Brava Grassroots Feminism!

What does the FWS win mean for Australia?

A landmark UK court judgment has confirmed that equity legislation should define women as a biological sex for the purpose of human rights protections. Any way you look at it, this is a significant win for “my side” as a gender critical feminist, in the battle of the TERFs Vs gender identity. But what will it mean for Australia?

First, let me pay tribute to the organization that is responsible for the challenge to the UK Supreme Court, For Women Scotland (FWS). FWS was founded in 2018 as a grassroots organisation for women. FWS three directors are Trina Budge, Susan Smith and Marion Calder, they do not receive any public money, but JK Rowling has donated to the organisation. The bulk of the support for FWS comes from regular women.

FWS was co-founded by the late Magdalene Berns, who has become a hero in the gender critical world for her common-sense feminist arguments against gender identity ideology and legislation. Small grassroots organisations like FWS have been the mainstay of women’s rights since the suffrage movements.

I met Marion Calder on my recent trip to the UK, and a more unassuming, friendly woman you are unlikely to meet. If you met Marion in the street, you would never know that she was going to be kneecapping a giant.

We must keep in mind that the UK decision was specifically in relation to the Equality Act 2010. This win is not everything, but it is very significant, given that equality law is where gender identity is being used to coerce women and men to deny their sex around the world.

Australian law and politics has always reflected that of our colonial masters, first the UK and then the US. Since the 1990’s, Australian human rights law has increasingly modelled population management templates that have come out of international bodies, like the United Nations and the World Health Organisation.

When I was studying for a humanities degree in the early 1990s, the Australian Labor government was putting pressure on the arts to become vocational. I completed my honours thesis in 1994 at the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith University. The institute's intention was to sing for its supper by providing advice to the government on cultural management issues.

My thesis was titled “Policing Culture – Reinstating Cultural Policy for the Management of Urban Populations”. The humanities was actively lobbying to provide research and policy advice to the government in relation to reshaping cultural attributes in populations. At the time I was a massive fan of our Prime Minister Paul Keating, and his focus on bringing the grotty working class left into the more sophisticated global left. If I could go back and slap myself, I would.

This personal anecdote may not seem relevant to what is transpiring today in the sex v gender debate, but in the humanities, “gender” was widely used for the cultural meanings and roles that societies allocate to the two sexes. Government has adopted the use of “gender” instead of “sex” precisely because gender is culture, and culture is malleable, while sex is not.

In 1992 the geographer Linda McDowell wrote the following in “Doing Gender: Feminism, Feminists and Research Methods in Human Geography”:

“After years of either ignoring feminist work or assuming it is only for women, many theorists are now turning to feminist scholarship in order to examine the difference that gender makes to what we know and how we know it.”

In 1993 the UN redefined violence against women in the “Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women” to place the root cause of violence in gender:

For this Declaration, the term "violence against women" means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.

Gender, the culture of sex, was being offered to government as a useful mechanism to control sexed based population problems, like male pattern violence and dissident women.

Germine Greer said that “Female is real, and it’s sex, and femininity is unreal, and it’s gender.” I don’t entirely agree that femininity is unreal, but it is malleable, it is a conversation, it should be, at best, a suggestion for females, it should not define what it is to be a girl and a woman.

Over the last 30 years, women’s studies has gone from a sparsely funded examination of the inequality of the sexes, to having many billions of dollars being poured into gender research by governments. This has produced what I call regime feminism.

Under regime feminism, no taxpayer funding is released for “women’s issues” unless the definition of woman is exclusively based in gender (culture), and sex is disregarded. To be inclusive, women must include men, and erase themselves.

Right-wing men telling women that feminism invented “gender” in the 90s (as they do),is equivalent to saying that Columbus invented America. Feminists mapped gender, they described it, they put gender under a microscope. Many feminists dreamed of putting gender into a hessian sack and drowning it in the ocean. What happened in the 90’s was not an extension of the women’s revolution, but a bureaucratic solution to the problems the women’s revolution were causing governments.

The right loves to blame the “globalist” for all the “woke” things, but on the whole, commentators are too lazy to track the source of ideas that erase women’s rights, when they can just blame women. But women, in small, poorly funded organisations, have been doing research on the scourge of gender identity for years, so it’s no surprise that grassroots women’s organisations are the ones getting results.

Examine any documents funded by government on “gender equity” in Australia, and go to the sources (which I do frequently). All publicly funded women’s policy and advice is sodden with UN, World Bank, IMF, WHO “research”. When I was an anti-establishment young leftie, we were suspicious of these organisations.

The grim situation women now face in Australia, is that women and girls are defined essentially as femininity. We are not bodies of a particular sex, we are skirts, and hair extensions, and enamel nails, and the victim side of “gender-based violence”. The sex on your Australian passport is nothing more, to our government, than a thing that you say about yourself.

This situation did not eventuate by feminists like Greer targeting gender. The grass is greener, where it is watered, and it wasn’t the critique of gender that was watered, but the concept of gender identity.

Gender identity was invented by predominantly male psychologists, psychiatrists and creepy sexologist, it emerged from the ground of free love and pornography and grew with lots and lots of money.

Gender identity is an ethereal concept that sex exists in the culture of itself, and it is sourced, not in the culture, but in the individual, in the human soul. This is profound nonsense. Nothing about modern gender identity concepts tracks logically, until you see its purpose.

To see the purpose of gender identity, we only need see what gender identity does to human rights law where it has been implemented without effective resistance. The shining examples of gender identity as a technology of government, are the former colonies of Canada and Australia.

Under Australian law, sex is not protected for women, because sex has been redefined as an identity characteristic. Only the gender identity of “woman” can be protected in law, and the “woman” gender identity is only protected in men. Gender identity in law, protects femininity as the possession of men. We can’t throw gender in the ocean now, because men need femininity to pretend to be women, and access all the protections feminist fought for.

In the Tickle V Giggle judgement, Justice Bromwich gave a decision in the Federal Court of Australia that sex is changeable; in doing so he used the terms “cisgender” and “transgender” as “useful” categories under which humans can be classified in human rights law.

Cisgender and transgender are religious terms, where women who were born female and who do not adopt a trans identity, are given the default categorisation of “cis women”. Cis women have no legal right to make a political, dating or commercial space based on sex, this is now an established legal precedent in Australia, and it was cheered by the establishment left. I was in the court during the Giggle v Tickle hearing, and at one point, you could hear the lawyers joke with the judge that they had all “done the training”.

Let me reiterate one point; it is now legally impossible in Australia to make “women” a political class. Politics such as mine, and that of For Women Scotland, is by definition, dissident in Australia; this was never the case in the UK, because women have stopped the progress of gender identity legislation.

UK women have stopped gender identity on several fronts by organising as a political class, just as the women of For Women Scotland have done. They haven’t stopped gender identity completely, but they have stopped its material basis in law. Australia has not.

Gender identity when enacted as intended, removes the material basis for the claims of the women’s movement; that women exist and that women are structurally oppressed as a class by men, and that it is only as organising as a political class will women gain and maintain the rights and protections that they need to access full citizenship. This political ideology and practice, which we used to call feminism, is illegal under the full intent of gender identity legislation.

What For Women Scotland understood, that many “anti-woke” commentators don’t, is that the push to change the definition of women is a governmental human rights efficiency, it’s a governmental colonisation of women’s rights, and it needs to be stopped the way all government tyranny is stopped, by collective action.

We have now seen two significant developments in the sex/gender debate in different ways from our colonial masters. From the US we have seen the Trump Executive Order, and in the UK, under a Starmer Labour government, we have seen this Supreme Court ruling to recognise sex in human rights law.

Even with a growing resistance movement to gender identity law, and some major victories, Australian institutions have proven resistant to change from the grip of their bureaucratic masters. The UN itself may have to change before Australian institutions will budge, and if that’s true, we need to question the undemocratic, unconstitutional and illiberal influence of international bodies on Australian law.

The Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody, has reacted to the UK decision by saying that "Human rights belong to everyone. Trans and gender diverse people should be safe, respected and legally recognised." The clear message is that sex has to be erased from law for “trans and gender diverse people” to live with a level of safety and respect. We are never given a clear definition of who these people are, or how the erasure of women will help them. All we are given, apart from social media blocks for being TERFs, is a word salad of regressive gender stereotypes.

If we don’t disband these useless human rights organisations, they will have to be made accountable to facts about human bodies and the people who walk around in them. We will only have success here with organised resistance by women.

Our fight is not against individuals, but an institutionally embedded, long-term population management experiment, an experiment that has to be made to fail. We can only make it fail by making it impossible to implement, we must resist.

If you are a woman worried about gender identity in law, please don’t assume the UK decision will trickle down to Australia. Connect with your local grassroots gender critical women’s organisation, you can do so anonymously, you’ll generally find out about them on the gender critical side of X, where you can also be anonymous. X is a madhouse, but it’s only among the lunatics that women can currently speak the truth in Australia.

With most of our politicians terrified of their own bureaucracy, it may be some time in Australia before sanity, but just like everything else in the history of women’s rights, it won’t happen unless we organise together and demand it, just as For Women Scotland has done. Brava For Women Scotland and Brava to their good friend JK Rowling.