The fact that one of the key election issues of 2022 was whether biological males who identify as female should be allowed to compete against biological females in sport is a warning that something is severely amiss in Australian society. What is amiss is that Australians can no longer agree on what constitutes reality. Specifically, it seems that the federal government is no longer able to agree on whether women exist or not.

This was revealed in early April when Senator Alex Antic asked Dr Brendan Murphy, Secretary of the Department of Health, “What is a woman?” If anyone should know the answer to this question, it should be the most senior health bureaucrat in the land, but Dr Murphy was stumped, responding that “it was a very complex matter.”

Dr Murphy is not alone in his inability to define a ‘woman’, but he is also joined by the federal Minister for Women and Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne, who is so unwilling to commit herself to admitting defining what a woman is, her office stating that “the Australian Government recognises that individuals may identify and be recognised within the community as a gender other than the sex they were assigned at birth or during infancy, or as a gender which is not exclusively male or female.”

Given that she is the Minister for Women, as well as part of the Taskforce for Women, one might be forgiven for assuming that she might be able to define the term.

This kind of obfuscation does not inspire confidence in a supposedly conservative government.

Meanwhile, the Australian Bureau of Statistics decided to ask Australians in the 2021 Census about ‘non-binary sex and/or gender identity; sexuality orientation.’ In 2021, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade signed Australia to a United Nations report that endorses radical intersectional gender theory. The report posited that “gender is a social construct” and then called on governments to “(ensure) minors have access to recognition of their gender identity.”

Yet, over at the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Payne’s Office for Women is doing its best to promote women, having announced that it will spend $2.1 billion to improve women’s safety, women’s economic security, and woman and girl’s health and wellbeing. Last year, it spent $3.4 billion.

That’s an awful lot of taxpayers’ money to spend on women when you do not know what they are, or when you are too afraid to actually say it.