It’s time to stop playing politics with our rights
The problem with Katherine Deves is not her language — it’s her boneheaded ideas.
Consider some of the reactions after a draft judgment was leaked suggesting the US Supreme Court may overturn Roe v Wade. One pro-abortion pundit, a man, said that men have no right to make laws about women’s bodies. Another pro-abortion supporter, a female politician, wrote that “birthing bodies have a right to freedom”. An anti-abortion Republican woman cried on camera in relief that American women may no longer have a constitutional right to abortion.
It is easy to understand why the women’s vote is hot property. After a hiatus of sorts, following big and substantive wins by feminists in the 70s and 80s, the 21st century has become a battle ground over the most basic women’s rights again.
The first, over abortion rights, is a peculiarly American skirmish. And contrary to our pundit above, men – and women – judges have every right to interpret the US constitution. Just as men and women politicians have every right to pass laws about abortion.
The ghastly mess in the US is the result of a country that botched the issue of who determines abortion rights. When the US Supreme Court – yes, it was an all-male affair in 1973 when the iconic judgment landed – created a right to abortion out of thin air, it didn’t cement a terrific win for women. It was a win for social engineering judges.
The Roe v Wade decision has proven, inevitably, to set abortion rights in some parts of the US back a good half a century. Whereas state legislatures would have faced, over time, inexorable social pressures to legalise abortion the democratic way, a meddling impatient court postponed that process. States where abortion is, or will be made, illegal, have been wrongly quarantined from social pressures. Regression doesn’t begin to describe the plight of American women in those states.
Notice that the same feminists screaming for abortion rights struggle to whisper the word woman. Hence the comment from a female politician that “birthing bodies have a right to freedom”. Regression doesn’t begin to describe this either.
While Australia has avoided America’s abortion predicament by sensibly legislating social change, we have not ducked the battle over an even more basic woman’s right – to be called a woman, and all that follows from that simple statement.
How did we get to the position, in 2022, where the gotcha question across the West for politicians, judges, bureaucrats and any other hapless soul is – can you please define what a woman is?
As Zoe Strimpel, a historian of intimacy and gender, wrote in a recent essay called How Feminism Got Hijacked, the rise of gender ideology and the trans movement in the 2010s “coincides with the petering out of the feminist movement”.
As Strimpel says, whereas feminism was once concerned with “real living breathing, working, menstruating, breastfeeding women,” when the cause lost its head of steam, academics got hold of it and transformed it into a gendered identity movement where biology counted for nought. The rest, as they say, is history where daily we are tying ourselves in knots unable to answer a simple question – what is a woman? – for fear of offending men who have changed their gender.
That process of changing one’s gender is fraught, and there is every reason to show compassion and treat trans men and women with respect. The unforgivable error has been to cut women adrift from their biology along the way. Women give birth. Women breastfeed. Women menstruate. Women use tampons.
Gender academics may have hijacked feminism. But many others have been complicit in killing it off. Even Woolworths is a part of the problem, referring to “people who menstruate” in a recent social media post. On Wednesday, The Washington Post’s editorial on the leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court overturning Roe managed to not mention woman, or women, once.
As a colleague said to me: “Honestly, if we can’t talk about women in Roe v Wade, then when?” When I suggested he write about it, he countered, not unreasonably, “This debate is no country for old men – even those of us who apparently now have reproductive rights.”
Democrats and Republicans are trying to work out how to use the leaked court opinion, and responses to it, for maximum benefit to win over women in the 2022 midterm elections.
In Britain, there is a political campaign under way called “if you don’t respect my sex you won’t get my X”. Though not as formal in the Australian context, respecting women’s biology is most definitely part of this federal election campaign too. How big a part is anyone’s guess.
Only a fool would ignore it or make a mess of such a basic request for respect from women. Enter the Australian political parties.
Whether it’s defending women’s sport, or referring to women who breastfeed, or defining a woman according to her biology, I will hazard a guess that many progressive women might feel let down by the Labor’s lack of interest on these matters. I have lost count of the new political orphans I speak to who once voted Labor.
Before the Liberals get cocky, let’s talk about why there is another set of political orphans. In the most cynical of ploys, the Prime Minister has tried to cash in on the trans issue by lobbing Katherine Deves into Tony Abbott’s old seat of Warringah.
Morrison is effectively saying “bugger off” to women in the inner-city seats where the “Teals” are flying high. Many of these women might, like me, be political orphans for the first time. He risks cementing that status by trying to seduce women in the outer ’burbs who he hopes will fall for his campaigning manoeuvres.
Maybe Morrison will get away with playing politics with a serious issue to help win an election. But he doesn’t deserve to. If the Prime Minister genuinely believed that women’s sport should be respected, and protected from trans competitors, he could have made this formal government policy. He could have lobbied his own party, and parliament, to enact a law to reflect that conviction. Go down fighting, but fight.
Respecting women’s sport most certainly does not mean using Deves as a cheap election ploy, not to win back Warringah for the Liberals, but to try to fool women voters in western Sydney. Morrison is counting on these women being too busy with their daily lives, or too uninterested in the dark arts of campaigning, to realise that he is playing brute politics to swing around a slogan of protecting women sports. It is a lousy way to show respect for women.
The problem with Deves is not inappropriate language. The problem is her boneheaded ideas. And not from 10 years ago. Her comments hail from last year, and this year. In February last year, Deves compared speaking out about the trans movement to the resistance shown by some people toward the Nazis. In January, she claimed that “half of all males with trans identities are sex offenders”.
After being exposed for using Nazi analogies, Deves claimed she was clumsy with her words. No. These are ideas. And it is plain dumb and counter-productive to pitch extreme ideas into a matter crying out for sense and sensitivity.
Morrison’s exploitation of Deves and the trans issue is equally irresponsible. Brute politics won’t help us, as a society, settle on sensible solutions to difficult issues about conflicts that arise between women and trans women.
There is a way to navigate this fraught area with common sense and compassion. It’s not easy – but vulnerable adults and children are at the centre of this after all. Those grappling with this deeply personal issue deserve much better than the radicals on both sides.
None of this is to deny wicked attempts by trans activists and their supporters to silence those who speak up for women. It happens. Just ask J K Rowling, and a string of others, including comedians such as Dave Chapelle, who publicly defend women and their biology.
That said, Morrison and Deves have waved the cancel card during this lacklustre election campaign to avoid legitimate criticisms of her ideas.
Tribal supporters of the PM and Deves who have struck out at me publicly and privately as some kind of sellout seem unable to process the following: one can believe in protecting women’s sport – and disagree with Morrison’s cheap politics and a clunky candidate who used Nazi analogies to prosecute the issue.
It will take more than that to forge a 21st century society that stands up for a woman’s biology.
Harnessing the women’s vote is serious business. But that doesn’t mean it’s being done respectfully or responsibly during this election.
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