Australia’s feminized pubic square. By Stephanie Bastiaan in The Spectator.
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. …
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.
Giggle vs Tickle is the new misogyny:
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. …
However, in Australia, gender ideology is, at its core, a woman-driven problem. …
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.
Show us the money!
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. …
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….
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.