The Sydney Morning Herald Tackles Let Women Speak

Hilarity ensues

Sometimes I read the newspaper and can’t work out whether to cry at the state of the world or laugh at how crazy things have become.

Reading a column on the Let Women Speak movement at the weekend I mostly shook my head in disbelief. And I laughed.

The Sydney Morning Herald column, by Jacqueline Maley, was headed:

“Let women speak? Anti-trans activists don’t give a damn about our rights.”

It went like this …

When your rally is supposed to be about freedom, it must be awkward when actual Nazis show up.

See, that’s the thing about freedom. Even idiot Nazis are allowed to show up.

But what’s the author’s real point? It’s clearly just a cheap shot. The first of many.

History shows Nazis were never big on freedom, at least not for the millions of people they murdered and the populations they subjugated.

Thanks for the history lesson. We didn’t know about Nazi Germany until you filled us in.

Is the author insinuating that organisers of the Let Women Speak event hope to subjugate and murder those with whom they disagree?

That would be ridiculous.

So what then is the author’s point?

Ah, just more cheap shots. I’m weary already. But let’s continue.

But that was precisely the position anti-transgender activists found themselves in this week, when their protest in Melbourne was “hijacked” by neo-Nazis who repeatedly performed the Nazi salute. The anti-trans activists said they were all about freedom of speech.

Why does the author use quote marks to suggest that the Let Women Speak event was not really hijacked?

Is the author suggesting the Nazis - wanting to subjugate and murder millions - were in cahoots with the Let Women Speak organisers?

The author has officially moved from cheap shots to outrageous slurs and she hasn’t even said anything yet.

The speaker at the rally was a British anti-transgender activist called Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull. She was on a national tour and turned up in Canberra on Thursday, where protesters and counter-protesters clashed again, this time without Nazis.

“This time without Nazis”. That made me laugh. What, did she forget to bring them?

Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull is a women’s rights speaker, not an “anti-transgender activist”. I bet the author doesn’t refer to people in favour of abortion as “anti-baby”.

And in regards to protestors and counter-protestors clashing, I watched the extensive news coverage. Only one group - trans activists - were doing the “clashing”. The other group were just trying to speak.

Keen-Minshull is the founder of a British group called Standing for Women which opposes transgender people participating in sports that align with their gender identity, or using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

The author, of course, means blokes playing women’s sport or using women’s change rooms.

But the author must resort to obfuscation because otherwise Keen-Minshull sounds rather sensible, and we can’t have that.

But yes, Keen-Minshull does oppose blokes using women’s change rooms because she’s a woman, and she’s not stupid.

She believes transgender people should not legally be allowed to change their gender, and she even opposes drag performances, according to reports.

She “even opposes drag performances”! Whoa! What a bigot.

Keen-Minshull opposes men dressing as caricatures of women in order to perform overtly sexual moves in front of kids. She opposes this because she’s not a groomer.

Is the author saying that she believes such performances are healthy for children?

She’s particularly concerned about drag performances in places where they might be viewed by children – a culture war directly imported from the United States, where some state legislatures have banned drag queens reading stories to kids in libraries. Regressive state governments in America say they are “protecting” children with these bans.

Okay, now I’m on the floor in fits of laughter.

The culture war was imported from America where legislatures have banned drag queens reading stories to kids in libraries? Seriously?

The world would be harmonious and peaceful if it wasn’t for those damned conservatives wanting to impose the innocence of childhood on children perverts have marked for grooming.

Hilarious.

The culture war was not started by people trying to protect kids from perverts.

Conservatives in the US are trying to defend decency and norms from a war being waged against the moral fabric of society by progressives who want to destroy biology, compel people to use certain pronouns and sexualise kids.

And we know which side of the culture war the author is on. She labels those who want to protect children from sexualisation as “regressive”.

They are part of a wider Republican “war on woke” – proof, ultimately, that the contemporary mainstream American conservative movement is bankrupt of policy ideas.

You have to love progressives. They try to turn your kids into play things for drag queens and then, when you object, they accuse you of having no good ideas of your own.

I can’t stop laughing.

Once, the Republicans had things to say about fiscal policy and family policy. Now they just ban life-saving abortion care and persecute one of society’s most vulnerable minorities – trans people.

Weird. I thought children were the most vulnerable minority, after unborn babies in the womb of course.

This is quickly becoming one of the stupidest newspaper columns I have ever had the misfortune of reading.

But it’s so bad that I want to read on.

This week it was reported that the only hospital in a northern Idaho town of 9000 people, is closing its labour clinic. In a statement, the hospital named Idaho’s “legal and political climate” as one of the reasons for the closure.

Idaho is a Republican state – it has outlawed abortion and made it possible to sue doctors who perform abortion care. In the words of the hospital’s statement, “the laws criminalise physicians for medical care nationally recognised as the standard of care”.

Consequently, obstetricians and gynaecologists are leaving the state because it’s too dangerous for them to deliver their services to women.

It is always depressing when elements of our politics attempt to import American culture wars.

This is all very interesting. Of course, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Let Women Speak rallies.

The object of the author is clear. She’s warning us that the exact same people who want to stop blokes flopping their penises around in women’s change rooms also want to take away women’s rights to abortion.

So come on ladies, don't say you weren’t warned. If you want to retain the ability to get an abortion, you need to let blokes beat up on you in female sports and dangle their dangly their bits in your daughter’s change room.

In the case of wars on “wokeism”, they gain some traction here because they do speak to concerns people have about social change, particularly around ideas of gender identity. There is also anxiety about the omertas of social media, which people call “cancel culture”, but which I think of as a creeping form of social censorship that is insidious when it occurs because it is mostly self-imposed.

If the author had listened to Keen-Minshull and others at the Let Women Speak event she would have heard their genuine concerns about ideas of gender identity. But the author is too busy smearing them as Nazis, and regressives, and culture war protagonists.

But the thing that really bothers me about the anti-trans activists is their claim to be speaking for women. The loudest voices amplifying this stuff tend to belong to right-wing men, who hitherto have shown little interest in the rights or freedoms of women. That tells us everything we need to know about their real agenda.

I’m on the ground laughing again.

The author dismisses women attempting to speak about women’s rights at a Let Women Speak event as just an echo of right-wing men.

On the other hand, the author insists that trans women are women.

You can’t make this up.

I sincerely hope the Sydney Morning Herald's didn’t pay Maley for this column.

In the case of NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham, the emphasis is on parents, but the issue is still transgenderism. This week Latham spoke at a church meeting in south-west Sydney, and violent protests broke out outside the church, when LGBTIQ protesters were attacked by a mob of men, some of whom said they were there to assert their religious rights (others just seemed to be spoiling for a fight).

The LGBTQ protestors advertised that they would block the entrance of the south-west Sydney church, and seek to disrupt people attempting to access it.

The LGBTQ protestors were not staging a quiet, peaceful, protest. They were laying on the road outside the church actively blocking people.

Locals arrived to get rid of them. It turns out that locals in south west Sydney take their freedom of religion ever bit as seriously as the Dylan Melvaney’s of this world take their girlhood.

Latham is outspoken about the gender fluidity he says is being “taught” to children in schools. Previously he tried to introduce legislation compelling teachers not to support a student’s gender identity without parental consent. Such support might involve, for example, treating a child according to their gender identity in the classroom, in terms of names and pronouns.

Mark Latham believes parents, rather than employees of the state, should be responsible for their children, and that it is wrong of the state to usurp that authority.

He is a hero.

This type of ban is another American import and, as pointed out by NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell, it is unworkable. It’s also unethical and wrong.

OMG.

It’s not Latham’s objection that is imported from America. What’s been imported from America is the idea that schools should assist children to change gender, and without parental knowledge or consent!

If a kid from a conservative religious household talked about his atheism at school, should that be reported back to his folks? What about a Muslim girl who wants to wear a bikini to the swimming carnival against the wishes of her parents? It always worries me when parents assert their “rights” – as a general rule, I don’t believe we have “rights” over our children. We have responsibilities to them. Surely the most sacred of those responsibilities is to allow them self-expression, and safety in doing so.

Except that we’re not talking about a girl wearing a bikini or a kid saying he doesn’t believe in God, are we.

We’re talking about school teachers secretly assisting little boys to live as girls without their parents’ knowledge.

Parents concerned about this are not ‘asserting their rights over a child’. What a twisted worldview the author has.

Now that some of these anti-transgender people have literally associated themselves with Nazis, it becomes less and less possible to have a sensitive, respectful public conversation about, for example, the level of medical intervention desirable for young trans kids, or the concerns some women have around gender-neutral language like “chest-feeding” instead of “breastfeeding”.

And now the author plays the Nazi card again.

First, the Let Women Speak organisers were pro women’s rights, rather than anti transgender. They weren’t saying tans people can’t be trans. They were saying women have a right to private spaces and to integrity in sport.

Second, the women did not “literally associate themselves with Nazis”. They men giving Nazi salutes in Melbourne were uninvited and unknown to the organisers.

Third, it’s pretty rich to spread lies and smears about the Let Women Speak organisers and then accuse them of being unable to “have a sensible, respectful conversation”.

Fourth, since the author has now finally, belatedly, raised some actual issuers (medical intervention young kids; gender-neutral language that erases women) is she going to tackle them? Haha … we already know the answer to that.

Biological essentialism versus the sociological origins of gender is a live, and interesting debate within feminism, but at women’s festivals and in other feminism forums you won’t see both sides of that debate represented. This, in turn, only feeds the narrative of the hateful anti-trans crowd – that debate is being shut down and “you can’t say” certain things.

What on earth is “biological essentialism”?

What goes up must come down. Is that gravitational essentialism?

I love how the author spends her entire column caricaturing the women she disagrees with before lamenting that too often “you won’t see both sides of a debate represented”. No kidding. The author’s column is a wonderful example of that. If she’d given both sides I wouldn’t have had to write this response. Sigh.

These are people who don’t care a fig about women in a political sense – people who would never lobby for abortion care, or for domestic violence funding, maternity leave or equal pay.

First, it is illegal to pay women less than men for the same job.

Second, who says that none of the women at the Let Women Speak rallies have no interest in helping victims of domestic violence or in the provision of maternity leave? This is just another slur from an author too lazy to actually engage in the issues raised by the Let Women Speak organisers.

The fact that their rallying cry has become “let women speak” would be funny if it wasn’t so galling, not to mention disingenuous.

The author clearly knows a fair bit disingenuousness and a LOT about hilarity.