How Many Misrepresentations Can One Article Contain?

Penny Marie strings together a conspiracy theory but the pins won’t hold.

Holy conspiracy cork-board, Batman! Let’s dive into the latest rainbow panic bulletin from Penny Marie of Let Kids Be Kids. In her April post about the Rainbow Wellbeing Legacy Fund, Penny rebrands mental health support as a “manufactured crisis”, state funding as a sinister plot, and affirming care as indoctrination and mutilation. It’s a conspiracy classic: selective outrage, invented villains, and total amnesia around history, research data, and the law.

Penny claims to be an ‘independent researcher’ in her bio. Here are eight of her most spectacular misfires to help assess her abilities as a credible researcher.

🏛️ “So why did Ardern and Robertson, alongside a few friends, decide to create a fund for ‘youth’…?”

Reality: This claim erases the actual origin of the Rainbow Wellbeing Legacy Fund. The idea came from gay men who had been convicted under pre-1986 laws criminalising consensual sex between men. When those convictions were expunged in 2018, some of the men affected acknowledged that nothing could undo the historical harm done to them. Instead, they asked the government to invest in something forward-looking: a fund to support the wellbeing of current and future rainbow youth. The fund was created in response to that request. It was restorative, not opportunistic. Penny’s version replaces community-led advocacy with the suggestion of nefarious political imposition.

🧵 “The whole rainbow spectrum (which back in the 1980s didn’t even exist…)”

Reality: False. Not only did it exist, it has a paper trail. Magnus Hirschfeld posited a spectrum of sex and gender variation in 1910 in his German-language work Die Transvestiten. David Cauldwell coined the term transsexual in 1949, and John Oliven coined the term transgender in 1965. Robert Stoller conceptualised gender identity in 1964 and published his book Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity in 1968. That’s over 70 years of conceptual development before the 1980s, not counting centuries of recorded gender diversity in other cultures. Penny’s erasure of queer history isn’t just wildly false, it’s ideologically convenient.

💰 “This money isn’t going to counselling or direct support for struggling kids.”

Reality: Wrong again. Many funded projects do include counselling, youth-led peer support, and educational outreach: all things shown to reduce isolation and suicide risk. Community-building is mental health support. Penny relies on a false binary: support versus advocacy, as if one cancels out the other. In reality, they work hand in hand. When a group is actively being targeted by misinformation, prejudice, and violence, calling it out and building resilience isn’t optional, it’s essential. You only need to look at the recent Destiny Church-orchestrated assaults to see why.

🏗️ “They’re not addressing a proven need; they’re building an infrastructure to create the need.”

Reality: This is where Penny switches from merely misinformed to outright conspiratorial. The idea that rainbow services somehow create more rainbow kids is a reversal of cause and effect. It’s like saying suicide helplines increase suicide. People aren’t becoming queer or trans because support exists. They’re accessing support because it’s finally easier and safer to do so. This is grievance politics in disguise: the existence of these services offends those who wish the people they dislike would go back to suffering in silence.

📊 “There was no data in 2019 showing a specific need for rainbow youth.”

Reality: False. The Youth2000 series, led by Prof. Elizabeth Wells and others, has been tracking rainbow youth wellbeing since 2001. This 2001 report showed already-elevated rates of distress among sexual minority youth. And since 2014, they've published work on trans youth specifically. The claim that this need was fabricated from thin air is simply false. The data is there. The distress is real. Penny either didn’t do the most basic of searches or she chose to deny the existence of this data to knowingly mislead her audience. I’ll leave it up to those reading along to decide which is worse.

⚖️ “This legislation makes it illegal to question a child who is confused about their gender.”

Reality: False. The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 Section 5.1 bans sustained efforts with the intention of changing or suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It does not criminalise questions, exploration, or parental doubt. What it targets are coercive practices like the ones that told generations of queer people they had to become someone else in order to be accepted.

If you are genuinely confused about what is legal, read the Act. If you are claiming it bans questions while knowing it does not, that is not confusion. It is outright disinformation.

🔄 “Affirming a child’s ‘gender confusion’ isn’t [conversion therapy]?”

Reality: This is the rhetorical pivot du jour in gender critical circles. Here Penny is rebranding support as coercion. Affirming care doesn’t predetermine outcomes. What it affirms is that all gender identities and expressions are part of natural human variation and none are inherently pathological. By contrast, conversion therapy does predetermine outcomes: it tries to enforce cisgender, heterosexual norms. Affirming care creates space; conversion therapy closes it off.

Penny’s trick is to assume cisgender is the neutral default and anything else is deviance. It’s a variation on the same contortion Jan Rivers of Genspect NZ tried. Affirming care is the opposite of conversion therapy and under New Zealand law, that’s why only one of them is illegal.

💉 “This industry is driving more children to sterilisation, castration, mutilation.”

Reality: This is not just false. It’s dangerous. No children in Aotearoa are undergoing hormonal or surgical transition. Puberty blockers are reversible and other medical interventions are rare, carefully assessed, and only offered to older adolescents or adults with their express consent. This kind of inflammatory language is designed to provoke fear, incite disgust, and increase risk for the clinicians who provide such care. It is the rhetoric of conspiratorial moral panic.

Conclusion

When you start with the assumption that rainbow youth are a manufactured demographic, everything looks like a plot. But the reality is simpler, just harder to accept if you’re prejudiced and committed to moral panic. Rainbow youth exist. Their distress is measurable. And they deserve support grounded in evidence, not fabricated suspicions.

Penny’s post isn’t investigative reporting. It’s an outright conspiracy theory dressed up as parental concern. She claims to be a truth-seeker in her bio, so let’s see if she corrects any of these false claims.

Addendum

Penny Marie has since posted an X thread casting aspersions on me and then blocked me after I pointed out that she still hasn't offered any counter-arguments regarding the eight false claims above that I quoted from her article.