With reports in the press about further ‘clashes’ in Melbourne last week between ‘trans’ and ‘anti-trans’ activists, and the self-inflicted drama facing the Liberal leadership in Victoria following the Let Women Speak rally, I wanted to provide clarity about the kind of people who will unite a trans activist and a Liberal moderate in disgust.

The gender critical movement is a single issue, largely non-partisan political movement, consisting mostly of women and gays. I am a gender-critical feminist, but gender-critical (GC) covers a range of political dissidents who oppose legislation that flows from the introduction of ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic in law. More ‘hardline’ GCs, like me, oppose gender identity anywhere in law. GCs are more anti-state than we are anti-left as many of us still maintain left-wing analysis and core political principles despite siding with some right-wing political parties on the gender issue.

The evidence that gender identity policy, legislation, and medicine are materially harmful to women, gays, lesbians, and children, is overwhelming. It is clear to any honest person that ‘gender identity’ dis-empowers the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ and ‘sexual orientation’ where they matter, and where they matter is where females and homosexuals need protection because they are female or homosexual, or both.

In Australia, lesbians are being openly and proudly refused permission to meet with other women for dating and social purposes if they deliberately exclude males who have a ‘gender identity’ of ‘female’. This refusal is coming from the human rights infrastructure that has been built to protect lesbians and women.

In places with self-ID (everywhere in Australia except NSW), the only evidence females are entitled to receive from a male with a ‘gender identity’ is a verbal declaration. Once that declaration is received, a girl or woman is legally obliged to assume that man is free of male pattern violence and male pattern sexual deviance. Any suggestion that he is not could soon be a hate crime.

Hannah Barnes, in her book about the collapse of the Tavistock gender service, revealed that 90 per cent of the girls referred to the UK gender clinic were same-sex attracted. The majority of children being referred to gender clinics are now girls. GCs consider the treatment children receive in gender clinics as surgical and endocrine conversion therapy.

Gender, in the sociology of old, is the cultural meanings that societies give to sex. I don’t use gender as a word that relates to the body; sex is of the body, gender is of the culture. Feminists of my generation critiqued gender meanings, suggesting they were designed to limit the life choices of females.

Gender identity is a modern concept born of psychology, psychotherapy, and sexology. Gender identity claims that the kind of sex-based cultural expressions that a person is attracted to arises from an internal personhood or soul that exists independent of sex. This soul (evidenced in a declaration) is so powerful it can abate male pattern violence in men. GCs are gender soul atheists – we don’t believe gender identity can abate male pattern violence.

Gender identity souls are distributed by the state and human rights infrastructure to children, who are told that this special soul can be at war with their sex. More and more children are finding that their gender identity soul is causing them distress.

In 2023, 172 Queensland children started on puberty blockers under the medical pathway promoted by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Research asserts that the vast majority of children started on puberty blockers will go on to cross-sex hormones. The children who start puberty blockers early will become adults by age only because the endocrine treatment will permanently stop adult sexual and reproductive capacity.

International and local research appears to confirm that there is little to no evidence that the gender ‘affirmation’ model improves the mental health of the person in any way. If anything, evidence is emerging to the contrary. The social justice medicine at the pointy end of gender identity has been laid bare recently in the WPATH files by Mia Hughes.

The Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for trans and gender-diverse children and adolescents use WPATH as a key authority. Every Australian child who ends up in a gender clinic will come under the influence of WPATH standards of care (SOC), and a lot of Australian kids are ending up in gender clinics.

As mentioned above, the recommendations made in this document are based primarily on clinician consensus, along with previously published standards of care from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), treatment guidelines and position statements, and findings from a limited number of non-randomised clinical studies and observational studies. (Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines.)

Australian politicians will ignore harm that gender identity causes because gender identity gives politicians fake social justice rationale to bypass human rights and democratic accountability when passing unpopular and illiberal legislation.

Queensland has redefined sex as a self-identity category with no referendum or public mandate. Former Attorney General of Queensland, Shannon Fentiman, failed to meet with gender-critical women’s groups when her Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 2023 was being drafted. She claimed in a speech to Parliament that women were trying to ‘cloak their transphobia in the guise of women’s safety’.

Shannon Fentiman said the changes to birth certificate registration was necessary to ‘affirm’ those Queenslanders who have special gender identities. The theoretical basis of the use of the ‘affirmation’ model of health care for social policy was established in 2013 when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5) deleted ‘gender identity disorder’ and replaced it with ‘gender dysphoria’. Gender dysphoria takes the disorder out of the person and places it in the population.

Gender dysphoria posits that the mental distress a person experiences around their gender identity is not pathological but the result of ‘minority stress’ (ie. cultural oppression). To cure the ‘minority stress’, the patient does not only need surgery and medication, but the widespread ‘affirmation’ of all of society of their gender identity over their sex. This sounds like unsubstantiated nonsense, because it is, but the Australian government has taken to it with vigour.

In the same year as the DSM5 was released, 2013, the Labor Gillard government changed the Sex Discrimination Act to include ‘trans women’ in the definition of women and removed material-based definitions of sex. While the protected characteristics of sex, sexuality, race, and disability made it into Australian law and policy with collective political action, and broad social agreement, gender identity has entered our law as a protected characteristic via a change in a medical diagnosis in a US psychology manual in relation to a rare psychological disorder.

In practice, gender identity in law prohibits any woman or girl from forming a procedure boundary with a man who claims a gender identity in public spaces or private companies. This includes profoundly disabled women receiving daily intimate care. If you can’t see the safeguarding negligence in this type of law, you are either lying or stupid.

Gender identity in law is poisonous to women’s rights because at its core, it denies the humanity of women. Gender identity, and the entire philosophy around the DSM5 diagnosis of gender dysphoria, treats sex as immaterial, and its recognition, for safeguarding purposes, a form of hatred. Gender identity is antithetical to feminism.

Apart from the routine abuse GCs receive from the trans activists, there is a growing movement in the centre that suggests that the GCs, and especially GC feminists, are a bit mean and lacking ‘nuance’. Some of the moderate Liberals are clearly tempted to bend on the issue of women’s rights and actively demonise politically active GC women.

Gender identity is not an altogether unattractive legal framework for the Australian Liberal Party, and they have been funding it for many years. Once a government has the power to undermine women’s rights and gay rights, there is no historical or international evidence to suggest that they would willingly surrender this power without broad popular resistance.

To the honest Liberal I ask: If the government can invent a social justice category, redefine human sex in law, create funding, and be selective when it comes to damaging science and philosophy, all to reinforce power, isn’t that a government expanding into tyranny? If you don’t oppose gender identity in law, you may call yourself a conservative, but don’t call yourself a classic Liberal. The ‘moderates’ need to hand over their John Stuart Mill card at the door and pick up a membership to the Greens.

Edie Wyatt writes on culture, politics, and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt, blogs on Substack and you can catch her on Welcome to the Dollhouse

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