OPINION: Rodney Hide.
There was a moment when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon lost the plot. During the last election campaign he declared that anyone wanting to talk about women’s toilets was “on another planet.” He did not need to make bathrooms the centre of the campaign. He needed only to stand on a clear principle: that girls, women, daughters, sisters, wives and mothers are entitled to private spaces for modesty and safety. He could not do it.
That single comment revealed everything. Luxon is a manager. He sees politics as the balancing of competing interests and the avoidance of difficult ground. If defending single-sex spaces for females registers as electorally inconvenient, the principle is not discarded. A politician who cannot accept as foundational that biological females require protected private spaces has no bottom line at all. He is simply a kindly New Zealander, tolerant of everything and therefore standing for nothing. He cannot distinguish between the liberal right of a man to dress as he chooses and the illiberal demand that everyone else must treat that man as a woman and grant him immediate access to female spaces.
This is not an isolated cultural skirmish. It is another front in the same conflict Karl Popper identified: the open society versus closed systems that demand total affirmation. What began as a liberal project — equal rights and non-discrimination for homosexuals — has metastasised. The original claim was simple: people should be free to live as they are without persecution. That liberal idea has been replaced by an illiberal one. It is no longer enough to leave people alone. We must now affirm their internal identity, adopt their language, rewrite biological categories, and surrender female-only spaces. Dissent is treated as harm. Dissent is already career-ending and, indeed, criminal.
The alphabet activism that followed the genuine liberal gains of earlier decades has become among the most intolerant forces in public life. It does not seek coexistence. It seeks institutional capture and the silencing of opposition. Once biological sex is treated as optional and self-identification as decisive, the material reality that protects women and girls is dissolved. Changing rooms, sports, prisons and shelters become contested zones. The open society’s commitment to evidence, equal citizenship and the protection of the vulnerable is subordinated to a subjective claim that cannot be questioned.
Luxon’s refusal to defend the principle was not mere tactical caution.
It was a symptom of a wider collapse. In our expansive tolerance we have allowed an intolerant ideology to advance unchecked. The demand is no longer “live and let live.” It is “accept my self-declaration as reality and rearrange society accordingly.” That is the closed society’s demand dressed in the language of inclusion.
A free society can protect the right of adults to dress and live as they choose. It cannot surrender the objective categories that safeguard women and children, nor the right to state biological fact without fear. When a Prime Minister treats the defence of female private space as planetary eccentricity, the open society is already yielding ground. The cost is paid by the very girls and women the liberal order was supposed to protect.
