We can’t protect women’s rights by denying biology

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins has been asked to lead an independent inquiry into parliament’s workplace culture, yet the Human Right Commission on which she serves ‘champions the promotion of gender identity at the expense of biological sex’. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Our headlines and social media have been awash with allegations about male sexual harassment and violence towards women. Angry and frustrated women are demanding action. Yet amid all this commentary, there is silence about a profound redefinition of what it means to be a woman. This change, with troubling implications for the rights and interests of women and girls, is being spread through society by lobby groups and bureaucrats without proper public debate or media scrutiny.

Most Australians are simply unaware. Most mainstream media has failed to look into this cultural and political shift with any curiosity or impartiality. What dominates is the narrative of the activists driving this fundamental change to how we understand humanity. One way society seeks to protect women and girls from assault is through single-sex spaces such as change rooms, toilets, dormitories, prisons and domestic violence shelters.

Australia ratified the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and passed the federal Sex Discrimination Act. These protections and rights were based on a woman’s biology, her reproductive sex. After all, one of the most common forms of discrimination relates to pregnancy and child-bearing.

How many of the politicians and journalists talking about the problems facing women in our national capital realise that the words woman and man were removed from the Sex Discrimination Act? That the biological significance of these words was considered problematic, and a new definition was adopted in 2013 that allows anyone to identify as the opposite sex? This novel concept of a self-declared “gender identity” potentially at odds with biology has flowed through into legislation and institutions more generally. Change in gender becomes a mere statement, with no requirement for medical intervention, psychological oversight or a sustained period of living as the opposite sex.

Even the Australian Academy of Science defines a woman as “anyone who identifies as one” — and this in a document about advancing female careers in science. The ALP’s redrafted 2021 national platform refers to the dilemma of “whether people choose to continue with pregnancy”. The 2018 platform had no problem speaking to “pregnant and new mothers”. What happened?

In our politics and media we have a debate about sexism without sex. The quiet substitution of gender identity for biology is not just a word game. It comes with potential conflicts and risks. Single-sex spaces are under threat.

Overseas, women’s domestic violence shelters have lost funding because they were deemed not inclusive of people who were born male but identify as female.

In Australia, women who resist the gender identity push were excluded by organisers of the March 4 Justice last month. Women with a public profile who speak up for sex-based rights suffer abuse and threats, and only a handful of commentators call out this unacceptable behaviour.

Following the rape allegation made by Brittany Higgins, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins was asked to lead an independent inquiry into parliament’s workplace culture. Yet the Human Right Commission on which she serves champions the promotion of gender identity at the expense of biological sex.

Its 2019 transgender inclusion guideline urges sports to reorganise along the lines of self-declared gender wherever possible, thereby putting girls and women at risk of unfairness and injury if they must compete against male-bodied players who identify as female.

Usually when a potential conflict of human rights arises, there is broad debate. Yet the conflict of rights arising between females on the one hand and males who declare a transgender identity on the other is being ignored. “No debate”, we are told.

What happens under federal discrimination law when both sex and gender identity can be the basis for a complaint? If a man makes a successful complaint he has been discriminated against because of his gender identity, that may have a discriminatory effect on a female on the basis of her sex. What takes precedence — subjective feelings of a male-born person about his gender, or the material reality of living in a female-sexed body? This is territory with extraordinary implications, and it is a debate that everyone has an interest in.

Sex is determined at fertilisation, observed at birth, and immutable; it is not something a person can identify into or out of. Gender identity reflects sex-based stereotypes: name, dress, mannerisms, appearance.

The definition of gender identity as found in Australian legislation was drawn from a document called the Yogyakarta Principles. This is a pseudo-human rights document that purports to have enforceable authority, yet it is merely a template for activism bolting together ideas from queer theory and post-modernism.

We are witnessing an extraordinary display of cognitive dissonance by our political and media class — the promotion of little understood policies hostile to women’s rights, while stories about male sexual harassment and violence loom large. At what point will politicians and journalists face up to this contradiction?

Katherine Deves is co-founder of Save Women’s Sport Australasia.