James Campbell: Gender politics swamps Left’s new agenda

The transgender rights movement wants mainstream society to believe that a male can be a woman and female can be a man, James Campbell writes.

You may simply think of yourself as a man or a woman but not everyone agrees.

One of the great constants of Australian history has been our tendency to adopt an imported novel idea just as it is losing steam overseas.

Back in the 1950s the Poms went all-in on a nationwide program to replace dilapidated and bomb damaged Victorian slums housing, much of it jerry built, with brutalist high-rise towers.

By the mid-1960s it was clear the policy was a disaster.

But despite warnings it was going horribly wrong there, the Victorian Government, keen to show it was up-to-date and modern, persisted well into the 1970s, in the process demolishing whole blocks of well-built Victorian houses that would these days change hands for millions.

The latest fad from overseas to have gripped the imagination of the Australian progressive class is that biological males who believe themselves to be female and biological females who believe themselves to male ought to be taken at their own estimation.

To grasp the ambitions of the trans-rights movement you need to get your head around the concept of ‘cisgender’.

You, dear reader, might simply think of yourself as a man or a woman but according to this way of thinking this is not so.

If you are a biological male or female and happy to identify as such you are in fact a cisgender male or cisgender female – often shortened just to ‘cis’ – as opposed to a transgender male or female.

In other words ‘cis’ is not merely a clever but hardly useful antonym of ‘trans’ but its equal.

As with all streams of progressive thought there are differences of opinion here not least because this division leaves the poor old intersexed up a gum tree.

The transgender movement is telling us to believe something most of us disagree with, writes James Campbell.

The important thing to understand is that the definition of man and woman that has satisfied most of us since we came down from the trees has been shaded and reshaped by ideology.

It isn’t theoretical either: tune into Radio National or flick through the arts sections of the SMH and The Age and you will find brave members of the performing arts community happy to be quoted describing themselves as ‘cis’.

Likewise emails from staffers from the Greens Party now inform you at the bottom that in case you were wondering, the sender’s chosen pronouns are “he/him”.

As you may have already guessed we are a lot further down this road in Victoria than the ROA.

As long ago as 2018 the Health Department here had nominated the first Wednesday in every month as “They Day” in which staff were encouraged to drop “he” and “she” in favour of the third-person plural.

If we’ve learned anything with this sort of stuff, it’s that what starts out as an option sooner or later ends up being enforced by coercion.

Victoria has already made it a crime to try offer a therapy to someone that would change which sex they identify as.

Last week the University of Melbourne released a draft ‘gender affirmation policy’ which would allow it to ban activities, speeches or events that it deems an attack on gender diversity.

The policy looks to be an attempt to shut down academics – particularly one female, sorry cisfemale – academic – who has been researching the views of biological females forced to share women-only spaces with biological men.

Stating the bleeding obvious, Melbourne’s Vice-Chancellor told staff that week that there were “deep disagreements and widely divergent views amongst our community about questions concerning gender identity” which have “at times been perceived as a stand-off between the academic freedom of colleagues to pursue particular questions concerning transgender identity, versus the damage and harm that our transgender colleagues experience from those questions being pursued.”

How and why you might ask, did we move in record time to a situation where just to question the claims of biological men to be treated as women is deemed to need policing?

The why is the easy bit: because the transgender rights movement is telling us we have believe something most don’t buy.

It likes to pretend it is a natural extension, or the next frontier in the gay liberation struggle.

But it’s nothing like that.

Whatever mainstream society thought about homosexual acts in the 1960s and 70s, nobody pretended they didn’t occur.

The question, in the first instance, was how they were to be treated by the law.

The transgender movement is demanding something completely different: that mainstream society believe that a male can be a woman and female can be a man.

Now as Orwell taught us if you are prepared to use enough violence 2 + 2 can indeed be made to equal 5.

But the evidence from the UK is the transgender movement is not going to be able to carry this off.

A friend who works at a British university told me the gender critical feminists there are becoming increasingly loud in their refusal to accept the claims of trans advocates.

There’s an increasingly political element to this which Labor here needs to be mindful of. As the journalist Nick Cohen pointed out recently, the trans rights movement has achieved much in the UK but only by silencing “the anger of all but the bravest women.”

That is changing. Conservatives MPs now tell him “they are noticing a pattern they first saw with progressive Jews. Women constituents are telling them that, although they have not become Tories … they now regard a Conservative government as the least dangerous option.”

Originally published as James Campbell: Gender politics swamps Left’s new agenda