[Posted to Medium 3rd June 2019].Dear Board of Directors,I’m a Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Australia. My account — @aytchellesse — was the most recent in a long line of permanent suspensions for gender critical women, usually for very trivial things like referring to biological sex, or giving dictionary definitions of "lesbian"…

[Posted to Medium 7th June 2019].About a week ago, I started wondering: what would a list of demands for women look like, if contemporary feminism wasn’t so thoroughly co-opted by the idea that it must include everyone and fight every struggle? I put an initial list (incorporating 10 items from a thread by Alessandra…

[Posted to Medium 16th June 2019].I’ve been giving talks lately on what I see as a conflict of interest between women’s rights and trans rights, and the first thing I’ve been doing in all of them is to stress the heterogeneity within the class of transwomen. I focus on transwomen rather than transmen because…

[Posted to Medium 21st June 2019].In a guest post at Philip Goff’s blog Conscience and Consciousness, Professor Sophie Grace Chappell from the Open University, UK made the case[1] that ‘transwomen are to women as adoptive parents are to parents’. Some of my colleagues across the discipline of Philosophy have been very impressed with this…

[Posted to Medium 1st July 2019].The week before last, the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2019 was introduced to the Victorian Parliament. The Bill proposes an amendment to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1996, allowing people to alter their sex in the birth register through a statutory declaration, and to…

[Posted to Medium 12th July 2019].[Clockwise from top: transgender YouTuber Kat Blaque; transgender model Munroe Bergdorf; transgender writer Julia Serano; trans student officer Jess Bradley; trans rights activist Danielle Muscato; and an actual Glitterbeard].In Philosophy, there’s a well-known problem called the “Sorites paradox”[1]. The usual example given to explain it is a heap…

[Posted to Medium 9th August 2019].[This is the text of a short talk I gave at a public event ‘The Future of Sex-Based Rights’, held at the University of Melbourne on the 8th of August 2019. I will post a longer essay giving the expanded version of this argument separately].Some of the other…

[Posted to Medium 9th August 2019].The current legal understanding of sex in Victoria (Australia) is either of: biological sex, as observed at birth and recorded in the birth register, or, what we can call ‘altered’ sex, as obtained by a change to the birth register on the basis of having had sex reassignment surgery,…

[Posted to Medium 14th August 2019].An Open Letter[1] signed by 46 academics (14 from my own institution, the University of Melbourne) and aiming for 800 further signatories has gone up on the Equality Australia website (these guys were also the host of the recent letter[2] attempting to have the Victorian Women’s Guild’s public event…

[Posted to Medium 24th August 2019].Earlier this week, The Conversation published a piece[1] by some of my colleagues at the University of Melbourne, arguing in support of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2019[2] (hereafter ‘the bill’). This is a reply to that piece.The title. The bill doesn’t change gender on…

[Posted to Medium 29th August 2019].[This is a copy of my recent thread for Twitter, covering the debate in the Upper House over the Victorian Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2019. I’ve reorganized it so it tracks the right times and edited lightly to remove confusing time references (for Twitter I started…

(Posted to Medium 13th October 2019).If Janice Raymond’s much-maligned (1979) book The Transsexual Empire could be summed up in a single sentence, I think that sentence would be: gender dissatisfaction is a social problem, not an individual problem. Social problems should be treated with progressive social reform, not with the medicalisation of individuals. When…

[Posted to Medium 16th November 2019].[This is the text of my talk from the Speak Up For Women NZ event Feminism 2020, held on the 15th of November 2019 at Parliament in Wellington. The video is here].What is a woman? Is there a difference between being a woman and being female? If there…

[Posted to Medium 5th December 2019. This is a parody of this[1] piece by Ray Briggs].A DisclaimerI’m not the official spokesperson for women. I did put myself up for election, but sadly I got no votes. You should be suspicious of anyone, woman or not, who claims to be giving you the woman…

[Posted to Medium 20th December 2019].The Racial and Religious Tolerance Amendment Bill 2019 proposes to extend the protections against vilification currently extended to race and religion to a further five attributes, namely a) gender, b) disability, c) sexual orientation, d) gender identity, and e) sex characteristics. I oppose the bill in its current form…

[Posted to Medium 12th March 2020].[This is the text of my opening statement, presented at 12.45pm on the 12th of March 2020. The transcript is here].I’m going to focus on the proposed protected attributes in the Racial and Religious Tolerance Amendment Bill 2019. I’ll have nothing to say about sexual orientation and disability,…

[Posted to Medium 21st April 2020].So you’ve been publicly accused of ‘transphobia’ / called a ‘transphobe’. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one! There’s J.K. Rowling[1], accused of transphobia for saying that women shouldn’t be fired for saying sex is real; there’s Debbie Hayton[2], a transwoman accused of transphobia for wearing a t-shirt saying…

[Posted to Medium 12th May 2020. This essay was commissioned for the Australian Book Review, although for mysterious reasons they did not end up publishing it].Gay. Women. Race. Trans. These are the names of the four substantive chapters of Doug Murray’s new book, The Madness of Crowds. In each of the chapters, Murray talks…

[Posted to Medium May 12th 2020].As will be familiar to anyone who is likely to be reading this, ‘transsexualism’ as it was understood in the past has undergone a rapid rebranding as ‘transgender’-ism, gathering a whole lot of new recruits along the way. The aim of public health officials and policy makers today is…

Image credit: Gizmodo Australia[Published to Medium 1st October 2020. A version of this essay was also published to the BroadAgenda blog on October 22nd, 2020.]Troubled Blood, the fifth novel in JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, has been released — infuriating activists online and leading to the burning of Rowling’s books and the trending of…