Submission to Qld Self ID Bill

Warning: poorly edited and emotional

My name is Christine Edie Chehade.

I was born in Brisbane in 1971, my mother was born in Brisbane in 1932, my grandmother was born in Brisbane (father unknown) in 1898, her mother was born in Brisbane in 1879 also father unknown. I come from convict working class women.  My 4 times great grandmother Mary Mullender was trafficked to this land when she was 22 for her sexual and reproductive labour and to “civilise” convict men. She committed two crimes, one was being poor and the other was being born female.  Class and sex, are now completely overlooked by the bourgeois fantasists that craft legislation in the name of the Labor party.

I am a survivor of child sexual abuse, and you can look this up in the records of the Queensland Police to see there was a conviction made.  My family suffer from Huntington’s Disease which is also called “the cruellest disease known to man”. Because of this and the disproportionate burden of care on women in families have, I have all my life been involved with the Queensland health system, including rather more tours of the mental health facilities than I would have liked.

I wish to add two things here, I do not carry the defective gene that leads to Huntington’s Disease therefore myself and my children will not be affected by it, so I am of sound mind.  Also, I want to say that the Queensland Health and public housing system has been excellent to my family. My history and experiences have made me hyper aware of the vulnerability of female people and especially female people who have lost all capacity to protect themselves from male people.

I grew up in public housing and I also worked for the Queensland Department of Public Housing, and I am very grateful to the social welfare system that is a legacy of the Labour movement from which I have emerged as a traditional left-wing thinking, working class woman.

Thanks to the late Gough Whitlam, I was the first in my family to go to university, where I graduated with a First Class Honours in Humanities studying cultural and political theory. I am a mother of two daughters and have been married 30 years this year.

I have written about women’s rights for The Spectator Australia, Quillette, The Critic, my own Substack and a number of other independent publications.  I use a family name for my writing; Edie Wyatt.

I strongly object the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2022 (The Bill) on a number of grounds but in the knowledge that you are receiving a number of very thorough submissions I will concentrate on just a few points that mean the foundations on which The Bill sits are unrepresentative, dishonest and illegitimate.

Representation

1.       The constitution of Queensland is clear that Parliament of Queensland is a representative institution, passing laws on behalf of the people of Queensland.  Throughout the drafting of The Bill, I have been involved with a number of individuals and groups who sought consultation with the Attorney General in regard to the vulnerabilities of women The Bill lays bare, but she has refused to make herself available to hear any concerns of women. 

2.       The justification for the lack of consultation was address in Ms Fentiman’s speech to Parliament on introducing The Bill;

We also know that some groups will try to cloak their transphobia in the guise of women’s safety— making claims about trans women accessing women’s spaces, including change rooms or even domestic violence shelters. I want to be clear: there is no evidence, domestically or internationally, to support these outrageous claims. I note the Australian Psychological Society has warned against casting undue suspicion on an individual’s motives for stating a particular sex. Shannon Fentiman speech to parliament 2/12/2022

This is a gross miss-representation of the intention and motives of women like myself who have protested The Bill and Fentiman is knowingly lying to the Parliament about me and the groups with which I have associated.

3.       In attempting to avoid accountability to Queensland women, Fentiman employs a well-used trope of feminists as women who should carry sin and social shame for connecting their rights with their female body. Destiny Rodgers, a trans identified male who works for QNews, called me and fellow feminists “bitches”.  This was followed by thinly veiled death threats online by activists.

If you follow the link to the QNews you will see a picture of myself and other women, where it is reported that we had planned to meet to “bitch” about trans people.  This is a very typical characterisation of women engaged in activism by men. I made a video of the points I was planning to make at the Royal on the Park before the management of the hotel cancelled our booking under pressure from transactivists. I will remind you that Royal on the Park is owned by the Sultan of Brunei who advocated for the stoning to death of homosexuals, and it was the feminists in Brisbane City that were considered the danger.

4.       If you need evidence that I am not someone who cloaks my interest in the rights of women and girls in “transphobia”, I am happy to provide evidence of my ongoing support for women and girls in East Timor (in the charity of which I am a director), along with my involvement with other charities that support women and girls. I have written many articles about the interest of women and girls like one on the dangers of allowing boy children in girls schools.  In the article I detail my “lived experience”, since this has been offered as evidence to parliament from “trans and gender diverse people”, I wonder if the lived experience of women and girls was relevant? 

5.       I was involved in a single sex girl’s private school for many years where my daughters attended.  If you ask Her Excellency the Honourable Dr Jeannette Young AC PSM, Governor of Queensland for a character reference I am sure she would provide one, as she worked alongside me for many years in the chess program and the netball team where our children attended school together.  I would be happy to meet with Dr Young and any member of Parliament to clear up issues pertaining to the slights that have been made on my character in the Queensland Parliament by the Attorney General.

6.       The Attorney General claims that feminists like me “cast undue motives” on people changing sex markers on birth certificates, this is not true, I don’t believe human sex is a category for “claiming”, and I put all the blame for the problems and crimes this type of legislation perpetuates on women and girls at the feet of the Queensland Government.  
The aggressive and abusive men who take on trans identity in order to violate the boundaries of women do so because they are men, not because they are “trans”.  I don’t even know what “trans” is because a stable definition has not been provided.

I have had to revert to the logical practical definition, and that is that a “trans” person is any person the government allows to change their sex marker.  A trans woman is a man who has completed a government declaration to change their sex marker from male to female. These are the definitions I use here.

7.       I wrote a letter to Associate Magistrate Jane Campbell outlining some of the issues I am interested in, and I defy you to tell me that these concerns are ground in “transphobia.”

8.       Gender critical feminists like myself believe that human sex is a born and immutable characteristic and the maintenance of a sex-based category as a vessel to hold our human rights and protection is important.  Our view deserves representation in the Parliament and in the process of the legislation, this is being refused. I believe our basic view that human sex is important and immutable is held by the vast majority of Queenslanders.

Factual errors in the rationale of The Bill

9.       The number of factual errors, improbabilities and logical paradoxes that are in Fentiman’s introductory speech, the Explanatory Notes of The Bill and The Bill itself are astounding. 

10.   Fentiman states in her speech to Parliament;
“A common theme across all of these conversations is a simple desire to have their identity documents match their identity. Without this, they face the prospect of outing themselves every time they apply for a job, go for a rental property or enrol in university. Most of us take for granted that our birth certificate accurately reflects our lived identity, but for many people that is not the case”

11.   The idea of a “lived identity” that over-rides your human sex category is complete nonsense. There is no background in science for this and the assumptions that flow from this have massive consequences for women. 
Being born in the female sex has massive implications for our life. Living in a female body is living, and living with a female body is experience, there is no other “experience” of being female apart from the life of someone who has a female body. 

This nonsense that some people have a different gendered soul to their body, will one day have to be rolled back in governments at all levels.  I write this submission as a testimony to my objection that Indigenous women with female bodies will be incarcerated with men who have a government recognised and invented “lived experience” of female.

12.   There is no “outing” yourself as your sex.  Humans are evolved or created (whatever you believe) to recognise the opposite sex very quickly, women are especially good at this and develop the ability to recognise sex at a much younger age.  This ability to recognise a man and secure your body from him, is an instinct so deeply embedded in female people, it is just not a reasonable expectation to think that Queensland women will over-ride their inbuilt instinct by seeing an identity marker on a birth certificate. The way women who refuse to override their sight and bodily instincts, especially when accompanied by trauma responses, are called “transphobic” is a gross miscarriage of the truth and justice.

13.   There is a claim that “The current surgery requirement unnecessarily medicalises the recognition of a person’s lived identity.” Very few humans seek to change their body in such a way that it realistically mimics the body of the opposite sex, and when they do this is solely based on the fact that human males and human females are easily identifiable by looking at them. There are very few trans identified males who seek to remove their penis in order to mimic female sex organs. 

There is a credible claim by some trans people and specialists in the field of male sexuality that the driver behind much of trans identity in men is in fact sexual not an “inner female soul”.  Specialists claim that some trans identified males don’t desire to have their identity affirmed by removing their penis but by exposing their penis in female only spaces.  They seek to have their sexual desires affirmed by women’s infrastructure, and this is exactly the purpose of The Bill for Shannon Fentiman, to “affirm” trans identity.  No study or investigation is being conducted into this very credible claim by the Queensland Government, and even if it is only mildly credible, one wonders why it is not investigated when the Attorney General is making such radical changes in the law based on an ethereal belief in a gender soul or essence.  

14.   There is a claim made that we need to have legal recognition that a gender identity declaration should override sex markers on birth certificates to reflect a change in “Queensland society”, this is just not true.

A birth certificate is issued for living humans and the identity markers are to identify key aspects of the living body that emerges from the female parent (mother), that was almost always conceived by a sexual act between a man and a woman and that certainly required sperm from a living male and ovum from a female.  Everyone understands this, even humanities graduate like me.

Our society hasn’t “moved on” from the raw reality of bodies and how we are conceived by a male and a female and how we are gestated in a female person and how we are born with a designated reproductive role (if we reproduce or not), and how that sex doesn’t change for our entire life, and especially how female bodies require special care and protection from the state because of male pattern violence. This claim of social acceptance of the nonsense that is gender identity ideology is a lie. That government think they can effectively change these realities with legislation based on an idea that some people have a gender essence is extraordinary.

15.   One of the claims in the rationale of The Bill is that it is a continuation of the “life events” system that was started in 2003.  There is no evidence that when the government decided to accept (wrongly in my opinion) the change of sex markers on birth certificates for castrated males, that it was ever intended to be anything but a legal fiction to accommodate for an extremely tiny section of the population who were of reduced danger to women because they were castrated for a start, and they were almost all homosexual.

16.   The definition of “trans” has expanded from what we once called “transexuals” (almost all surgically altered homosexual males with gender dysphoria) to include a large number of mostly heterosexual males who have little more claim to the “lived experience” of a woman than the purchasing of a special hat.  The way The Bill redefines sex and subjects it to gender meanings is misogynistic and misandrist in nature, assuming that the male and female of the human species are just really what governments and culture invent them to be.

In essence gender supremacy theories, now littered in government, assume that male pattern violence (MPV) is something that men put on because of a weakness in their gender, but simultaneously and contradictorily, it is something that disappears in men with a declaration of an inner essence or soul that is female.

Female becomes a collection of feelings and “expressions of the person’s gender, including name, dress, speech and behaviour”. Once feminists were taking hold of their gender away from dress and behaviour, and here we have it being legally enshrined in how to make women from male people.

17.   This entire gender supremacy ideology is abhorrent to the aims of the feminist movement, and I am personally ashamed of every woman in the Parliament. I can only excuse them by thinking they must have lived the most privileged and protected life imaginable to think a male sex offender would never identify as female to access vulnerable women and children.  We know that they do and are, it takes very little research to find that out.

18.   The most astounding assumption woven into The Bill, is that the declaration made by a male to become a female is always made in earnest by virtue of the fact that it is made.  Fentiman in her introduction to The Bill to Parliament states,

it is an unfortunate fact that, through this debate, there will be members of the community who will seek to denigrate trans people’s lives and identities by making ludicrous claims about how people will be able to identify. No-one who engages in this process will do so lightly. It is a deeply personal process and decision which must be respected.130

I speak to this because I am the member of the community who claim that identity based “sex” assignment legislation will be used by sex offenders, fetishists, paedophiles and the worst of men because this is absolutely the case elsewhere and you will be getting many submissions to prove this.  But I say this not to “denigrate trans” people (because they have no stable definition apart from someone filling in a form) but to denigrate the parliament of Queensland, and the Law Society if they allow this to go without protest.

I just can’t believe anyone in the position of Shannon Fentiman would make such a broad and general good will assumption about men in order to pass a Bill that completely disarms women from the use of single sex safeguarding.  Fentiman’s assumption is that every single man that makes a declaration to be female are not just free from MPV but will always be absolutely earnest and “must” be respected. 

Has Shannon Fentiman met a criminal? Has she spent time in the criminal courts?

I ask in earnest, can the Queensland government please provide me of evidence of the way the declaration will itself abate male pattern sexual behaviour and deviancy, because that is what is being claimed. And will the Queensland government and Shannon Fentiman personally take responsibility for any harm and discomfort that is given to the women and girls of Queensland?  Or will they not be believed? Will their testimony hold the same weight as Emily who is so highly regarded by Ms Fentiman that she praised him in her speech?

I deny now, as I will when The Bill is enacted, that a male person can turn into a female person.  I notify any person or panel reading this that I will dissent from this law and will continue to use sex-based pronouns, even when instructed to do otherwise.  I do not believe that “trans women” are in any way women.  I seek to know what you will do with all the dissidents this Bill will create. 

What will the government do with all those men and women that do not respect that the Birth, Deaths and Marriages Registrar now determines people’s sex?  Will they again use the Queensland Police against the people of Queensland, as has been done before in order to enforce unjust and authoritarian laws? Because this is a violation of the separation of powers.

19.   There is no provision in the Bill for even the possibility that a man would adopt the female sex marker and not in fact have some kind of female soul that immediately transforms him into someone who not only requests but insists on the same goodwill assumption that society would give to any woman.

The male person who fills in the declaration to gain a female sex marker immediately gains the additional protection of the sex discrimination legislation that women lose, because it forces women and girls to recognise a male person as a female person, almost always against blindingly obvious reality.

Legitimacy

20.   This is a deeply illiberal Bill that leads directly to the subjection of women again to a special section of men who the state has appointed as female with no evidence, no research, no science except the testimony of Emily who was given such weight by Fentiman in her speech to Parliament.  Emily may or may not be the same trans identified male who’s picture donned the Guardian the next day. Emily and his like, are to me of no perceivable difference to any other man, apart from the fact that he demands access to women’s spaces and by doing that we are supposed to know he is a good guy and in fact a woman.

21.   This legislation has no legitimate basis in a liberal democratic state.  Nothing about the redefinition of sex categories in law has ever gone to an election in this state, no national referendum has been held and yet this Bill represents the final blow in a range of top down measures to erase women as a protected sex category in law.  This Bill is the complete redefinition of sex into a category that has no way to attach to the living bodies of women and girls to existing and historical human rights legislation.  Women have won these rights and protections through grass roots activism and legitimate liberal democratic processes they are being removed illegitimately.

22.   Even beyond this Bill, the way Fentiman speaks about women is from the same international template of gender identity and gender equity ideologies that are of no perceivable benefit to women’s lives, and quite the contrary, because it has become impossible to talk about our bodies or advocate for our rights in ways that are not approved by the state.

23.   It could be easily seen that the women’s movement started in the west solely to protect women’s bodies and those of their children.  Women sought to have their more complex bodies free to participate in public life in much the same way, but not exactly that men’s bodies did.

Women’s bodies can’t interact in society in the exactly the same way as men’s because of the specific vulnerability and power of a female body and the specific vulnerability and power of a male body. The sex of our bodies has relevance to our citizenship status and protections in some but not all ways, but where sex matters, it matters more for women.

24.   One of the more specific sex specific issues is that according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare males commit 97% of all sexually violent crimes, we call this male pattern violence (MPV). We know these crimes disproportionately affect poor women, indigenous women and disabled women.

Because of MPV, very simple and deliberate sex selection can be used in selecting carers, group members and more generally sex is used as a boundary for space to make women and children safe in public activities. Even though the technique of single sex spaces is only really effective for women because of the realities of MPV, men also use sex selection for dating, social and mental health reasons. The “men’s shed” is one example, of important single sex male spaces, the other is areas for homosexual dating. I have written about this issue in relation to the neglect of a section of the homosexual community with the institutional redefinition of sex and homosexuality.

25.   The Bill gives the registrar the discretion to determine that some identities are not “genuine” if they are “obscene, offensive or absurd” or not in the “public interest”.  By doing so, The Bill effectively changes the role of the government registrar from a recorder of sex to an assigner of sex as an identity category in accordance with government set rules.  According to the ideology behind The Bill, even a baby born is just randomly assigned their birth sex as an identity category ready for them to change, even while still a child. 
This is of course nonsense because sex is not a category of assignment by government, or declaration by a man, sex is a human reproductive role, regardless of feeling.

The government taking the job of sex definition and assignment is a gross overstep. The Queensland Government has no legitimate mandate re re-define human sex categories in law, not even if the other States have done it.

Conclusion

The most appalling thing I have faced in opposition to this Bill and gender identity based legislation, is the onus on women to prove that a special cohort of men, who have made a declaration, have not got exactly the same level of MPV as women.  The only way women are given to prove this is to make our own bodies and those of our children’s vulnerable to attack.  This was highlighted in a case in Tasmania recently where a lesbian woman was denied an exemption from Anti-discrimination legislation to hold a single sex event and sought appeal from the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (TASCAT). 

Jessica Hoyle provided evidence that originally emerged from the British prison system and a legal case FDJ,R v Secretary of State for Justice where it showed that 50% of a sample of trans identified prisoners in a cohort of British prisoners were sex offenders.  The data seemed to indicate that males will identify as “trans” to access the male estate.  This is backed up by recent reports in Scotland where “trans women” revert back to male when they leave the prison.  The astounding thing is that the TASCAT said that they required “peer reviewed” data what women would be raped as a result of self ID policies. 

So let me make this clear; an Australian administration tribunal is accepting that women’s spaces are to be fully open to self-identifying males, and to even request for one small space away from male people we need to see women raped, have the rapes reported, secure convictions and then for those convictions to be the subject of an academic study and those studies need to be reviewed by other academics.  If all this happens, the evidence may be accepted in court as a reason for a lesbian to have a single sex dating space.

Plenty of evidence now exists of trans identified males showing clear male pattern behaviour. Obviously, because only a complete idiot would think that a declaration of gender will abate sex based patterns of behaviour, the concept itself is ethereal and complete nonsense. But when we gather this evidence, or talk about gathering this evidence, or meet to discuss that the evidence may exist, the Minister for Women, the Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, Shannon Fentiman calls us “transphobes.” Shannon Fentiman is the Minister for Women in the same way that Terry Lewis was the Commissioner for Queensland Police, except far more negligent.  

The voices of women are shunned while non-scientific fiction is flouted to the detriment of the most vulnerable of women.  As I said, I know you are getting ample evidence of this in submissions, and if you called for submissions specifically for evidence that trans identity does not in fact abate male pattern behaviour and made them public, this would immediately expose 90% of the lies and corruption of this Bill, because it is built on the fiction that human sex is secondary to gender as a driver of human behaviour.

The mythology of gender identity and the gender soul is based in a number of romantic and ideological schools of thought that stem from the Humanities, where I spend four years getting a degree in the early 90’s. This has made me an unusual specialist in this area, but here I am.

Just on another note, I want to say since the Bill has been tabled I have seen an increasing boldness in harassment of trans activist toward gender critical people including the regular threats of doxing.  The women that the Attorney General calls “transphobes” are part of largely underground activist’s networks that consists of a large amount of anonymous social media profiles.  These women attempt to enter the debate and give people more information under constant threat of cancelation and loss of income.  I was permanently banned from Twitter earlier this year for saying that men pretending to be lesbians is rape culture. I was recently reinstated under Twitters new free speech policies.  

Some women do high quality research in their spare time, make freedom of information requests and meet in cafes and restaurants to talk in whispers about how they can protect their daughters in the face of the increasing threat of government authorised misinformation that girls are given about sex, sexuality and their ability to create boundaries around their bodies (which are able to be impregnated) from the types of bodies that impregnate female people (male bodies).  Women discuss how they will protect their children when the protective infrastructure they have come to rely on in public life has been repurposed to affirm the identities of males.

Fentiman openly admits that the purpose of the Bill is not just to “recognise the existence and validity of trans and gender diverse people” but to “affirm them.”

So to be clear, we have in Brisbane underground networks of feminists who live in fear of losing their income because they believe human sex is immutable, important and unchangeable, and that girls and women carry an inherent risk and are a target for oppression from male people and that women’s protective infrastructure does not exist to affirm males. And we have an Attorney General who vilifies these women because she has a stated aim of repurposing billions of dollars of state and private infrastructure to affirm government ordained entirely fictitious identities.

As a working class descendent of poor, trafficked, raped and abused women, I denounce the Queensland Labor Party as a hate group against Queensland women and children and I am ashamed that we have allowed bourgeois women to take hold of the Party.   

I and many other Queenslanders are now dissidents to the state because of this Bill and you will need to decide what you will do with us. I am more than prepared to continue my activism from prison.

Please listen.

Best regards,

Christine Edie Chehade AKA Edie Wyatt.