Dear Jane.

My letter to Associate Magistrate Campbell

Associate Magistrate Jane Campbell

Associate.MagistrateJaneCampbell@courts.act.gov.au

10/9/2022

Dear Ms. Campbell

My Name is Edie Wyatt, I am a writer, a mother and now thanks to gender identity ideology, a political dissident.  I started writing about women’s issues a few years ago where I wrote a piece for Quillette about my history of sexual abuse and how dangerous the conflation of sex and gender are for safeguarding.  I now write regularly for The Spectator Australia and a number of feminist publications. I have a First Class Honours Degree in cultural and political theory and am well versed in the nuances of the gender theory and the current gender debate.

I write in regard to a case before you of a 27 year old man facing 72 charges against his siblings that I read about in ABC News.  Although the prosecution argued that the man should be refused bail, you released him back into the community saying;  

"To my grand astonishment I am told she (sic) would be held in the male section of the AMC and that would clearly not be in the interests of a person who identifies as a woman."

I don’t understand how a male person can “identify” as a woman because they cannot possibly have any frame of reference to construct such an identity with apart from sex stereotypes. I do understand the legal fiction of “gender identity” and how that it is erroneously applied to males to pretend they have natural access to female spaces, but the enthusiasm in which you extend this fiction to this person when the prosecution clearly didn’t, is of “grand astonishment” to me and many women.

I have written publicly about the sexual abuse I encountered as a child that eventually made me homeless, what I didn’t say, was that like the case that is before you, the offender was a much older sibling and also abused other members of my family.  The reason I didn’t say that, is because I didn’t want to implicate my other siblings.  For this reason, I use my mothers maiden name to write, and not my married name or my maiden name.

You see, there is a lot of social shame in emerging from a family that includes a violent sexual offender. A person who has suffered such things as a child is expected to be fundamentally broken, to be unable to think rationally, to be fragile and needing to hide from society.  But it would seem I am the rational one and the entire legal establishment have lost their minds.

You would rightly assume the offender in my family is male because no magistrate would be unaware of the phenomenon of male pattern violence.

You may be aware of the UK case R (FDJ) v. Secretary of State for Justice 2021 where a prisoner attempted and failed to keep males out of the female estate. The case sites a significant sample of 163 trans identified male prisoners of whom “81 have convictions for sexual offences”. That’s 50 percent of trans identified prisoners in the cohort that are sexual offenders, a much higher rate of sexual offense than in the general male prison population in the UK, which is 30 percent and only 5 percent in the female prison population.

To their great shame, the judge in this trial permitted evidence from “queer theorist” Dr Sarah Lamble. Lamble claimed that “there is not a reliable basis for generalised claims that transgender women have male patterns of criminality”. This obviously is in conflict with the statistics, both in the UK and in America and Canada where the rate of sex offending in “trans” prisoner cohorts is much higher than in general male prison populations. 

People like me and other feminists and survivors shouldn’t be wasting our time proving to the likes of you that gender identity does not abate male pattern violence, the onus should be on you to explain how it possibly can.

You should have to justify to the women of Australia why you feel entitled to release adult human males, who the police have enough evidence to place 72 charges against, not just into the community, but into the community with your validation, on the Crowns authority, that they are entitled to use infrastructure designed for female people. I don’t say this very often but how dare you!

I would posit to you that there is no rational justification in the ideology that feminine gender identity can abate male pattern violence, because this is a nonsense.  

Magistrate Campbell, if you and the other elites wish to practice this ethereal belief on your own time and welcome violent and dangerous men in your home on the condition that they have feminine gender identity, go for it, but don’t subject vulnerable women to these men because you want to seem virtuous. Your virtue comes at the expense of women’s safety.

The ABC report indicates that the charges in the case include “incest, assault, choking, sexual assault and acts of indecency.” This all very familiar to me as I was routinely choked as a child by my assailant to terrify me into performing “acts of indecency”.  At one point I clearly remember thinking “this is how I will die, here in the dirt, under the house where my mother will find me and the police will come and he will pretend he is shocked and saddened”.  But to the detriment of you today, I didn’t die there in the dirt, and because I survived, I am here writing this letter.  

My assailant came to enjoy the choking ritual and the violence escalated to a point where I was routinely hiding injuries from my parents. I didn’t tell my parents because of shame. Shame and fear are the currency of the violent sex offender.

Child victims routinely rise for the day having been sexually assaulted in the night and have to pretend to the world that all is fine.  Children are going to school, greeting the offender at breakfast and lying constantly that they are OK. The tears, that lie just below the surface come out in smaller schoolyard or classroom conflicts and the victim will cover those emotions also with lies.  Lies become the cloak for the natural trauma responses. I am sure that when you uttered these thoroughly indecent words above, you didn’t make one thought for the “interests” of the victims, who will now be expected to cloak their trauma with lies.  

I despise having to pour these details of my life out to people I have so little respect for, such as yourself, and I don’t do so to garner sympathy, but you are either completely clueless, or you don’t understand what sex and gender are.  Gender, is the word we use for cultural meanings societies give to sex, it is not a magic soul that can change a violent offender into a nice lady.

This has nothing to do with what we use to call “transexuals”. To imply serial sex offenders, hiding in in the legal fiction of “gender identity”, are exactly the same as old school transexuals who “transitioned” to abate gender dysphoria, is not as progressive as you may think it is.   To pretend you don’t know the difference is tiresome.

I need you to get a glimpse of what these two girls are going through.  You see, when you are abused like these girls have been as children, and like I was, the psychological cost is ongoing. People who emerge from traumatic sexual violence may find they have a heightened awareness of danger, to the point that it is hard to even turn this hyper vigilance off, this is especially the case when the abuse starts very young. 

Part of my recovery has involved the establishment of personal boundaries that some people find impolite.  Also, it means I refuse to lie about my body or other people’s bodies. The gaslighting involved in telling the so many millions of female survivors in this country that men can become women with pronouns is astounding, and it is institutional sexual abuse. I therefore will never use the wrong sex pronouns for a person. I am a survivor, but I didn’t survive unscathed, and I won’t harm myself or other survivors with lies.

I can’t pretend my history has nothing to do with my current brand of feminism, but my feminism is not “hate”.  I was brought into gender critical feminism when I heard that lesbians were claiming that gender identity ideology led to rape culture, and they were being subject to sexual coercion.  I believed the lesbians, and in believing them I became what you may call a TERF.

The use of shame to erode women’s sexual boundaries is rape culture. “transphobe” has become just another shame word to erode the sexual boundaries of women and give males access to vulnerable women. Even your hyperbole of using the phrase “grand astonishment” is intended to put shame on those who think a man should go to a male prison.

Like the girls in the case before you, the perpetrator left my house after a confrontation, but unlike the case before you, the perpetrator was invited back to my house, because my mother believed him to be reformed or changed in some way.  This act of kindness from my mother made me homeless.  Extending inappropriate mercy on behalf of a victim when you are in a position of power is not just neglect, it’s a gross violation of decency and it is just as much a form of abuse as locking a woman up with a rapist.

It is not that I haven’t read and understood the ideology of gender identity, I have probably read and understood more of the underlying theory relating to “queer theory” than you have.  The arguments are not only theoretically flawed they are basically sophistry steeped in statistical manipulation. 

There is no possible way that trans identity can abate male pattern violence, on the contrary there is strong evidence that offenders will take on trans identity to avert justice, to get access to female estates or to access women and girls when they are in states of vulnerability.  No thought terminating cliché will convince me otherwise because, like the girls in the case before you, I know better.

You know that the women in this case would be living in fear and in sickening anticipation to have this over, and yet you released the alleged perpetrator into the community, affirming the pretence that they are female, and validating the alleged offender access all female change rooms and toilets where women and girls are vulnerable.  

I was eventually rescued from homelessness by my sister, who was also abused by our sibling.  It would have been my sister’s birthday today but unfortunately, she died in 2018, so I write this on her behalf as well.

If you want details of the case I was involved in I am happy to provide the details of my legal name at the time, and that of my other family members (all now deceased). The case was prosecuted by the excellent police offices of the Queensland Police Service who secured a conviction.  I can only imagine the statements that the ACT police had to take for these 72 charges, only for you to insult them and the victims by pretending you believe that the perpetrator has changed into a woman. 

If you have the decency to reply to this letter, please don’t use any expression of sympathy to me or my family because such a sentiment would make me physically sick.  You deserve no assumption of good will from me or from any survivors of child sexual abuse in this country. 

I am ashamed of you and the justice system in this country that has abused women ever since my four times great grandmother was trafficked to these shores for her sexual and reproductive labour.

I will be publishing this letter on my Substack.

I have no regards for you,

Edie Wyatt.
writer. dissident. feminist.
msediewyatt@gmail.com