Last week, Twitter restricted the availability of a documentary called What is a Woman? The title might sound innocuous, but when political commentator Matt Walsh puts the question to the trans clerisy in his mild-mannered, deadpan voice and scrutinises their advocacy of the surgical and chemical modification of the bodies of minors, he rattles their ideological platitudes.

The reason Twitter gave for throttling the visibility of the film was that it might ‘violate Twitter’s rules against Hateful Conduct’. The capitalisation of Hateful Conduct suggests that it isn’t just undesirable behaviour but a formal crime. Even free speech advocate and owner of Twitter Elon Musk seemed nervous. He responded to early criticism by referring to the movie as ‘sensitive content’.

Once Musk had watched the film, he shared it himself tweeting, ‘Every parent should watch this’ and joking that, ‘The Streisand Effect on this will set an all-time record!’ He was right. In less than a week, more than 170 million people have watched the film. Yet mainstream critics have refused to review it calling the director a ‘transphobic bigot’ and telling the publicist that she should be ‘ashamed to be associated with him’.

All this might be just another skirmish in the looking-glass land of 21st-century culture wars but the question ‘What is hateful conduct?’ just got a little more pointed, at least in Queensland, which is poised to criminalise hate speech. And it’s not messing around. Vilification based on racial, religious, sexual, or gender identity will be punishable by up to three years in prison.

That’s a dramatic increase. At present, offenders face a maximum fine of 70 penalty units or six months in jail, but that’s not enough it seems. According to the explanatory notes provided with the Bill, the increased sentence reflects ‘the seriousness of this type of offending and the community’s denunciation of such conduct’.

The bill was based on the recommendations of a report by the Queensland Parliament’s Legal Affairs and Safety Committee tabled in January 2022. It called on the government to protect the community from the distress and insecurity associated with the public display of hate symbols.

The government responded by making it a criminal offence to display hate symbols used by Nazis and Isis but just to cover all eventualities, the Bill gives the minister the power to prohibit ‘emerging symbols and images associated with extremist ideology’ by regulation.

It will also be a lot easier to charge someone with a hate-speech crime. Under the current civil law, a written complaint must be sent to the anti-discrimination commissioner within a year. By law, the commissioner must reject complaints that are frivolous, trivial, vexatious, misconceived, or lacking in substance. If the complaint is not dismissed, it may be dealt with through conciliation. For the police to commence a prosecution, they must first seek the written consent of the attorney-general or director of public prosecutions.

The new legislation gives police the power to lay charges without consulting anyone if they believe someone has committed a crime using ‘any form of communication to the public including by speaking, writing, printing, displaying notices… or by electronic means’, which would cover social media posts.

It is not hard to imagine what Queensland police might designate as hate speech in the current environment. In March, for example, the Let Women Speak movement organised a series of rallies in Australia and New Zealand headlined by Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker.

The purpose of the rallies was to defend single-sex rules in places where women feel vulnerable such as changing rooms, bathrooms and prisons, the right to single-sex sporting competitions, and to shield children from radical gender theory.

Little more than a decade ago, such practices were uncontroversial. Suddenly, they are unspeakable. Anyone who espouses them is labelled a ‘transphobe’. And since gender identity is protected under anti-discrimination law, ‘transphobic’ behaviour is unlawful. In the workplace, it can be grounds for dismissal. In the public square, it is grounds for cancellation. The question for Queensland is, if the new Bill passes, will women who demand single-sex rights which are deemed transphobic be guilty of a criminal offence?

If that sounds daunting, it’s not the only threat women’s rights activists face. The Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne was besieged by hundreds of trans activists and about 30 black-shirted Nazis who the police ushered through the crowd allowing them to make Nazi salutes as they passed the women.

It was all very convenient for Victorian Premier Dan Andrews who branded the women ‘anti-trans activists’ who had ‘gathered to spread hate’ and conflated them with the Nazis by saying that ‘some of them performed the Nazi salute’.

It got very ugly, very quickly. Liberal MP Moira Deeming was threatened with expulsion from her party for speaking at the rally. She alleges that the Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto accused her of being a ‘Nazi sympathiser and Nazi associate’ and used that as a basis to eventually ‘threaten and bully’ her out of the parliamentary party. Pesutto denies the allegations so Deeming is suing him for defamation.

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, weighed in on the stoush expressing concern that women and girls were being silenced on issues of sex, gender and gender identity through ‘the incitement of hatred’ by smearing them and their allies as Nazis and extremists. She condemned the fact that women politicians ‘have been sanctioned by their own political parties with a threat of dismissal or actual dismissal’.

It’s all bad enough as it is. People are already too frightened to speak out about women’s rights or trans issues for fear of losing their jobs or their reputations.

It would be even worse if what was at stake was the loss of your liberty and a criminal record.

This wouldn’t just have a chilling effect on free speech, it would put it in a deep freezer that all the sunshine in Queensland couldn’t thaw.