Peak stupid

Written by

May 15, 2026

Julia Gillard explaining how men are women if they really really think so.

https://twitter.com/travelingsushi1/status/2055195059893719119

She’s asked if she can say what a woman is. Instead of saying yes of course I can she taaalllkks verrrry slowwwwly about how terrible it is that people keep asking this question. She calls it a gotcha moment – how original. She says, verrry slowwwly indeed, that we have to come at this from first principles. She burbles about rich diversity. She says it’s powerful. Finally at 1:39 [that’s a long time to say nothing relevant!] she gets to the myth.

There are a number of people who genuinely believe they are trapped in the wrong body, and they want to be recognized as the gender that their mind, their mind and soul have always told them that they are.

Ok. First of all, how do you know they genuinely believe that? It’s not knowable. Other people’s minds are a black box. This appalling ideology is based on an assumption that is negated by everything we know about people, minds, knowledge, rhetoric, politics and all the rest of it.

Second, and all too obviously, so the fuck what? People can “genuinely” believe all kinds of bullshit – just look at how many people think Donald Trump is a great guy.

Guess what: we could all claim we genuinely believe we are Julia Gillard. Would she make duplicate keys to her house for all of us?

It’s just staggering that this childish horseshit is allowed to cancel women’s rights.

Comments

17 responses to “Peak stupid”

Holms

May 15, 2026 9:51 AM

Such extensive squirming! Politicians have been pivoting any time the question is inconvenient for a long time, but now they also like to call the question a ‘gotcha’. No idea how they think that works, but it is a clear signal that they know the answer they want to give is risible in some way.

Gillard has the welcome distinction of being Australia’s first female prime minister, yet she punted on women’s protections. Less known is that she is also our first atheist (or at least, non-religious) PM; she also punted on the question of religious entanglement with government.
Alan Peakall

May 15, 2026 10:15 AM

It seems to me bleakly ironic that the sort of pioneering female heads of government (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher…) who would have had least truck with this sort of contemptible evasiveness were precisely those who were, in their time, denounced as “not real women”.
twiliter

May 15, 2026 10:40 AM

Her dishonesty about biological sex is indeed a parlor game.
Omar

May 15, 2026 10:41 AM

“It’s just staggering that this childish horseshit is allowed to cancel women’s rights.”

But… It could be good for garden fertiliser, maybe?
Freemage

May 15, 2026 10:49 AM

Even if we take as writ the claimed feelings of transwomen, that means nothing in terms of how the law should look upon them. Many religious believers sincerely think their sky-daddy is the best (and only!) sky-daddy. But while they are free to profess this, and try to get others to agree with them, they cannot use the law to force this belief (or at least, the rote repetition of the belief) on others.

This has to be doubly so in the case of trans, because the belief itself clearly cannot be examined. Just because someone sincerely believes they have a woman’s mind, how can they actually know this? One defense usually posited by trans believers in face of skepticism is that critics can’t possibly know what’s in the mind of the transwoman. But this is exactly the issue. Transwomen also have no ability to compare their internal mental structure to that of biological women. They may like things that are generally associated with femininity, but the whole crux of feminism is that femininity as a concept is a social creation, so while a transwoman might be falling into the roles and tastes their culture says women should do and like, they are not, in fact, capable of knowing if those things are what women actually like and want to do.

Final bonus note: She does give the game away here when she adds “soul” after mind. This is a religious belief, and should be treated as such.
Ophelia Benson

May 15, 2026 10:51 AM

Omar could you please follow the local convention on quotations? I’m tired of fixing yours for you.
Deep Thinking

May 15, 2026 11:31 AM

Omar could you please follow the local convention on quotations? I’m tired of fixing yours for you.

How might one go about fixing it; is it still HTML?
iknklast

May 15, 2026 11:53 AM

First of all, how do you know they genuinely believe that?

This is one thing that always bothered me about religion. The courts are forced into a position of having to decide what is a ‘sincerely held religious belief’, what is a ‘cult’, and what is bullshit. The courts should never have to do this, because it is impossible to know if that person insisting on handing out bibles to school children have a sincere belief, whether it is a cult, or whether they are just trying to gain control over the minds of the youngsters for some other reasons…profit (not prophet) maybe?

If there is a sincerely held belief, religious or otherwise, that is no good reason to suspend the laws for the person holding the belief. If a law is necessary, religious people (whether standard religion, cults, or trans) should have to follow it, too. If it is possible to give the religious a pass based on their ‘sincere belief’, then the law needs to be reviewed because it might be an unnecessary law. If a religious person should be allowed to sacrifice a goat within city limits, then everyone should be allowed to sacrifice a goat within city limits. If this is not a good idea, then religious people should not get a pass.

Same thing here. If a man holds a ‘sincere belief’ that he is actually a woman, and you allow him to invade spaces, steal prizes, and take jobs intended for women, then why should any man have to stay out? If he is a man, and he is, he should stay out. If he is a woman, which he isn’t, it wouldn’t be a question. Of course he should be able to receive the same treatment as women. Dude, make me a sandwich.
Guest

May 15, 2026 1:09 PM

Irony being what it is, Gillard spends half of her year in the UK as chair of the country’s largest health charity, the Wellcome Trust https://wellcome.org/about-us/our-people/staff/julia-gillard.

You’d hope a health charity would know the difference between men and women but it’s not clear that it does.
Ophelia Benson

May 15, 2026 3:54 PM

Deep Thinking – Yes, just good old blockquote & negation between angle brackets.
SwanAlien

May 15, 2026 4:05 PM

Worth pointing out that Gillard opposed same sex marriage at the same time she was eroding sex based protections, and only changed her position when it no longer mattered.
Omar

May 15, 2026 5:06 PM

OB:

“Omar could you please follow the local convention on quotations? I’m tired of fixing yours for you.”

With respect, two questions:

1. What is this ‘local convention on quotations?’ And,

2. Why is following it so important? I thought that this was a free thought blog, making a break from conventional thinking on anything and everything.

The ‘convention’ I follow is the one I was taught in primary school, too many moons ago now to count. And I think that what I have written here in the past has been understandable. Nobody down all those years has challenged me over that.

FINAL NOTE: I might be getting paranoid, but I sense that there is another agenda in play here, lurking behind the arras; though I am damned if I know what it is.
Steven

May 15, 2026 5:33 PM

There are a set of issues that need to be thought through about prison arrangements, about fairness in elite sport […]. Most people in their lives won’t end up playing a league sport; most people in their lives won’t end up in prison […]

Words fail me. This is appalling beyond beyond belief.

Oh, and she never answers the question, either.

She does make an appeal to “first principles”, and I’m thinking, “gamete size?”
Freemage

May 15, 2026 6:14 PM

OB:

“Omar could you please follow the local convention on quotations? I’m tired of fixing yours for you.”

With respect, two questions:

1. What is this ‘local convention on quotations?’ And,

2. Why is following it so important? I thought that this was a free thought blog, making a break from conventional thinking on anything and everything.

Above, you see the ‘local convention’ in action. It’s the use of a pair of HTML tags to offset the quoted text, rather than simply slapping on the quotation marks. It has a few advantages, but the key one is legibility–by offsetting the text, it makes it easier, amongst other things, to quickly skim past the quotation, and go straight to the meat of the poster’s response.

The HTML tags in question are Blockquote and /Blockquote, each set inside angle-brackets (, with no spaces).

As for why you should do it… because it’s polite to accommodate a reasonable and trivial request by your host, maybe? It will have no impact on your ability to express your thoughts here, so it is not, in fact, impinging on your right to expression.
Omar

May 15, 2026 8:00 PM

Freemage:

As for why you should do it… because it’s polite to accommodate a reasonable and trivial request by your host, maybe? It will have no impact on your ability to express your thoughts here, so it is not, in fact, impinging on your right to expression.

Many thanks. First I have ever heard of it as a commenting requirement here at B&W, though as I recall, I used to use the original format HTML at the old site. Thus do the caterpillar tracks of progress crunch onwards.
maddog1129

May 15, 2026 8:01 PM

I’ll bet that if men’s access to women’s everything were not on the table, the “sincerely held belief” would diminish considerably. IOW, if the men could get full marks and validation as being men who “sincerely believe” that they “feel like” women, but that doesn’t translate into access to women’s spaces, etc., I’d bet that the profound insistence that they “really really” “feel like” women would practically disappear.
Ophelia Benson

May 16, 2026 3:55 AM

Oh honestly. Omar did you really never notice that everyone else follows the convention? Did it never for one second occur to you to do likewise, just for ease of reading?

There is no “agenda” that you don’t already know about. My creepy agenda: less random flippancy, more substantive discussion.