The sex wars continue apace, with spooky new cases emerging every day. Whether it is the radical trans agendas, the radical homosexual agendas, or the radical feminist agendas, they – like death and taxes – are always with us it seems. Two bizarre new cases have just emerged Down Under which in one sense require no comment – they speak for themselves.
But let me raise them and add a bit of discussion nonetheless. One thing that I find interesting about the three camps mentioned above is that we often find them warring against each other. That is fine by me. As we have members of the woke brigade and the PC loonies turning on one another, I am more than happy to sit back and watch. Both of my examples involve this infighting.
The first is the old and best-forgotten former Liberal leader John Hewson. He is much like Turnbull: someone who would best serve Australia by simply being put out to pasture. He has spent the past few decades proving how out-to-lunch he is as he has been commenting in the leftist media, regularly blasting other Liberals and chewing out conservatives who dare to differ with him.
Talk about a political lost cause. The really amusing thing about his case is that he has spent years telling us that the Liberals are a bunch of sexist pigs, and they need to have quotas to get more women into the Party and into parliament. This is the typical and misguided call of woke leftists, but should not be the call of someone claiming to be a member of the Liberal Party.
But payback can be quite ironic as Hewson has now been hoisted on his own petard. The Nine newspapers that he has been writing for have told him he is no longer wanted as a commentator, since they want a 50-50 mix of men and women. The ability to get a gig as a good commentator is now not achieved by merit or by ability, but simply by your sex.
As usual the Australian Spectator is on top of such things, so I will feature a bit of their commentary on both of my cases. As to Hewson, they begin an article this way:
Poor old John Hewson has been dumped as a columnist with the Nine chipwrappers for the great crime of being male. Hewson should have counted himself lucky he had a column anywhere 28 years after condemning himself to irrelevance. We always thought he’d end up like Jim Cairns, pushing pamphlets on the streets of Double Bay the way Whitlam’s former Treasurer spent the last decades of his life occupying a card table by the doors of the Prahan markets.
Yes he is an unhappy man right now. But he claims to have a number of other offers to continue his commentating career. Heaven help us if that is the case. But my second example is even more of a case of the left turning on each other. I have discussed before how lesbians, feminists and the trans cultists are regularly at each other’s throats.
And now we have yet another case of this. As one homosexual website says of this:
Tasmanian LGBTQIA+ community advocates say they are deeply disappointed about an attempt by supporters of the LGB Alliance to discriminate against trans and gender diverse Tasmanians. The newly-formed LGB Alliance has applied to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to hold an event that excludes trans and gender diverse people. As reported in The Australian, Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Sarah Bolt says women’s events that exclude transgender women are at “significant risk” of breaking the law. https://www.outinperth.com/lgb-alliance-tasmania/
Writing in the Spectator, James Macpherson puts it his way:
The woke tower’s foundation of sand is on view for all to see now that lesbians have been told they will be breaking the law if they exclude men identifying as women from their gatherings. In a case of Woke v Woke, Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Sarah Bolt has ruled biological men who are attracted to women while imagining themselves to be women are just as lesbotic as lesbians.
The ruling, reported in The Australian yesterday, has outraged actual lesbians who insist that transgendered women can’t be lesbians because they are not real women and therefore cannot be same-sex attracted, except to men. Which would make them gay, rather than lesbian. LGBTQ activists, shocked to learn that they are subject to the same anti-discrimination laws they have been subjecting the rest of the community to, announced they would appeal the decision.
He concludes his piece as follows:
The real problem though, is not discrimination against lesbians trapped in men’s bodies but something far more sinister — the power of an unelected, unrepresentative public servant like Sarah Bolt to define who you can and cannot associate with. While it’s enormous fun watching progressives eat their own – aided and abetted by publicly-funded ‘experts’ – we dare not be silent or indifferent since we can be sure our autonomy will be up for grabs next.
As Martin Niemoller famously said, first they came for the Launceston Lesbian Trivia Night, and I did not speak out because I was not a lesbian, at least not in the traditional sense. So then they came for the rest of us and by the time I realised my country had turned into a quagmire of identity politics and discrimination laws it was too late, because there was no one allowed to speak the truth and bring the nightmare to an end. https://spectator.com.au/2021/07/anti-discrimination-commissioner-lesbians-cant-ban-transsexuals-as-the-woke-eat-there-own/
Yes, it is always rather pleasing to sit back and watch the other side implode, as various factions of the loony left duke it out. They fail to realise that the radical positions they hold to – including the utterly nonsensical belief that people can change their sex at will – are bound to result in contradictions – and worse.
So now we have the various camps at each other’s throats. That in my books is a good thing. Let the carnage continue. Maybe there is hope yet for Western civilisation. But I won’t hold my breath on that.
If genders are not fixed, how can there be men and women, gay and straight? Doesn’t transgenderism presuppose fixed genders. If there are no male or female gender, there’s nothing to transition from and to.
As for Hewson, a measure of his importance is the caliber of paper he writes for. He has an opinion writer in the weekly free shopper rag from the Fairfax stable. Most would bypass his column for the weekly iced cake specials. How the mighty have fallen – then there’s Hewson.
Thanks Philip.
As an observer of the French Revolution wrote at the time of the Terror (1793-4), when former left luminaries such as Danton and Robespierre were being guillotined, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children”.
His insight has been continually vindicated ever since, most spectacularly under the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes.
We can only pray that the lesbian versus trans ideological rift leads to an at least partial return to rationality, and not to profounder and even more arcane depths of insanity.
If genders are not fixed, how can there be men and women, gay and straight? Doesn’t transgenderism presuppose fixed genders. If there are no male or female gender, there’s nothing to transition from and to.
As for Hewson, a measure of his importance is the caliber of paper he writes for. He has an opinion writer in the weekly free shopper rag from the Fairfax stable. Most would bypass his column for the weekly iced cake specials. How the mighty have fallen – then there’s Hewson.
Thanks Philip.
As an observer of the French Revolution wrote at the time of the Terror (1793-4), when former left luminaries such as Danton and Robespierre were being guillotined, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children”.
His insight has been continually vindicated ever since, most spectacularly under the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes.
We can only pray that the lesbian versus trans ideological rift leads to an at least partial return to rationality, and not to profounder and even more arcane depths of insanity.
Quite so Bill.