POST- Culture & State
The Copy & Paste of female erasure
EDIE WYATT – 2 MAY 2024 – CULTURE & STATE SUBSTACK
On the first of May, Queensland began living under the Criminal Code (Serious Vilification and Hate Crimes) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2023. You know what they say about Queensland, beautiful one day, hate crime legislation the next.
I want to tell you what Queensland was like before we had hate crime legislation, long before. I grew up in Brisbane in a time when people were allowed to hate other people freely. My mother hated National Party voters, she hated the Queensland National Party, and most of all she hated the then leader of the Queensland National Party, and long-time Premier of Queensland, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, or as he was known in our house “that f***ing old c**t” or just “Joh”.
In my formative years, I never heard Mr Bjelke-Petersen speak on the television without a stream of screaming obscenities barrelling from my mother’s working-class mouth. I now recognise I have a completely learned response to Joh, years after his death. The mere mention the name of the former Premier, or the sight of a picture of him, still makes me involuntarily cringe with revulsion.
To be fair, I think my mother’s estimation of Joh was pretty accurate. The corruption that flourished under Bjelke-Petersen was astonishing. When I started work in the Queensland Government in the mid-nineties, public servants told of the roaring of the shredders vibrating from George St when the National Party lost power just a few years earlier in 1989, after having reigned over Queensland since 1957. The National Party maintained power with an electoral gerrymander, and presided over a single house of parliament, Queensland having abolished the upper house under Labor in 1922.
Queensland Police Commissioner from 1976 to 1987 Terry Lewis, was latter sentenced to 14 years in prison on a string of corruption and forgery charges. Brisbane was a much smaller city in those days, and I knew many people who had experienced the violent and corrupt behaviour of the Queensland Police firsthand.
The weaponisation of the police for political purposes, my mother had told me many times, was a violation of the separation of powers under the Westminster system. I remember saying this in political debates, before I even knew what it meant.
This week, as I trawl through the new hate speech legislation, wondering if I should anticipate a visit from the Queensland Police Service for my outspoken gender critical stance, it is feeling a bit like the days of old in the deep north. When introducing the new progressive legislation to the media, we were led to believe that the objective of the Queensland legislation would be the banning of the Nazi symbols like the swastika. I’m not sure why this is necessary almost 80 years after our forebears defeated the Nazis with massive national sacrifice, but it has no real bearing on my life as I don’t intend to display such a symbol.
I’ve lived in Brisbane all my life and I’ve never met a Nazi, nor have I seen a swastika displayed in a public place. in addition, I see the Labor Party do little to tackle real and rising anti-Semitism in the currently political environment.
However, the legislation doesn’t ban the swastika, it bans “symbols” that the government deem to be representative of an ideology responsible for the persecution of historically oppressed groups like the “Jews, Roma people, the disabled and LGBTIQ people”.
Given that LGBTIQ people have only just been invented in the last few decades, it seems the suspicious standout in the list. Among gender critical activist there has been conjecture if the female symbol may be banned because we use it to indicate the prominence of sex over gender identity. Maybe, the double female symbol used by lesbians to indicate same sex attraction for female people, will get you put on a list? Maybe not, but the mechanism will be there in the criminal code, ready to use.
For me, the most troubling part of the Criminal Code (Serious Vilification and Hate Crimes) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2023, is the “relocation” of a section from the Anti-Discrimination Act directly into the criminal code. The section in question is 131a of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991, and covers threats of physical violence towards an individual or group on the basis of a protected attribute.
The new law in the Queensland criminal code relates to “serious vilification”. Serious vilification is essentially threatening to harm someone or their property, because of a protected characteristic (which I actually thought was illegal already).
I have no intention of seriously vilifying anyone, protected characteristic or not, but the way of making legislation through the copying and pasting from the Anti-Discrimination Act into the criminal code, should worry anyone who has been taking notice of the movements of the Australian Human Rights Commissions (AHRC), and the tribunals over which they exercise influence.
I have recently been in a courtroom in the Federal Court of Australia where the AHRC argued that recognising human sex over gender identity is unlawful under Anti-Discrimination legislation. In a tribunal in Tasmania, it was ruled that lesbians who seek to excluded trans identified males from their space, do so because they find them “irksome”, and therefore seek to discriminate on the basis of gender identity against them. Both of these positions impute hateful motives on women who are acting in the normal course of exercising internationally recognised human rights as women and lesbians.
With the “hate crime” aggravator in the new legislation, additional time can be placed on the sentencing of crime when it is determined the crime was motivated by a hate toward the protected characteristics of a person or group.
This will mean if a trans identified man assaults me because I’m a woman, it just common assault, but if I assault a trans identified man, because he is in the ladies’ room (for instance), a hate crime aggravator is added to the assault, making it a much more serious crime. This is because gender identity is a protected characteristic, but sex is not. Only “sex characteristics” are covered in the legislation. “Sex characteristics” is not sex, but characteristics that come from sex like genitalia, reproductive parts, chromosomes and hormones related to the person’s sex.
So, a woman’s vagina or XX chromosome is a protected characteristic, in the same way a man’s genitals and XY chromosomes are, but those things are equally weighted, they are not placed in a historical oppression framework, like being Jewish is. A “female” is no longer protected as a fully embodied person or as a class that is subject to historic discrimination or bodily vulnerability in the same way that a “trans person” is, and this is quite deliberate…