Let’s Cancel ‘Gender’ and go Back to ‘Sex’

Jane Austen wrote a lot about sex. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet says to Mr Darcy: “I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.” He replies: “Are you so severe upon your own sex, as to doubt the possibility of all this?” In Emma, Mrs Weston says to Mr Knightley: “perhaps no man can be a good judge of the comfort a woman feels in the society of one of her own sex, after being used to it all her life”. And in Sense and Sensibility, Austen writes of Mr Palmer: “His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman.”

Of course, Jane Austen never mentioned the word’s other usage, to have sex or intercourse, since that topic was never mentioned in print or in polite circles when she wrote. But until the 1970s, the terms “male sex” and “female sex” were normally used to describe the different biological and cultural status of men and women. Since then, sex has been dumped in favour of gender.

The traditional usage has not been completely purged. The word sex still has some important political and legal functions. The Commonwealth still has a Sex Discrimination Act (1984) and the Australian Human Rights Commission still employs a Sex Discrimination Commissioner. The phrase “same-sex marriage” gained common use on both sides in 2017 during the big debate over legalising that demand. But this usage is increasingly rare. In fact, the writings of the current Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, make it clear that she would like to ditch her outdated title in favour of the now dominant description of her role, the assertion of “gender equality”. Her major report is titled Unleashing the Power of Gender Equality and on the Commission’s website the almost unmentionable word sex is conspicuous by its absence everywhere except in the titles. Instead, Jenkins says: “My purpose as Sex Discrimination Commissioner is to advance gender equality.”

Newspaper subeditors, who once regarded themselves as the true guardians of the language, have also succumbed, not only in the leftist media but in what remains of the respectable press where terms such as “gender quotas”, “gender fluidity” and “gender crisis” now abound. The doyenne of economics writers, Judith Sloane, recently analysed the “gender pay gap”. And even an impressive defender of cultural sanity like Peta Credlin can warn about the political consequences if the “Liberals concede on gender”.

How did this change to such a vital term come about? Some might think gender is preferable because it is a more polite term that removes the ambiguity that emerged in the twentieth century when the word sex not only referred to biological status but also became openly used to refer to sexual intercourse. However, there is much more to it than that.

Gender is a term that reeks of identity politics. It emerged in its present form in the 1970s when gay activists began to demand that homosexuality be not merely tolerated but given equal standing with heterosexuality in all things. It was reinforced by feminists who wanted to eliminate the differences between men and women. Since sex was grounded in biology, it decreed that the difference between men and women was fundamental. Our chromosomes determined that neither one could become the other. Moreover, the biology of sexual difference did not recognise homosexual activities. Indeed, it implied they were unnatural.

So the activists ingeniously moved their terminology away from biology and into linguistics. In linguistics, gender is applied arbitrarily and by custom. Apart from customary use, there is no inherent reason why the French language, for instance, applies the feminine gender to “the sea” or “the mountain”, la mer, la montagne, or the masculine to “the dog” or “the desk”, le chien, le bureau. If gender is arbitrary and customary, it can be altered by changing the language. Hence if sex was redefined as gender, it too could become just as changeable.

The way to do this, the activists saw, was by demanding new speech codes in government-run bodies like universities and bureaucracies. They also campaigned relentlessly by example, using their preferred terminology in their own writings, first in academic journals and later in the popular news media.

Meanwhile, the public at large remained oblivious to this sleight of hand. Most people never understood the issues at stake in renaming sex as “gender” and saw nothing to get upset about, let alone any evidence of a campaign to impose an ideological orthodoxy. Even most of those who made their living as writers saw no need for any fuss. So gender took the field without a struggle.

This strategy has been remarkably successful. Politically correct debate no longer talks about two sexes but at least six varieties of gender preference: male and female heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender. This is not to mention several further categories now endorsed by activists. The UK transgender lobby group Stonewall adds another sixteen divisions within the taxonomy: transsexual, gender‐queer, gender‐fluid, non‐binary, gender‐variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi‐gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois.

Such excess of nomenclature is a sure sign that power has gone to the activists’ heads. It is now twenty years since New South Wales and Western Australia led other states to change their laws to recognise people under the Gender Reassignment Act. An unintended consequence for the politicians who voted for this is that the biological concept of sex has been progressively replaced by the sociological term of gender. So the next stage of the activists’ campaign is to get rid of the biological concept altogether.

They do this by arguing that it is “transphobic” to support the use of “sex” as a meaningful category. In the UK, gender identity lobby groups such as Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence will brook no opposition to their claim that “Trans Women are Women” and that gender identity outweighs any claims that arise from biological sex. Merely to identify as a man or a woman, they say, is sufficient to actually be a man or a woman, irrespective of chromosomes, reproductive organs or any other biological attribute. They demand acceptance of their slogan with repeated calls of “No debate”. Stonewall has now awarded the majority of UK universities the title of “diversity champions”, which means they are publicly committed to this activist group’s definition of gender identity.

In an illuminating paper published in March in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, two UK feminist academics, Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan, took a stand against this position. They argued it meant the end of scholarly research and debate in this field. Biological sex lies at the heart of a body of feminist theory that asserts the ongoing inequality between men and women, its historical origins and its role in political theory and practice. Suissa and Sullivan say one cannot articulate, much less defend, this theoretical analysis without assuming the basic distinction between biological sex and gender:

Gender identity ideology is in this sense, absolutist, demanding that we ignore material evidence of the relevance of sex in any context. Repetition of the mantra “Trans Women Are Women” obstructs any attempt at a nuanced discussion about the circumstances under which sex might be relevant … The view that it is transphobic to acknowledge natal sex as even potentially relevant has led gender identity campaigners to demand that social and human scientists must not collect data on sex, and philosophers must not use sex as a conceptual category.

It is heavily ironic that among the principal targets of the gender identity campaigners are those on the Left of the political spectrum. In the UK it is the Labour Party that has copped most of their attention in recent times, and which, in response, has quickly bent the knee in apology. During the contest for parliamentary leadership of the party in 2020, all the candidates, except the winner Keir Starmer, signed a pledge to expel from the party any women who supported “sex-based” rights. Another Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, found herself in the sights of the new orthodoxy when, in response to an advertising promotion for cervical cancer screening for “individuals with a cervix”, she “liked” a mocking tweet that asked, “Do you mean women?” Duffield soon found herself in the middle of a social media storm calling for her removal from the position of Labour Whip. Two of her own staff resigned over her “overtly transphobic views”.

Feminist academics who once made university teaching intolerable by trumped-up charges of sexism against male colleagues are now seeing their own specialisation cut from under their feet by more militant operators. In Australia so far, publicity about this activity has been confined to radical critiques of Germaine Greer and J.K. Rowling for taking pro-feminist positions against transactivists, and the issue of the right of biological men to compete in women’s sports. The paper by Suissa and Sullivan reveals that in UK academic life, things are gyrating out of control. When they tried to convene the 2020 Women’s Liberation conference at University College London, their event was deemed by university authorities as “high risk” and required expensive security. The list of tactics recently used by transactivists against events staged by traditional feminists include sabotaging their booking systems, defamatory allegations against speakers, petitions to get meetings cancelled, protest rallies outside events, threats of violence, and even physical assaults on speakers.

Anyone who thinks Australia will be somehow quarantined from this epidemic of political insanity had better think again. The Morrison government has just capitulated to the Human Rights Commission’s pursuit of “gender equality” by accepting its list of rules that prohibit men from, among other things, looking at a woman for too long, or inviting her out for a date she doesn’t want. These activists clearly have the ability to get politicians to do their bidding. Like the British Labour Party, the Coalition will soon find that feeding this ravenous beast only encourages it to demand bigger servings from the same banquet.

To succumb to the demand to use gender as the preferred synonym for sex is to corrupt and diminish the language. It leaves speakers of English without a one-word version for the most significant biological division within the human species (not to mention all the other mammals on the planet). So it is clearly time for some cultural disobedience in response. Those of us who see this tyranny for what it is should stop using the linguistic term gender as a synonym for sex. When categorising the males and females of our species, we should emulate Jane Austen and the other great English novelists by sticking with the traditional term.

Instead of giving in to the cultural totalitarians of identity politics, we should give them a taste of their own medicine and cancel the word gender from our own usage altogether. This is a small gesture that might take a while to catch on. It will never happen in the universities, of course, but there is probably a silent majority out there in the real world hoping someone will start the ball of dissent rolling.

The Closed Trials of George Pell

One of the proofs that a society is civilised is that its criminal courts are open for inspection. No one should be tried, convicted and sentenced without the legal proceedings being made public. Secret trials are the hallmark of dictatorships and run completely counter to the legal and political traditions Australia has inherited. The trial of George Pell in 2018 for child sexual abuse, based on accusations from one complainant about what allegedly happened twenty-two years earlier, was not completely secret but was not far from it.

Pell faced two trials because the jury could not agree in the first. The judge who presided over both trials at the Melbourne County Court, Peter Kidd, directed that journalists could not be present in court when Pell’s accuser was giving his evidence and being cross-examined, even though the accuser was not actually in court himself but made his case and answered questions by video link. Nor would a full transcript of that evidence be provided to the news media or other members of the public. Kidd also announced that Pell’s trial would be subject to a suppression order prohibiting the news media from reporting any of the proceedings until all accusations against Pell were resolved by the court.

Under Victo­rian law, only the “parties” to the trial could be provided with a tran­script. Jour­nalists who covered the trial were restricted to knowing only those parts of the first-hand evidence that were repeated by prosecutors and defence counsel in their closing addresses. To outsiders, the whole thing appeared a closed process, kept from their view so that the sole anonymous accuser could have the comfort of a “safe space” to tell his story.

Peter Kidd’s remarks during sentencing—largely a lurid account of the sexual offences the former choirboy alleged had taken place over five or six minutes in the priests’ sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, in December 1996—were, at the time they were made on March 13, 2019, the only detailed official explanation of why Pell was convicted. It was not until the judg­ments of the Victorian Court of Appeal were published in August 2019 that many more selected quotations from the first-hand evidence became part of the public record. Even so, anyone following the case closely was still at a profound disadvantage to see whether the conviction really did follow from the evidence provided by the choirboy and the other witnesses. In short, no one but the judge, jury and legal counsel had access to all the evidence. 

Given Pell’s status as the most senior figure of the Catholic Church in Australia, an institution with a following of 5.2 million people, or 22.6 per cent of the population, this was an affront to public expectations. With the suppression orders still in place, the public was effectively kept in the dark, with little to go on except to trust that those in authority had done the right thing. Hardest to accept for Pell’s followers must have been Kidd’s decision to broadcast his sentencing remarks live on television while they looked on without any account of how formidable a defence had been made by Pell’s counsel. It was not until April the following year that the High Court showed the whole story of sex in the sacristy was bogus, that the detailed sexual deeds Kidd had broadcast to the world never happened, and that Pell had been jailed on spurious grounds.

Fortunately, the Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan had the foresight to see that members of the public who followed the case were entitled to accurate information about the closed proceedings. “I could not see that such accuracy and lack of bias would be provided by the group of journalists who were already circling,” he writes. “The books by Louise Milligan, Melissa Davey and Lucie Morris-Marr confirmed my assessment.”

So Brennan suggested that Pell’s legal team arrange for a retired County Court judge to monitor the proceedings and report on them once the suppression orders had been lifted. Inside church politics, Brennan had long been on an opposing side to Pell and their differences had sometimes turned very sour. However, Pell replied to his suggestion by proposing that Brennan himself would be the person best suited to the role: he “would go over better with the literati and glitterati”. By agreement between the head of the Jesuits in Australia and the Australian Catholic bishops, Brennan was asked by the bishops to scrutinise the proceedings, the bishops insisting that “any commentary needs to be seen, as much as is possible, to be clear, objective and impartial”. Pell agreed to make available trial transcripts, except for the transcript of the complainant’s evidence. Brennan attended key days of the hearings when his other Canberra-based commitments permitted travel to Melbourne. 

In Brennan’s new book, Observations on the Pell Proceedings (Connor Court), he reveals that this arrangement meant he had immediate access to all the transcripts of evidence and cross-examination at the trial, except the evidence of the sole complainant. This gave Brennan an advantage over other writers covering the trial, who had to wait days or even weeks to receive transcripts through normal court proceedings.  He put his advantage to good use. On February 28, 2020, the day after the suppression order was lifted, Brennan published a long article in the Australian examining the jury’s verdict. Even though Pell failed to secure an acquittal, he argued, “the defence seemed to be on strong ground in submitting that the circumstances made the narrative advanced by the prosecution manifestly improbable”.

Brennan’s response left the anti-Pell journalists who covered the trial infuriated. In her book The Case of George Pell, Melissa Davey of the Guardian claims that Brennan was one of those commentators who had not been in court for as many days as she had, and were simply regurgitating the words and “lifting key phrases and arguments” from counsel for the defence. “Where could they have learned all those details about the defence case,” Davey asked, “since their ‘reporters’ had not been in court?” Brennan points out that his advantage in analysing the case was not difficult to understand:

Pell’s trial had concluded on 11 December 2018. I had access to the transcript for more than two months before writing my article. Davey could not access the transcript for some time after that. But that was her problem, not mine. I had many weeks to thoroughly review the transcripts.

There are plenty of other equally robust exchanges in this book, not only with other reporters who got the Pell story completely wrong, but devastating critiques of Victoria Police who failed to perform their sworn duties properly and the prosecution authorities who allowed this hopeless case to go to trial. Brennan accuses the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse of failing to accord Pell natural justice “in their pursuit of a necessary big scalp for media delectation”. And he offers a crushing assessment of the performance of the Victorian Chief Justice, Anne Ferguson, and the President of the Court of Appeal, Chris Maxwell, in their majority judgment in Pell’s first appeal:

The fragility of the Victorian criminal justice system is exposed when you look at the total absence of any investigation of the second incident [alleged by the complainant] and the reasoning of Ferguson and Maxwell satisfying themselves that the incident must have occurred. I don’t think Aborigines were treated as prejudicially by even the worst of the 19th-century judges. 

Quadrant readers will find this book compelling. It brings together fourteen major articles, interviews and commentaries that Brennan produced from February 2019 to March 2021: an impressive record and highly recommended reading.