The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem has issued a statement voicing concerns about the silencing and vilification of women and girls who are attempting to engage in debate about the human rights of women and girls.
Ms Alsalem said that ‘women and girls who emphasise the specific needs of women born female and who call for and engage in discussions around the definitions of sex gender and gender identity and the interaction of rights’ should be able to ‘express themselves and their concerns on these issues in safety and in dignity’.
It shouldn’t be an astounding statement, but it is, and at a time when the Australian government is ramping up censorship toward the very people Reem Alsalem is refereeing to, gender-critical activists…
Let me take you back, if I may, to the dark days of November 2022. I was still in a Twitter dungeon, banished from the bird app for stating that men pretending to be lesbians is rape culture. My appeals were falling on the deaf ears of soon-to-be unemployed community safety moderators.
It was as if the ABC knew they would be facing the dark shadow of women like me emerging from the musky underworld to say the things in the light that should only be spoken of in the dark.
The headline read, Australia’s eSafety commissioner writes to Elon Musk concerned about Twitter’s direction. In the story, our ABC warned about the risk of jeopardising ‘safety online, and allowing misinformation to flourish’. The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, was pictured next to Musk, who was referred to in the article, and by Grant herself, as the ‘chief twit’.
‘If the first week of the chief twit’s tenure is any indication, I think they have a bumpy ride ahead of them. It’s said that content moderation is not rocket science but in some ways it’s more complex and nuanced than that,’ Ms Inman Grant said.
According to feminist publication Reduxx, the eSafety Commissioner has now begun a ‘censorship rampage’. Reduxx claim that they were told to ‘censor or delete an article’ by the eSaftey Commissioner, before having it hidden from Australian audiences. I have no idea if that is true or not, but if it is true, that raises potential infractions of Australian law.
For engaging in political action in the gender debate, Kirralee Smith also allegedly found herself disciplined by the eSafety Commissioner, allegedly having her Facebook page deleted. She has now received attention from the NSW police, with the issuing of an Apprehensive Violence Orders to Smith.
The UK’s Daily Mail described Smith as a ‘campaigner fighting to “keep blokes out of women’s sport”’. You would never see Smith described that way in the Australian media. The national broadcaster covered the issue, their headline read, ‘Football Australia to accelerate trans-inclusive high performance policy following anti-trans harassment cases in NSW.’
Gender-critical feminists like me, now happily tap away on the bird app, while facing the very real prospect that the Australian government censor or a member of our state police will punish us for our words.
Last week a notice was given to my friend and former breastfeeding counsellor Jasmine Sussex by Twitter, advising her of an Australian law infraction. I met Jasmine in person just over a year ago at a Brisbane radical feminist conference, but she first contacted me in 2021 when I wrote an article in The Spectator Oz titled On “Chestfeeding”.
At this time Jasmine’s long relationship with the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) was ending in some level of pain and bitterness. As I wrote in my article, the ABA was collaborating with an organisation called Rainbow Families. The result was the adoption by the ABA of some gender identity ideology-based practices that Jasmine found problematic and dangerous.
Jasmine raised concerns with the ABA, that the inclusion of men in their purview meant an alignment with very shoddy and experimental medicine, just to name one of the many red flags that she raised. Jasmine lost her position as a breastfeeding counsellor and has become entrenched in activism on the gender identity vs sex issue.
Reem Alsalem said that she is concerned about the reprisals women face for speaking on this issue such as ‘censorship, legal harassment, loss of jobs, loss of income, removal from social media platforms, speaking engagements and the refusal to publish research conclusions and articles’. I now know dozens of women in Australia who have faced these kinds of reprisals because they refuse to yield the factual definition of sex.
Women like Jasmine speak up because they can’t turn from what they see. In the world of breastfeeding, the inclusion of gender identity ideology in women’s support infrastructure, is leading to the assumption that male people can produce milk suitable for an infant, and these males should be supported in the pursuit of feeding an infant from their body by the entirety of the medical profession, including birth and lactation specialists. Apart from the coercion that is required to implement such a practice, the process by which endocrinologists are getting human males to exude a substance from their nipples, seems to be ethically debased and scientifically unsupported.
Jasmine Sussex and a Brisbane women’s rights activist recently took to Twitter to highlight the disturbing promotion of males feeding infants through an untested chemically induced process. Both women have received notices that their tweets are in violation of Australian law, and the tweets are now hidden from Australian audiences.
When I raised this issue on Twitter recently, a trans activist posted a study in response, as an argument for the support of men ‘chest-feeding’. It was called Case Report: Induced Lactation in a Transgender Woman and it involved experimentation on an adopted human infant.
Isidora Sanger, who is a medical doctor and author of Born in the Right Body, says that the study is not only unethical but ‘fraught with incomplete and misleading information, disingenuous analysis and undeclared conflict of interest’. In what could be a warning to health professionals in Australia, Sanger said the study is ‘an example of how transgender health clinics prioritise emotional needs of trans-identified males over the welfare of women and children’.
If what the women are saying in the censored tweets is true, endocrinologists could be conducting unaccountable experiments on human infants in this country, and there is not a news outlet in the nation that would cover this using actual words that mean what they say.
The smoke and mirrors of ‘inclusive’, ‘queer’, and ‘diversity’, mask an unpalatable tale of misogyny and abuse of power that is told only when we are permitted to use words with correct meanings. The reality is that gender identity cannot survive without linguistic subterfuge and the broadscale censorship of women declaring their bodily needs and political interests.
Reen Alsalem said in her statement:
‘Sweeping restrictions on the ability of women and men to raise concerns regarding the scope of rights based on gender identity and sex are in violation of the fundamentals of freedom of thought and freedom of belief and expression.’
How we allowed Australia to lag so badly in the human rights of women and children is baffling to me.
Alsalem also raised concerns about the smearing of women who are organising politically to raise issues of the protection of women and girls, specifically their smearing as ‘Nazis’. Our national broadcaster is leaning heavily into this narrative, with a story recently published about neo-Nazi groups, strongly linking them to women who organise to fight against gender identity laws.
Former Attorney General of Queensland Shannon Fentiman refused to meet with groups of gender-critical women when changing legislation for birth certificates, saying openly in Parliament that such groups ‘cloak their transphobia in the guise of women’s safety’.
Having been involved with such Brisbane-based women’s groups, I find it strange that Fentiman would believe that a bunch of left-leaning, gainfully employed, middle-aged women have decided to risk their jobs, social standing, and physical safety to meet in secret, pool their resources, and engage in political action, with the single objective of picking on a minority group that have no firm definition.
After being in this fight a few years, I can report that trans activists are some of the meanest, nastiest individuals I have ever encountered in my life, and no woman would pick a fight with them without serious consideration. The most aggressive of the activists, stripped of identity signifiers, are mostly straight white men.
We are facing a failure of democracy and a corruption of liberalism and a time when we have a chronic dearth of liberals. The recent problems with John Pesutto and the Victorian Liberals show just how quickly the testicles of the Australian Liberal man will shrink back into his body when he is threatened. It has become obvious that some Victorian Liberals are fleeing for safety in appeasement to gender identity ideology in the face of aggressive state power, or what we used to call tyranny.
Maybe we should send the Victorian Liberal ‘moderates’ away from their Melbourne Pinot Grigio swilling mates for a few days to attend John Stuart Mill Camp, where they could listen to On Liberty on repeat and be subject to images from the Russian gulags, just to remind them what the people of Victoria pay them to be in favour of, and what they are meant to be against.
I hear political commentators regularly citing ‘the trans issue’ as a fringe or minor issue, but if the state can re-define the sex of our body, the role of a mother, and the purpose of a baby, and we are not permitted to critique that, we have already yielded essential liberties. Liberties that we need to politically organise and bring our requests to the state that we fund, to the liberal democratic state that is supposed to be accountable to the people, including women people.
Edie Wyatt writes on culture, politics, and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt, blogs on Substack and you can catch her on Welcome to the Dollhouse
