Mick Hartley

Julia Gillard was at the Hay Festival last week – and was heckled. From the Times:

Sall Grover was not aware that her name had been shouted at a former Australian prime minister, on stage at the Hay Festival, until she saw a post about it on social media.

On Monday a female protester attending the Women in Politics event at the literary festival in Hay-on-Wye, yelled “what about Sall Grover?” at Julia Gillard, Australia’s first and only female leader. A second protester held up a banner that read: “Julia Gillard, DESTROYER OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS.”….

Gillard has been a target for protesters who argue that biological women’s rights were diluted in Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act under her government. The 1984 law was amended in 2013 to include a person’s self-identified gender, which was a factor in this high-profile court case.

Gillard appeared taken aback by the heckler at Hay, in Powys, but did not respond. Grover, however, was pleased to see it. “I am so grateful,” Grover told The Sunday Times by email. She has since been put in touch with the protesters and thanked them, describing them as “two amazing lesbian women in Wales”.

Jo Bartosch at The Critic:

In practical terms, Gillard has done more to roll back women’s rights than a manosphere goblin like Andrew Tate or any of his greasy online imitators ever could. Unlike the bros who sell misogyny to disaffected teens online, Gillard embedded it into law while being applauded for her feminism.

In 2013, her government inserted “gender identity” into Australian anti-discrimination law while leaving sex-based protections dangerously porous. The consequences have since rippled through female-only spaces, services and associations, allowing men who identify as women to challenge exclusion from everything from women’s gyms to lesbian networks.

Most absurdly, the recent Giggle v Tickle case saw a women-only social-media app successfully sued after excluding a man who identified as female because he looks obviously male, which was deemed to only apply to “transwomen”….

Gillard is far from the only political woman to have shafted her sisters. The tents at Hay were stacked full of them. Towering (metaphorically) above the rest was Nicola Sturgeon, who is set to take time out from auditing the cutlery drawer to have a “candid conversation about a high-profile career played out in the glare of the public gaze” with Francine Stock.

Sturgeon’s obsessive pursuit of gender self-identification brought Scotland to the brink of effectively abolishing legal sex categories altogether. Under her proposed reforms, men would have been able to become legally female by declaration alone. Women who objected were treated not as constituents with legitimate safeguarding concerns, but as “transphobic”, “misogynist”, “homophobic” and even “racist”, in Sturgeon’s telling.

It was only the extraordinary vigilance, tenacity and courage of For Women Scotland campaigners Trina Budge, Susan Smith and Marion Calder that prevented Scotland effectively adopting legal gender self-ID. Oddly, the three women behind one of the most significant feminist legal victories in modern British history did not receive invitations to the festival.

Of course, the political women platformed at Hay call themselves feminist. Perhaps once they were. But now, looking at the deeds below the words, it seems quite clear that “feminism” is simply something they grip onto to deflect criticism….

As the self-identified “gobby feminist” Jess Phillips acknowledged at Hay, all institutions are sexist. Asked why Labour has never had a UK-wide female leader, she explained, apparently without a flicker of irony, that “every institution that every single person in this room works for is led by the patriarchy”.

Hmm. The Tories have managed it. Four times.

Curiously, Phillips did not stop to consider whether her own willingness to subordinate female safeguarding to gender ideology might have helped smooth her path through those institutions. She did not reflect on her role in attempting to weaken protections for women whose husbands adopt trans identities, nor on her vote against a national inquiry into grooming gangs.

Politics, of course, is the art of compromise. But when women advance their careers by sacrificing the rights and safety of less powerful women, they may well qualify as successful politicians. Feminists, however, they are not.

It is telling that the women platformed at Hay were drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of elite institutional feminism and trans activism. The women who fought back, the grassroots campaigners, whistleblowers, dissenters and ordinary women forced to absorb the consequences of these policies, remained largely outside the tent.

It was always open for Julia Gillard to say, well OK, at the time back in 2013 I didn’t realise the effect this would have, replacing sex with gender identity. No one did. It seemed the right thing to do at the time, but I see now that it was a ghastly mistake. But she hasn’t taken that opportunity. She’s firmly embedded in that group of official “institutional” feminists, like Nicola Sturgeon, like Jess Phillips, who loudly proclaim their feminism while joining in with the men campaigning against women’s rights and women’s safe spaces.