In the recent kerfuffle over Australia’s derecognition of West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, DFAT jumped the gun on its website before the policy was formally announced by Foreign Minister Penny Wong. The unusual instance of amateur hour reminded me of a doubly offensive email from DFAT. Its signature template included the Aboriginal flag, with black and red horizontal bands and bright yellow sun in the centre, alongside the Australian flag and indicated the official’s preferred pronouns. Its website says DFAT ‘promotes and protects Australia’s international interests to support our security and prosperity’. How is either of the two virtue-signalling gestures in identitarian politics consistent with this core mission? In the campaign to decolonise the Australian mind, many government departments are being offered re-education – sorry, training – courses on how to recognise unconscious bias and the importance of inclusive language.

The national flag is the foremost symbol of the nation. It represents Australian identity and pride. A second flag representing just one component of the Australian demographic mosaic cannot but be exclusionary and divisive. On 22 September, the day of mourning for the late Queen, protestors denounced British colonialism and racism, chanted ‘Abolish the monarchy’ and burnt the Union Jack and Australian flag. Millions would sacrifice much to legally migrate and resettle in Australia. When the independent member for Fowler, Dai Le, delivered her maiden speech in parliament on 5 September, she proudly draped herself in an Australian flag fashioned into a traditional áo dài. She spoke movingly about her family’s journey from Vietnam to Australia as refugees and the welcome they received from the Australian community.

If one flag cannot represent all Australians, how about one for convicts who continue to define Australia in the minds of many, another for free settlers under the White Australia policy, and still another for the sizable influx of more recent multiracial migrants? Senator Jacinta Price suggested to Wong ‘perhaps we need to co-design an Asian voice to parliament’ and ‘any time I need expert advice on how to better improve Wong’s life, I can consult with the Asian voice’. According to last year’s census, 52 per cent of Australians were either born overseas themselves, or one or both of their parents were. If, back in dreamtime, the supercontinent Gondwana included India before it split and drifted north, then is my claim to ancestral ties to this ancient land any less authentic? I say this not seriously but to illustrate the absurdity of looking back deep into our separate histories to shape current choices for a common future.

Perhaps DFAT signatures could combine two virtue signals by including the rainbow pride flag. We could mimic US woke imperialism by instructing all our embassies to fly the rainbow flag for Pride month every June, even to the Vatican. I’m sure this helped the US to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan. As Katharine Deves explained last week, a lasting Julia Gillard bequest to Australia was the Sex Discrimination Amendment Act 2013 wherein biologically-defined sex-based rights were pushed aside by the vague, fluid and subjective social constructs of gender identity. The idea behind preferred pronouns is that everyone’s conception of gender identity deserves the protection of law. The unintended, perverse yet predictable consequence is that the wilful supression of biological reality with pretend facts is a threat to women’s rights, safety, privacy and dignity. There is good reason to create women-only safe spaces in toilets, changerooms, refuges, crisis services, prisons and sports. Efforts to use the full force of the law to coerce and compel everyone to genuflect to biologically false legal fiction is characteristic of communist totalitarian systems where people must show obeisance to party diktats or risk public show trials, confession of errors and spells in re-education camps.

The ‘preferred pronouns’ culture feeds into and enables abusive men while silencing victims. A women’s group pushed to move a convicted trans sex offender with a ‘working’ penis out of a woman’s prison in Melbourne. J.K. Rowling mocks bearded males defining what a woman is. Too many have either been brainwashed into believing or are too intimidated to challenge claims that ‘penis holders’ are women, men can get pregnant, doctors, nurses and midwives must be trained to help men give birth, trans-males committing rapes must be documented as women rapists and males self-identifying as women must be allowed to compete in women’s sports despite decisive biological advantages in size, strength and stamina. None of this would be possible without first denying that sex is a biological fact that cannot be subsumed under socially constructed gender. Once the preferred pronoun movement is appeased in law, conversely, there is little defence left against its extreme claims. In July serial sex offender ‘Sally Ann’ née John Stephen Dixon was convicted and jailed for 20 years for sexual assaults, before changing genders, on seven boys and girls aged 7-15. Sussex Police reported it as a ‘woman convicted of historic offences against children’. Julie Bindel wrote: ‘This is a MALE sex offender’ and sex is relevant to sex crimes. One mother tweeted: ‘No this is not a female crime’. The police threatened her with misgendering the serial paedophile – a ‘hate crime’. Echoing an earlier column from Toby Young that cops should police streets not tweets, former home secretary Suella Braverman tweeted: ‘Focus on catching criminals not policing pronouns’. Yet the Telegraph’s report of this story referred to Dixon as ‘she’ and ‘her’. And oh, Dixon was sent to a woman’s prison. Will a paedophile identifying as a child be sent to juvenile prison as the next stage in the progression of this collective madness?

Let’s be clear: the debate on trans language is an argument over truth and science versus lies and dogma, not an argument about competing human rights. We have created a culture that enables abusive and predatory voyeurs while shaming and silencing their victims. A man who says he is a woman is praised and glorified for his ‘inspirational’ bravery and honesty. The woman who objects to the invasion of her privacy by his presence in a toilet or shower room and fears for her physical safety, is verballed and may be prosecuted for hate crime. Goodwill gestures can have harmful and dangerous consequences. ‘Gender-neutral’ language is neither neutral nor inclusive but anti-women. Pressure groups have morphed from protecting and promoting minority rights to micromanaging majority behaviour. To fight for trans feelings is to actively undermine the actual hard-won rights of women and girls. The end result is the trans tail wags the ‘heteronormative’ dog.

For myself, I’ve adopted this comment spotted online: ‘I was born visible, but I identify as invisible. I’m trans-parent and my preferred pronouns are who, what and where’.