Why has it taken JK Rowling to call this issue out for what it truly is?
And it has taken JK Rowling – one of the few people prepared to put her head above the parapet on these issues – to call this out for what it truly is.
An impertinent and tasteless encroachment into a tragic issue which can only ever be experienced directly by women.
Occasionally stories come along which make you do a double-take and rub your eyes to make sure you haven’t been pranked. But no, this actually happened.
After years of lobbying, women’s groups representing grieving mothers have succeeded in establishing a parliamentary committee in South Australia to examine support for mums who have lost babies to miscarriage.
The committee is charged with important and sober tasks, including changes to the way women who have lost babies are treated post-labour, such as not leaving them on maternity wards to hear the happy cries of other women’s newborns, and not leaving them unattended in hospital rooms to absorb the impact of their loss.
As a health issue, you can’t get anything more innately female than this. It seemed like the last place where any discussion of transgender issues would come into play.
Not so for the SA Women’s and Children’s Health Network chief executive Rebecca Graham who prefaced her evidence to the committee with the laughable claim that transgender and intersex women should also be factored into discussions of stillbirth.
It’s an assertion that invites an obvious question – how?
How is it that someone who started life as a man, and will never be able to carry a child due to their lack of a womb, gets equal billing at such an innately female forum?
It would have at least made a kind of sense if Ms Graham had extended her come one, come all invitation to trans men, who as former women at least had or still have the capacity to reproduce.
Ostensibly progressive people such as Graham might want to reflect on the undeniable truth that every time they open their mouth and say something like this, another Trump voter is born.
Malinauskas was right. The culture wars are exhausting, both on the far left and the far right, a war waged by the interminable brawling and name-calling on social media and late-night chat shows.
But you can put this one down as a huge loss for the left, given a progressive person in Graham has – in what was no doubt a sincere attempt to sound inclusive – instead made people laugh in disbelief at the demonstrable silliness of it all.
It’s a silliness which has a very serious centre – one which begs the question, which people such as Rowling and fellow author Helen Joyce have fairly asked.
Is there a single field of female identity and female endeavour which trans activism regards as off limits?
The answer to that question from South Australia’s parliament is apparently not.
PM calls emergency NSC meeting to plan response to massacre
In a week when Peter Malinauskas was speaking complete sense about the excesses of woke politics, one of his most senior health bureaucrats confirmed his very point by speaking complete nonsense about the forgotten impact of miscarriage – on, wait for it, men who have had sex changes.