

What I know now is that she’s a New Zealand First MP who said she got into politics because she doesn’t feel safe to walk on her own at 5am. Which apparently is a new development for her. She should talk to a queer person for many reasons, but one might be to ask about what it’s like to be visibly queer and walk anywhere, at any time.

She really, really likes Winston Peters and devotes many tweets to saying he ‘owned it’ and is ‘on fire’ in Parliament. She is largely consumed with trans people using toilets, ‘indoctrination’, and protections to prevent the spread of Covid 19 that are no longer in place.

She also has a cat.

Prior to being in Parliament she was an ‘author, speaker, mentor and life coach’ and a ‘world-leading transformation specialist’ and a ‘media expert’ and a ‘Tony Robbins coach’, and she has ‘listened to many stories’. Her book Fuck the Food is ‘a ladies’ guide to letting go’. It is accompanied by a ‘master class’ on how to lose weight, and personal mentoring for weight loss. She says the book can easily also be used for drug addiction, alcoholism, giving up sugar, or ‘anything we use to soothe ourselves’. Helpful!

Her books were published by Christian publishing company Deep River Books and she is a member of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

She’s Tanya Unkovich.

She won 573 votes and is a member of Parliament due to NZ First winning 6% of the public vote in the 2023 election. She was also a member of the Nuremberg Trials channel on Telegram which says the COVID-19 vaccine was akin to the Nazis' war crimes.

When she was contacted by a member of the public about the Fair Access to Bathroom Bill on Facebook messenger she replied with:

Well, I don’t know all that, but what I’m clear about is that we only have male and female [sic]

She was told ‘You are wrong. That is not correct at any level. And trans men (who your bill would require to use the women’s restroom) are men. They look just like cisgender men. Do you want men to use the women’s restroom?’

She responded with:

‘The rest as you say are mentally ill people who need to go to the hospital for brain checks because I don’t see any reason to pretend to be what you are not’.

When told this was inaccurate she said:

‘Are you male or female?’.

She was told ‘I am nonbinary, how about you?’. She replied:

I am female

what was the gender assigned to you from birth

She was then told ‘As you’re not my doctor, you don’t need to know what genitals I have. Why do you ask?’

Tanya Unkovich then called the person and hung up after 12 seconds. She then said:

‘You’re female like me

So I’ll work on my speech, have a good day’.

It begs the question as to whether we should have someone who thinks gender is based on how your voice sounds, be speaking in Parliament on gender issues and drafting bills to change legislation.

It also might explain why the bill is so batshit.

I thought it’s important context to read the letter Tanya Unkovich was sent so you can decide if this is an appropriate response to a person’s concerns about an issue that will directly put them at risk.

I am assuming Uncovich will come out and say the Facebook page Tanya Unkovich MP that has her face on it and was linked to by the NZ First page has been hacked or isn’t her. For what it’s worth, I put questions to her yesterday but she did not respond. I sent her another message letting her know I would publish at 5pm but she didn’t respond.

Oop there it is - I just checked the Tanya Unkovich MP account and she’s said - “I have previously reported a fake account on Facebook that has been impersonating mine. They have been posting, commenting, and private messaging people pretending to be me.”

Update again: Unkovich told RNZ that Netsafe is “investigating” lol. How deliciously ironic that Netsafe would never confirm or deny anything on this, thus allowing NB people to be harassed online. Netsafe are truly a gift that keeps on giving and by that I mean, wow, as useful as a screen door in a submarine once again. Or as my grandfather would have said - as useful as a one legged cat trying to bury turds on a frozen pond.

I sincerely would have thought NZ First considered Netsafe too “woke” to run to - given they’re essentially a public service and we all know public servants are gay drag queens who want to turn your children into non binary vaccinators who love CINDY - but here we are!

I would like you to know that if you’re offended by anything I say in this newsletter, please know it’s written by a fake account. And not me.

Tanya Unkovich and her cat

Dear Tanya,

Your members’ bill, the ‘Fair Access to Bathrooms Bill’, will hopefully be laughed out of the House, but in case it isn’t, I have a few things to say.

The main issue is that your Bill is proposing to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, with a solution that wouldn’t work.

If the Bill relates to ‘the right to privacy, personal safety, and freedom from harm for all New Zealanders,’ it is redundant.

We already have laws that address those things.

There is no current problem with gender-diverse people in the public restroom they feel most comfortable in. No one is being attacked by trans people in bathrooms, no trans people are peeping over or under toilet cubicles, and no trans people are waving their genitals around for everyone to see. But even if that did happen, we have laws to deal with assault, voyeurism and public decency, regardless of someone’s gender identity.

If, say, a Canadian person assaulted someone in a bathroom, you wouldn’t respond by banning all Canadians from bathrooms - you’d deal with the incident that had occurred, using the laws already in place.

The same is true for anyone, transgender or cisgender, behaving inappropriately in a public place.

Many people seem to be of the mistaken belief that transwomen are ‘men in dresses’ who want to invade women’s spaces for nefarious purposes. Nothing could be further from the truth, and there is no evidence of this happening. The real threat to women (and trans people for that matter) is cisgender men - and if a man wants to enter a public bathroom to commit assault, he doesn’t need to put on a dress to do it.

Putting aside the redundancy of this Bill, the enforcement of it would be impossible, and would cause more danger and harm to both transgender and cisgender people.

Despite what you may think, it is not possible to tell someone’s sex assigned at birth by looking at them.

Many bigots online claim they “can always tell” and then prove over and over again that they can’t. What would end up happening is that many transgender people, along with a whole lot of cisgender people who don’t look “traditionally” male or female, would be challenged, bullied and subject to humiliating accusations or worse by vigilante members of the public who feel validated by this bill to harass others based on their outward appearance.

It would also mean that trans men, many of whom look just like cisgender men, would legally be required to use the women’s bathroom. That would a) make women feel less safe and b) make it more likely that a cisgender man could claim to be a transman and go into the women’s bathroom, making the non-existent problem you think you’re solving, actually worse!

Even if you had a security guard stationed at the entrance to every public toilet, requiring ID on entry (which surely in itself shows how ridiculous this Bill is), people in New Zealand can change their official gender marker, so there would be no way for the guard to tell if that was their sex assigned at birth or one subsequently changed.

The only way to enforce your Bill would be genital checks - which is going against the idea of ‘privacy, personal safety and freedom from harm’, and would also still leave you with no way to tell if you are looking at a transgender person who has had gender reassignment surgery.

Any way you look at it, this Bill would do the absolute opposite of your stated intention to ensure ‘the right to privacy, personal safety, and freedom from harm for all New Zealanders’.

If that’s really your aim, the best way to ensure that is to leave people alone to use whichever bathroom they feel comfortable in, and to stop providing validation to the bigots and trolls who already invade transgender people’s privacy, make them feel unsafe, and cause them harm.

Gender-diverse people are New Zealanders too, Tanya.

And all we want to do is pee in peace.

Ngā mihi,

[name redacted by me for their safety]

Back to me.

The bathroom bill is ridiculous and everyone knows it cannot pass. You can’t have random NZ First MPs inspecting people to see what genitals they have before they take a dump. BUT - the horrific rhetoric and misinformation around gender is putting people at very real risk.

Prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sex under the Human Rights Act 1993 is considered to include the grounds of gender identity. Transgender people and children must be protected under the Human Rights Act 1993 from unlawful discrimination.

The LGBT+ Pride 2023 survey showed that 84% of New Zealanders believe transgender people should be protected from discrimination in employment, housing and access to businesses.

NZ First are whipping up a tiny and vocal minority - but it is a minority.

Still, trans people and particularly parents of trans children are afraid. They’ve told me over and over again that death threats, harassment, and bullying have all increased since the election. Imagine having a teenager who doesn’t look like a feminine teenage girl or a teen boy with long hair and having them at risk of being abused and potentially assaulted by some 60 year old NZ First supporter. That’s what parents are facing.

Jennifer K Shields is one of those incredible people who will probably one day get a gong from the Queen King for services to literally everyone for her tireless work. Her newsletter The Edit is essential reading right now, in this age of incredible misinformation.

In her latest newsletter she said something I thought I would share for context - but really, I think you should read the whole thing, and sign up to it.

“For one, a quick glance at how bills like this have played out in America make it obvious that rather than keep women safe, they encourage hypervigilance and vigilante violence against anyone that doesn't fit narrow and subjective gender norms - cis women included.

Secondly, the bill is largely drawn from similar legislation from England, which operates in an entirely different context - that is, they don't have self-identification like we have in Aotearoa. Trans people in Aotearoa can easily access legal ID that affirms their gender - we did that already, and it was hard won - and, championed by a NZ First MP.

But I don't think this bill was ever intended to pass. Pre-election, Luxon called this policy platform "from another planet". While it certainly seems Seymour and Peters have the run of the house, I'm not sure that Peters cares enough about this bill to hold the coalition government in a stranglehold over it.”

I talked to Jen today about including parts of her newsletter here and she shared how important it is for us to recognise that even though the bill won’t pass, we must stand up for our trans friends and whānau who are suffering and at risk due to this ridiculous rhetoric.

We WILL see people taking it upon themselves to police bathrooms. It’s encouraging an open season on trans people who are already at greater risk of assault and sexual violence. Women who don’t present as feminine enough will be harassed. Those of us with tamariki are at risk of having transphobes screaming at us that our children cannot be in the same bathrooms as us.

Taking a dump in a public bathroom is stressful enough without adding weirdo anti-vaxxer trad wives and misogynists to the mix. We need to keep pissing private, no matter what transphobes say.

What can you do? Show up and stand up. It’s that simple. This weekend, if you’re in Wellington, come along on Saturday 18 May at 11.30am at Te Papa. Show the community you have their back.