Is Australia worse than UK for 'woke' agenda

We have it all, though. Not just unisex. All the shopping malls and public buildings have the lot. So do the public conveniences in the street at this stage.

I’ve had the dubious privilege of looking into toilet rules for a commercial renovation. It’s covered by the Australian building code, which is legally binding. It doesn’t vary by state.

Most facilities of any scale have to have single sex provision. Unisex facilities, including accessible toilets for people with disabilities, have to be enclosed cubicles with their own hand washing facilities.

You wouldn’t know this if you relied on a diversity consultancy to tell you what to do, but builders and architects know this.

There is a load of crap on here about Australia. As for the rubbish about toilets in Victoria, welI I have lived here 50 years and I can tell you it just is not true. There are some unisex toilets but most are still Male and Female. As for ‘ woke’ it is not a word used here. We have a left wing government, bordering on a dictatorship in the state but we don’t hear much about gender inequality or trans people or anything much of that sort. It is all about a stupid referendum designed to divide everyone and cause problems with our First Nations people.

For me it is a belief system about fairness. It is not fair for women not to have their own safe spaces. Nor is it fair for First Nations people to be ignored in the Australian constitution and unheard in policy matters. Nor is it fair for refugees and asylum seekers to be treated punitively. Nor is it fair for women to endure daily misogyny and escalating family violence.

I think you have to consider gender ideology as part of the larger field of identity politics, and I guess what you could call ideological progressivism, which is a kind of quasi-religious, but secular, faith based belief system, combined with politics.

Many of the mainly English speaking former colonies seem to have embraced that kind of thinking wholesale. Gender ideology is just part of that. It fits within the progressive framework.

Why so many of these places took so much to that belief system is a really interesting question.

‘Pauline Hanson’ and ‘good woman’ in the same sentence just shows how little people opining on the topic even know….

Pauline Hanson is a horrible racist. Moria Deeming is anti-choice. She believes women with unwanted or medically unviable pregnancies should pray. I agree with the above poster who said you can be gender critical without being anti-woman. Holly Lawford Smith is a good example of a gender critical feminist here, she’s from NZ but she lives and works here.

Germaine has lived a lot of her life in the two countries. She owned a house and on some land in Australia for years and spent a lot of time there. I think it became her home in later years. She’s spoke of leaving the stultifying oppression of the Australian suburbs for England back in the late 60s and I can understand this. I saw her interviewed only recently and she’s now living in a retirement home in Australian suburbia snd I think that makes her quite sad (even though suburbia has changed a lot in most places and is no longer so conforming - thank god for multiculturalism). She refers to being a resident of the retirement home as being an ‘inmate.’ It was hard to see this wild spirit feeling so restricted.

Sorry, when their son, Barry

And let’s face it, transwomen are inevitably straight male people, so the only people they’re bothering for sex are lesbians.

So - not men’s problem. Easy for them to say TWAW - it impacts on them in no way.

Plus (and this is completely unevidenced) it doesn't impact me so why would I give a fuck? They may change their minds when Barry says they are now Sheila.

That’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of that!

@Hippyhippybake

The closest I can fathom is that the blokishness and TWAW are linked thus:

"Any bloke who would willingly degrade himself by calling himself a woman can't be a real man, and is therefore a woman"

It comes from a place of über-masculinity

@JanesLittleGirl I agree with you on this, I find the combination of Aussie blokeishness and the embrace of TWAW very confusing!!

Nonetheless.

It was because counties like NZ and Australia led the way and did something profoundly radical, i.e. giving women the vote, that countries like the UK followed.

My issue was with the person who said we ‘don’t have the same strength of connection to feminism’ as the UK. Hardly.

You might have misunderstood me. I'm not saying that Australian men are universally unpleasant. I am trying to match a picture of unquestioning TWAW with my admittedly small experience. Is it that both are true?

Sorry, I have lived and worked in both the UK and Australia and in my experience Australia is far more sexist. Just look at the treatment of Julia Gillard, nothing like that happened to any of Britain’s three female prime ministers.

And I don’t believe the way self ID was introduced would happen in England either.

And I can tell you a few not pretty things about my experience working with British men….

That really doesn’t negate the point.

Women had suffrage in New Zealand and Australia a long time before the UK. We have deeply held feminist beliefs that go a long way back.

New Zealand - probably more so than Australia - is socially progressive, which means we’ve fallen down the gender rabbit hole hook, line and sinker.

Are there two Australias? I have never been to Australia so my view has been formed by the half dozen male Australians that I have worked with in the UK over the last 5 years. All of them regard 'cunt' and 'mate' as interchangeable and get really defensive if you complain and they all refuse to accept that addressing someone with red hair as 'Ranga' could be offensive.

I realise how confusing that is.

what I mean is that Germaine was still active in Australia even though she might have been focused on UK. I remember her on different media in Australia and I was surprised when I first saw her on Uk media when I moved to UK and i have been going back and forth between UK and Australia and she is still around. Not as active as in the past obviously.

And yet I very much remember her being active in Australia throughout time.

She was still featured on media even when she was focused over here.

@sadaboutmycat your response pretty much sums up everything awful about wokensss - ‘if you don’t agree with me then you are wrong and need to look at yourself.’ People form views and opinions based on their life experiences. Those may or may not be the same as yours.

Germaine Greer’s academic career was mostly in Europe.

Yep. South Australia was 1895. Federal election voting was 1902 and the rest of the states allowed state level voting and candidacy by 1908.

Considering how vocal Germaine is, I am surprised people forget her. And Sheila Jeffries was prominent in my mind in the 90s and 00s in Australia being there at Uni of Melbourne.

Two very strong and powerful voices.