Queer Theory, the Ultimate Hypocrisy
Sandra Pertot, Sep 28 2026
What is gender? The High Court has decided that by relying on the definition that a woman is an adult female human, Sall Grover discriminated against a transwoman who is not an adult female but is a woman because he says he is.
This makes it clear that under the Australian Sex Discrimination Act, a person’s self-declared gender is a protected characteristic, but a person’s biological sex isn’t: translated, this means that a trait that can be observed and agreed upon by individuals with even a limited biological knowledge isn’t accepted as a fact, while a person’s unobservable “internal sense” of their gender becomes the only criteria needed to claim legal protection from any perceived discrimination.
Note: my internal sense of being a woman because I am an adult female human prohibits me from referring to a person born male as “she” or “her”, to have to do so would cause me significant distress.
Roxannne Tickle’s claim to be a woman is just one of a long list of newly created gender identities. Apart from transwoman and transman, these are the most common gender identities:
♦ Non-Binary Individuals whose gender identity does not fit strictly into the binary of solely “man” or “woman”. This group comprises about a third of the adult transgender community, with the choice “sub identities”.
♦ Genderfluid: People whose gender expression or identity shifts and changes over time rather than staying fixed.
♦ Agender: People who feel they have no specific gender or describe themselves as gender-neutral.
♦ Bigender: People who experience two distinct gender identities, either at the same time or alternating
Overall there are, apparently, upward of 70 separate gender identities to choose from. One of my favourites is
Ambigender:Having two specific gender identities simultaneously without any fluidity or fluctuations.
How did we get here?The cynic in me speculates that as female issues of inequality were addressed and largely resolved in the Western world by second wave feminism of the 1960-70s, the academics who service the departments of Gender Studies in tertiary institutions were left with nothing controversial to trade on, so they had to come up with a new area related to gender and/or sexuality to justify their existence.
The malleability of gender roles provided the perfect solution. Throughout history there have been individuals, female and male, who for one reason or another wanted to live in the gender role of the other sex. Importantly, from my work with male to female transsexuals in past decades, it is clear that these individuals did not believe they literally became the other sex/gender, despite sex-reassignment surgery. Disregarding this historical evidence, Gender Studies departments have been revitalised by promoting the new theory of intersectional feminism which includes the position that any man who claims to be a woman is a woman.
The author of Transgender History, Susan Stryker, a professor emerita of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona, outlines the shift in academic direction to issues of gender rather than sex discrimination, and gives a clue to how modern gender theory became so influential.
There rest is here.