‘IDAHOBIT was hard,’ says Moira Deeming. IDAHOBIT is not a female creature from the The Lord of the Rings, it’s the acronym for the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia which is celebrated on 17 May in the Victorian parliament with much fanfare. Every Labor and Green member used the occasion to profess their support for the trans community and/or to attack Deeming or at the very least glare at her. Not a single parliamentarian defended her, she says.

Deeming is being martyred not for attacking trans people, which she has never done, but for standing up for women’s rights. Her ‘crime’ was to attend a rally called ‘Let Women Speak’ organised by Posie Parker, also known as Kellie-Jay Keen, a British women’s rights activist.

Ironically, rather than letting her speak, Deeming was damned by association when neo-Nazis gate-crashed the rally. Deeming says she thought the men, dressed in black, were members of the left-wing group Antifa, protesting the rally. They wore no insignia of any kind and only identified themselves when they gave a Nazi salute. Deeming was horrified. A member of her family was a Holocaust survivor.

Parker was demonised by the media throughout her tour of the antipodes. At a rally in Auckland she was mobbed by thousands of heckling protesters and pelted with tomato juice. J.K. Rowling was one of the few to defend Parker, tweeting that, ‘After the repellent scenes from New Zealand, in which a mob assaulted women speaking up for their rights, the Lesbian Project is being intimidated and threatened in the UK right now.’ The tweet draw attention to the fact that many lesbians, gays and feminists support women’s rights but if they do, they are branded anti-trans, cancelled and reviled.

For Victorian Liberal party opposition leader John Pesutto, Deeming’s presence at the rally was unacceptable. He assembled a dossier purporting to show that Parker and other speakers, ‘have been publicly associated with far right-wing extremist groups including neo-Nazi activists’. On this basis he called for Deeming to be expelled from the Victorian parliamentary party.

Deeming strenuously denied Pesutto’s allegations and in a compromise was initially suspended from the party for nine months. However, she called on him to publicly state that she was not associated with neo-Nazis because of the damage the allegations had done to her reputation and the safety of her family. Pesutto says that that is unnecessary because ‘nothing’ in the dossier accused Deeming of ‘being a Nazi or herself having Nazi sympathies’.

The whole unsavoury matter came to a head last Friday, after Deeming flagged possible legal action against Pesutto. Deeming, who represents the Western Metropolitan Region in the Victorian Legislative Council, was expelled from the parliamentary Liberal team after a divided vote in which more than a third of the party room voted against the motion to expel her.

Naturally, when the ABC’s Q+A decided to discuss the issue last month, it didn’t invite Deeming on to the panel. Rather, it invited Pesutto, who declined and was replaced by Victorian Liberal party president Greg Mirabella. Yet when the topic turned to Deeming, host Stan Grant called on non-binary influencer and trans-activist Deni Todorović. Todorović was only too happy to oblige but he spent the first 228 words talking about himself. starting with his pronouns – ‘they/them’ – and thanking the Q+A team for putting them in his onscreen title.

Todorović had risen to prominence weeks earlier after being announced as the newest brand ambassador for women’s swimwear label Seafolly in early March during Sydney World Pride and just before International Women’s Day. A photo of him in a lime-green bikini bottom, his beard and moustache bristling and his penis bulging through the swimsuit sparked outrage amongst women and a boycott of Seafolly.

Undaunted, he lectured his critics claiming, ‘Some women do have penises (and) some trans women don’t feel the need to have any kind of gender surgery.’

This is a major goal of transgender activists who demand the right to change their identification documents without the need for surgery or any other medical treatment.

‘She shouldn’t have been there,’ he snarled. ‘By being there, you are, by proxy, approving an anti-trans rhetoric… Stay in bed and watch Rage, doll. Like, seriously stay at home.’

Once upon a time you might have expected a ‘progressive’ program like Q+A to frown on such sexist and patronising language, but Grant didn’t bat an eyelid.

Back in the Seventies telling women to stay at home and calling them ‘dolls’ was considered sexist stereotyping and objectification. These ideas were championed by a young Germaine Greer, but these days Greer has been branded as trans-exclusionary and transphobic for arguing that undergoing sex-change surgery does not change your sex or your gender.

Of course, if a conservative man were to make the same comments as Todorović he would be excoriated. When then federal opposition leader Tony Abbott said that an emissions trading scheme would hit ‘housewives’ doing the ironing, Labor MP Yvette D’Ath was far from alone when she said the comment was ‘extremely patronising’.

As Jennifer Saul, the Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo, Canada explained in an article in the Conversation in March 2020, ‘To be a feminist, you do not have to be in support of every group of women. (To take just one example, white supremacist women don’t deserve our support.)’

These days it is not hard to be labelled a ‘white supremacist’. Queer activist Michelle Tea, the founder of Drag Queen Story Hour, based in San Francisco, stated as a fact in 2019 that ‘we live in a culture that is white supremacist, it’s ableist, it’s fat negative, it’s heteronormative’. The interviewer, Chelsea Quint, praised Tea for ‘visibly checking her privilege’ but presumably anyone who doesn’t is a fat negative, heteronormative, ableist white supremacist.

By April, Todorović decided he was comfortable using male pronouns again. ‘I am so comfortable in my own skin that now I use he/him/she/her/they/them. I don’t give a f..k what you call me. I’m just Deni. So they are my pronouns.’ It’s not so easy for Deeming smeared and isolated in her lonely fight to defend women’s rights.