Australia now has a confused generation of teenagers raised in the shadow of gender identity divorced from biological reality, according to Professor Emerita of Psychology Dianna Kenny.
She was addressing a women’s rights rally in Sydney’s Martin Place held on Sunday to protest amendments to the federal Sex Discrimination Act in 2013. The definitions of “man” and “woman” were removed from the law. As a new protected attribute, the concept of gender identity uncoupled from biological sex was introduced.
Single-sex spaces for women and girls have been thrown open to transgender-identifying males, while adolescent girls are prominent in the exponential growth since the 2010s of new referrals to gender clinics offering life-altering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
“The generation raised after 2013 is different from preceding generations,” said Professor Kenny, who uses psychotherapy and psychological interventions with young clients distressed or confused about gender and sex.
“A child born in 2010 was three when the [sex discrimination] legislation changed, and is 16 today. These are the children who are streaming through my door, confused about who they are. They’re not sure whether they’re a demiboy, a demigirl, asexual, aromantic, pansexual, omnisexual, transgender, demigender, and so forth.
“Today’s adolescents are the first Australians to have spent their entire conscious childhood within a legal and institutional culture in which gender identity is formally separated from biological sex. This has affected the categories available to children for understanding themselves.
“I have observed youth surveys of gender identity that offer young people 46 categories of gender identity. Is there any wonder why children are confused?”
Anna Kerr, principal solicitor at the Sydney-based Feminist Legal Clinic, told the rally that there was “nothing kind or compassionate about misleading people that it is possible to change sex”.
She said her clinic spoke to “many detransitioners, for want of a better term—these are young and vulnerable women and girls who have been fast-tracked into harmful ‘gender-affirming’ hormones and surgeries, and despite what the general public is being told, this is generally done without any thorough psychiatric assessment or counselling”.
She said the clinic was seeing cases “where surgeons have conducted gender-affirming mastectomies on young women with only a GP’s referral … The physical and psychological impacts are obviously devastating.
“We’re not here to hate anyone. We are here because we care about keeping people safe from the sex-change industry and its cruel and exploitative medical experimentation, which turns young and vulnerable people into lifelong pharmaceutical customers.”
Public intellectual Dr Clive Hamilton, a former professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, spoke of the restriction of free speech in the name of gender identity.
“Australians typically are a pretty tolerant bunch. We’re fine with other people living their lives in all kinds of ways that might be quirky or niche, and we typically let them get on with it—until, that is, they infringe on our own rights by a demand that we must change how we speak and act to conform to their beliefs,” he said.
“Gender ideology is the politics of the one per cent. It demands compliance from the 99 per cent. It’s captured our institutions, and individuals who do not conform are punished, sometimes harshly.”
He highlighted the case of psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos, whose membership of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists was suspended after the regulator ordered him to cease his social media criticism of the medicalised gender-affirming treatment model.
“So, now, doctors across Australia who follow the evidence risk losing their jobs,” Dr Hamilton said.
The rally also heard of Sall Grover’s struggle to keep her platform Giggle female only. She was to speak at the rally but pulled out, saying she had received death threats from a trans activist.
The stories of other critics of gender ideology were cited on Sunday, including—
the damages penalty facing Kirralie Smith of the group Binary Australia for “vilifying” males playing in women’s sport
the Lesbian Action Group requiring approval from human rights bureaucrats to hold a public event limited to lesbians
the harrying of child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer who spoke out about the risks of paediatric gender medicine
philosopher Dr Holly Lawford-Smith needing a security guard outside her feminism class
and former breastfeeding counsellor Jasmine Sussex accused of “vilification” for criticising males who claim they can breastfeed
Dr Hamilton said: “We are in Australia in the midst of a great silencing. Critics of gender ideology, or those who simply want to protect the hard-won rights of feminism and gay activism, are now subject to legal sanction, loss of employment, bans from public facilities, deplatforming, institutional discipline, reputational damage, campus intimidation, online slander and threats, and even physical attack.
“Just think how much institutional machinery and bureaucratic energy has been mobilised to stop people saying something that, in every culture for millennia, is the most ordinary observation: men are not women.
“The punishment of one silences thousands, and a cloud of fear now hangs over this debate. It’s no wonder that academics, journalists, doctors, public servants, and everyday citizens have learned to keep their mouths shut.
“What frightens me most about this whole conflict is not so much that certain words and arguments are silenced, but that we are being coerced into declaring that certain falsehoods must be true.
“If you can make others say things they believe to be false, you’ve achieved something more sinister than winning an argument. You have shown who has the power to name reality.
“In recent times, science has been under attack on several fronts. Now, gender activists use the techniques refined by climate science deniers to suppress the material fact of biology,” Dr Hamilton said.
“You don’t have to agree with everything each speaker says here today. You only have to agree that voices critical of gender ideology and trans fanaticism should be heard, because the chilling effect on [the] free speech [of] concerned citizens goes against everything a liberal society is supposed to stand for.
“When what can be said around the kitchen table cannot be said in the office, the school, the hospital, or the university, something has gone badly wrong in democratic life.
“Without courageous people willing to exercise the right to free speech, we would never have had a women’s movement. We would never have had a gay liberation movement, and now we have a deformed outgrowth of those movements, shutting down free speech. To protect our democracy and our right to express ourselves, we must resist, we must speak out.”
Catharsis: Saying out loud the things that everyone knows are true
Confusing the young
Professor Kenny said she saw “rampant social contagion among youth and public institutions [as] the only viable explanation for the exponential increase in transgender identifying young people in this century. Teaching gender ideology and gender identity confuses children about basic biology and social roles.
“An adolescent experiencing discomfort with puberty, same-sex attraction, gender non-conformity, alienation from peers, body dissatisfaction, or a more diffuse uncertainty about gender identity, now encounters a vocabulary of transgender, non-binary, gender fluid, genderqueer, gender diverse, gender expansive, gender questioning that was far less socially available to Australian adolescents 20 years ago,” she said.
“Prioritising self-declared gender identity over biological sex in law and policy leads to the medicalisation of youth who might otherwise simply be gender non-conforming, or coming to terms with same-sex attraction, or who have autism spectrum disorder.
“Gender ideology encourages young people experiencing typical adolescent awkwardness, uncertainty, or distress, searching for an identity, to mistakenly believe they are transgender.
“Before understanding or realising their sexual orientation, and before having had any experience of romantic or sexual attraction, the reality is that young people are growing up in a society actively navigating these incomprehensibly complex, nonsensical concepts.
“They are being exposed to confusing, non-scientific definitions of sex and gender, and this is having a devastating effect on young people’s adolescent development. It is absolutely no wonder the children are confused.
“Our very own Sex Discrimination Commissioner, when asked to define a biological male, said she could not do that, and the questioner and she were speaking a different language,” Professor Kenny said.
“I have tried to speak with some of the state human rights commissioners over the past six or seven years.
“I walked into the office of one commissioner whose office was adorned with rainbow flags and badges and so forth, and I launched into my extremely simplified, two-syllable explanation of why gender ideology was nonsense.
“She stopped me halfway through, and she said, ‘I’d like to seek a point of clarification. Could you tell me the difference between sex and gender?’
“We require not only the urgent reinsertion of biology, reality, and logic into the Sex Discrimination Act. I call on the Education Minister to completely revise the sex education curricula in government schools. Currently, children can leave home as male and change their sex to female or vice versa at the school gates.
“Some schools are providing alternative school uniforms for these self-declared transgender young people, including using their preferred names and pronouns completely without parental knowledge or consent. Some parents have told me that they have only found out that this is happening at the end of the year when school reports come home in the child’s preferred name.
“The current policy and curricula, and the wider legal framework, and organisations such as [trans lobby] ACON, the [Australian] Human Rights Commission, and the Sex Discrimination Office are destroying children, adolescents, and their families.”