27 December 2021

The Dentons Report

How a small, inconspicuous paper is changing laws, one country at a time.

2021 saw the New Zealand Parliament introduce/reintroduce laws about sex self-ID, conversion practices, and free speech. Public consultation was not supposed to happen, which should become the subject of an entire investigation all by itself. However, eventually it did happen: More than 6,500 submissions were received for the sex self-ID bill, and the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill broke all the records with more than 100,000 received submissions. In spite of an overwhelming majority of submitters voicing grave concerns, the sex self-ID SOP 59 was passed earlier this month. This article explains the puppeteering behind the making of these laws.

New Zealand Green Party list MP, Dr Elizabeth Kerekere, wrote an opinion piece for STUFF in late November 2021, commenting on the process of sitting on a Select Committee and contemplating her “cis privilege”. She described having to listen to hundreds of citizens’ opinions as “difficult”, until she decided to just “focus only on people supportive to the bills”. Her disdain for the ones expressing concerns, she called them “haters”, was palpable and sometimes even visible. The hearing of submitter Maree Docherty’s evidence on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill on 2 December 2021 provides a prime example. Watch her submission to get an impression (time stamp 1:10:19).

The initial disbelief Dr Kerekere displayed was in reaction to the mentioning of a 2019 report written by the largest legal firm in the world, Dentons, in cooperation with one of the world’s largest news media corporations, Thomson Reuters. The report is called “Only Adults? Good practices in legal gender recognition for youth. A report on the current state of laws and NGO advocacy in eight countries in Europe, with a focus on rights of young people”. Let’s simply call it The Dentons Report. You can download the report as a pdf.

It is hard to imagine Dr Kerekere being unaware of this report. In it, Dentons pushes best tactics for having laws passed so children can change their legal sex without the pesky involvement of their parents. However, if she was, indeed, unaware, Dr Kerekere has surely realised by now that Dentons’ carefully orchestrated approach involved (and still involves) so-called grass roots campaigning and the lobbying of trans youth. Clearly, Dentons did not advise looking at the research of and consultation with qualified medical and mental health professionals. Tellingly, the Dentons Report even advises a certain level of secrecy. Some of the authors of this article have known her long enough to know that Dr Kerekere recognises such activity as being the opposite of “grass roots” when it comes from corporations and organisations of the world’s wealthiest and most influential sectors. In her submission to Select Committee, Maree Docherty went on to explain who benefits from steering children into a lifetime of medicalisation and surgery. She also linked the mostly US-based groups and corporations to New Zealand.

The Dentons Report advises:

“Get ahead of the government agenda and the media story”

In New Zealand, groups like “Gender Minorities” had paved the way for gender identitity ideology to penetrate all levels of government departments and agencies long before any discussion could reach the public. Absurd changes to what is considered a “woman” were made without proper public consultation. New Zealand mainstream media are shtoom about the damage this ideology is doing. Dentons’ advised tactics have been successfully applied to keep details out of the news media, which, despite desparate assertions to the contrary, appear to be state run and corrupted by massive government funding. If the public hears anything at all, it is that non-binary/gender questioning/transgender people are being discriminated against by so-called anti-trans hategroups, like Speak Up For Women. One look at their website is enough to convince even the most suspicious of visitors that there is no hate to be found there. Mainstream media groups have a lot to answer for. Instead of helping the process of ending discrimination, encouraging gender non-conformity and aiding the protection of everyone’s rights, they are involved in promoting the dangerous and impossible idea that humans can change sex.

The Dentons Report advises:

“Tie your campaign to more popular reform”

A tactic also called “riding on the coat tails”. In New Zealand, this has been done quite deviously by attaching claims to a gender identity to the human rights issue of lesbian and gay discrimination. Also popular is the attachment of gender identity conversion to the conversion of gay men and lesbian women. The tactic of obscuring the profound difference between same-sex attracted people and those identifying as “trans” was quite successful. After all, LGBTQIA+ persons have some things in common. For example, we are not completely part of the dominant culture, and we we are all affected by heterosexism - just not all in the same way (especially considering some trans-identified persons are heterosexual).

The Dentons Report advises:

“Use human rights as a campaign point”

“Based on [Dentons’] research, human rights arguments have been instrumental to the success of several campaigns for more progressive gender recognition laws.” In several countries, for example Belgium and Norway, sterilisation was a prerequisite for “gender reassignment” treatment. Recognising the likely public outcry at such blatant human rights violations, the Dentons Report advised the instrumentalisation of human rights campaigns to advance “trans rights”. It does not, however, explain that the new laws obviously have the very same outcome: 98 percent of children on puberty blockers are going on to take wrong-sex hormones with sterility and loss of sexual pleasure as side effects (to name but a few). Not to mention the human rights violations committed by surgically and chemically experimenting on otherwise healthy children and adults.

The Dentons Report advises:

“Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure”

Amazingly, the Dentons Report is quite frank about the reasons why the press should be avoided, and instead, senior politicians should be directly lobbied (that way, it looks as if the ideas come from politicians themselves). Apparently, the media are not intelligent enough to correctly report on the issue: “In certain countries, like the UK, information on legal gender recognition reforms has been misinterpreted in the mainstream media, and opposition has arisen as a result.” The advice is to circumvent mainstream media to avoid misinterpretation, yet in the same paragraph it is lamented that “the general public is not well informed about trans issues, and therefore misinterpretation can arise.” - a classic example of a circular argument.

The Dentons Report advises:

“Be wary of compromise”

Here, we have one of the explanations for the trans activists’ hard line of “no debate”. Anything that doesn’t immediately advance legal recognition of “trans” youth is considered a compromise, which, further down the line, will take “years to revise”. One man who was squarely on the side of the rainbow community and trans youth is New Zealand therapist Paul Letham who learned the hard way that compromise is not the recommended Dentons way. In his blog post, The Great Rainbow Schism, he warned about the negative impacts trans activism and the no-alternative-to-affirmation route has on young people questioning their place in life. A couple of months before, he wrote A Small Cancellation. Then, he still believed there could be a path to unity.

The Dentons Report claims that every child knows its own gender identity, which should be affirmed in law without hindrance. The report states that, "The right to legal gender recognition is crucial for young trans persons to secure all other rights" and advises against a “minimum age requirement" so that children can change their legal sex "on their own volition, without the need for medical diagnoses or court determination …. no eligibility criteria, such as medical or psychological interventions". Dentons advice comes in full knowledge of the general understanding that younger people don’t always realise the consequences of what they are doing. That is why, for example, courts and the legal system treat children and younger people who appear to have committed crimes differently.

To our knowledge and to date, there was only one person who said anything on mainstream media to clarify the fact that medicalisation to “change sex” is wrong, that it is, in fact, conversion. Trinity Thompson-Brown on the “Marae” program on TVOne on 14 March 2021:

“If you are a young person and you’re going through conversion therapy right now, you’re not alone. You are not alone. You’re loved, you’re accepted, you are celebrated. You don’t have to change who you are. You don’t have to mutilate or augment yourself, try and cut pieces of you off to fit into a box that you were never made for”.

Further information:

Read the supplement to Maree’s written submission to the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill.

See the graph illustrating the sharply rising revenue from “gender reassignment” surgery. And here’s a chilling press release written by the same company, which matter-of-factly states how much money can be made by performing each surgery.