Paul Tyson
Friday, 9 May 2025
An Open Letter To Senator The Honourable Penny Wong and The Honourable Mr Mark Butler MP on the Greens, and the culture war politics of conflict and grievance.
Dear Minister Wong and Minister Butler
Congratulations on the success of the ALP in the recent federal election.
My letter refers to Senator Wong’s brief but significant comments on Channel 9’s ‘The Today Show’, 6 May 2025.
Senator Wong’s comments refreshingly state the undeniable fact that the Greens – who I have actively supported in the past – are now deeply entangled in divisive and grievance-defined cultural warfare on non-environmental issues. I refer here to the ideological repudiation of the natural reality of male and female biological sex. This repudiation is not something mainstream Australians can identify with.
Largely, Australians do not understand queer grievance politics, or the manner in which it opposes sex-based rights for women and promotes the sex-disabling medicalization of gender dysphoric youths. However, when ordinary Australians do come to understand this politics – because they have been denied sex-based rights, or because their children have been drawn into a cult-like community which does irreversible harm to their bodies – they do not support it.
Unfortunately it is not only the LNP, but also the ALP that is distressingly embroiled in culture war politics. The Greens have led the ALP into the gender-identity culture-war, just as One Nation has led the LNP into the climate change denial culture-war. In both cases the facts of science and a reasoned and civil respect for reality are significantly lacking.
For complex historical reasons both the LNP and the ALP have been hijacked by polarizing and marginally driven cultural warfare. With one third of the primary vote in this year’s federal election not being for either of the major parties, preference deals and fringe influenced policy decisions have strongly impacted both centre-left and centre-right politics.
Since 2013 when biological sex was removed from the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the Sex Discrimination Act – by a Labor government – there has been a complete failure of any centrist party to stand up for the rights of lesbians to have single sex gatherings and spaces, a complete failure of any centre party to stand up for sex-based rights for women in general, and no one in power has stood against the abandonment of evidence-based caution when it comes to the often sterilizing impacts of experimental hormonal and medicalized therapies for gender dysphoric minors. Brave therapists, like paediatric psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer, have signalled the urgent need for caution and evidence based appraisal in this domain, and have not been heeded. But the determination to deny natural reality can only ‘work’ for so long. As brilliantly facilitated as rainbow ideology changes in law and government policy have been by influential queer lobby groups such as ACON and Stonewall, the facts of science cannot be indefinitely mocked.
Australia is now lagging seriously behind the UK. The Case Review, the UK suspension of puberty blockers for minors, and the recent Supreme Court judgment for Women Scotland, show that the mass hysteria in the political centre of being unable to say that a transwoman is not a female, is about to hit the reality wall. The UK’s Supreme Court pointed out the obvious fact that women’s rights are entirely incoherent and meaningless if the category of ‘woman’ is not understood biologically. Of course, this is not the Australian High Court, but a truth of reality is true no matter who says it, or who refuses to say it, or what certificated legal fiction has replaced reality in our law. Further, on 1 May the US Department of Health and Human Services released a 400+ page document titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria, Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” This is a careful review of the evidence which shows up serious cause for concern with the “gender affirming care” model of medicalized treatments for minors. The 9 page summary of findings document can be read here. This is in no sense as culture war document, but it is a very carefully researched, very clinically and compassionately concerned examination of the evidence regarding how to best respond to minors presenting with gender dysphoria.
I am an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. I am a scholar working across philosophy, sociology and theology. I have read Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and other gender and queer theorists closely. I also have close personal knowledge of how parents of minors and young adults drawn into the transgender identity movement struggle with terrible anxieties and concern for their children, and how many trans converts simply cut their parents off if they express any caution or concern. This is very damaging not only for the suffering young people themselves, but for their families as well.
Queer theory is out and proud in its conviction that the transgender-identity movement is not a minority rights movement. For example, “queer theory seeks to disrupt dominant and normalizing binaries that structure our understandings of gender and sexuality.” De-normalizing heteronormative sex and gender conventions, for everyone, is the queer political agenda. The queer minority wishes to dictate to the heteronormative majority that the biological sex binary no longer exists, and all sex-defined gender conventions are now oppressive. In this, and other regards, the queer movement is very different from the gay rights movement, which is a liberal movement upholding the freedoms and protections of both non-heteronormative, and heteronormative people. The LGB Alliance understands these differences very well and draws clear distinctions between the transgender movement and the gay rights movement. Gay rights are entirely compatible with mainstream sexual liberalism, but the queer movement maintains that the heteronormativity of the majority is inherently oppressive and must be overthrown.
The majority of Australians are heterosexual and assume adapting but time continuous heteronormative gender conventions in both private and public contexts. In the normal course of things, the continuation of the species relies on there being males and females who are prepared to form secure sexual relationships with each other. Typically, in human history, the heterosexual bond is the core relationship out of which children are conceived, and on which families are built. By all means, heteronormative non-conformists should not be discriminated against, and the plebiscite on Same Sex Marriage made it clear that mainstream Australians have no desire to ostracize or stigmatize the significant yet still small minority of Australians who are same-sex attracted. But ordinary Australians have no intention of pretending that a male can be a female, and rightly find it distressing that a male claiming to have a female gender identity now has access to any female only space, competition, and forum that they like.
Ordinary Australians do not believe that broadly accepted heteronormative sex and gender conventions are inherently oppressive governance structure that are genocidally opposed to trans people. But the far left – and the Greens – do believe this. Alas, dear ALP, you (and the LNP!) have been coopted into the fringe far left queer culture war, and you are out of step with mainstream Australia in this very basic human matter.
Dear Mr Butler, according to one of the most rigorous observers of gender identity matters in Australia – Bernard Lane – you are well informed about the clinical problems with puberty blockers. Please grab the bull by the horns and address the real clinical evidence in this domain, rather than letting queer ideology continue to define Australian clinical and policy practices. Dear Senator Wong, as a lesbian surely you must be familiar with the Lesbian Action Group in Melbourne, and the manner in which they have been denied the right to assemble as a female-only same-sex attracted community. But it is not just lesbians who are being denied sex-based rights; it is all women. Nursing mothers associations, maternity wards, gynaecologists, women’s sporting competitions, women’s change rooms; they must all admit males who claim a female gender identity, and women have no right to deny them access to their intimate, single-sex, or mother specific spaces. Please stand up for women. Please, dear Ministers, show form consistent with your fine victory speeches and act on behalf of mainstream Australia, and reject fringe-driven culture war politics.
If the ALP wishes to govern for mainstream Australia, it must free itself from culture war capture to the far left in the domain of queer gender ideology. Ultimately the 2013 amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act needs to be re-visited, and biology-based definitions of sex identity need to be returned to the legislation, or we face exactly the incoherence the Supreme Court in the UK had to address. Please show me you are not beholden to culture war politics, and pursue this task. Women like Moira Deeming and Sall Grover are being hung out to dry because of the legislative train-wreck of the 2013 amendments, and these women are not extremists at all. But the mainstream of Australian women and men should be concerned about protecting vulnerable women from fetishized predatory males who can now claim to be females with the complete protection of the law. Perhaps most transwomen are not such predators, but undoubtedly some are, as some men are autogynephilic, and some men really are sexually violent towards vulnerable women. And in contrast to the low proportion of biological women in the criminal justice system for sexual offenses, a careful study of the 2021 UK census found that “males who identify as trans are five times more likely than other males to be imprisoned for sexual offences.” Significantly, this census data also demonstrated that “those declaring a transgender identity are less likely than the general population to be victims of murder.” The victim mantra claiming that our vulnerable trans minority faces the genocidal wrath of bigoted sex-realists is not true or sustainable, and the reality is, it is women who have no rights, and transwomen are now inordinately legally powerful. Ask Roxanne Tickle. Centrally, women should be able to feel safe in single sex spaces, but presently, in Australia, women have no right to insist on single sex safe spaces under the present legal denial of the reality of biological sex.
Please disentangle the ALP from the Greens’ far left queer gender identity politics.
Regards
Paul Tyson