Feminism in the Age of Ultra-Political 
Correctness by Mrs Vera West

“Feminists Decry Sex Change Proposal, (The Australian, August 26, 2016, p. 7), is one of those stories illustrating the paradoxes of our culturally diverse society. The Tasmanian anti-discrimination commissioner has recommended changes to the Births, Deaths and marriages Registration Act, so that men who self-identify as women, should be legally able to change their sex, even before having a sex change operation. If such changes are made, it will be as easy to change one’s sex as changing one’s name, and in principle, people could change their sex multiple times, even once a year, or maybe more.

Feminist groups have criticised the proposal, arguing that such reforms “legally erase the existence of female people,” and would undermine the protection of women under anti-discrimination law. As one feminist put it; “By allowing any person to self-identify their sex, it effectively redefines what ‘sex’ means under law….It stops being a reflection of a physical biological reality and becomes a social construct and a reflection of how a person subjectively feels about themselves.”

Now, excuse me, but I have read over the years many truckloads of feminist literature, which has said exactly that; that sex is a social construct. Mind you, they were almost always doing a job on masculinity, which they see as socially constructed. Well, the chooks have come home to roost now.

If sex is a social construct, then what could be wrong with the anti-discrimination commissioner’s proposal? It seems that feminism is coming unstuck in the age of political correctness.

And that is not all which is under critique. Following in the wake of the claim made by the American college of Pediatricians, that the “gender ideology harms children,” at  https://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children, a new study has been released by two John Hopkins University researchers, Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh, “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,”  The New Atlantis, Fall, 2016, at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/docLib/20160819_TNA50SexualityandGender.pdf. 

The report examines all of the alleged evidence that there is a “homosexual gene,” that homosexual and transgender people were born that way, and concludes that scientific evidence does not support this. There is thus no “gay gene.”
The report of 143 pages is impossible to summarise in an article such as this one, but there are the main key points regarding gender identity, which will be important given developments in this country regarding the “Safe Schools’ program:

“● The understanding of sexual orientation as an innate, biologically fixed property of human beings—the idea that people are “born that way”—is not supported by scientific evidence.
 ● While there is evidence that biological factors such as genes and hormones are associated with sexual behaviors and attractions, there are no compelling causal biological explanations for human sexual orientation. While minor differences in the brain structures and brain activity between homosexual and heterosexual individuals have been identified by researchers, such neurobiological findings do not demonstrate whether these differences are innate or are the result of environmental and psychological factors.
● The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex—that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body”—is not supported by scientific evidence.
 ● According to a recent estimate, about 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as a gender that does not correspond to their biological sex.
 ● Studies comparing the brain structures of transgender and non-transgender individuals have demonstrated weak correlations between brain structure and cross-gender identification. These correlations do not provide any evidence for a neurobiological basis for cross-gender identification.”

This report, to my mind, seems to destroy the philosophical basis of the Safe Schools, gender agenda program, which is being implemented across Australian schools.
And even here it is interesting that aspects of the new class morality are coming into conflict with each other, such as multiculturalism and the gender agenda.
Thus, the Australian Chinese community presented a petition to the NSW parliament, and there are concerns also made by the Indian community.

See: “Indians Join Chinese Concerned about Safe Schools Rollout,” The Australian, August 25, 2016, p. 3.

I bet the Left did not foresee that one!