Trans ideology on its knees

Let Women Speak March 2023. Photo by Natalie J. Russell

In the aftermath of last week’s UK Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of “woman” is based on biological sex, I stumbled on a new word: gleefreshing, the state of being happy to refresh social media, the opposite of doomscrolling. And while gleefreshing I was struck by another set of opposites in two media interviews, one on the BBC and one on The Project, which for overseas readers is an Australian current affairs panel show on commercial TV.

On the BBC, female presenter Martine Croxall spoke to Heather Herbert, a trans woman (biological male) and Scottish Green party campaigner, about the landmark decision. Herbert claimed the UK “was following in the footsteps of Trump's America”, while simultaneously conceding — as the judges have been keen to stress— that trans people continue to enjoy legal protection from discrimination, victimisation and harassment. The exchange took a startling turn when Herbert decried the ruling as “an attack on minorities.”

“I’m sorry, but how is this an attack on anyone?,” Croxall argued. “It’s just a clarification of what the word woman means.”

“Well, I am a woman, so where do I fit in?” Herbert responded, before turning the questions back on Croxall: “Are you a woman? If someone were to say to you, you’re not a woman, would that feel like you were under attack?”

At which point there was a very pregnant pause, one that finally allowed the absurdity — the affront!— of the past decade’s rampant trans propaganda to sink in. In this moment we witnessed the brazen lie that men can be women, and vice versa, passed off as a mundane, self-evident truth.

While excruciating, the exchange was also delicious for the spectacle of the BBC journalist liberated from totalitarian censorship. At last, at last, she’s free to declare the emperor has no clothes. To her counterparts in the antipodes, to the quiet TERF resistance at the ABC, I say: keep the faith. One day you too will report unbound on the derangements of gender identity ideology.

For now, we turn to the other interview, the one on The Project. It was with Sall Grover, founder of the female-only social media app, Giggle, who is leading the crusade to reclaim sex-based rights in Australia. That she was interviewed on the woke’ish show at all spells progress and her stunning performance will go down in the annals of Aussie terfdom, not least for airing the concept of autogynephilia on the telly.

The contrast with the BBC was in the posture of the presenters, especially the discussion after the interview in which Grover had expressed delight in the court’s affirmation of sex-based reality underpinning women’s rights. One of the presenters, Waleed Aly, urged caution in interpreting the UK decision: the judges, he said, were only ruling on the meaning of “woman” within legislation — the UK Equality Act (2010) — and not adjudicating the broader “philosophical” question of what is a woman. Fair enough. I guess anything can be a philosophical question.

But Aly’s female co-presenters — I don’t know their names and wouldn’t be doing them any favours by looking them up — knitted their brows and projected mourning vibes.

“My worry,” said one, “is that you will see this kind of rhetoric become dangerous because it gets weaponised” against trans people by people who don’t understand the legal “nuance”.

How upside-down we are down-under? Our mainstream press is still at the “be kind” caper, urging capitulation to the zombie mantra “trans women are women.” Still framing reality — and not its opposite — as “rhetoric” that can be “weaponised”. All this in a country where lesbians have no legal right to exclude men from their public gatherings or even their dating pools.

Within days of this presenter’s solemn warning against “weaponising” the “rhetoric” of biological sex, thousands of transactivists marched on Westminster and elsewhere in the UK. They held trans flags and Palestine flags. Some chanted “Fuck JK Rowling.” A statue of suffragette Millicent Fawcett was vandalised with graffiti reading “FAG rights”. One placard read, “I love pissin on TERFs (meaning women)”, others declared “the only good TERF is a dead TERF.”

Some trans-identified male influencers vowed they would continue to use female toilets in defiance of any ban, neatly demonstrating the misogynistic contempt for women’s boundaries that forced the Supreme Court showdown.

Yet here’s the thing about the segment on The Project. I felt like I was watching it from a great distance, as if The Project’s panelists were already in the past, a relic from the wrong side of history.

Ancient hatreds, the violent ticks of human nature, autocrats and demagogues — some abominations will be with us forever. But the mania that is trans ideology will pass. Even the most tyrannical regimes can fall literally overnight. Even in Australia, even in the trans theocracy that is Victoria, this too shall pass. Even as the journos on The Project furrow their brows in misplaced empathy, the bubble is bursting.

Photo by Allison Saeng on Unsplash+

In the UK, gender identity ideology, the cultish belief system that obfuscates the reality of biological sex, is on its knees, and it’s no mere flesh wound.

The ideology — a virus leaked from the mad laboratories of the identity-immersed US Ivy Leagues that went on to infect the world — could only ever replicate by bullying, shaming and cancelling dissenters. That will be hard to do now that the adults in the room, the five judges of the Supreme Court, ruled sex is “binary”.

The case that went to court is straightforward. The Scottish government had brought in quotas for women on public boards to boost their representation, a measure allowed under the UK’s Equality Act (2010), as it is under our own anti-discrimination law, to redress substantive inequality.

But Scotland being a dystopia of sex denial, the Scottish Government decreed that the “women” in question included “certified” women in possession of a gender recognition certificate. The quota for women on public boards included men, in other words.

And such idiocies would be flying still in the cradle of the Enlightenment were it not for the ballsy women whose long battle ended with the Supreme Court deciding that the definition of “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act did not include the certified kind.

Aly is right when he says the judgment was concerned only with the definition of “woman” in the UK Act. But the judges’ guide in defining “woman” was … a woman! A woman as we understand woman “as a matter of ordinary language”, of words that reference the material reality of biological sex. An interpretation based on certified sex, the court ruled, would “cut across the definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and thus the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way.” For instance, look at the provisions on pregnancy and giving birth - only biological women can do either so therefore…

Geez.

Pity for a moment these judges. All those dreams of forging new frontiers of jurisprudence, of penning memorable prose that future generations of law students would imbibe as akin to Lord Denning redux. And yet here they were, turning out 88 pages of statutory interpretation to flesh out a ratio decidendi best paraphrased as the one-liner: “The world’s gone barking mad.”

Sex is thus restored as the norm that henceforth must shape workplace protocols and social services. Males cannot assert right of entry into female rugby teams, changing rooms, rape crisis shelters and lesbian spaces. In contrast to the barely concealed contempt for lesbians in recent Australian jurisprudence, Lord Hodge made specific mention of “the anomalies” that would “adversely affect” lesbians if the word sex was “interpreted as certificated sex rather than biological sex”.

Integrity returns to data collection too. Future generations will chuckle over what appears as a dramatic short-lived spike in sex crimes committed by females in the late 2010s.

Let Women Speak, March 2023. Photo by Natalie J. Russell

Back in Oz, women who dared say what the UK Supreme Court has just unanimously said, that as a matter of common-sense trans women are not women, have been slapped down by Labor attorneys-general, bureaucrats, state-appointed “experts” and most infamously former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, all of whom branded them bigots, transphobes and literal Nazis.

A succession of Orwellian hate speech laws, the most egregious passed in Victoria early this month, raises the serious prospect of harsh civil and criminal penalties for “misgendering.”

So booby-trapped is the terrain of naming biological reality that in the midst of a federal election campaign, Peter Dutton — desperate to deodorise himself from the whiff of Donald Trump amid the Opposition’s sliding fortunes in the polls — declined to comment when asked for his response to the UK ruling.

Whenever TERF island lurches back to reality, Australian officials and institutions scold their British counterparts with a ratcheting up of passive-aggressive human-rights speak. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Dr Anna Cody responded to the UK judgment affirming that sex discrimination law bans discrimination on the basis of .. err .. sex, with a statement of support for the “trans and gender diverse community.”

“The laws in the UK are not the laws of Australia,” she says. “Our laws should reflect inclusion, respect and the right of all people to live with dignity.”

It’s a confused statement —well, duh— because Cody too goes on to state that trans people in the UK continue to be protected from discrimination under the Equality Act.

Alas she is right in saying the law in the UK is different to the laws of Australia on sex and “gender”. Gender self-ID, a regime facilitating legal sex by mere declaration, operates in most states — in the UK it never got up. Obtaining a gender recognition certificate in Britain still requires two years of living as the opposite sex, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and the backing of two medical reports.

And the Gillard government in 2013 removed from our own Sex Discrimination Act (1984) the sex-based definitions of man and woman and introduced protections for “gender identity”.

Did Parliament intend to usher-in a post-sex era, extinguishing women’s sex-based rights? Or was this an epic story of unintended consequences that’s trapped subsequent Labor politicians into pretending that disenfranchising lesbians was always part of the plan?

I can only leave such questions hanging as an invitation to conscience from those involved in passing the amendments: I’m here to listen.

The “trans women are women” dogma prevailed in the Federal Court decision of Tickle v Giggle — Justice Robert Bromwich finding that under Australian law sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary” — replete with the legitimising of contested terminology such as “cisgender”. The decision is under appeal.

L:et Women Speak March 2023. Photo by Natalie. J. Russell

Lastly, when the UK-government commissioned Cass Report found the evidence base for paediatric transition “remarkably weak”, the immediate reaction of Australia’s health bureaucrats and ministers was to double down on “affirmative care” orthodoxy. Our gender clinic protocol is “world-class,” we were told — despite the Cass Report marking it down for the rigour of its development relative to the more cautious version in Sweden.

Lest this needs explaining, the debate around “gender affirming care” for distressed children is ground-zero in the trans wars. Puberty blockers is the first step in a treatment trajectory that leads to cross-sex hormones and sometimes surgery. Children put on such treatments suffer lifelong medicalisation, sexual dysfunction and infertility.

Trans health doctors insist that if minors are denied treatment they may never make it to adulthood because of a heightened risk of suicide. (The Cass Report dismissed claims that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of suicide among gender-distressed youth.)

Underpinning “gender affirming care” is the belief that some children have an identity incongruent with their birth sex, a state of right/wrongness so innate that from the time they’re in nappies we might tentatively flag them as “trans.”

And yet.

There are signs affirmative care might come under critical scrutiny after all, which partly explains my exuberant optimism at the start of this piece. So, disregard the last weary 17 paragraphs.

Earlier this year the newly-elected conservative government in Queensland announced an immediate pause on hormonal treatment for dysphoric minors pending a review on the evidence base for such interventions. The review was to be led by Victoria’s former chief psychiatrist Professor Ruth Vine who would “bring a truly independent mind” to the task.

Immediately, in a metaphorical “snap,” Federal Health Minister Mark Butler announced that he had asked the National Health and Medical Research Council to review the guidelines for care of young people with gender dysphoria so these can be consistent across the nation.

Oh and we can expect the results of the review in 2026: well after the election.

Still — the events mark a turning point of sorts. As one Victorian MP told me, Butler’s actions, taken in the shadow of Trump’s assault on trans ideology, betrayed a sense of panic. The MP noted this was the first time Labor appeared to acknowledge that unease about puberty blockers could be politically combustible for progressive governments.

And then early this month came a startling decision of Family Court judge Andrew Strum in a case involving a gender-questioning 12 year-old boy, “Devin,” whose mother had been taking him to an unnamed gender clinic in a public hospital. Puberty blockers were on the cards. The father opposed treatment and wanted to keep the boy’s options open. The judge sided with the father, gave him custody and effectively barred the child from accessing treatment.

While custody disputes always turn on the best interests of the child in question, the judgment was significant for Strum’s forthright rejection of some of the central tenets of “gender affirming care” and his strong criticisms of one of the nation’s leading gender clinics. Which is why if you rely on the ABC or The Age/Sydney Morning Herald for your news this is the first you’ve heard of the case.

Strum, “delivers a series of hammer blows to the dogmas of the ‘gender-affirming’ treatment approach,” writes Bernard Lane on his Substack, including rejecting the idea that trans children have an immutable “gender identity” and that England’s Cass Review is biased and of no relevance to Australia.

On the latter, I can’t resist setting out in full Strum’s critique of one expert witness, a paediatrician and former director of the gender clinic. The individual is anonymised as “Associate Professor L,” a measure both baffling and ineffectual, but never mind.

Drawing on an article in Scientific American, the associate professor had suggested the Cass Review was part of a “third wave of transgender oppression” commencing with the Nazis.

We really should stop here a moment and contemplate the abyss. As I said earlier, our public institutions routinely dismiss legitimate criticisms of trans ideology as Nazi-adjacent.

At September’s tribunal hearing on the lesbian case — the (ultimately unsuccessful) appeal against the Australian Human Rights Commission’s refusal to let the Lesbian Action Group hold public events that exclude trans women, meaning men — the Commission’s “independent expert”, an academic and sex worker advocate, accused the lesbians of sharing common ground with Nazis.

Now, bearing witness to the intellectual degradation of Australia’s human rights bureaucracy is unnerving, to be sure. But when a senior figure in the medical establishment plays the Nazi card to deflect legitimate questions about a highly controversial treatment for children, we start to approach a civilisational crisis.

Strum found that the “emotive” suggestion linking the Cass Report to anti-trans Nazi oppression “has no place whatsoever in the independent evidence that should be expected of such an expert.”

“It demonstrates ignorance of the true evils of Nazism and cheapens the sufferings – and mass murder – of the millions of the victims thereof, which included, but were most certainly not limited to, transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, amongst other groups of people.”

His words are heroic in these ahistorical times.

Yet even more than Strum’s fearless judgment, it’s Butler’s response to it that explains why I’m smelling victory in our local chapter of the trans wars.

Asked by The Australian to comment, the health minister said that while he was yet to read the judgment, he had been “thinking quite a lot” about the issue. His office was attuned to changing international attitudes towards the treatment of gender-dysphoric children and he would await the results of his commissioned review of Australian guidelines.

The “changing international attitudes” towards gender treatment for children refers, undoubtedly, to his UK Labour counterpart, health secretary Wes Streeting, banning the routine use of puberty blockers after the Cass Report found there was insufficient long-term evidence about their safety or benefit.

And take it from someone with “lived experience”: when people say, as Butler did, that they’ve been “thinking quite a lot” about the issue, this almost never means they have come round to seeing the “life-saving” supremacy of gender-affirming care. Take it from one who knows that “thinking quite a lot” about all things trans leads, inevitably, to the grim realisation that our society will keep tilting towards certifiable insanity until someone has the balls to say, “enough.”

We can’t know what Butler’s gender medicine review will find, whether it will defy activist pressure or infiltration. We don’t know how Strum’s judgment will affect other family court cases involving treatment for gender-distressed minors. We don’t know how the Federal Court will rule on the Giggle v Tickle and Lesbian Action Group appeals even under the magnetic pressure of the UK Supreme Court’s emphatic triumph of commonsense.

But I can say that there is a crack — and through it the light will come flooding in.