As a former anglophile, I liked their earlier stuff better, and I often check in to see just how close the UK has come to total social dissolution.

In the news this week: convicted Islamist terrorist Shah Rahman is allowed to stay in Britain, as deporting him to Bangladesh would ‘breach his human rights’.

This individual was convicted of participating in the 2012 Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange. He received a 12-year sentence and was released after serving half the time.

Those with doctorates in law and politics assure us this is justice served. Others, such as myself, see this sort of thing as further evidence of capitulation by a British state that appears to be openly contemptuous of its native inhabitants.

Living through the end of the Cold War, I saw human rights as freedom of speech, association, the right to a fair trial, to vote, freedom of religion, and the right to privacy.

It appears that in my country, I was wrong on just about every issue.

In Australia, as in the UK, human rights moved from protecting citizens against power to compelling citizens to validate ideology.

Shocking though it is to realise, Australia is the only Western liberal democracy without a National Bill of Rights. As such we are smothered with anti-consorting laws, regulation of the right to strike, the notorious 18C laws criminalising offence, and countless laws criminalising various parts of speech.

Indeed, the official pursuit of human rights has arguably made the human rights situation worse. For example, everyone remembers what happened to the extremely popular and talented caricaturist, Bill Leak, over a cutting satirical take on Aboriginal welfare.

Then there was the case where three students were sued for $250,000 under Section 18C after they questioned why they were asked to leave an Indigenous-only computer lab. Something they initially failed to notify the students of. The case was finally thrown out by a Federal Court judge who called the claim ‘hopeless’.

It is becoming clearer that ‘human rights’ is an institution focused on ideological progressive fanaticism, while hiding behind a name associated with benevolence and decency.

The recent Equal Identities report is, in my opinion, emblematic of the ideology over human rights position this institution has made its raison d’être. Instead of asking the obvious question of, ‘Why did this boundary exist and what breaks if it disappears?’, the AHRC has opted for decision-making based on sentiment and affirmation. This is genuinely the stuff of horror stories, particularly when it comes to children, medicalisation, and the possibility of irreversible harm.

Further, in wider society, women’s rights have been reframed as prejudice to preserve ideological affirmation. There are real constraints:

• female prisons cannot ignore male violence patterns
• women’s sport cannot ignore male physical advantage
• rape crisis centres cannot ignore trauma responses
• intimate care settings cannot ignore embodied sex

Yet they do, and activism often hides the potential for real violent outcomes behind soft language, smiling inclusion posters, symbolic diversity photography, and moralised branding around ‘belonging’.

I could not care less if Bruce wants to be called Tina. Adults can live as they choose. The issue begins when private identity claims become public obligations, and when women are told that their boundaries must disappear to accommodate them. In what world is endangering women a human right? How on earth did we go, in my lifetime, from ‘women should have equal opportunity and equal pay’, to ‘women have no right to be protected from biological men in their spaces, intimate groups and societies’?

I have watched in total disbelief as the law has stepped in to ask whether women are still allowed to define womanhood for themselves. That is the real fault line. Once women must seek legal permission to exclude men from female spaces, rights have not expanded, they have been inverted. The protected boundary must now justify its own existence, while ideological affirmation is treated as untouchable.

Women’s rights have become negotiable, while ideological affirmation has become absolute.

It is my view that an institution that presents itself as the guardian of human rights while watching the erosion of women’s rights is not a protector at all, but a wolf in sheep’s clothing.