Daughters and Destroyers

The daughters of second-wave feminism who use the power of state institutions to dismantle women's sex-based rights in Australia.

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.

The fight for women’s sex-based rights in Australia

Second-wave feminism (1960s - 1990s) saw the fight for women to be recognised as a political class that required sex-specific protections - domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centres, single-sex spaces and services, equal pay and increased participation in sports and public life.

When Gillard et al were cutting their teeth on their youthful left-wing activism, the word “woman” unambiguously meant adult human female rooted in biological sex and the shared material realities of female bodies - menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and vulnerability to male sexual violence.

By the 2010s women in the Labor political establishment began treating “woman” as a movable, inclusion-defined category. The women who once said - “keep men out of women’s refuges to protect women,” now say, “it’s violence to keep men out if they say they are women” and “woman” is a construct and defining “women” in terms of biology is oppression.” The domestic violence shelter is now mixed-sex, the shortlist half male, the rape-crisis hotline staffed by people with beards and anyone who objects is ‘transphobic’ or ‘far right’.

Given the incontrovertible biological and psychosocial differences between men and women, gender ideology is at root a linguistic Ponzi scheme that survives by avoiding meaningful debate, critique and analysis.

Gillard et al have become sophists who rely on an array of rhetorical devices: circular definitions, word games, subjective truth claims, spell words, slogans, reification, logical fallacies and, when all else fails - stonewalling, censorship and threats.

These women have their own rhetorical devices - from Gillard’s claims of gendered souls, Cody’s legalistic evasions, Mostyn’s glitter words, Allan’s DARVO (deny, attack and reverse the victim and offender) and Telfer’s framing of the medicalisation of children as ‘life-changing’ and ‘miraculous’.

Here are some prime examples of Australia’s gender girl bosses promoting a misogynistic ideology while refusing to answer a single question while gaslighting and stonewalling those who dare question them.

Julia Gillard - Sophist-in-Chief

Julia Gillard became politically active at university and rose through the Labor ranks to become Australia’s first female prime minister from 2010 to 2013. The Gillard government set up a 12-year $3.9 billion federal initiative to expand women-only shelters and crisis centres in recognition of women’s unique needs for sex-based protections.

And yet – the Gillard government also amended Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) to remove protections that were based on the concepts, “man”, “woman,” and “sex” and replaced them with protections based on “gender identity.”

With the stroke of a pen, the SDA no longer protected those who bleed, gestate and lactate and opened the door of every single women-only shelter, change room, toilet, sports team and prison cell to any man who claim to be a woman.

At a public event on women’s advancement in Adelaide on August 25, 2023, Gillard responded to a question from women’s rights activist, Biddy O’Loughlin who asked her: “What is a woman?” and whether she agreed with statements that trans women are women and that some women can have a penis.

Gillard’s four and a half minute, rambling response included the following:

“There are a number of people who genuinely believe that they are trapped in the wrong body and they want to be recognised as the gender their mind and soul have always told them that they are. [my italics] And that doesn’t go one way - it goes both ways you know, people who have transitioned from being men to being women and women who have transitioned to being men and I think we’ve just gotta say, like we want to show everybody else in the community love, inclusion and respect.”

It’s hard to square Gillard’s response given her famous misogyny speech in Parliament in 2013 where she makes clear its biological and material conditions that shape women’s lives. Now Gillard proposes a radical mind/body dualism in which an immutable ‘gender essence’ and not human bodies that define one as male or female.

Gillard’s response implies that to even ask the question is ‘hateful’, ‘unkind’, ‘exclusionary’ and ‘disrespectful.’ She accuses women raising concerns about males in female spaces, services, and sports of the same motivations she once attributed to men in her misogyny speech.

Anna Cody the Enforcer-in-Chief

As Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody is gender ideology’s Enforcer-in-Chief and uses the power of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to advance self-ID at the expense of sex-based protections for women.

Under Cody’s leadership, the AHRC acts as amicus curiae (friend of the court) against women like Sall Grover who is currently seeking to restore women’s sex-based rights in the 2025 Federal Court appeal case - Giggle v Tickle.

The UN Special Rapporteur, Reem Alsalem provided a submission in support of Giggle’s legal defence in which she stated that the word “woman” in the UN convention - CEDAW refers to biological women and protects sex-based rights.

Following Alsalem’s intervention, Cody secretly lobbied to block her reappointment and in an email to Leanne Smith, CEO of the AHRC Cody complained about Alsalem’s “intervention on issues of ‘trans women’ and their rights, and her interpretation of CEDAW to exclude trans women.”

Cody’s active opposition to women’s sex-based rights are on full display in this exchange with Liberal Senator Leah Blyth at a Senate hearing in October 2025:

Blyth: Do you understand what a biological man is?

Cody: I’m not a medical expert; I’m a human rights advocate.

Blyth: Do you accept that there are clear criteria that exist to distinguish between male and female?

Cody: The Sex Discrimination Act does not define man or woman. It has an inclusive definition of women that includes all women – First Nations women, women from culturally and racially marginalised backgrounds, trans women, lesbians, and women with disability.

Blyth: What do you think a man is?

Cody: All the same definitions I’ve just given in relation to women: First Nations men, men with disability, culturally and racially marginalised men, gay men, and trans men.

Blyth: Do you recognise that there are biological men and women?

Cody: As I said previously, Senator, I’m not a medical expert.

Blyth: So you’re saying you have to be a medical expert to recognise the difference between a biological man and a woman? Only medical experts can do that?

Cody: As I said, my role is to uphold the Sex Discrimination Act. It is not defined what a man is and what a woman is within the Sex Discrimination Act.

Blyth: How can you, as Sex Discrimination Commissioner, advocate and stand up for the equality of women if, under your own evidence here today, anyone can be a woman? How do you protect and advocate for something you can’t define?

Cody simply refused to answer.

Sam Mostyn - What’s a few broken bones?

Sam Mostyn, Australia’s Governor-General was a keen athlete at school and played top women’s hockey and cricket at university. Mostyn was a passionate advocate for women’s inclusion in sport from grassroots to elite leagues and spoke about how competitive sport shaped her leadership skills in public life.

In July 2024, Sam Mostyn accepted the role as patron of Equality Australia (EA) a leading LGBTIQ+ group that advocates to allow trans identified men access to women’s sporting competitions spaces and services.

How could Mostyn not know about the young NSW female football player whose leg was broken in two places after being tackled from behind by a trans-identified male player, Rav Lumsden?

Following this incident Lumsden went on to join another women’s football team, the Flying Bats that now includes five trans-identified male players. The NSW women’s teams who opposed playing the Flying Bats have been threatened with disciplinary action under AHRC-inspired sporting policies that encourage participation based on ‘gender identity’.

The recent UN report - Violence Against Women and Girls in Sports counted over 600 female athletes that lost more than 890 medals in more than 400 competitions across 29 sports to trans-identified male athletes. Despite the controversies in the 2024 Paris Olympics and the subsequent new rules put in place by the International Olympic Committee to insist on sex-testing prior to athletes being accepted into women’s sports, Mostyn put out the following statement on her appointment as patron of Equality Australia:

“It’s a privilege to celebrate diverse LGBTIQ+ communities, to honour your strength and resilience, to recognise your vital contribution... and as patron to support Equality Australia in bringing an end to discrimination and injustice.”

And: “We all shine the brightest when we are united.”

Mostyn employs Hollywood glitter words to frame concern about women’s safety as discriminatory and to insist on the unconditional acceptance of men in women’s sport. Her use of the acronym LGBTQi+ is an attempt to muddy the waters as it’s ‘identities’ that play sport not bodies - of which there are only two types - male and female.

The NSW woman who can no longer play football due to her injury and the female footballers threatened with disciplinary action may take comfort from the U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright who said:

“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Jacinta Allan – Paramoraliser-in-Chief

Having spent 19 years at the centre of Labor politics, Jacinta Allan is the current Victorian State Premier. Allan leads a government on a mission to impose gender identity ideology on Victorians by means of a top-down ‘human rights’ legislative and policy framework.

Labor policies now include certificated sex change (self-ID), gender identity education as part of the State’s Respectful Relationship schools’ program, taxpayer-funded advertising and PR campaigns, a Commissioner for LGBTQi+ rights and an ‘affirmation-only’ medical model at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH).

At a press conference on 13 August 2025, reporter Rachel Baxendale from The Australian newspaper asked Allan if the secret school’s policy to ‘affirm’ a child’s chosen gender identity might result in a “school-to-clinic pipeline” toward irreversible medical treatment for children. Allan responded by saying:

“That’s just nonsense. It’s disgraceful nonsense. Seriously, this sort of ongoing attack on a program that is making a difference in kids’ lives just should be stopped. It’ disgraceful reporting, it’s hurtful. When you consider that transgender kids are 15 times more likely to kill themselves, we should be supporting them. The Australian needs to stop this ongoing campaign because it’s hurtful and harmful.”

Allan’s response is pure political theatre - feigning outrage that anyone could doubt that children should be able to socially transition at school without parental knowledge or permission.

This is pure DARVO where she denies there is a legitimate debate (this is settled); attacks and denigrates parents and journalists as “disgraceful” and “hurtful”; and reverses victim and offender; “you’re endangering vulnerable transgender kids by even questioning this policy.”

Allan plays Mother Protector to justify the social transitioning of vulnerable children under the moral code of “kindness” and frames dissent, concern and questioning as tantamount to child homicide.

Allan’s source for the ‘suicide’ claim was from the activist LGBTIQ+ Health Australia that has been roundly debunked by peer-reviewed studies in the U.K., Europe and the U.S.

Michelle Telfer – Meat Lego Medicine

When paediatric endocrinologist, Professor Garry Warne retired from his role as head of the gender clinic at the RCH, paediatrician, Michelle Telfer “jumped” at the offer to head up the clinic in 2012 and said she was motivated to make “affirming care” accessible despite having no experience of gender medicine. (The medical model recommended in the U.K the U.S. and Europe following evidence-based reviews is “watchful waiting” that includes a holistic, biopsychosocial treatment plan that allows children to have an open future as they resolve their gender dysphoria).

While the RCH gender clinic saw a cumulative total of 39 patients from 2003 to 2012, under Telfer’s direction the clinic has witnessed a forty to seventy-fold increase over a decade with a cumulative total of 1,200 patients. The clinic sees children from three years old.

Telfer was interviewed by U.K. trans activist Dr. Helen Webberley on the podcast Gender GP where she spoke about her commitment to an ‘affirmation-only’ medical model:

“The evidence also really well documents the damage that is done with either denial of that care or even in worst case scenario, an active denial, or conversion-type response in terms of not providing that care. I was really struck by the young people I was seeing and anecdotally how strong the affirmative stance was in terms of producing really good outcomes at an individual level. You could see the power of allowing the young person to express who they are and supporting them in being who they know themselves to be.

“You could see in front of your eyes the way the young person could thrive and bloom …. really eye opening and there aren’t that many areas of medicine that you can see that difference so profoundly especially in terms of the work that we do in talking to young people but this was an area I could feel how rewarding it was to just support young people to be themselves.”

In a 2023 judgement by Justice Andrew Strum in the Family Court Strum criticized Telfer noting that she acted more as an ‘advocate for transgender rights’, adopted an “overly binary” and “unquestioning” approach to gender affirmation, dismissed clinical concerns and equated criticism of affirmation-only models to “Nazi-like oppression”, which the judge said “cheapened the suffering of victims of Nazism.”

Helen Webberley was suspended for misconduct by the U.K’s General Medical Council and no longer has a licence to practise medicine.

Webberley has set up a global telemedicine platform called GenderGP that is registered in Singapore to sell hormones to young people. At present GenderGP has around 10,000 patients who are charged a $250 (US) set-up fee followed by a $30 monthly fee for a minimum of six months.

Second wave feminism hijacked

When Simone de Beavoir 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.

“We cannot escape truthful reality - one of the reasons we fend off truth and reality so defensively is that we seek often desperately to preserve our worldview intact. For there is nothing dearer to us than the way in which we see the world, in fact we prefer our worldview to the world itself and that dearness is all the more greater amongst intellectuals, who, if they find themselves obliged to change their outlook may have to reverse all that they have hitherto said and even to consider the harmful effects of what they have said.”

Theodore Dalrymple