I don’t know about you, but the days following the Let Women Speak riot in Auckland have changed my life. Truly. I went full nuclear, metaphorically speaking, narrowly avoiding blowing up my house but very definitely blowing up what I now laughingly refer to as my career. My MSM career, that is.

I went for a job interview in a news organisation, made it to the second round, met my prospective boss, and then succeeded in enraging my prospective boss by disagreeing with him about the Albert Park riot. ‘Fault on both sides,’ he said. ‘You’re down a rabbit hole,’ he said. ‘The issue is boring,’ he said. Not so much a job interview as a verbal slug-fest. I lost.

But I had to go there knowing I had a farewell to MSM journalism column coming out in The Spectator Australia. So boom! ‘Yup,’ said a friend mournfully. ‘You’ve put the boom back into boomer.’

Oh yes, the house… All of us who attended the Albert Park event slept badly the following week, alternating between rage, despair, and exhaustion. I can now confirm I am able to channel all three at once. So, in this complicated state of tiredness, I forgot I had two eggs boiling on the gas hob, went upstairs, read a book for an hour, and then went out. Three hours later I remembered wretched eggs. Rang son. No answer. Rang flatmate. Not at home. Spent the next hour fretting but knew I was too far away to rush home and do anything meaningful.

Fortunately, the aforementioned son had been home and found flames licking the side of a dry pot with two charcoal lumps at the bottom. The house smelled like a crematorium, not that I really know what a crematorium smells like. But it was weird and nasty.

None of that’s really important, but like everything these days, I appear to have to get it off my chest before I can move forward. Sorry about that.

What I wanted to write about in this piece is to explore my claim in the previous column that gender ideology is the new state-sponsored religion. You could write a PhD on this and no doubt someday people will, but I want to keep it simple.

I’ve read articles where gender ideology has been labelled a cult. Without getting into the weeds on the difference between religion and cult, I want to argue that in New Zealand gender has become a religion. Both religions and cults are unverifiable belief systems, except that one of the criteria for a cult surely must be that it is marginal, fringe, and going against the prevailing culture.

Gender ideology has been enshrined in law with the changes to The Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill and also the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill (where not affirming someone’s gender could technically result in a prison sentence). It has also been adopted across the public service (show me your pronouns), while the Education Ministry has implemented gender ideology in relationship and sexuality education teaching. In our census, gender is now collected in addition to sex. Some national awards are handed out based on gender, not sex, while the importance of gender is affirmed by politicians who publicly disagreed with the views of a woman campaigning for women to be defined by their sex. Given all these examples, I think it’s fair to say gender ideology is mainstream. Thus, for me, it is a religion.

You could even argue that it is a religious manifestation of an even bigger religion – Wokeism – a belief system that sacralises formerly oppressed minorities. Wokeism places paramount value on identity markers like race and gender and judges conflicts, not on fact, but on power dynamics. The person with the perceived least power is the person who is exempt from criticism. It is the greater victim argument.

The other aspect of gender ideology that operates like a religion is its view of gender, which has all the hallmarks of a metaphysical soul. That is, there are two markers of identity – sex and gender. Sex is biology. Adult human female. Really, that’s all New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins had to say at that presser when asked, ‘What is a woman?’ Chromosomes, gametes, and sex organs.

But gender is a feeling. Gender is a magic womanish or mannish essence that exists independently of sex and can inadvertently find itself trapped in the wrong body, a bit like souls in limbo, I guess.

The manifestations of this gendered soul, essence, or magic ectoplasm often look suspiciously like sex role stereotypes. Men who feel like women frequently wear dresses, high heels, and make-up. If I concentrate on men, it is because they are the sex who traditionally pose an increased threat to women in single-sex spaces.

Not all men make an effort to adopt an outward feminine appearance when self-identifying as the opposite gender. Self-ID laws mean that a statement of gender is now enough to become that gender and receive official recognition on a birth certificate.

This results in a state-sponsored religion endorsing what many women complain is the erasure of women’s rights because the category of woman now includes biological men who feel like women. Even though objective, material reality tells us womanhood is not a feeling in a man’s head.

We are our biology. We are oppressed as a result of our biology, and no amount of wishing and hoping is going to stop that.

And as we all know, religion has believers and non-believers. People of faith and infidels. Saints and sinners. Those welcomed in and those cast out.

Guess where the believers in material, objective reality sit?

It’s a baffling phenomenon to witness, especially when espoused by people, mainly from the left, who would describe themselves as secular. Whoever first said there is a God-shaped hole in everyone had a point.

Although I am an atheist I don’t begrudge anyone their religion, but I don’t think I should have to participate in other people’s faiths.

Which is why I argue that gender ideology has to be expunged from our institutions. It’s intellectually incoherent, dogmatic, and hostile to free speech. I also find it to be deeply misogynistic and often homophobic in practice when effeminate men and masculine women are encouraged to think of themselves as the opposite sex instead of being part of the glorious variety of human sexual expression. Our bodies aren’t wrong, although sometimes society is.

So that’s me for the day. My rage against the machinations of gender is done. I am hungry now, and lazy. A nice boiled egg should do the trick, though it will take superhuman powers of concentration not to get distracted by this nonsense. Honestly, I don’t know what’s happening. Could it be my magic woman essence going berserk? Very likely. Women get like that when men try to colonise us.