On a busy Friday night on 11 October, a lively crowd of 400 gathered outside South Australia’s parliament. Spilling across the pavement, protesters brandished homemade signs reading “Abortion care is healthcare”, “Hands off my body” and “Forced birth = violence”.
Young women and men, workers who had just clocked off for the day, families and trade unionists were there to rally against a new anti-abortion bill being proposed this month. If passed, these changes would force people who are more than 27 weeks and 6 days pregnant to give birth regardless of their wishes or the advice of their doctors.
The crowd was protesting to defend the hard-won right of women to control their own bodies and to decide their own futures. Loud booing and jeering followed the mention of Ben Hood, the Liberal MP introducing the private member’s bill. Hood aspires to be a culture warrior in the mould of US conservatives who spent decades chipping away at abortion rights until Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
Abortion was decriminalised in South Australia in 2021 with widespread support. According to a 2019 <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1753-6405.12997">study</a> in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 80 percent of South Australians support decriminalisation, 65 percent support widespread and readily available abortions and 63 percent support late-term abortions.
Most South Australian politicians are disinclined to attack abortion rights. So Hood’s bill is unlikely to pass either house of parliament. But the battle over abortion is far from finished.
As Prudence Flowers, Flinders University lecturer and co-convenor of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (SAAAC), told the crowd, a small but committed hard-right minority view undermining abortion access to organise their forces. Last month, around 1,000 anti-choice campaigners <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-25/ben-hood-abortion-bill-supporters/104397276">reported</a>ly gathered at parliament in support of Hood’s bill. This included prominent anti-abortion activist and academic Joanna Howe, who describes herself as advocating for “an Australia where abortion is <a href="https://www.drjoannahowe.com/about_dr_joanna_howe">unthinkable</a>”. For the hard-right and religious conservative wing of the Liberal Party, this is an opportunity to enthuse their base, recruit to their cause and drag their party—and the rest of society—even further to the right.
There is an important tradition of coming out onto the streets to defend abortion rights in South Australia. Rallies were held in 2021 in the lead-up to decriminalisation, and when Roe v. Wade was overturned in the US, many thousands marched in solidarity with the protests there. Friday’s rally continued this proud tradition. Those who took to the streets were united by anger, defiance and a commitment to action. Grey, a former health worker, told Red Flag: 
“I used to be a nurse, so this kind of issue is incredibly important to me. When I was a nurse, the times we went on strike were the only times things happened and people paid attention. Australians can be laid back people, but we need to get out and scream about it. People trust the government too much.”
Many placards and speeches called not just for the right to abortion, but to make it free, accessible and available without conditions. Barbara Baird, a long-time abortion activist and co-convenor of SAAAC, told the crowd “There are still access problems that haven’t been solved by decriminalisation”. These challenges particularly affect people in remote, regional and rural areas, 80 percent of whom must travel to Adelaide to access abortion care. It also involves significant costs for many women and requires them to take time off work. 
Labor has played an appalling role. Despite sixteen years in government before 2018, Labor did not decriminalise abortion. The party is expected to allow a “conscience vote” on Hood’s bill, which is an inexcusable concession to bigotry inside the party. Maddy Tapley, rally chair and convenor of the Defend Abortion Action Group told Red Flag: 
“The Liberals’ hard-right faction is attacking abortion while the Labor Party is committed to pandering to anti-women bigots inside and beyond its own ranks. A conscience vote would let Labor members vote against abortion rights with no repercussions. The real opposition won’t happen in Parliament—it’s going to happen here, in the streets.”

Harvey Bail

Nix Herriot

Abortion rights rally in Adelaide

Sexism is so fundamental to our existence that we are not even aware of it much of the time. 
It starts from before we are even born. An experiment described by Annie Murphy Paul in her book Origins highlights the different ways pregnant women interpret the movement of their babies in utero. Those who knew they were expecting a boy were more likely to use words like “energetic”, “vigorous” and “jabbing” to describe the movement, while for girls it was “gentle”, “rolling” and “quiet”. 
This sort of unconscious bias shapes and curtails women’s potential throughout their lives. In her book Delusions of Gender, neuroscientist Cordelia Fine describes an experiment which showed that simply reminding university students about whether they’re a man or a woman at the beginning of a test, by asking them to tick a box, reduces women’s performance on the test compared to that of men; in the absence of such a reminder, men and women perform equally well. Even the “feminine” or “masculine” nature of the décor in the room where the test is held has a measurable impact on performance. If such subtleties can have a statistically significant effect, just imagine the cumulative effect of this conditioning over a lifetime. 
The sexist bias that plagues data collection and design has been documented by Caroline Creado Perez in Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Every area of design and technology is affected, from medical testing and drug development to building design, workplace temperature and tool size, all of which have wide-ranging and material effects on women’s health and lives. The male bias built into car safety testing, for example, means women are 49 percent more likely to be seriously injured in car accidents and 17 percent more likely to die than men. 
Then there are all the manifestations of sexism that we are conscious of, like unequal pay, lack of adequate maternity leave, limited access to child care, greater poverty on average for women throughout their lifetimes, greater risk of violence and death from intimate partners, sexualisation and objectification in daily life as well as in popular culture and advertising, to name just a few. 
There is not an aspect of life that isn’t affected by the gendered, and therefore sexist, nature of society in some way, from the most personal to the most public. 
So what can be done about this so all-pervasive form of inequality?
First, we—women and men—need to become as conscious as we can of sexism in our daily lives and strive to minimise it as best we can. We want women to be able to reach their potential and participate in whatever area of society, work and culture they want as equals. That means being sensitive to how the minutiae of behaviour—things like who dominates conversations and who gets listened to and taken notice of—affect women, who are used to being ignored, dismissed and generally treated as less important than men. It means treating women as equals, not sex objects, there merely to be admired or preyed on by men. And it means taking pro-active measures to push against the various subtle ways sexism shapes all sorts of human interactions. 
But even if we do everything we can to be alert to everyday sexism, it doesn’t alter the social reality around us that is reinforcing sexist ideas and norms as fast as we can reject them. 
So we also need a strategy for changing society and the inequalities that are structured into it and which every day normalise the subordinate position of women. 
In the immediate term, this means policies and services that enable women to participate as equals in paid work and the public sphere as much as possible—free, accessible child care and aged care, unlimited maternity leave, greater scrutiny of hiring and promotion to reduce discrimination against women, as well as higher wages in industries dominated by women, to name just a few. 
But on their own, these measures merely support women to undertake paid work more easily while they continue to take primary responsibility for caring as well. Hence the notorious “double burden” that plagues working women’s lives. In themselves, such reforms don’t challenge the idea that women are naturally nurturing and better suited to caring for others than men, who, by their nature, belong in positions of power. 
So, important as measures that enable women to participate fully in paid work and the public sphere are, they are not sufficient to bring about genuine equality or liberation. To achieve this, we need more radical change. In particular, we need to transform the way work is done, including breaking down the division between work in the formal economy and caring work, and the subordination of all work to profit making and capital accumulation. 
As long as most of us are expected to spend 40 hours or more a week performing waged labour—during which our “real” lives are on hold and we are under the control of a boss and doing work to generate profit for those who hire us rather than doing what is needed to keep ourselves and those around us alive, healthy and happy—the division of labour that so effectively supports this economic model will endure. Indeed, this is why it persists more then 50 years after most formal rights for women were won, including the right to equal pay, the right to work while married, the right to financial autonomy, the right to divorce and reproductive freedom. 
The bosses rely on the existence of a sub-class—women— to take responsibility for ensuring workers are looked after and fit for work, and that new generations of workers are produced who are willing and able to work. Women perform the majority of this work for free out of a sense of duty and because they genuinely care about the wellbeing of those around them. But the value to the bosses, who rely on that work to provide a productive workforce, is nevertheless enormous. 
A 2017 PWC report, “Understanding the unpaid economy”, found that unpaid work is worth $2.2 trillion to the Australian economy, equivalent to a third of GDP. Unpaid child care is the largest contributor, worth 25 percent of GDP, and would be by far the biggest industry in Australia if it was part of the formal economy. Domestic household tasks, including cooking and cleaning, are the next biggest category of unpaid labour. 
Having more women in the halls of power won’t be enough to change this. The halls of power are dedicated to strengthening the economy—i.e. generating more GDP through better exploiting workers and maximising the profits of business—and are dominated by the economic interests of the powerful few who control major corporations and industries. Waged labour and the status quo that ensures exploitation continues smoothly serve their interests, and those who challenge that soon find themselves on the outer. So while women have as much right as men to occupy parliaments and boardrooms, this is not a strategy for liberating women. 
To bring about the radical change that is necessary, we need to orient to an alternative source of power: the power the working class has collectively to challenge and transform society by mobilising at the point of production. Workers make everything, and they do it together. Rather than bosses directing this process, workers have the potential to decide democratically how and what to produce and for what purpose. 
Work and production could and should be reorganised to meet need—including the social need to care for everyone as well as the need to protect the planet from destruction. And because it could only be done collectively, cooperation, solidarity and fostering mutual respect are necessary to help strengthen working-class power. This is why we can be confident that the prejudice and inequality that are so rampant in capitalist society would be organically challenged and eventually overcome in the course of workers fighting for a socialist society, as has happened historically at high points of workers’ struggle. 
Working-class women aren’t necessarily conscious of the need for this sort of radical change to solve the problems they experience as a result of capitalism’s need both to exploit them and maintain their caring role. And nor are most male workers, who likewise have an interest in challenging waged labour and exploitation. But the reality is this is the only way to bring about a society of gender, as well as broader, equality, and to have a society that can meet people’s needs as a matter of priority, not as an afterthought or a ritualised hand-wringing every year on International Women’s Day. 
To get there, we need to start with rebuilding working-class consciousness and power from the bottom up. This is the radical origin of what was originally known as International Working Women’s Day when it was founded by socialist women in 1910 and celebrated under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. 
There is no easy way to do that, and we are currently a long way from the sort of consciousness and organisation needed to overthrow this system of inequality and prejudice. But if we want to avoid the cynicism or despair that comes from watching politicians carp on about women’s empowerment while they maintain policies that keep women down, or CEOs raising champagne glasses at International Women’s Day breakfasts while women languish on low wages in low-status jobs, we need some idea of what could actually transform the position of women. And we need to fight for those ideas wherever we are—at work, on university campuses and in every other area of life—and get together with other people doing the same, so that we can maximise our impact and form a larger pole of attraction for people who are continually pushed to radical conclusions by the injustices and atrocities of the capitalist system. That is the small but important step we can take towards women’s liberation, and the liberation of all humanity, in the here and now.

Louise O'Shea

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

The facts are undeniable. Women in 5,000 companies—covering almost five million workers—earn 21.7 percent less than their male colleagues’ median total remuneration. In some companies, the gap is as high as 31.8 percent. This is according to figures released by the Workplace Gender Equity Agency (WGEA) in the lead-up to International Women’s Day this year. 
A significant gender pay disparity in some areas with relatively small numbers of women, such as mining or construction companies, might not be surprising. But others, such as banks and airlines, often have even higher wage gaps. In retail women’s wear, for every dollar a man gets, women’s pay ranges from 42.3 to 79.1 cents. 
Importantly, the WGEA figures compare full-time work, with pay rates for part-time work translated into a full-time rate for the purposes of comparison. But because women disproportionately work part time, the actual amount they are paid—what goes into their bank account each fortnight—is even less compared to their male counterparts than what the pay gap alone suggests. 
Why does the pay gap exist? The problem is well illustrated by Bain Consulting. Bain is a company with a 31 percent wage gap, despite winning awards from the WGEA for gender equality. At Bain, women make up just 31 percent of its highest earning advisers, 45 percent of its second-highest ranks and 71 percent of its bottom quartile. 
A similar situation exists at the Commonwealth Bank, which has a 54.4 percent female workforce. Around 71 percent of the lower-paid customer service roles in branches and call centres are women, which accounts for its 29.8 percent pay gap. The bank may pay the same wage for the same work, but men get the higher paid jobs with all the perks and bonuses that go with them.
The solution, according to Angela Priestley in Women’s Agenda, is to “Bring on the heat around the gender pay gaps ... Bring on the scrutiny ... the awkward discussions” in companies championing the UN’s International Women’s Day slogan “count her in”. 
But while it’s welcome that the WGEA has published business names and matching figures of pay rates for the first time, transparency itself won’t necessarily improve things for women. In Denmark, when similar data was published, the gender pay gap narrowed because bosses responded by holding down men’s wages, rather than increasing women’s. 
Not mentioned by the WGEA, companies or media commentary is the one thing that has won gains for women in the past—militant union organising.
Since the 1800s, Australian unions have been organising for equal pay. As early as 1902, telegraphists and postmistresses in the new federal public service won equal pay after a determined campaign by the union. Later campaigns during WWII saw tram conductors, munitions workers and bread carters win after taking industrial action. 
Two campaigns particularly stand out: one by manufacturing workers in 1969 and the other by insurance workers in 1973. Several industrial campaigns in manufacturing in the early 1960s were instrumental in bringing about the 1969 decision that enshrined equal pay for the same work. This decision triggered a two-year campaign to win full equal pay for 72,000 women process workers. Concerted industrial action, including the unionisation of many new workplaces and joint action with their fellow male workers, got results.
After the second equal pay decision in 1972 broadened the scope for claims by requiring equal pay for comparable work, insurance workers initially relied on the courts to implement pay equality in their industry. When this didn’t happen, they started to organise and in 1973 several thousand workers demonstrated in Melbourne and stayed out for the rest of the day. They then went on to have a stop-work a week later and another strike, and a month later threatened a national strike—the first in the industry. The employers backed down and, though it took another year and a further threat of industrial action, pay equality was won for most of the workforce. 
We’ve now had decades of reports, committees, court rulings, new legislation undoing some of the structural barriers to women’s work—and yet the gender pay gap remains stubbornly high. It remains high because union leaders have forgotten the lessons of the past, relied on all these committees and laws instead of the industrial strength of their members. 
The 1980s ALP-ACTU Accord promised many things for women, but collaboration with the bosses led to women’s wages falling and big job losses in female-dominated industries as the economy was restructured. Unions held back from taking industrial action, unionisation and wages and conditions plummeted, while the bosses reaped the profits.
In the wake of this latest WGEA report, the ACTU released several memes, concluding that “There is much to be done, but union members are no stranger to getting things done”. Where we have actually won equal pay or broken through barriers, it is because we have used our industrial strength, not meme wars. Where is the call from the ACTU or individual unions for a stop-work on International Women’s Day? 
We can’t rely on naming and shaming the bosses into granting equal pay. We have to take on the system that reinforces inequality. If unions were prepared to take on the banks, the supermarkets and the airlines to demand better wages for women and back it up with industrial action—like workers did in the insurance industry in the 1970s—there is every indication it would be popular and they would be under huge pressure to pay up. But for all the talk of “breaking the rules”, there is clearly no appetite for that sort of action.
If we are to break through the gender pay gap, it will be necessary to follow the example of those before us who used their industrial power to win better conditions for women. And to do that, we need to start building power in our workplaces from the bottom up.

Liz Ross

Equal pay: the solution is hiding in plain sight

“Sydney’s gay community is rightly hurt and angry. Police should not march in this year’s Mardi Gras.” So said the Sydney Morning Herald editorial on 25 February. By the end of the day, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras board had uninvited the police from marching in Saturday’s parade. By 28 February, they had invited them back, albeit wearing T-shirts with a police logo instead of their uniforms.
The hurt and anger to which the Herald editorial referred arose from the domestic violence-fuelled murders of a Sydney gay couple, Jesse Baird and Luke Davies. Beau Lamarre-Condon, a gay police officer, has been charged with the murders. He allegedly used his police gun.
The only positive to come out of this horrendous crime is that it has re-raised the argument about whether the police should march in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. Not because an individual cop turns out to be a homicidal stalker, but because they are the police, and not everyone has forgotten their repressive role in society, past and present.
The police have been part of Mardi Gras for 26 years. In that time they have committed, as an institution, egregious crimes against every oppressed group in society. Lamarre-Condon himself was photographed marching in the police contingent at Mardi Gras in 2020. That was the year he was also filmed repeatedly tasering an Indigenous man in the face, neck and chest. He was later cleared by an “internal investigation” in what is standard procedure for police caught enacting violence on and off the job.
The Mardi Gras board didn’t seem to think this—or the other ongoing crimes of the police force—was a good enough reason to question the cops’ participation.
So why this time? Timing played a role. News of the murders came to light ten days before Mardi Gras, and only two months after the police’s refusal to even apologise when an inquiry into LGBTI hate crimes criticised them in December for being “indifferent, negligent, dismissive or hostile” to the investigation. More importantly, while much grief ensued for the victims, there was also from many an angry reaction against the cops in general.
The NSW police commissioner Karen Webb understood what was at stake. She needed to draw a line between the “one bad apple” and the force as a whole. How else to explain that on 24 February she suddenly remembered to apologise for the four decades of LGBTI hate crimes that the police had previously ignored?
The Mardi Gras board decided to make a gesture to assuage popular anger at the police. Yet what has eventuated is meaningless. The logic of “inclusion” based on identity (“don’t you realise there are LGBTI police officers?”) won the day and the cops were back in. When it came down to it, even a one-off absence of the police from the parade raised too many awkward questions. Most importantly, why was this repressive force ever part of an event that had started with a police riot against protesters for LGBTI rights?
The police should never have been invited in the first place.
Mardi Gras at its 1978 origin was a protest in solidarity with the gay liberation movement in the United States. It took place on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots of 1969 that initiated that movement. The first Mardi Gras and the campaign to drop the charges against protesters that followed it gave an enormous boost to LGBTI radicalism and mass mobilisation in Australia.
Yet twenty years later, in 1998, Mardi Gras had been so transformed that the cops were invited to participate in an event that had once chanted: “Stop police attacks on gays, women and Blacks!”.
Had the police changed their spots? Or had Mardi Gras? 
Did, perhaps, the police get let into the parade in 1998 because they made a nice apology in 1997 for the beatings and arrests that they inflicted on the original Mardi Gras protesters in 1978? Nothing like it. That insincere utterance only came in 2016, after they’d already been polluting the parade with their presence for eighteen years (and three years after they physically attacked several gay men on the night of Mardi Gras 2013—something else that failed to move the Mardi Gras board to un-invite them).
The police force is a violent, right-wing institution that plays no role in protecting oppressed people, and an enormous role in holding up structures of oppression and injustice. Police brutality is defended by and entrenched in the entire institution.
What has changed is Mardi Gras’ “management”. Having the police march in the parade is just one sign of what a conservative corporate entity Mardi Gras has become. 
While Marxists, socialists, anarchists and other radicals established Mardi Gras, its nature did not go uncontested. By 1980, the key debate was between those fighting to retain Mardi Gras as a political protest and those (including gay business owners) who wanted to make it a celebration of “our lifestyle”. That the date of the march was shifted in 1981 from the chilly climes of the winter Stonewall anniversary in June to the tourism-friendly warmth of late summer should tell you who won.
Mardi Gras was no longer organised by the radical activists of the Gay Solidarity Group but by a specific Gay Mardi Gras Task Group, the forerunner of today’s board of directors of what is now a registered charity and company with a multi-million-dollar turnover. The parade itself is a huge tourism event from which major profits are made, many of them by the organisation’s corporate backers such as Qantas. Political floats are rare. The 78ers float is now limited to 100 participants—apparently subject to the same numerical restriction as the police who bashed and arrested us throughout 1978.
The only positive about today’s Mardi Gras is that the crowds of people of all genders and sexualities that come to view it—hundreds of thousands lining the parade route, and millions online—remind us of the effect that radical mass campaigns for LGBTI rights, from Mardi Gras to marriage equality, have had on popular attitudes.
The police, on the other hand, have resisted every advance. Normalising this repressive force by including them in the Mardi Gras has not improved them one bit. Instead, it has whitewashed their true nature.
Diane Fieldes is a 78er who marched in the “drop the charges” rally on 27 August 1978 at which more than 100 people were arrested.

Diane Fieldes

Cops should never have been invited to Mardi Gras

Recent research published by Sydney’s Westmead Children’s Hospital is being weaponised by anti-trans activists to argue against the use of gender affirming medical care for trans youth. 
The <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-11/blocked:-the-battle-over-youth-gender-care/102587506">ABC’s Four Corners</a> program reported in July that the Westmead gender clinic is severely understaffed and has only admitted three patients this year (compared to 88 in 2022), while the waitlist has blown out to 115 people. The ABC alleged that staff members had left due to the implications of the controversial study, which did not involve current frontline staff from the gender clinic, and that they felt they were no longer able to provide the care they knew their patients needed.
The study, which argues against recommending medical transition to transgender youth, followed the transition process of 79 patients. It asserts that young people primarily identify as trans due to family trauma and “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). Proponents of ROGD claim that gender dysphoria is caused by social influences, such as social media, during adolescence and that this newly adopted gender identity will not last into adulthood. 
This is a contested concept that, according to the Australian Psychological Society, empirical evidence refutes. For instance, a recent study in the Journal of Adolescent Health showed that nearly two-thirds of trans and gender diverse people realise their gender does not match the sex they were assigned at birth at or before the age of ten. The implications of ROGD are that trans youth should not have access to gender affirming care because they will “grow out” of their gender dysphoria. Many conservative lawmakers in the United States have referenced it when banning hormone therapy and puberty blockers for trans people.
The report bases its stance towards gender affirming medical care on its warning that “for young people who may regret their choice ... the risks for potential harm are significant”. It claims that 22 percent of participants detransitioned, meaning that they no longer identified as trans. 
However, The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH) said in a <a href="https://auspath.org.au/2023/03/01/auspath-response-to-elkadi-j-chudleigh-c-maguire-a-m-ambler-g-r-schers-kozlowska-k-developmental-pathway-choices-of-young-people-presenting-to-a-gender-service-with-gender-distre/">response</a> to the report that the figure includes patients who were not diagnosed with gender dysphoria and thus were never offered medical care. A few patients chose to stop taking puberty blockers, but there is no evidence that suggests they were no longer trans (some trans people pursue medical intervention, others do not). Only one patient in the study stopped all treatment and assumed their gender assigned at birth.
AusPATH claims that there is significant bias in the Westmead research, pointing out that the authors credit the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, an organisation with known links to the anti-trans movement whose current president has presented anti-gender affirming talks to groups such as the conservative Australian Christian Lobby. 
The report claims that doctors are pressured to “compromise their own ethical standards” by providing gender affirming medical care, and recommends a more “holistic” approach to treatment. Anti-trans activists and professionals regularly call for alternative forms of care, such as “watchful waiting”, which asserts that psychotherapy and the passage of time will resolve adolescent gender issues. These include Dr Jillian Spencer, a senior child psychiatrist recently suspended from the Queensland Children’s Hospital after speaking at an event held by anti-trans activist Posie Parker, and psychologist Dianna Kenny, an ambassador for the anti-LGBTI lobby group Binary Australia—both featured on the Four Corners program.
There is no evidence to back up the claim that “watchful waiting” is a legitimate alternative to affirmative care, and AusPATH likens these practices to conversion therapy under a different name. 
According to the ABC, Westmead de-prioritises children who have advanced into puberty, unlike the gender clinics in Queensland, Melbourne and Perth. It has also been reluctant to prescribe hormone treatment for those under the age of eighteen, meaning parents are forced to find expensive private treatment for their children’s transition. 
One former Westmead staff member told Four Corners that she quit after the death of fourteen-year-old trans boy Noah O’Brien. Noah, who had already begun puberty, was pushed to the bottom of the clinic’s list. His mum insisted that he developed a severe eating disorder due to the stress of not being able to begin gender affirming medical care. While in hospital, a social worker recommended he see a gender specialist, but this request was denied. He took his own life in January. 
Westmead’s report has been released in the context of a global assault on trans rights. A key plank of the anti-trans assault is the claim that gender affirming medical care for young people amounts to child abuse. More than twenty US states have banned this care, while Sweden, Norway and the UK have wound back the use of puberty blockers.
There was a backlash against the Four Corners program from the right-wing media and known transphobes, including Dr Spencer. However, the NSW government issued a statement the day after it was aired expressing its dissatisfaction with the level of care being provided for trans youth at Westmead. NSW Health Minister Ryan Park has commissioned a review into the way in which gender affirming care is administered across the state, and promised to expedite the completion of a new gender hub for under 25-year-olds in south-east Sydney that has stalled for the last two years.
This is a reminder that anti-trans politics is still on the fringe in Australia. But this should not be taken for granted. The backlash in the US had a rapid onset, and the Westmead research shows that transphobes exist not just in the organised far-right, but in the medical profession as well.

Emma Terry

Westmead Children’s Hospital publishes anti-trans research

Barbie, Mattel and Greta Gerwig’s multi-million-dollar confection of nostalgia and hot pink, is a blockbuster hit and a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The film has taken in more than a billion dollars at the box office and inspired scores of breathless articles, everywhere from the mainstream press to the far left, extolling it as an artistic and political masterpiece. 
But Barbie’s tale of the famous doll grappling with real-life sexism and the complicated world of human feelings left me cold. The film’s plot was frequently directionless and overly saccharine. I developed a grim respect for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling (Barbie and Ken) who work hard to carry off the script. But outside of a few satisfying gags, I found much of the humour over-reliant on a stale self-reflexivity and nostalgia factor for the little plastic doll. Opulently detailed and faithful set design, some impressive dance numbers and a too-brief car chase are entertaining, but not enough to save the two-hour runtime from dragging.
That’s this humble critic’s opinion. But this review wouldn’t exist if Barbie’s only crime was being a bit crap. Barbie is worthy of criticism because it has succeeded in making controversial what once was such a basic observation as to be virtually hackneyed amongst progressives: Barbie is a sexist toy. For at least 50 years the doll has been seen as the embodiment of the pressure to fulfil impossible beauty standards imposed on women; playing with Barbies is associated with <a href="blank">increased negative body image</a> in girls as young as five. 
But thanks to the Barbie movie, she’s back in business, with a progressive facelift that has made it positively uncool to point out the misogyny behind the pastel dreamworld. 
The film’s genesis lies in a concerted campaign by Mattel to rehabilitate Barbie. Between 2009 and 2016, <a href="blank">Barbie’s market share decreased</a> virtually year on year. Mattel’s focus groups indicated this was in part due to a younger generation of parents refusing to buy Barbies for their children because she peddles sexist stereotypes. Mattel saw the writing on the wall and decided it was time to revamp her image. They released a line of dolls with different body types and ethnicities, alongside an overhaul of Barbie’s advertising. The strategy worked: in 2022, Barbie reclaimed her top spot in the dress up doll market. 
It says a lot that the brand’s most progressive credential in the last two decades is the release of a “curvy” Barbie whose waist measurement, contra original Barbie, would just about allow for a complete liver. But Barbie’s new “inclusive” range of body types, skin tones and career ambitions haven’t in fact cleansed her of sexist content. The point of Barbie is that you can be a doctor, a head of state, a vet, or a teacher—you can even be “curvy”, or not white, or disabled—and still be an attractive object for others to look at. (As it happens, the main Doctor Barbie currently sold by Mattel isn’t, in fact, called “Doctor Barbie”, or even “Paediatrician Barbie”—she’s “Baby Doctor Barbie”, complete with two infants to care for and a pink bedazzled stethoscope.)
Regardless, the main character is still “Stereotypical Barbie”, with shiny blonde hair, blue eyes and long tanned legs.
Producing a Barbie movie that slyly pokes fun at the brand and makes descriptive observations about the sexist double standards women face is congruent with this new marketing strategy. It’s a conscious tactic for rehabilitating the toy with an audience Mattel has struggled with, by convincing us that it’s okay to love Barbie even if you hate sexism. 
Most of the media coverage and online discussions of the Barbie movie celebrate its digs at Mattel as a profound and nuanced—even anti-capitalist—critique of the Barbie brand. But the movie’s in-jokes and winks to the camera about the sexist stereotypes built into Barbie, the corporate nature of Mattel and the obvious vacuousness of releasing new versions of a plastic doll as a strategy for fighting real-world sexism, are exactly what enable it to function as a Barbie ad for the 2020s. Because you know that I know that Greta Gerwig knows that Barbie knows that Barbie is a sexist consumer product, we’re freed up to set all that aside while the film does its best to convince us of its core argument that she can be whatever you want her to be.
Most of the film’s Barbie-critical sentiments are delivered via dramatic irony. The effect isn’t to imbue them with clever subtlety. It’s to soften them, to push them to the side. The only time an anti-Barbie bit of dialogue is delivered directly and straight faced, the audience is intended to regard it as a bit ridiculous: the character, cynical teenager Sasha, escalates from saying Barbie perpetuates sexist beauty standards to calling her a fascist. “I don’t control the trains or the flow of commerce!” Barbie wails. So, criticising Barbie to her face is way harsh and over the top.
The character arc of Sasha, played by Ariana Greenblatt, is worth narrowing in on, because it’s one of the more egregious examples of Barbie’s sexism and a metonym for the broader argument the film is making. Sasha is introduced as a smart and self-assured young woman, furious at the sexism society heaps on her. As far as the film is concerned, this is reflective of an unfortunate rigidity on Sasha’s part, which has driven a wedge between her and her mother, America Ferrera’s Gloria. 
It’s resolved by Sasha and Gloria travelling to Barbieland, where Sasha learns to relax a little and fall back in love with the magical potential of Barbie. To underscore this transformation, each time she appears on screen, Greenblatt’s hair, makeup and costume is more elaborate, more feminine and more pink. The relationship between mother and daughter is healed, and Sasha returns to the real world all the better for having embraced the Barbie within. 
Being a jaded teenage girl with a rage against totems of sexism like Barbie is great. I would recommend it to anybody who asked. This adolescent feminist anger can be an early step on the way to arriving at a more worked out set of politics. One of the worst moments in the film is when Sasha is used to impress on its audience of mostly young women that our best chance of being liked and happy is instead to walk back down its pink-dream-house-lined political and cultural cul-de-sac.
Another line of defence for Barbie argues that attacks on the film by sexist internet ideologues like Ben Shapiro are evidence of its left-wing content. Frankly, a lot of not particularly left-wing things upset the far right, including Target selling rainbow T-shirts, Hillary Clinton’s presidential run and Mars switching the green MnM’s high heels to sneakers. 
Beyond this, the main conflict of the film, in which Gosling’s Ken and his counterparts transform Barbieland into Kendom and dupe the Barbies into accepting a patriarchal order, effectively rests on talking points that would hardly seem out of place in Shapiro’s videos. The reason the Kens seek domination over the Barbies is that they’re unfulfilled; they don’t get enough attention from the Barbies, they’re treated dismissively, and all the jobs are taken by women! By the time the saga has reached its conclusion, via a musical number about these long-oppressed men becoming self-actualised, Robbie’s Barbie is made to apologise to Ken, acknowledging that she is at fault for failing to care about his feelings.
This dramatic arc mirrors Barbie’s prescriptions for women in the fight against sexism: just change your mindset around gender roles, reclaim #Barbiecore or declare yourself “Kenough”. Empowerment is achieved as an individual, and it can be whatever makes you feel good, regardless of its political content or social impact. It’s a version of anti-sexism that centres on finding self-fulfilment through an enthusiastic embrace of the gender stereotypes imposed on you—it’s subversive, don’t you know.
The film hits us on the head repeatedly with the notion that Barbie is an “open-ended” idea, including through a ghostly visit by Ruth Handler, original Mattel capitalist and inventor of Barbie, played by Ruth Pearlman. Between gag-inducing lines like “I do all my best thinking at the kitchen table” and “mothers stand still so daughters can see how far they’ve come”, Handler informs us that Barbie has evolved with the times and transcended her sexist origins.
At one point, during a monologue that’s clearly meant to be the film’s major anti-sexist statement, Barbie tips into suggesting that it’s for the best that these dolls are designed as flawless, pretty objects; if she had room for a complete large intestine, she’d just remind women of their own struggles in a sexist society. Barbie isn’t just redeemable, she’s inspirational, a welcome window of escapism. Mattel executives everywhere weep with joy. Now that it’s uncool for Barbie to be a misogynistic cash grab, better for her to become a plastic-fantastic, O-T-T, so-bad-it’s-good idea that will help you unlock your fun, pretty, authentic self in a world of harsh realities. 
It’s easy to feel cynical about the moral that Barbie is a creative canvas for us modern women to do with what we will when we see that the movie has come into the world saturated with brand tie-ins (the marketing budget outstripped production spending). You can buy Barbie-branded everything from eyeshadow and nail polish to thistle tea, which tabloid magazines will tell you Robbie drank on set to “detox her liver” and achieve flawless Barbie-like skin (here’s to authentic self-expression!). Perhaps we’re meant to think all these products are also just empowering creative ideas. Let’s not buy it.

Eddie Stephenson

The Barbie movie—how we were told to stop worrying and love the doll

The New South Wales Labor government will be moving a series of amendments to the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 at the beginning of August. These amendments will make it “unlawful to, by a public act, incite hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, a person or group of persons, because of their religious belief, affiliation or activity”. 
While these amendments are being presented as a commonsense updating of discrimination laws to protect religious people, in reality they are a significant concession to the conservative right and potentially strengthen anti-LGBTI discrimination in a variety of ways. 
The basic premise of the proposal, that there is a wave of discrimination in Australia against people because of their religion, is mostly a fabrication of right-wing politicians. While some religious groups, such as Muslims, still suffer from discrimination, the idea that religious people in general, and Christians in particular, are experiencing a wave of intolerance is laughable. 
This myth began in the aftermath of the 2017 marriage equality plebiscite, as conservative religious organisations argued that same-sex marriage would lead to the oppression of Christians. It is also a prominent theme of far-right politics internationally, most notably in the United States.
While conservatives drone on and on about Christians being a new persecuted minority, the reality is that religious institutions are the ones doing the discriminating, not suffering from it. 
In 2021, Steph Lentz, a high school English teacher, was fired from Sydney’s Covenant Christian School after she came out as a lesbian. In the same year, another openly gay teacher Karen Pack was forced out of her job at Morling College, also in Sydney, after the school received a letter urging the administration to “distance itself from her demonic actions”. The Illawarra Grammar School faced a backlash from parents earlier this year following revelations that incoming principals and board members would have to sign a statement saying they oppose same-sex marriage. 
Private religious schools also have the right to discriminate against LGBTI students. This potentially impacts a large cohort of young people: 688,000 students attend private schools across Australia, 94 percent of which are religious. 
The Australian Christian Lobby is arguing that if there were more religion-based legal protections they would have been able to block the ACT government’s acquisition of Calvary Public Hospital, which had been run by a Catholic organisation that refused to administer abortions since the 1970s. 
Australian Lawyers for Human Rights President Kerry Weste pointed out in a statement that the amendments do not make a clear distinction “between freedom of expression directed against the ideas and tenets of a religion, and vilification against persons or groups because they hold or express religious beliefs”. So, if you ridicule or are contemptuous of someone, or a group of people, for believing in some religious nonsense, ranging from the existence of God to the idea that gays are sinners who are going to burn in hell, then you could potentially be liable under these amendments. We’ve already had a taste of how this can go down with the furore around comedian Reuben Kaye making a joke about Jesus on Network 10’s The Project. Kaye was hounded by conservative religious organisations in the aftermath—with these amendments, he could also have been hit with legal action. 
We need to hit the streets to push back against the Christian right’s agenda and call out the ALP for embracing this nonsense. The fight in NSW will precede a national fight when the Australian Law Reform Commission hands down its recommendations for a federal overhaul of religious discrimination law in December. This will likely lead to a similar federal bill. 
Community Action for Rainbow Rights is <a href="blank">holding a protest</a> to oppose the amendments on Saturday 5 August.

Jordan Humphreys

NSW government pushing a new religious discrimination bill 

Welcome to Sex: Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out describes itself as a “frank, age-appropriate introductory guide to sex and sexuality for teens of all genders ... inclusive, reassuring and all about keeping sex fun, real, and shame-free”. 
The book has become the latest target for right-wing campaigners obsessed with children’s sexuality. To give you a sense of the content, topics covered include: “What is sex?”, “Parents and carers and awkward conversation”, “Getting intimate with myself”, “Orgasms”, “Labels: sexual and gender identities”, “What the outside world is telling us about sex” and “Reasons to not have sex”. 
The tone is very much fun/cool aunty. The introduction encourages young people to “feel good about who you are”. As well as content addressed directly to young readers, quotes from qualitative research and “experts” in the field of sex education offer reassurance to adult readers that this is all evidence-based content. 
Welcome to Sex is a useful contribution to comprehensive sex education, but the debate it has sparked demonstrates the need for a more combative approach to the conservative right. We should absolutely be talking about pleasure, consent and communication. If we don’t produce books, teach it in schools or talk to our children about sex, there are plenty of places where they will learn terrible lessons. The most significant of these is the increasingly violent world of pornography. 
But if we want to win this battle, we must go beyond small-l liberal appeals to “scientific” research. Since the mid-1970s, more than 1,000 sex education books for young people have been published in English. The debates about what is “appropriate” are not going to go away just because the evidence suggests they should. 
Welcome to Sex came under attack from the usual right-wing media outlets such as 2GB radio “shock jock” Ben Fordham, who did a punchy segment, News Corp, which ran sensationalist stories, and an army of online creeps were stirred into action. Sky News then reported random online comments describing Welcome to Sex as a “sick sexual book”. 
Rachael Wong, CEO of “Woman’s Forum Australia”, did the rounds positioning herself as a defender of children. Wong, a regular contributor to the Australian edition of the right-wing magazine Spectator, last year defended transphobic Liberal candidate Katherine Deves and described abortion as not being “in the best interests of women”. 
As a result of their campaigning, Welcome to Sex was removed from the shelves of retailer Big W and co-author Yumi Stynes received death threats. The book subsequently hit the top of the Amazon Australia bestseller list. You know what they say about publicity. 
After being targeted by a sustained media campaign for my work leading Safe Schools, a program aimed at supporting gender and sexual diversity in education, the media discussion of the controversy surrounding Welcome to Sex is very familiar. 
In 2016, News Corp, conservatives in the Liberal Party and online trolls published hundreds of homophobic and transphobic articles to try to stop teachers being nice to gay and trans students. Campaigners against Welcome to Sex have used all the same talking points of the misogynist right, including the nebulous idea of “gender ideology” and whipping up fear about grooming and paedophilia. 
In response, appeals to evidence have been presented in defence of the book, just as they were raised in defence of Safe Schools—as if a lack of scientific rationality in educational materials is the main animator of the political right.
Yumi Stynes told the Sydney Morning Herald: “We really have a lot of credentials”. But an array of supportive doctors and professors are generally of zero interest to those on the right, unless of course they peddle conservative ideas. 
The research on the benefits of sexuality education has been clear and unequivocal for decades. Emma Whatman from the University of Melbourne, summed it up in a piece in the Conversation: “Comprehensive and inclusive sex education that begins at a young age can prevent child sex abuse, decrease rates of domestic violence and intimate partner violence, and reduce homophobic bullying”. 
Conservative campaigners couldn’t care less about this. They engage in moralising to generate emotional responses. During her 2GB interview, for example, Wong told Fordham that she “felt physically ill at the thought” of children reading Welcome to Sex. There were no references to research on child sexuality, the impact of sex education, or links between sexual knowledge and grooming. 
For the right, the main aim is to whip up fear and disgust. This is why conservatives will always highlight what they consider to be the most shocking elements of sex education programs. The page of Welcome to Sex featured in most of the critical media shows an illustration of two naked people in a “scissoring position”. Shock horror!
Crucially, the right-wing campaigners are backed by personalities in the media and mainstream politicians who want only heteronormativity, “family values” and pro-capitalist ideas promoted. Who has time to worry about climate change or the cost of living when there are predatory cultural Marxists influencing your children? 
That is why, when defending sexuality education, we need to go further than just pointing out the health and social benefits. We need to understand that the right is not interested in the welfare of children; its main concern is to create a moral panic to build a reactionary political movement.
We need to push back against the political right at every opportunity and, ultimately, reshape the system that operates to oppress our genders and sexualities.

Roz Ward

The political right isn’t interested in child welfare

“Where the Catholics had Mother Mary as their guiding light, there will now be me, Rachel, Our Mother of Perpetual Misery.” This is how ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith was depicted in a satirical piece criticising the ACT Labor government’s acquisition of Calvary Public Hospital, which has been run by the Catholic organisation Little Company of Mary since it opened in 1979. 
The acquisition follows a government-led inquiry into abortion and reproductive choice in the ACT, commissioned in July last year. The inquiry’s report, published in April, includes harrowing testimony of a woman who suffered painfully during a miscarriage. She was severely cramping but was advised upon admission to Calvary’s emergency department that the procedure she needed would not be performed because it was used for abortions. She instead had to pay $1,000 for the procedure at a private hospital. Calvary also refused to offer elective reproductive surgeries, including contraception and tubal ligation. 
In 2021-22, the ACT government paid Little Company of Mary $261 million to run Calvary Public Hospital and Clare Holland House, a palliative care unit. 
As a public hospital, Calvary was the default location for emergency treatment for Canberra’s northside. Two women lamented to Canberra Weekly that if they “get sick...the ambulance takes us to Calvary. We want health to be decided by health practitioners, not religious people.” 
The government's acquisition of Calvary is a step forward for public health and abortion rights in the ACT. But the decision comes after years of Labor refusing to confront the Little Company of Mary. In 2010, former Chief Minister Katy Gallagher said that the ACT government would not compulsorily acquire Calvary because it “would cause a lot of conflict”. 
The difference between then and now is the widespread public discussion around abortion sparked by the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. It is no longer tenable for the ACT government to fund a hospital that refuses to terminate pregnancies. 
Last year, 2,000 people protested for abortion rights in Canberra. Shortly afterwards, ACT Labor announced abortions would be free. A surgical abortion used to cost at least $650 in Canberra, now it costs nothing. Medical abortions cost only $30 due to subsidies through the pharmaceutical benefits scheme. 
While abortions are now free in the ACT, access remains an issue. Because of a lack of specialists, Canberrans can only access medical abortions up to nine weeks and surgical abortions up to sixteen weeks. 
The political and religious right have turned the acquisition of Calvary into their cause célèbre to push for a religious discrimination act. Peter Dutton claimed the takeover was an “attack on religion”. Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn Christopher Prowse said the takeover was an act of religious discrimination. 
The ACT Liberals ran a scare campaign in the lead-up to the takeover on 3 July, claiming the health system would see a mass exodus of workers. However, 95 percent of the hospital’s 1,800 staff will remain. Despite the Liberals’ cynical arguments, the sector is indeed under strain. Labor, in power since 2001, has systematically underfunded and understaffed Canberra’s healthcare system. Consequently, the ACT has the country's longest emergency department wait times. 
Free abortions and the acquisition of Calvary are two important steps forward against the bigoted practices of the religious right. But much more needs to be done to improve the quality of healthcare in the ACT.

CPSU member

ACT government’s acquisition of Calvary Public Hospital is a win for abortion rights

A parliamentary inquiry into reproductive healthcare has concluded that access to abortion remains a “postcode lottery”. Yet the federal Labor government is refusing to make sure that public hospitals provide abortion services. 
Despite calls from medical practitioners for abortion to be made universally accessible, Health Minister Mark Butler has ruled out any return to Labor’s 2019 position, which promised to provide abortion services in all hospitals. 
“That was a policy at an election some time ago. It’s not our policy now”, Butler told a press conference in late June.
Abortion in Australia remains inaccessible and unaffordable. Sixty percent of abortions in NSW are surgical, yet according to the most recent data from NSW Health only 0.7 percent are performed in public hospitals. Decriminalisation over the last few decades has not resulted in free, widespread, easy to access services. Years on from decriminalisation in NSW, the two public hospitals that perform abortions continue to turn women away, including those seeking help for complications from medical (via pills) abortions. 
“It should be free and safe for everyone, no matter where you live”, Jess Scott Hayes told the Sydney Morning Herald in March. Jess had spent $700 and waited weeks in a state of limbo trying to find a clinic that would terminate her unwanted pregnancy.
Simplified access to medical abortions was one of the key recommendations of the parliamentary inquiry the Greens initiated after the overturning of the Roe vs Wade decision. This decision by the US Supreme Court, in June 2022, overturned abortion rights which had been enshrined since the 1970s. 
A second option is via abortion pills. The pills are cheaper, viable for pregnancies up to nine weeks and can be performed at home. Only 10 percent of GPs and pharmacists in Australia, however, are licensed to prescribe the pills. Abortion accessibility will improve somewhat from August 1 with the decision by the Therapeutic Goods Association to remove additional certification requirements needed for licensing. 
In the United Kingdom, the proportion of women opting for the abortion pill has increased to nearly 90 percent in the last decade. But the decision is often related to cost, rather than preference or health considerations.
Ultimately however, Australian Labor, governing federally and in all states except Tasmania, is responsible for the limited access to abortion. Surgical abortions should be freely available, both within and outside the nine-week period. 
Women should have the right to whatever treatment is preferable to them without financial or geographical barriers—barriers that could be alleviated immediately by the federal government.

Abortion rights rally in Adelaide

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

Equal pay: the solution is hiding in plain sight

Cops should never have been invited to Mardi Gras

Westmead Children’s Hospital publishes anti-trans research

The Barbie movie—how we were told to stop worrying and love the doll

NSW government pushing a new religious discrimination bill

The political right isn’t interested in child welfare

ACT government’s acquisition of Calvary Public Hospital is a win for abortion rights

Labor refuses to act on public hospital abortions

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