Left Right Centre

LRC 90.5

1. What do you think about Auspol federal elections 2022’s latest politicisation on the participation of trans women in sports? 2. Has female empowerment or liberation been achieved or propelled forward by any female South Aussie politician? If not, can you provide another example? 3. Does the university’s campaign of management cuts to the arts faculty mean an incentivisation of women in stem? What does that mean for women’s academic contribution for both science and arts?

Socialist Alternative | ANNA NGUYEN, KALESH GOVENDER 1. Katherine Deves’ transphobia is appalling. In February, Deves helped develop a bill to exclude trans athletes from women’s sports. She has claimed that young girls would face sexual predation if sports admitted trans players. Deves’ comments are outrageous and aim to normalise the discrimination experienced by transgender people. Trans women have every right to participate in women’s sport. The Liberals’ latest bigoted campaign is unsurprising. Capitalism relies on these oppressions to keep us divided and underconfident. Like the Religious Discrimination

Bill, this is part and parcel of a broader attempt to wind back progressive sentiment that exists around LGBTI+ reforms and marriage equality. It’s important that the left cede no ground to

2. Women’s liberation has always been propelled forward outside of parliament. Mary Lee (1821-1909) was a suffragist and trade unionist who helped establish the influential Women’s Suffrage League. The suffrage movement fought relentlessly and made South Australian women some of the first in the world to gain the vote.

Lee also advocated for the formation of female trades unions as many women worked in unregulated sweatshop conditions. She established SA’s first Working Women’s Trades Union to fight for better conditions for working women. Lee linked the political demands for women’s suffrage with the economic fight of working women in factories.

Lee was asked to stand for parliament but declined. She saw the importance of workplaces as institutions of collective political struggle - one that extended far beyond parliament. 3. Cuts to the Arts will not ‘incentivise’ women to enter STEM. They merely limit options for choosing to study something we enjoy. We are against management’s cuts because they are unnecessary austerity measures carried out by corporate-minded executives on exorbitant salaries. Their restructures and cuts will exacerbate the already-rampant casualisation and precarious employment for a predominantly female workforce. The livelihoods of staff across faculties are at constant risk because the university wants to increase its profits. There has been no transfer of resources from Arts to ECMS. In reality, there have been cutbacks across the board, including at least 28 job losses in ECMS and Sciences.

1. The decision of both major parties to use transgender people as a political football to score cheap second preferences off One Nation voters was as regrettable as it was abominable. We should be completely frank on this topic: the argument was never about transgender participation in sports, but about transgender identities and their place in the fabric of Australian society. It’s gladdening to know that the Coalition’s attempts to use transgender identities as a wedge to retain government failed as spectacularly as it did. However, we cannot give our incoming prime minister a free pass for his transphobic comments in the ‘No Woking Class Hero’ News Corp article published before the election. Greens Club | BUSBY CAVANAGH, CAITLIN BATTYE, ANNIKA STEWART (in order of response)

In his victory speech, Albanese promised his government would promote unity rather than fear and division. With our deluge of new Greens representatives, you can be assured we will keep him honest on that promise.

2. I don’t particularly prescribe to the Great Man Theory (or…well…Great Woman Theory). Great strides in feminism cannot be attributed to or achieved by any one woman, and are rather the result of a strong grassroots movement of women. That being said, the Greens are proud to boast many women representatives, both in South Australia and across the country, who uphold feminist and progressive values and have been a part of larger movements to fight for these values. One example of such a politician in SA is Tammy Franks MLC, who has used her position in Parliament to help fight for important steps for women such as the decriminalisation of abortion and the registration of social workers, and is currently fighting for the decriminalisation of sex work. The politicians who, like Tammy, are part of the fight for liberation, cannot be singled out as the person who achieved female empowerment; they are part of a complex machine of great women supporting one another in the struggle against the patriarchy, and their efforts should be applauded as part of that collective. 3. The reality is that women aren’t pushed out of STEM because arts degrees are much better, they’re pushed out of STEM because they’ve heard, or worse yet lived, the horror stories; being talked down to, belittled, and mansplained to by peers and mentors. If educational institutions really cared about advocating for more women in STEM, they would be tackling these issues instead. Don’t be fooled: the choice to defund arts faculties has nothing to do with women’s rights and everything to do with corporate greed. The university makes more return on investment when it pumps out engineers because weapons and mining companies cash up our university by bribing the major political parties to increase defence research contracts for them to fight over. At the end of the day, cuts to arts faculties expose how universities value winning defence contracts over a fair education system.

Labor Club| STEPH MADIGAN

1. Liberal senator Claire Chandler’s bill seeking to ban trans women from women’s sport is a shameless example of astroturfing and the import of toxic American identity politics. The idea of federal Parliament making mandates in this domain is ludicrous. Also, sport researchers found that the overwhelming majority of female athletes support the inclusion of trans people! Yet we still have marginalised bodies being used as the thin edge of a wedge against the LGBT+ movement. The Liberals are polling badly and hoping that ‘trans-baiting’ will bring conservative voters

2. SA’s distinct feminist

narrative lies in a succession of Australian ‘firsts’: first to grant suffrage, first to offer Women’s Studies at university, first to criminalise marital rape et cetera. I’m so grateful for the progress made by early feminists like Molly Byrne (first SA female parliamentarian) but I’m skeptical that liberation has been achieved. ‘Empowerment’ virtually always turns out to be white, middle-class women gaining parity with white men, and hoping that equality will ‘trickle down’ to the rest. Mainstream politics calls upon women to engage in constant double think. It makes proud lesbian women stand in the way of equal marriage, for example. It enforces a dichotomy between the hated, independent, ‘unassimilated’ woman, and the upwardly-mobile Token Woman.

3. It is impossible to calculate the mass psychological damage done to women by centuries of tiptoeing around male egos; of being constantly aware of your potential yet unable to explore it. That’s why, as a modern woman, you can never be overeducated. Any cuts made to university courses disproportionately affect women graduates and endangers all progress made to the culture within professions. Empowering women to contribute to any field they choose, science or art, is a necessary step in ending the Great Silence of women throughout history. party Member (Liberal Club failed to respond)

1. Let it be said that Katherine Deves (Liberal for Warringah, NSW) has made unacceptable remarks which deny the legitimacy of trans and intersex identities. Similarly, Claire Chandler (Liberal Senator for Tasmania)— who evoked this ‘politicisation’ via the proposed Save Women’s Sport Bill—seems fundamentally guided by the assumption that trans women are not women at all.

2. I am a resident of Boothby and a few things come to mind. In 2015, Nicole Flint, MP published Gender and Politics, alongside Nick Carter: an investigation of Parliament archives, documenting the history of female representation in Australian government, as well as identifying the needs for targeted intervention in achieving equity in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Dr Rachel Swift, who is contesting the Liberal Boothby seat in place of Miss Flint, is an inspiring woman who champions female empowerment. A Rhodes Scholar with a Doctorate in Clinical Medicine, she has worked across East Africa (as a part of the Clinton Health Access Initiative) supporting and researching maternal and childhood nutrition. My humanistic ethic forces me to part from my constituents in this area. Trans rights are human rights. Trans women are women.

This said, I want to address your question a little closer. The relationship between the binary categories of sport (men’s games, women’s games) and the development of intersex policy is innately political and, in my opinion, completely avoiding the richest potential of this debate. It seems unusual to me that trans rights have become fundamentally invested in reaffirming the hegemonic male-female binaries in so many cultural domains, not least of all athletics. Perhaps it is worth reviewing our investment into these historically acclimated sport’s categories themselves.

Ultimately, sport may be the truest global theatre. This is not a domestic issue. Let us turn to the global discourse for this global issue – and keep Australian politics focused on the real issues at hand.

3. I would not be inclined to put it that way: rather, it seems to incentivise keeping women out of the Arts. As someone who hopes to make a career in the Arts, it is difficult to frame these cuts as anything but negative.