The bitterest pill to swallow for many left-wing women is that many of the fiercest and most committed supporters of gender identity ideology, are themselves left-wing women: Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Anna Cody, Australia’s Governor-General, Sam Mostyn, Victorian State Labor Premier, Jacinta Allan and paediatrician and gender medicine zealot, Michelle Telfer.

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When Simone de Bouvouir wrote; “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” she provided a conceptual door for academics like Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Kimberle Crenshaw and others to walk through – postmodernism replaced biology with identity labels while intersectionality parsed human experience into a multiverse of identity fragments to dismantle “women” as a unified sex class.

Do Gillard et al believe that trans women are women? Have they memory-holed their earlier support for women’s sex-based rights? Unlikely. But these days, to be considered progressive is to adopt the elitist belief that humans can change sex; men’s feelings are more important than women’s safety and female athletes should put up and shut up for the sake of “inclusion.”

The takeover of left-wing party politics, the media and state institutions by a post-truth, authoritarian ideology often called DEI / woke or progressivism destroyed the fundamental principles many on the Left used to stand for - women’s sex-based rights, anti-racism and equality for all and gay rights. All of these have been dismantled under the takeover of the new progressive Left. As the beneficiaries of second-wave feminism, Gillard et al have played a central and active role in dismantling every one of its gains.