Biology matters
Conservatives should not be cowered by trans activist attempts to change the definition of a woman. By Nick Cater.
On Friday, the Prime Minister faced a twisting ball that might have claimed the wicket of a less experienced player. “Just to avoid any confusion, could you define for us what a woman is?” asked 3AW’s Tom Elliott. “A member of the female sex,” the PM replied, quick as a flash.
Two days earlier, the Secretary of the Department of Health was asked the same question at a Senate estimates appearance. “Perhaps to give a more fulsome answer we should take that on notice,” Brendan Murphy replied to Senator Alex Antic. “It’s a very contested space at the moment.”
Murphy’s caution is understandable. It is difficult to imagine an answer that would pass the pub test while meeting the exacting standards of moral purity the public service demands these days. In any case, why should a bureaucrat raise his head when our political leaders have been keeping their own heads down?
Anthony Albanese has not yet been asked for his definition of a woman, but he will be before this campaign is over. If his advisers are smart, they’ll be workshopping an answer of half a dozen words or fewer. Any more and Albanese will find himself wedged between the politics of identity and common sense, like Britain’s Labour leader, Keir Starmer. “A woman is a female adult,” Starmer told The Times last month. “And, in addition to that, trans women are women.”
Recently, Starmer was asked if a woman can have a penis. The question can hardly be dismissed as frivolous after the controversial victory of Lia Thomas, a biological male, in the 500-yard freestyle title at the women’s NCAA championships. Starmer declined to answer yes or no: “I don’t think discussing this issue in this way helps anyone in the long run.”
A protracted debate about protecting women’s sport won’t help Starmer, or Albanese for that matter. Once transgender activists crossed a line by insisting biological males be allowed to participate in women’s sport, there was no going back. What was simmering disquiet has been brought to the boil. If Albanese does not join the Prime Minister by asserting biology matters more than identity, the issue will dog him. It does not help that an identarian definition of womanhood is baked into Labor’s policy platform, which pledges “to ensure that male, female and non-binary identity can be affirmed without discrimination”.
Until recently, the fear of being accused of intolerance deterred many otherwise courageous politicians from entering the debate. In February, Morrison took the plunge by publicly supporting a bill put forward by Senator Claire Chandler to allow sporting codes to apply biological screening in single-sex sport without the threat of legal action under the Sex Discrimination Act.
“It’s a terrific bill and I’ve given her great encouragement,” he declared. “Well done, Claire.” Labor’s woke warriors obliged the PM by falling into the trap he had set. Tasmanian state Labor MP Ella Haddad condemned Chandler’s bill as “a crusade against trans-women and girls”. Tasmanian Labor senator Carol Brown accused Chandler of creating fear, distrust and division in society. “Gender identities are valid, and they should not have to tolerate blatant discrimination,” she said. Albanese has yet to comment.
Morrison, like Thomas, might be said to possess a hormonal advantage. After all, he represents the people of Sutherland Shire, where biological differences between men and women are simply understood. Albanese, on the other hand, represents the trans, cis and binary folk of Marrickville, where matters are somewhat more complicated.
Yet Morrison has not lightly taken a stand and not everyone in the Coalition agrees with Chandler. MP Bridget Archer condemned Chandler’s “vanity bill” while Senator Andrew Bragg said: “I don’t think importing US culture wars is a good idea.” As the internal opposition to the Religious Discrimination Bill shows, the line between woke and non-woke runs seamlessly across the aisle and that the old definitions of left and right do not neatly apply.
What matters, surely, is what the Australian people want. Here, as in the US, woke ideology is politically unpalatable as the Democrats will shortly discover in the midterm congressional elections. The touchstone for transgender resistors is a bill restricting classroom lessons on gender identity or sexual orientation in the years kindergarten to Year 3 recently signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The bill unleashed the fury of the woke industrial complex, notably the Walt Disney Company, which campaigned against it and now vows to fight for its repeal. So forceful is their passion that Disney executives seem unperturbed by a mass movement of conservative parents who vow never to darken the arched gates of Disney World again or the fall in the company’s stock price from a post-Covid high of $US197 a year ago to $US132 at the close of business on Friday. President Joe Biden called the bill “hurtful”, committing his administration “to continue to fight for the protections and safety you deserve”. De Santis has burnished his credentials as a future president by standing firm and letting the woke wave roll over his head. “This state is governed by the interests of the people of the state of Florida,” De Santis said last month. “It is not based on the demands of California corporate executives.”
The State of Florida versus the Disney Company may prove to be a landmark case testing the right of unelected crusaders to remake the moral rules and reshape previously neutral institutions according to their tastes. The timidity of our leaders has allowed them to disguise the harm already committed to our social fabric and the harm that may yet be caused by the ever-escalating, mutating demands of wokeism.
Now the woke defenders are falsely accusing Morrison of playing the politics of woke for crude political self-interest. Which suggests they know full well that the cause they ostentatiously embrace is electoral cyanide.