It is such a strange phenomenon, Transgender Politics. It is built on the fantasy that human beings can voluntarily choose their gender. Many other aspects of our biological endowment are not challenged in such a way. I haven’t heard for example of brown-eyed people demanding that they should be called blue-eyed or short people demanding they should be considered tall!

But inexplicably we concede the right of those born with male genes to insist that they are female and vice versa.

This has had bad consequences largely for women who are now being compelled to share “women’s only” spaces with transgender women who are in fact biological men. They have also suffered from the fact that some of these transgender women have been allowed to compete in women’s sports despite the natural strength and weight advantage that male hormones confer on them.

This travesty commenced in 2013 when Julia Gillard amended the Sex Discrimination Act providing protection for those who wanted to identify with a gender other than that which their biology had determined.

The left has fought hard to ensure that those misguided souls who believe their lives will somehow be enhanced by contradicting biology have the rights to do so.

Now this might seem to be a compassionate and harmless thing to do but as it has transpired it has resulted in a substantial erosion of the rights of women. Excuse me if I am a little judgmental here, but we have allowed the so-called rights of a very small misguided minority to impinge upon the rights of 50% of the population. In a pluralistic society compromise is unavoidable. When identity collides with reality it is surely undemocratic to allow the rights of a small minority to over-ride the rights of half the population.

This rather perverse thinking has been unashamedly promoted by the left. For example in Victoria, the Premier, Jacinta Allen promotes the state’s Respectful Relationships program which encourages children as young as five to believe that they can simply choose to identify with  the opposite sex to that which they have biologically inherited if they believe the manifestations of their biological sex causes them discomfiture.

What prompted me to write about this vexed issue again is the recent case of a 25 year old man who sexually abused his own five year old daughter and was consequently sentenced to jail. Subsequently the man identified himself as a woman and the Victorian Correctional Services allowed him to be incarcerated in a women’s prison. I can’t imagine a more dramatic demonstration of manhood than to have fathered a child, but by simply self-identifying as female such evidence is automatically discounted!

Moreover, inexplicably, when the (female) judge was informed of the man’s intended transition to the female gender, she reduced his sentence!

Many women in prison come from troubled backgrounds no matter what they have been convicted of and have been victims of abuse by men.. Julie Bidell who set up the UK feminist law reform organisation, Justice for Women, asserts:

I have gained decades of experience working on the issue of women in prisons and there can be no doubt that the vast majority of them, whatever their conviction, have been victims of sexual abuse domestic violence and rape.

As a result you can imagine that having to share their prison accommodation with a convicted biologically male, child abuser might prove to be traumatic!

Feminists have long struggled to ensure that women weren’t discriminated on the basis of gender. They have largely succeeded in that endeavour. But now the rights of women are again under threat, not from misogynist males but from the proponents of transgenderism.

The federal government in order to, initially, support the rights of women established the office. of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner. But in another recent case that noble cause seems to have been diluted. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner intervened in the case of Giggle vs Tickle. This case revolved about a dispute between a transgender woman, Roxanne Tickle, who successfully sued Sally Grover who set up a women’s only social media app which she named “Giggle”. Tickle was initially allowed to access the app but once Grover realised Tickle was transgender barred Tickle from accessing the app. In this case the Commissioner intervened as a friend of the court and argued that sex is not a binary concept determined by biology but is broad enough to allow the idea that sex can be changed. In effect the Commissioner implied that sex was an element of identity that a person chose to adopt and not an immutable biological fact!

Incongruously, the Commissioner even argued that transgender women (biological men) should also have pregnancy rights!

This is indeed a travesty.  Those who initiated this perverse notion of gender identity purportedly did so in compassion for those who are gender-confused. But the manifestation of such thinking has resulted in the protection of sexual predators and a diminution of the rights of women.

I will allow journalist Chris Uhlman to have the last word on this contentious issue. He recently wrote:

The erasure of sex is just one skirmish in the war of reason waged by identity politics. It is an ideology aimed at dissolving the foundations of meaning built on the belief that all human relationships are exercises in power. Confusion is the objective. When the meaning of basic terms is unmoored, power flows to those who dictate the new definition.

The Commission seems determined to etch a dangerous precedent in law. Its staff may feel on the right side of history, but they are morally adrift. They are defending a lie – and no law or court can make it true.

It is always a problem that when we promote diversity and the protection of minorities that we can often sacrifice the welfare of major sections of our citizenry and diminish our democracy.