As J. K. Rowling has drily observed, transgender activists might better persuade us that they’re not a threat to women, by not actually threatening women so often. Like any woman who speaks publicly against transgender ideology, Rowling has been subject to a barrage of death threats, including having her address and a photo of her home published on Twitter, along with a pipe-bomb threat.
Now, the “inclusive, welcoming” progressives have driven another woman into hiding with threats of violence.
Liberal candidate Katherine Deves has sent her family away from Sydney after receiving death threats over controversial comments she has made about transgender athletes.
Ms Deves has told SBS News she has had to involve the police and AFP to protect her and her family.
“My safety has been threatened,” she said. “My family are away out of Sydney because I don’t want them to witness what I’m going through, nor do I want their safety put at risk.”
The Australian
Why are the “progressives” so infuriated by Deves? If she really is just a fringe nutter, why do they care so much?
Because they’re really worried that she is simply speaking for a great many people. Maybe not the doctor’s wives and wealthy wokesters in the teal-blue seats like Warringah, which Deves is contesting, but certainly in the sort of seats Labor takes for granted.
Deves may well fail in Warringah, but Zali Steggall’s calls for her disendorsement suggest Steggall is concerned about her chances. More widely, what do left-wing journalists imagine communities in the outer suburbs of our capital cities think about Deves’s women’s sports issue? Seats with high numbers of Muslim, Indian, Polynesian, Maronite and Catholic voters are likely to want their daughters playing sport against other biological females.
Such communities are socially and religiously conservative and often living in seats held by the ALP. Think the marginal seats of Macquarie and Dobell in western Sydney.
As Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen said after the 2019 election, “people of faith no longer feel progressive politics cares about them”. Nor do a great many ordinary Australians, many of them traditional Labor voters. In 2015, the United Voice union released an ad, “Have Your Say”, which depicted the Labor party as a house built by ordinary Australians — and taken over by a bunch of “progressive” clowns. The ALP quickly forced them to take it down (thankfully, others preserved it for posterity).
Electorally, there may be more upside for Morrison in religious freedom and defending women’s sport than there is downside in an unpleasant debate about trans rights.
The Sydney Morning Herald was praised on Twitter last week for Wednesday’s editorial demanding Deves be disendorsed. It cited as precedent Howard’s 1996 disendorsement of Pauline Hanson. It was a poor example. Hanson went on to win the Labor seat of Oxley as an independent and to become a national political figure as leader of One Nation. She would most likely have remained in obscurity had she run as a Liberal.
Many journalists last week tried to pretend trans-competitors in women’s sport was not a serious issue. Wrong. It is an issue all over the world.
The Australian
It is an issue which has finally galvanised women especially against an ideology which seeks to erase their unique and biologically intrinsic identity.
More importantly, a great many people have realised the truth of what Theodore Dalrymple wrote of Soviet propaganda: to force people to assent to propositions that are outrageously false, on pain of losing their livelihoods or worse, was to crush them morally and psychologically, and thus … complicit in their own enslavement. To assent to obvious lies and perforce parrot them is to become a liar too, however unwilling.
More and more, ordinary people are growing sick of being forced to tell obvious lies. The violent fury meted out to a daring truth-teller, far from intimidating them into silence, is galvanising their fury at the agents of lying.