A Critical Analysis: Why NZ Herald‘s Keffiyeh story on Davien Grey is Not What it Seems
When the New Zealand Herald published a story on May 2 2026 about a University of Canterbury student being asked to remove a Palestinian keffiyeh at graduation, it presented the incident as a civil liberties outrage worthy of national attention. The Press — the Stuffers’ Christchurch masthead, the city where this took place — ran the same story with identical framing. Two competing media companies, one ideological lens. This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.
But before we get to the media, we need to peek under the hood. Who is Davien Gray? Because the media outlets didn’t tell you.
Who is Davien Gray?
Gray is referred to throughout the NZ Herald article using the pronoun “they.” This is not a stylistic choice. Gray is a biological female. The use of non-binary pronouns is a framing device: by presenting Gray as multiply marginalised – trans-identifying and pro-Palestinian – the Herald constructs a character whose grievance carries maximum ideological weight. The reader is primed to sympathise before a single fact is presented.
What readers were not told is that Gray is a seasoned political operative with documented involvement in multiple radical activist organisations.
Gray is a member of ‘People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA)’
Gray is named as a coordinator within People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA), a self-described “prison abolitionist organisation.” PAPA’s newsletter Take No Prisoners (Issue 4, December 2020) lists “Davien Gray and Madeline Henry” as Prison Newsletter Coordinators, and Gray authored an article in this issue advocating cannabis legalisation.
PAPA began in February 2015, by its own admission, as a group concerned about the treatment of transgender people in prisons, before broadening into wider prison abolitionism and anti-policing advocacy.
“We started in February 2015 as a group concerned about the treatment of transgender people in prisons. Since then, we have become a mass-based organisation that works with different communities to address the worst problems of the criminal justice system, and to build a better one.” – PAPA Take No Prisoners (Issue 4, December 2020)
Gray is also a member of ‘Peace Action Ōtautahi’
Gray is also a prominent member of Peace Action Ōtautahi, the Christchurch direct action group that made national headlines when 36 protesters were arrested at the National Aerospace Summit – an outcome their organisers publicly celebrated as a “major victory.” Gray is not a student who stumbled into controversy. She is an activist with years of organisational experience across prison abolition, pro-Palestinian direct action, and disruptive protest.
Grey: Taxpayer-backed and University-rewarded
Far from being an outsider persecuted by the institution, Gray was actively elevated by the University of Canterbury. Gray holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Sociology with an 8.75 GPA and was awarded the University of Canterbury Senior Scholarship – a merit-based award. Gray was also listed as an undergraduate researcher within UC’s own Public Diplomacy and Political Communication research hub.
The institution now cast as villain in the NZ Herald narrative is the very institution that gave Gray a scholarship, featured her in its research programme, and handed her a degree.
The NZ Herald would have you believe Davien Gray is a victim of institutional power. The University of Canterbury gave her a merit scholarship, featured her in its own research hub, and handed her a degree. Some oppression.
It is also worth noting that at the time Gray’s LinkedIn scholarship announcement was made just a month ago, she was based in Melbourne, Australia and actively seeking work there. The question of whether this story was deliberately timed and amplified to serve an activist agenda, rather than reflect any ongoing injustice in New Zealand, is entirely legitimate.
The ideological ecosystem
Gray’s activism does not exist in isolation. It sits within an ideological ecosystem that includes the International Socialist Organisation Aotearoa (ISO), which describes itself as “dedicated to building the movement for a socialist society” and explicitly frames its work through Marxist revolutionary theory. The ISO is openly active across many of the same issue spaces – Palestinian solidarity, anti-police activism, Treaty-based organising – that PAPA and Peace Action Ōtautahi inhabit.
The ISO, PAPA, and Peace Action Ōtautahi are not separate stories. They are nodes in the same network, operating in overlapping spaces, advancing a coherent political programme – while individual media stories present each node in isolation, as though the person at the centre is simply a student with a scarf.
The language of a global strategy: Yogyakarta to NZ parliament
Here is the thread that ties Gray’s activism to a much larger international project – and that explains why accurate, sex-based language about Davien Gray is itself considered a political act worth suppressing.
The phrases “gender identity” and “gender expression” did not emerge organically from community experience. They were deliberately codified in 2006, when a group of 29 international human rights lawyers, NGO representatives, former UN officials, and academics met at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The resulting document – the Yogyakarta Principles – defined “gender identity” as “each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth.” In 2017, the principles were expanded – in a document known as YP+10 – to add “gender expression” and “sex characteristics” as further protected grounds.
I discuss this in depth in my speech at NZ First convention in 2025
The Yogyakarta Principles are not a treaty. They have never been adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council, or any UN treaty body. The UN has, in fact, repeatedly rejected attempts to make gender identity and sexual orientation new categories of non-discrimination at the international level.
Read this interesting insight for more information:
The Principles are the product of a private meeting of NGO-aligned legal experts – and yet, through deliberate strategy, their language has been inserted into domestic legislation in New Zealand and dozens of other countries, via UN agency frameworks, national human rights commissions, and activist-driven law reform processes. This is exactly what I bring to the NZ First convention in my presentation.
The Yogyakarta Principles instruct signatory governments to “amend any legislation, including criminal law, to ensure its consistency” with their provisions. This is the architecture of top-down legal change: write the principles outside democratic processes, pressure governments through international bodies, lobby groups and NGOs (funded by the government and tax payers), and embed the language quietly into domestic law. New Zealand has followed this playbook almost to the letter.
I presented this strategy in detail at the Public Child Protection Wales conference last week. Full coverage of that presentation is coming soon to my Substack – subscribe to one notified of when this drops.
The law they want – and the law that actually exists
This is why the language used in the NZ Herald story – and the framing of Gray as a non-binary person rather than a biological female – matters beyond politeness. It is part of a legal and political strategy.
The Human Rights Act 1993 (HRA) lists thirteen prohibited grounds of discrimination. “Gender identity” is not one of them. The Act prohibits discrimination on the ground of “sex” – a word that in its plain meaning and legislative history refers to biological sex.
However, the Human Rights Commission (HRC) has for years administratively interpreted “sex” to include gender identity – not because Parliament legislated it, but because a Crown Law Office opinion stretched the meaning of an existing word. The Commission’s own Prism Report concedes the tension, acknowledging that the HRA “does not provide explicit legal protection from discrimination with regards to gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics.”
The HRC’s interpretation is contestable and reversible. It has not been tested in the senior courts. And as Wikipedia’s own entry on the HRA notes, “the decision to interpret the prohibition of discrimination on the ground of sex to cover discrimination based on gender identity is easily reversed.”
This is precisely why activists are pushing hard for gender identity to be explicitly legislated as a protected ground – because the current protection is built on bureaucratic sand, not democratic bedrock. If that change were made, stating the fact that Davien Gray is a woman could be framed as discriminatory misgendering. Stories like this one could be silenced not by argument and online threats alone, but by legal threat.
In the United Kingdom, before the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in April 2025 confirming that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex, gender-critical commentators routinely faced employment tribunals and civil complaints simply for stating that sex is immutable. New Zealand activists are determined to cement equivalent protections here before the same judicial correction arrives.
The law, as it stands today, does not stop me from reporting this story. Every New Zealander should understand that – before it does.
What must be repealed and reformed
Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 is the first New Zealand statute to explicitly enshrine “gender identity” and “gender expression” as protected concepts in domestic law. It defines conversion practice as anything “directed towards a person because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” Framed as protecting people from harmful therapy, it was simultaneously the moment Yogyakarta-derived language gained its first statutory foothold in New Zealand law.
By treating gender identity as something that must not be questioned, challenged, or “suppressed,” this Act restricts professional, pastoral, and even parental guidance. It must be repealed.
Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act 2021, which came into full force in June 2023, replaced the Family Court process for changing recorded sex with a simple statutory declaration – no medical evidence required, no court oversight, no doctor’s sign-off.
- A 16 or 17-year-old can do the same with a letter from a “suitable third party” who need not be a health professional.
- The Act also introduced “non-binary” as a registrable sex marker.
- This law must be amended to restore the requirement that sex on a birth certificate reflects biological reality, and to remove the self-identification mechanism that allows legal sex to be changed by declaration alone.
NZ First’s Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill rightly defines “woman” as “an adult human biological female” and “man” as “an adult human biological male.” This is a necessary starting point. However, the bill contains a critical drafting vulnerability: it uses the phrase “regardless of gender identity” without explicitly overriding existing statutory clauses – including those in the Conversion Practices Act – that enshrine gender identity as a protected concept. Unless explicit supremacy language is added, activist courts could interpret the bill narrowly and render it toothless. Parliament must strengthen it or send it back for redrafting.
Taken together, these three changes would:
- Remove “gender identity” from its only current statutory foothold in New Zealand law.
- Anchor the legal definition of woman and man in biology throughout the statute book.
- End the legal fiction that a person can change their sex by signing a form.
Media as the apparatus of social engineering
New Zealand’s mainstream media is not a passive observer of this cultural and legal transformation. It is an active participant.
‘Stuff’ was rated the most left-leaning mainstream media outlet in New Zealand in a Curia Market Research poll. A separate study found that 65% of New Zealand journalists identify as left-wing, with only 12% identifying as right-wing. The newsrooms producing these stories are not reflections of New Zealand’s population — they are ideologically captured institutions producing content for each other and for activist networks.
The result is measurable. Trust in New Zealand media collapsed from 53% in 2020 to just 32% in 2024, with nearly three-quarters of New Zealanders now actively avoiding the news – a figure worse than the global average. When surveyed about why, New Zealanders consistently cite bias and imbalance, not misinformation. The public can see exactly what is happening. The sermon has gotten louder; the congregation has left.
This story is a case study in how that apparatus works. Strip a radical activist of context. Apply flattering pronouns. Frame an institution as the aggressor. Publish nationally.
The NZ Herald and The Press have not covered a news story — they have laundered activist grievance through the respectable veneer of mainstream journalism.
A distraction by design
New Zealand is facing a cost-of-living crisis, a housing shortage, a health system under strain, and deep anxiety about the direction of the country. The keffiyeh story addresses none of this. It is a politically weaponised distraction – designed to generate heat without light, to push people into opposing camps over a symbol, while the issues that unite ordinary New Zealanders go unexamined and unreported.
The activists profiled here – Gray, PAPA, Peace Action Ōtautahi, and the networks around them – understand exactly what is at stake. They are working towards a legal architecture that would eventually silence the kind of reporting you are reading right now.
- The Yogyakarta Principles gave them the language.
- The UN gave the language legitimacy.
- The Human Rights Commission inserted it into policy.
- The Conversion Practices Act put it in statute.
- And now, the New Zealand Herald is doing its part: normalising the framing, manufacturing the sympathy, and building the political case – one graduation ceremony at a time.
The question is not whether Davien Gray was treated fairly at a graduation. The question is: who decided this was the story New Zealand needed to read — and why?
This article relates to my earlier piece on media framing: The Missing Man, The Police, and Media. Full coverage of my presentation at the Public Child Protection Wales conference coming soon to pennymarie.nz.
Penny Marie is a New Zealand-based advocate for sex-based rights and strong families. She formed Let Kids Be Kids in 2023.