What have we done?

With women's rights in Australia?

If you had told me that western governments would be infected with systemic misogyny of the type that was prevalent in religious dictatorships even ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I thought women’s rights were something that we had achieved, a historic victory that no one in their right mind would want undone. But things are changing rapidly in the west for women.

The scenes coming from the Let Women’s Speak rallies are, for many, not as shocking as the way the press has circled the wagons around the gender narrative with Orwellian precision. 

The Nazi fury sweeping through the bourgeois left in this country, reveals a corruption that is much more serious than the McCarthyism of the 50s. We are not in a culture war, we are in a class war, a hegemonic war and a war of women against the state.

Shannon Fentiman, who is LARPing as Queensland’s Minister for Women and Attorney General, sits atop a confected social justice cause for a community that are so ill defined we need to search the legislation that is made for them, to decipher how we may even identify them in the street, but that seems rather the point.

Last week in the wake of Nazi-gate Fentiman tweeted that she is bringing in new laws to ban the “the public display of hate symbols such as those representative of Nazi ideology”. Fentiman went on to say that she is “also introducing tougher penalties for crimes motivated by hatred based on race, religion, sexuality, sex characteristics or gender identity.”

These laws piggyback on those Fentiman recently introduced with the Births Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2022 (BDMRB). The BDMRB will allow any man to change the sex on his birth certificate to female via the declaration of a “gender identity”.  That legal fiction means that a man claiming “gender identity” must be treated, in any way that matters, as a female person, with all the legal and cultural assumptions given to female people.

In conjunction with new hate crime legislation, any male claiming “gender identity” protections will be able to pressure women and girls, with the violence of the state, to recognise him as female, even though all of us know that it is materially impossible for humans to change sex.

This is not a set of laws that have been asked for by the Queensland people and certainly not the women that Fentiman is Minister for.  Indeed many women attempted to speak to the government about the conflict between women’s rights and safety with the incoming doctrine of gender identity supremacy, but Fentiman made it clear in her introduction speech for the legislation, that these Queensland women “cloak their transphobia in the guise of women’s safety.”

Many submissions were sent to the Queensland government demonstrating that the legal status of “gender identity” has no capacity to abate male pattern violence in an individual, I mean how could it, unless it was magic? Clear data was presented that men will identify out of male prisons to prey on female prisoners.  Fentiman anticipated this evidence in her speech introducing the BDMRB and stated that “there is no evidence, domestically or internationally, to support these outrageous claims”. “These claims”, to be clear, are the claims that predators will adopt trans identity to access vulnerable women.  I’ll say one thing about Fentiman, she has a high opinion of the ethical boundaries of sex predators.

This Franky weird ideology of the supremacy of the gender soul over human sex and sexuality is given “human rights” authority in the BDMRB by the Yogyakarta Principles (sited three times in the explanatory notes of the Bill).  As much can be determined, the Yogyakarta Principles emerged from a website developed in Indonesia and have been further cultivated by gender identity activists. The UN has repeatedly rejected proposals to ratify the Yogyakarta Principles, but they have been woven into law by activists politicians around Australia like Fentiman. 

The Yogyakarta Principles place “gender identity” effectively sovereign over sex in human rights law. Professor Robert Wintemute, a Professor of Human Rights Law at Kings College London, was one of the co-authors of the “Yogyakarta Principles” and is an expert on anti-discrimination law and sexual orientation law.  Professor Wintemute now realises they got it wrong with the Yogyakarta Principles and “that women’s rights were not considered during the meeting where the principles were written and the authors “failed to consider” that fully intact males would seek to access female-only spaces.”

We all make misstates right?  Unfortunately, now imbedded illegitimately in Queensland law is the claim that it is a human right for men to be accepted into female spaces based on self-identification, that women should not be permitted to create a single sex space, that trans identity in men will always abate male pattern criminal behaviour, that girls should never see a man past a trans identity to recognise a man as a man, even when she is alone and vulnerable.

According to the Queensland constitution, the parliament are to “make laws for the peace welfare and good government of the colony”.  Even though Queensland has no upper house, the single house of parliament is to make laws for the people, not for individuals, friends or groups that have been paid by taxpayer dollars.

In introducing the BDMRB, Fentiman spoke directly to the “trans and diverse people and their allies in the gallery”, stating clearly that “these are the people this legislation is for.” Fentiman especially mentioned in her speech a person named Emily whom her office had consulted with. Emily Wells was on the front page of The Guardian the next day claiming he had a traumatic experience looking at the sex marker on his drivers licence.

The sex-based infrastructure built to serve and protect Queensland women, including the police force is now being repurposed to affirm the identity of the people in the gallery of the Queensland Parliament that day and Emily from Mackay. Fentiman stated in her speech that “Not only does this bill recognise the existence and validity of trans and gender diverse people; it affirms them.”  BDMRB has become part of the affirmation model of transgender health care that is now being discredited around the world.

The new definition of gender identity that the BDRB brings in is “a person’s internal and individual experience of gender, whether or not it corresponds with the sex assigned to the person at birth”.  Part (b) of this is to clarify that this includes “name, dress, speech and behaviour”. 

Therefore, a dress on a man has the same material weight as a female body in human rights law, except the dress carries the additional weight of “gender identity” under hate crime legislation, and that weight is significant. 

Gender identity is not just a legal fiction on a document, it becomes material, in the wearing of a dress, the tilt of a head or the pronouncement of a female name.  Gender identity in Queensland will protect a man performing “womanhood” in women’s spaces even before he has filled in a single declaration.

This legislation has huge implications for the way women and girls use the infrastructure that has been designed to be single sex, and especially for those most vulnerable people in our society to sexual assault, girls between 10-14 years old.

The thing about this vulnerable cohort of girls is that they are sexually developing, becoming independent, they are very active in sports and extracurricular events, and they are disproportionately under the protection of organisations and corporations where safety is managed by regulatory principles set by the state.

Apart from the obvious safeguarding implications for facilities that minors use away from their parents, the reality is that this cohort of girls who are being sexually assaulted at higher rates than anyone in our society, are also carrying trauma, including hypervigilance into public spaces. These girls are also facing their body changing rapidly in a society where pornography is proliferating in prevalence and violence.

This issue was raised to the safety committee in the BDMRB by a Brisbane girls school for vulnerable girls. The head of the girls school told the Committee that trauma related hypervigilance meant that a single sex environment was needed to give the girls space to heal.  Jason Hunt MP countered the testimony of the school by highlighting that there were male staff members employed at the school such as the groundkeeper.  The implication Hunt made, is that the claim of hypervigilance and trauma is a rooted in transphobia, otherwise the school wouldn’t have any male staff.

The way men have been given licence to enter this debate about the sexual trauma of women was seen on ABC’s Q And A this week with two men (Deni Todorvic and Greg Mirabella) discussing Moira Deemings “reasons” for being in “this debate”.  Deeming clearly sited sexual trauma from rape as one of the reasons she entered the gender debate. Both men confidently decided that Moira shouldn’t been involved in this type of women’s rights activism despite her “reasons”. Deni Todorvic concluded that Moira should really “stay at home”. 

As a sexual assault survivor, I have been repeatedly told by transactivists that I am weaponising my trauma against trans people, merely by mentioning it. One publication in the US said that sympathy for female sexual assault survivors should rightly end “when those fears are used to target other vulnerable people.” 

The reality is that there is no more vulnerable person than the female person, and among females, juvenile females. The vulnerability of sex is dominant, even over trans identity. The largest survey of trans and non binary identified individuals in the US was conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality, and it clearly shows that female trans identified people are more likely to have been sexually assaulted across all cohorts of trans and gender diverse categories.  Transgender identified males were the least likely of all trans and non-binary cohorts in the study to be sexually assaulted. (p209) The reframing women’s instincts and hypervigilance as hate against trans identified males is the cruellest aspect of this suite of Fentiman legislation. 

My conclusion after writing, tweeting and screaming about this for over two years, is that the trauma and experience of women is of no value to progressives and is only useful to most conservatives when political points are involved. One hope that remains to save our institutions that serve and protect women and girls in Australia and the trust people may still have in them, is to get correction through the courts.

The case of Tickle Vs Giggle has been revived by Roxy Tickle recently with an interesting twist by Sall Grover’s legal team. I wrote about Tickle Vs Giggle last July. Roxy Tickle is a trans identified male person who was made a human rights claim after being removed from the female only app run by Grover. Tickle dropped the case due to financial constraints.  Tickle has found some more dollars and has re-lodged the complaint. Giggle’s lawyers have replied boldly with a constitutional challenge. 

The constitutional challenge by the Giggle lawyers is aimed at questioning the legitimacy of the suite of laws Fentiman and other state governments have so enthusiastically rammed through the courts around gender identity. All the AG’s of Australia will be put on notice that these laws are about to be challenged on a constitutional level.

This will be, in part, a battle of authority between the Yogyakarta Principles on which gender identity legislation is based, and the human rights authority on which the Australian Sex Discrimination Act is based, the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).  Unlike the Yogyakarta Principles, CEDAW is ratified by the UN and is clearly based on women as a sex and not a gender identity.  The case may provide a straw Australian women can clutch to claim back the connection between their rights and their bodies.

The case will be hugely expensive and will have to be crowdfunded. Sall Grover had to have her own crowdfunding site built in full knowledge that other crowdfunding companies would come under pressure to shut down the campaign. Here is a link to the site, donate if you can and watch this space.  Tickle V Giggle may yet provide a consolidation point for a movement playing with pennies against massive money, authoritarian government power and stifling cultural control.