I was pregnant, single and in the Arts. I probably should have kept my head down. But once the penny dropped on what was happening, I had to voice my concern on trans ideology.

It was late 2020 when YouTube suggested I watch a podcast titled, ‘Trans Women Aren’t Women’. It was a jolt to read. I wasn’t supposed to say Trans Women Aren’t Women. I was supposed to believe that trans women are women.

The provocatively titled episode of Triggernometry stared at me for several days before I finally watched it. At the time of writing this article, it has amassed over one million views.

The guest was Posie Parker, also known as Kellie-Jay Keen. Her insistence on the truth was spellbreaking. Thank goodness for brave people. I saw that Parker was absolutely right to reject trans ideology.

The ‘Trans Women Are Women’ mantra is effective in preventing people from thinking critically about this. That, and the fact that anyone who dares to question it will be intimidated into silence. As Posie says in the podcast, ‘If I’m not allowed to talk about this, then this is obviously very serious and I need to talk about it as much as I possibly can.’

In the eighteen months since watching the podcast I have started talking about it, too. Perhaps it’s because I’m more aware of it, but it seems like there are growing number of people willing to admit they are skeptical of babies being born in the wrong bodies and men who insist that they are literally women.

I have girlfriends who thank me for posting articles on this issue. Some of them admit that they are too scared to speak up. They are right to be afraid. Women like Posie Parker, JK Rowling, Maya Forstater, Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Megan Murphy and many more are all fighting for women who can’t speak up, and encouraging those who can.

Since coming out as pro-woman, for want of a better label, I’ve been asked things like, Why do you care so much? Why can’t you just let them be? What’s it to you?

It’s heartbreaking. Why can’t I just let men obliterate women in sports? Why can’t I just let men self-identify as women to get into women’s prisons and shelters? Why can’t I ignore the fact that it’s cruel to tell gender non-conforming children that they were born in the wrong body? Why can’t I just go along with a lie?

By the way, you can call me anything you like. Gender critical, TERF, bigot. I don’t mind.

The first time I posted anything, I simply took a photo of some stickers I’d bought from Parker’s store, www.standingforwomen.com. The stickers read ‘I heart JK Rowling’. It is telling how worried I was to post a photo of some stickers but once Parker broke my brain with the truth, I had to stand up for women, too. Courage begets courage. Not offending some delusional blokes in dresses was far less important than spreading the word for women and children. I always felt a little nervous, and the posts didn’t get many ‘likes’, but no backlash came.

Then, weeks after giving birth, I received a message about my bigotry from an old friend. It was awful that she thought I was such a bad person she was compelled to tell me. Having had a daughter, and swimming in a sea of post-natal hormones, I reacted fiercely by posting more stories, more memes, more accounts of detransitioners. All expose this movement for what it is: a misogynistic worldwide medical experiment.

That did not go well. I found myself at the bottom of a social media pile on, and my real world fell apart. I deleted Facebook and left town with my baby. But it doesn’t matter where you are, the trans right’s activists will find you. A trans man tried to cancel my show at the Adelaide Fringe Festival earlier this year. She implored my venue to cancel my run and publicly atone for booking a ‘violent’ transphobe.

Thankfully the complaint was dismissed and I was free to do my comedy. In places like Canada, America and the United Kingdom you can be jailed, fined or lose your children for standing up to the gender cult.

So why do I care? Because at this point I can’t not care. Putting the feelings of men over the safety of women and children is wrong. Telling children that they could have been born in the wrong body is wrong.

I firmly believe that if I had been born ten years later, I would have caught this social contagion. I was born in the late eighties and I grew into a bit of a tomboy. I loathed the thought of puberty. I started dieting at 13 to prevent getting a period. I hated my breast buds and imagined a machine that would suck the new flesh away, leaving me with a flat chest forever. I even wished I had been born a boy.

But wishing you had been born a boy is very different from being told you might be a boy.

I follow a lot of gender critical thinkers and writers who articulate the danger of this movement but I keep the balance and also follow some trans rights activists. Their arguments are no doubt persuasive to very impressionable young people. Even adults are seduced by the social status points you gain in admiring the emperor’s new clothes. Who wouldn’t want to be on the side of ‘kindness?’

But it is not kind to lie to children. It is not kind to affirm delusions. My prepuberty dieting evolved into bulimia. I was convinced I was overweight when I wasn’t. Imagine if the kind thing to do was to affirm that my self-perception was correct? That I was fat. Maybe I had a fat soul? Should I have identified as obese?

What the ‘be kind’ brigade omits from their message is the ‘or else’. The kindness of these people is conditional on your total fealty to the church of crazy. If you question anything, they’ll come after you.

Thank goodness I was born in the eighties, when girls threw up their food instead of cutting off their breasts.

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