The day the music died

How gender ideology killed “Women Out Loud”

Credit: Axel Bueckert. iStock.

For about a decade now, over the Labour Day long weekend, me and mine have made the five or so hour pilgrimage to the Irish-tinged Victorian town of Port Fairy for the folk music festival where, each year and with quasi-religious fervour, I turn up at 10am on the Sunday morning to hear Women Out Loud. As the name suggests, the fixture, often coinciding with International Women’s Day, showcases around half a dozen female artists from the festival line up. 

They each perform two songs from their set and sometimes at the end they do an all-in number — I Am Woman, that sort of thing — but that’s only time permitting, and the session almost always runs overtime because the music is padded with talking. The host, acclaimed artist Sarah Carroll, asks the performers lots of questions, and generally it’s a bit of a talkfest about …women. Their stories. Their lives, loves and losses. Their politics — naturally always left. The performers share tales about childbirth and miscarriage, friendship and loneliness and travel, the passing of parents and romance gone wrong. 

One year a Serbian folk music duo, who were also a couple, were slated to play. Only the woman turned up. She explained that her partner was battling mental illness, his behaviour was so erratic sometimes he didn’t make it to gigs. She said all this with gentle honesty and compassion. We, the thousands in the audience, an audience heavy with middle-aged women, cried. I would often cry at Women Out Loud. It’s that kind of event; half consciousness-raising, half therapy session. It nourished my soul for all the other days of the year when I push through, or suppress, the exquisite pain of being WOMAN. 

And then — maybe you sense where this is heading — then came last year’s Women Out Loud. And what I’m going to say next will likely offend and upset some of you. I can only say it’s not my intention, but I guess if you’re after inoffensive, anodyne and fearful commentary on this subject you can always read The Age. Okay, that was bitchy. 

As it happens, the first act at last year’s Women Out Loud was the Folk Bitch Trio, which, again as the name suggests, comprises three women, all of them young; all belonging to the generation inclined to see biological sex as a matter of personal preference, something that can be cancelled with an announcement on social media. One member of the trio had gone down such a path and identified as “non-binary,” meaning — for this will still be news to some — neither male nor female. 

And Carroll, the host, asked the performer about their identity because, like I said, she asks a lot of questions, and she prefaced her questions with a little homily. She said the organisers of Women Out Loud perhaps aren’t as inclusive as they should be because some people don’t identify as women, a fact of which we must all be more mindful. And then she asked this non-binary musician, a person with lovely porcelain skin and angelic features and soft voice, a creature of unambiguously female presentation — well, it’s true — to tell the audience a little of her journey towards the realisation that she’s not really a woman, never mind that here she was at Women Out Loud, an event promoting the voices of women, and part of a band whose very name screams WOMAN by reclaiming a slur directed at women, and at women only. 

And then as the musician began to tell the women assembled for Women Out Loud about their journey out of womanhood, as if such a thing is a real thing, I … well, I lost it.

Started swearing.

I’d like to tell you I started swearing under my breath, but my voice is somewhat louder and less feminine than that of the talented non-woman female musician in Folk Bitch Trio, so such a statement is likely inaccurate. And as the audience generously applauded the non-binary non-woman on stage, applauded this person’s courage in telling their story of disavowing womanhood in front of thousands of women — from whom this female-born person is apparently a species entirely distinct — as the audience applauded — for that is what women do, they generously applaud, applaud even people who imply that ordinary woman-identifying women like them are docile slaves to an ancien régime — as everyone around me applauded, I sprang to my feet. 

Oops. 

The people around me tensed. 

Oh boy.

TERF alert!

And I turned and climbed/stumbled over the legs of the applauding people seated in my row, climbed over their legs as I swore sort-of-but not-really under my breath about how not five minutes into Women Out Loud and already gender identity ideology reared its deformed head, until finally I reached the aisle and charged towards the exit. 

Oh of course I don’t blame the lovely young creature on stage for wanting to burst from the constraints of the female body and the cultural baggage with which it’s been saddled, of course not, every generation of young women tries one way or another to do that, to will a better future for themselves than the one to which their mothers became resigned — that’s their job. Viva la revolución. She doesn’t need me haranguing her with home truths of the “love, take it from me, one day you’ll realise …” But when rebellion becomes synonymous with delusion — we’re a binary species or we wouldn’t bloody exist! — the adults in the room, the MCs, the judges, the politicians, must be that and politely demur from affirming the ludicrous. 

And to pick up on Carroll’s point about women needing to be inclusive, just how much more inclusive can women be? We are forever including the sick, the old and the very young in our daily schedules. The porn industry earns many, many billions from our every inclusive orifice. We are manufactured for inclusion. We take pity on hopeless men, make space for them in our lives, over and over, to our detriment, sometimes at the cost of our own lives. Even our handbags are overstuffed with every possible contingency of human need. 

And yet the first thing I was made to feel at an event aimed at celebrating womanhood or, if you like, easing the pain of it for a measly two or so hours once a year, was guilt. Guilt for being a woman; for it seems the answer is “no,” women are still not sufficiently inclusive. 

Next weekend I won’t be attending the Port Fairy festival because I’m overseas (more on that in subsequent posts) but in truth Women Out Loud, indeed the festival as a whole, is no longer, as the kids would say, my “safe space.” This year’s program touts Women Out Loud as featuring a line-up of international and local “female-identifying” musicians. Which is a curious thing to say considering the musician from Folk Bitch Trio did not in fact identify as a female despite being one. And as we know, the term “female identifying” is inclusive of men who are not in fact female but anyone can be a woman these days, the category now so inclusive it means nothing at all.

I know I should do the journo thing and ask the festival to explain the reference to “female identifying” and the apparent discrepancy with the sweet young artist from Folk Bitch Trio. But I don’t care to hear their explanation. I’m too weary and too sad. Because like so many other things I once loved and can love no more, for me the Port Fairy folk music festival is over. 

The music has died.