Gender in Law

Can we kill it?

After the latest Giggle ruling, there is an overwhelming amount of discussion in Australia about the issue I have singularly focused on for years, and intend to be focused on for many years to come, although in different ways. I am now anticipating an inevitable debate that is ever-present in the gender critical world. Can we, should we, continue to advocate for the complete removal of gender from law? Or are women being unreasonable hysterics for suggesting such a thing could be a political aim?

The issue of removing gender identity and gender generally from law is frequently encased in debates about pronouns, men in dresses, international law and liberalism. These fights are often grounded in a disagreement about the strategy of removing gender identity from law completely vs a mountain-by-mountain approach to the ultimate goal that we know must come.

Similar debates were had by the suffragettes, and indeed by the most famous suffragette family, the Pankhursts. The debate then was about whether it was worth arguing for universal suffrage or to try to get landed and upper-class women the vote first, as an interim measure.

Sylvia Pankhurst, I must say my favourite Pankhurst (even though she was a commie), was uncompromising about bringing working-class women into the fight, and she was not going to insult women by telling them they must advocate for rich women first.

Sylvia set up her base in the working-class East End of London and became of real use to working women, especially through the First World War. Sylvia set up child care facilities and services for women who had to work to feed their families. Her commitment to the worker and the worker’s cause cost Sylvia her relationship with her sister and her mother. I imagine she also lost some seriously powerful connections in London. She was a woman of principle.

Political debates are not always conducted with honour, and when I disagreed with a friend on the issue of gender in law some time ago, the next day he went into a message group and had people call me a Nazi, a bigot and an extremist in order to marginalise my influence in the debate. It worked. And yet I remain unrepentant, because my reasons for taking this stance are very rational and well thought out. So that is the topic of this post.

In the early nineties, the UN decided to change the language around women’s rights from sex to gender. It has been well documented that money began to flow into what used to be women’s studies to change it to gender studies, and now all the human rights language around the protection of women’s bodies from men’s bodies is encased in language about gender.

We could pretend this was all a happy accident, we could pretend it was all led by nasty feminists, but objectively, the erasure of female as a human rights category has been engineered and paid for by governmental bodies, using the most nefarious of characters. But this is not my topic today.

My topic is to question the effectiveness of the use of gender in government for the purpose for which gender was said to be placed into government. The intention of gender in human rights law, is supposed to be for the protection of women.

Putting gender identity aside for a minute, we can clearly see that what the UN have defined gender inequity as the greatest danger to women from men everywhere and always. It is a subtle fiction that the quiet observer may not notice. It’s a shit sandwich in a civil rights package.

The claim that gender inequity is the root of all violence from men to women is backed by mountains of research, much of which I have read. The data is very useful if you read it properly, which the UN do not. One frequently quoted multinational quantitative study of violence against women in the Asia Pacific region is most interesting, and it has recently disappeared from the UN website.

When you read the data in the study Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women and How Can We Prevent It? Quantitative Findings from the United Nations Multi-country Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific … takes breath… a much more realistic conclusion is that the root of violence against women is not gender inequity but misogyny.

We quite logically see that a danger to African American people in the United States is racism, that a danger to Jewish people is antisemitism, a danger to gay people is homophobia, so why are we so terrified of misogyny? Why are women being arrested, fined, and dragged through the courts for “transphobia” when misogyny has never been subject to legal sanctions in any substantial way?

The way that sexual discrimination has been structured in Australia and internationally is focused on the characteristic of sex and not the characteristic of being female. Gender removes the focus of the law completely, not just from sex, but from all of the realities of living in a female body, including the relationship between misogyny and violence against women.

So, before we even get to gender identity and its annihilating effect on women’s rights, gender has been removing the reality of women’s lives from protection legislation for decades. If we were very cynical, we could speculate that the boosting of gender in academia and policy in the 90’s was a direct reaction to the expansion of women’s rights legislation in the 70s and 80s.

Gender in law, we could reasonably say, is a technology of government. Gender mitigates the growing responsibility the government were being burdened with. The protection and care of female bodies is difficult and expensive and the government would much rather pay a bureaucrat 300K a year to lecture men about toxic masculinity than to actually protect women.

This is, in fact, what I believe to be true. I believe, based on many years of research, that gender and gender identity in law are materially harmful to women and girls, and that this is a feature, rather than a bug of gender as a civil rights category.

Gender-critical feminism, which is grassroots feminism, is dissident; we oppose the government and advocate for changes to domestic and international law. Telling us that we can’t advocate for something because it is against the law or international convention is just nonsense.

The report that I referred to earlier, by the UN, shows clearly that unprotected women in misogynistic sodden cultures are raped and murdered at much higher rates. I am a survivor of sexual violence that I experienced throughout my childhood, and that made me homeless, so I am not going to betray my own self or the history of women to support an aim that I don’t believe in.

Here is where we get the conflict. Men performing “womanhood” because of a fetish, drag and men pretending that wearing stereotypes changes their sex, are all rooted in misogyny. Since misogyny kills women and I am an advocate for women and girls, for children and for sexual assault survivors, I am critical of misogynistic things.

No, I don’t advocate for drag or cross-dressing to be illegal, but there is plenty of evidence to say that gender in law is injurious to the lives and culture of women. The shaming that goes on in gender critical politics of women who take uncompromising positions on pronouns and public displays of fetish is embarrassing. Women are allowed to say stuff on X using anonymous accounts, and the world is not going to crumble. It’s also OK if they swear.

Gender is useful as a word to describe the cultural meanings that society gives to sex, but as a word to replace sex in law, it is damaging and has to be completely removed as a human rights category. This is my simple position on the issue.

I want to conclude by saying what I have said many times: women have their own interests, and we are entitled to advocate for the protection and advancement of our own sex.