At the base of the culture wars, under the feet of those who bicker about the left and right, Woke and anti-Woke, is a miracle of the liberal democratic state that we call minority protections.
The history of the liberal state has played out on a number of continents with varying levels of success. The French embraced liberalism with such tremendous fervour, they briefly turned it into its antithesis. Maximilien Robespierre is now a famous figure for being so enthusiastic in his pursuit of liberté, he completely disregarded diversity of opinion and the lives of those who may express it.
Max is not the only example of reactionary aggression and violence in the pursuit of a state miracle. Since the French Revolution, what we have seen is a steady improvement in liberal statecraft, interrupted by regular shows of corruption and unpalatable violence.
Nobody really had any idea what would happen if the masses, including women, and eventually native people of colonised countries, could vote and become active participants in political systems. To be fair, we still are not entirely sure.
The central aim of liberalism is to maximise the freedom of the individual from the tyranny of government, while simultaneously tying the individual to citizenship obligations in a state that is said to be the servant of ‘the people’. Liberalism is the belief that the state will lean into tyranny at any opportunity, and therefore the state and its institutions, must be ruthlessly held accountable to the principles of liberalism and the voice of the people.
Democratic accountability is not based in the belief that people are perfect in nature, quite the opposite, but that people are moral beings and the state is not a moral being. The state will enact events of efficient atrocity without any moral question, because the state doesn’t have a moral core. Fascism claims authority and morality in the state itself, in liberal democracy, the people are the authority and the conscience of the state.
These are simple theories of state that we used to learn in social studies, but unfortunately the humanities is now used to teach children how to imagine a gender identity. Many young people are now approaching the state like it’s their daddy. A daddy who will give them cash if they are good or bad and punish their enemies for being mean to them. Anyone who has studied history will know that a daddy state is the enemy of human life.
At the base of liberal democracy is the knowledge that the state will turn into the most vicious aggressor against human life and dignity, if we allow it to decouple itself from accountability to people. This thesis was proven in Europe in the early 20th Century, it is not, as some have suggested to me, a conspiracy theory. It is my opinion that the liberal democratic state is an imperfect miracle, a glorious experiment that I am keen to see continued.
The liberal state across the West is in overreach and many people, like myself, have risen from political apathy to participate in the imperfect process to defend those who are at risk of being crushed by the state. More than any time in history, now is the time to be a classic liberal, and I am a classic liberal. I am also a feminist.
Feminism is steeped in liberal tradition. Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill were both women’s rights advocates. Feminists of the 19th and 20th Century used liberal arguments to achieve for women, what other systems of government have failed to do. By the 1970s, when I entered the world, women had not just gained legal equality but were enshrining in the state the liberal technology of minority protections for sex.
The doctrine behind minority protections is not woke, it’s not communism, it is steeped in the classic liberalism of J.S Mill himself. Mill spend almost all his words trying to defend the individual from the tyranny of the state, but Mill warned that society must also be on guard on what he called the ‘tyranny of the majority’ where ‘society itself is the tyrant’.
Mill considered that protections were needed ‘against the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose by other means that civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them’ (J.S Mill, On Liberty 1859). This type of tyranny is also called ‘minority stress’.
Minority stress tends to be operated against groups of people with an obvious and distinguishing common characteristic such as sex, race, sexuality and disability. We call these ‘class characteristics’ and protect them with civil rather than individual rights laws.
Civil rights laws are not ‘woke’, they are a liberal state technology. The civil rights categories of sex, race, sexuality and disability have a history in men and women politically engaging in liberal pluralistic political action, to win arguments for state protection, not just from the institutions of the state, but from other citizens.
Sex protections were enacted because females are subject to oppression (tyranny) because of our reproductive role, our relative physical weakness and male pattern violence. This means we need civil protections to access full citizenship, and most of us thought we had won a tremendous civil rights battle.
What is called ‘woke’ is a government-initiated corruption of civil rights doctrine called ‘equity’. Kamala Harris is a massive fan of equity, because equity is the state and corporate erasure of minority protections. Under equity doctrine, state institutions claim that the greatest threat to the people, is not the state, but certain kinds of minority stress that the state itself defines.
You will notice that all the new equity minorities are culturally defined and not related to human bodies. ‘Queer’ is the cultural version of gay, ‘gender’ is the cultural version of sex, and race and disability are cultural classes that a range of people can identify into.
By using cultural rather than material categories, confected research is used in equity social science to build moral systems that bypass democratic accountability. Former civil rights charities are paid by government to bypass public accountability under the guise of minority protection. The Equality Bill before the NSW Parliament is largely written by government-funded activists and erases key women’s rights protections in the area of sex trafficking.
Because major women’s rights groups are funded, only if they accept equity definitions of ‘sex’, they will not push back against the bill because they cannot argue for women’s rights on the basis of sex, that’s simply not what they are paid by the government to do. It is no accident that the only feminist groups who objected to the Equality Bill during the consultation process for the Greenwich Equality Bill were those not funded by government.
Here in Queensland, the former Attorney General Shannon Fentiman changed birth certificate legislation on the minority protection claim of protecting ‘trans people’. Women’s groups who did not believe men could changed sex, were locked out of consultation because they are said to increase the minority stress of transphobia.
Now in Queensland a man can call himself a woman, in any context he wishes, for any reason he declares, and women have no legal right to object. Women are no longer allowed to from a material barrier with men in a protected class category. Under equity, women’s rights are completely erased.
The only reason, in the new Queensland Birth Deaths and Marriages legislation for the registrar to deny a birth certificate sex change, is if they think the person is being dishonest in their claim to have changed sex. I will remind you that nobody in the history of the world has in fact ever changed sex, because it is materially impossible.
Females no longer have a protected class category in Australia and the conservatives are showing no will in changing that reality as long as it gives them culture war points. Despite the anti-woke claims of the right, conservative party leader David Crisafulli is unlikely to repeal the recent Queensland Birth Deaths and Marriages legislation if his party defeats Labor at the upcoming election.
The current crop of conservatives are giving us no indication they won’t just continue to completely ignore the corruption of equity in government until the problems start to show on, in more sexual assaults and rapes. They may then use the anti-feminist backlash to completely destroy minority protections for women altogether.
Unfortunately, after talking about this issue for more than three years, I am noticing an increasing number of reactionaries in the centre and right using the opportunity of the disruption of women’s rights and voice, to argue for the removal of many of the gains women have made in the last 200 years.
I am happy that dissident feminists, like myself, get to write in this conservative magazine and can finally speak more freely on X, but we do so currently under attack from both sides of the political spectrum. Sex denial on the left and sex protection denial on the right.
The men on the right need to understand that feminism is on its own side, the side of females. You can withdraw your support for minority protections, but as you do, you look like the neanderthals you so clearly are, and make yourself an easy target for your own political enemies.
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
