I have often heard gender ideology described as a new kind of misogyny – and in its material impact, it is. The Giggle v Tickle ruling, in my personal view, confirmed it: a man’s claim to womanhood now outranks the reality of sex, and it is women who have the most to lose – in sport, in single-sex spaces, in the services built for them. And that is not even touching on the ideology itself, where womanhood is often reduced to pornified cosplay.

However, in Australia, gender ideology is, at its core, a woman-driven problem.

The institutions hollowing out women’s sex-based rights are not run by shadowy men in back rooms. They are run, increasingly, by women: a majority-female federal Labor government, a public service that is 60 per cent women, a thicket of agencies where the gatekeepers of our rights are overwhelmingly female – and they all seem to sit on the same side of progressive politics.

The women’s suffrage movement was grounded in biological reality – that women were unequal under the law for the simple fact of being female. Somewhere along the way, that cause talked itself out of its own premise. ‘Sex matters’ became ‘sex is a feeling’, and a movement that began by defending women ended unable to say with confidence what a woman is.

When Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody – the official charged with administering a law whose entire architecture rests on the category of sex – cannot, or will not, define ‘biological men’, you are not looking at an outlier. You are looking at a pattern. From Equality Australia’s patron Governor-General Sam Mostyn to academics like Paula Gerber, the women in our most prominent public roles haven’t just accommodated gender ideology – it is my opinion that they have promoted it throughout their careers.

We were promised that putting more women in charge would deliver better outcomes. Women are now at or above parity at almost every level of the public service. So where are the better outcomes? Quantity is not quality. Filling the room with women who all think identically is not diversity – it is a monoculture wearing the costume of progress.

So why have so many embraced an ideology that works against their own sex? Part of the answer lies in a moral economy that treats victimhood as the highest currency. We are the majority of the public service and of university graduates, yet the story too many women still tell is one of subjugation. Trans rights arrive pre-loaded with everything a progressive conscience is trained to defend – and to question any part of it is to forfeit one’s standing as a good person.

What this monoculture exports is empathy untethered from consequences and sound judgment. Compassion is a virtue. But compassion that cannot count the cost is not kindness – it is moral abdication dressed as virtue. It is the reflex that lets a violent man into a women’s prison because to refuse would feel unkind. It is the instinct that strips single-sex spaces of meaning rather than risk the discomfort of saying no.

Those who speak out are swiftly punished by the very machinery built to protect this ideology, particularly through lawfare. The media class that claims to champion women has been conspicuously incurious about the rise in concern by women about gender self-identification. Independent analysis finds our national broadcaster’s coverage on gender ideology, produced by a majority-female workforce, is heavily skewed toward trans-activism. Presenters whose names are synonymous with ‘the female perspective’ on our screens have built careers on women in public life, yet that perspective is rarely turned toward the women who insist that ‘female’ still means something. It is an indictment that women from all walks of life in positions of power have proven to be the most willing to support gender ideology.

It is not all despair. Remarkable women – and men – are pushing back: Sall Grover, Dr Jillian Spencer, Kirralie Smith and Jasmine Sussex among them, each of whom has paid a price for refusing to fall into line.

The government that could restore sex-based protections to the Sex Discrimination Act today is majority-female. I doubt a single man would stand in the way if the women of Albanese’s caucus banded together and demanded our rights back. But they will not – because they are wedded to the ideology driving the problem.

The women dismantling our rights do it in our name, and often at the taxpayer’s expense. The women defending them do it at their own cost. History will not confuse the two.

Stephanie Bastiaan is the head of advocacy at Women’s Forum Australia