GOOD Statement by Brett Herron ,
GOOD Secretary-General
23 April 2025
Self-styled Mother Superior of the DA, Helen Zille has dismissed the trans-rights movement as a passing social contagion, similar to Bulimia and Anorexia decades ago. She believes the contagion will pass “in ten years’ time”. Until then, many young people identifying as trans would suffer irreversible harm, and women would require special protection from predatory members of the trans community.
“I have no problem with men dressing as women or vice versa. I have no problem with sex between consenting adults in private. I have no problem with Drag,” she said.
What she does have a problem with are providing avenues “for men to gain access to women’s spaces”; with trans women “who act in a way (replete with giggling and fluttering eyelashes) that turn women into caricatures (mindless idiots)”; and with “the manufacturers of women’s products (from sports bras to sanitary towels) using trans women to advertise them”.
Zille dismissed the transgender movement as a passing fad. “In our day, it was bulimia and anorexia. The role models of the day were Twiggy et al, and that is what sparked the obsession with having stick-like limbs. Now the role models are Caitlin Jenner et al, feted for bravery, along with the slew of attention-seeking Hollywood stars who suddenly have transgender children…”*
What Helen Zille seems to conveniently forget is that transgender rights do not diminish women’s rights, they are human rights. In South Africa, the Constitution is clear: the rights of the transgender community are protected under our anti-discrimination laws and must be upheld with the same dignity and respect as any other group.
Zille also appears to conflate two very different concepts, drag and being transgender, making false and harmful equivalencies. Drag is a form of artistic gender expression; being transgender is an identity rooted in a person’s lived reality. Misrepresenting the two not only spreads misinformation but also contributes to the marginalisation of an already vulnerable community.
The purposes of Zille’s Facebook post appeared to be to ingratiate herself with Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling, who has positioned herself as one of the UK’s leading transphobes over the past five years, and to re-assert her credentials in the context of the growing global wave of bigoted conservatism being conducted from the White House.
She appears miffed that, thanks to Rowling and a recent UK Supreme Court judgement that a woman is defined by her biological sex, a transgender debate is raging in the UK while there’s “only been a ripple of anger here at home”.
She said that while gender dysphoria did exist, it was a very rare condition. She was aware that Gender Affirming Care, including Hormone Replacement Therapy, was now available at the Red Cross Children’s hospital in Cape Town… “Except in profoundly rare cases, I can only see massive harm being done in this field,” she said.
Zille said she supported Rowling’s arguments “that Trans rights cannot be enforced at the expense of women’s rights”, and that “the priority emphasis on Trans Rights provides an avenue for men to gain access to women’s spaces again – from change rooms, to prisons, to sport – so that they can once again dominate unfairly and make many women uncomfortable (at the very least). There is a growing number of examples of how this had boomeranged badly, starting with rapes in women’s prisons,” she said.
Helen Zille is not a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist). She has never been a radical feminist; she’s just a plain old died-in-the-wool chauvinist.
*Bulimia and Anorexia are mental health conditions described as eating disorders. Far from being passing social contagions from decades ago, as Zille suggests, the US-based Journal of Paediatrics, in a December 2023 report on the prevalence of eating disorders, that “in recent years, many causes have contributed to a significant increase of this condition in the population under the age of 18”.
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