‘It’s a Biological Issue’: MP Moira Deeming on Transgender People in Women’s Spaces, Sports

The annual New York City Pride March in New York City on June 25, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The answer to the question of whether transgender people can enter toilets and change rooms of the opposite sex is based simply on biology, according to Victorian MP Moira Deeming.

“It’s a biological issue. It’s not about whether you pass [as a woman]. A woman is a woman, whether she looks like one or not. A man is a man whether he looks like one or not,” she said at the Friedman Conference in Sydney.

“I just really buck against this Orwellian detachment of language from objective reality.”

Ms. Deeming said demanding people to use language that was not rooted in reality was “psychologically abusive.”

“If they demand from me that I call them something that I don’t think that they are, that’s gaslighting. I find that psychologically abusive,” she said.

For Ms. Deeming, the same biological principles applied to whether or not transgender women can compete in women’s sports.

“If you are a biological male, that is my standard. It’s not about whether you pass; it’s not about some certain degree of strength ratio,” she said.

“I understand that there are people that identify as being a different gender. But I’m not referring to gender. These are sports, and the categories are based on sex.”

Liberal Party MP Moira Deeming poses for a photograph at the Parliament of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, on Dec. 19. 2022. (AAP Image/Julian Smith)

Ms. Deeming said her issue was not even about transgenderism but about fairness and freedom in the law.

“All the safeguarding for women and children, as far as I can say, in law and in policies was removed [in Victoria], using the excuse of transgender anti-discrimination protocols,” she said.

A Fight Close to Home

Ms. Deeming said that her home state of Victoria had lost all sex-based rights and that every public facility was already gender-neutral before the law.

Lawyers informed Ms. Deeming that if she stopped a man entering the women’s toilets and told them that it was a women’s facility, it could count as possible incitement to discrimination. If it was caught on video, she could find herself getting a complaint filed against her for inciting discrimination against transgender people.

“My main point, I guess, is that the meaning of words matters, the clarity in the law matters, and it has real-world consequences,” she said.

Ms. Deeming, who remains a member of the centre-right Liberal Party, was expelled from the Victorian Liberal Party Room on May 12 after she attended a women’s rights rally in Melbourne on March 18.

The rally was gate crashed by a group of neo-Nazis who repeatedly performed the Nazi salute.

The presence of neo-Nazis led Victorian Liberal Leader John Pesutto to put forward a motion that claimed the event was “fuelled by racist and white supremacist rhetoric ... and that Mrs. Deeming herself supported that rhetoric and ideology,” according to a letter by Ms. Deeming’s lawyer.

“It’s a very Orwellian time in this society. And even though it’s all about semantics in the end, I just don’t want people to think that it’s just a philosophical issue,” Ms. Deeming said.

“This is a huge issue. It affects my children and affects me.

“It’s impacted my political freedom, my economic freedom. It’s derailed my whole life.”

But Ms. Deeming vowed never to stop standing up for her values.

“Women’s boundaries and the rights of parents and free speech rights—they’re non-negotiable,” she said. “The balance comes in building a third option and finding some other way through. You do not trample over the rights of women and children.”

Stomping on Parental Rights

The state of Victoria has the most progressive position on the issue of children who believe themselves to be transgender.

Professionals must also affirm a person’s gender of choice, even if it goes against their medical opinion.

Transgender affirming childrens books in Irvine, Calif. on Aug. 30, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Schools can also declare a student a “mature minor” without informing the child’s parents.

“Principals or others working with students in schools can decide that the student is capable of making their own decision, i.e. that they are a mature minor for the purpose of making a particular decision,” the Victorian education department’s policy says.

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Ms. Deeming criticised this policy, highlighting that a teacher didn’t require any professional assessment for gender dysphoria and that there was zero accountability in the process.

“[Does anyone] have a record of who declared my child as a mature minor behind my back at school? Who’s going to be accountable? So it’s a disaster,” she said.

Victorian MP David Limbrick said the act of socially transitioning a child at school without the parent’s knowledge is happening at a greater scale than many parents expect.

“We don’t have a good idea of how widespread this is, but ... it’s far more widespread than I thought it was,” he said.

“The number of people that have contacted me about this and even acquaintances of mine, they’d come up to me privately and say they did this to my kid. This is something that’s happening fairly widely.”

Mr. Limbrick believes the situation may call for enshrining parental rights into law.

“Do parents do a bad job or make mistakes or stuff up? Yeah, absolutely,” he said.

“But ultimately, we have to have that as our starting point. Government interventions between parents and their children should be only under the very, very, most extreme circumstances and should be far and wide the exception.”