Last week I asked the eSafety Commissioner a simple question, ‘Are Australians allowed to call a violent male rapist who identifies their way into a women’s prison a man or a male?’
In case you’re wondering: no, this isn’t hypothetical. I’ve spoken in the Senate previously about the abhorrent case of the depraved man who spent years in a European men’s jail for sexually assaulting his young daughter, before committing a serious sexual assault on a woman in Melbourne. He was referred to as a woman and a ‘she’ in Australian media and the court, and was ultimately allowed to identify their way into a women’s prison.
There’s a simple and important reason this question needs to be asked. And that is because the website of the eSafety Commissioner – who has the power to order anyone’s social media posts be taken down in Australia – claims that ‘misgendering’ or refusing to use preferred pronouns is an example of ‘gendered violence’ or ‘gendered hate’.
There’s a huge problem with authorities and people in positions of power making ideological statements like this. It’s a pretty basic concept that if you’re trying to explain why a male shouldn’t be in a female sport or space, you have to be actually free to say he is male.
And that’s precisely why a trans activist lodged a complaint to the press council against the Herald Sun when it was one of the only Australian media outlets to cover the complaints by female prisoners against this male sex offender being housed in prison with them. The ideology that any male must be free to identify as a woman can’t withstand open discussion of the occasions when this policy plainly puts women in danger. As the Herald Sun reported, this activist has repeatedly tried to launch legal action against Australian media outlet for their reporting.
Authorities which label ‘misgendering’ as hate speech and have the power to accept complaints and take action against it are actively contributing to the undermining of women’s single-sex spaces, sports and facilities, when they deprive us of the ability to describe a man as a man.
While it’s pleasing that in this case the Press Council rejected the complaint from an activist, the reality is that it has upheld many other spurious complaints against journalists and media outlets trying to cover the various debates around self-ID. And on social media, the equivalent of the Press Council – but with vastly more power – is the eSafety Commissioner.
If you’ve paid any attention at all to this issue you know that forcing people to call males ‘women’ was the key that allowed men into female spaces. Many of the people who would rightly object immediately to a man walking into a women’s change room or a male rapist being put in a women’s prison suddenly go missing if that male claims to be a woman. And plenty of the rest who can still see how unfair and unsafe it is will nevertheless stay silent because they’ve heard loud and clear from authorities that ‘misgendering’ is hate speech.
Again, this isn’t a particularly difficult concept to grasp. Very few people actually agree that a violent male sex offender should be in a women’s prison. But if there’s a threat of punishment – or even the threat of being labelled a bigot – for pointing out there’s a man in a women’s prison, very few are comfortable to publicly object. So nothing gets said, nothing gets written or published, and it can keep happening.
The eSafety Commissioner is perfectly capable of understanding this. That’s why it was so shocking when her response to my question about the male rapist in a women’s prison was to label it ‘a long bow’ and say she refuses to be drawn on the issue.
This is the same Commissioner whose website labels ‘misgendering’ as hate, and the same Commissioner who has ordered news articles that accurately report on males in women’s sport must be taken down in Australia.
This is the trick gender activists have been playing for years now. Change the language, demand you comply, and then accuse you of hate and bigotry if you don’t. It’s one thing for activists to play this game, but when it comes from people with the power to limit free speech and discussion, it has catastrophic consequences for our society.
