 Thank you for coming. I know you're all very busy. I appreciate your time and I also want to thank CAS for having these series of lectures. It's great to only become a professor, which was very exciting, but also to actually have a chance to talk about my work. So I really appreciate that opportunity. I also want to begin by acknowledging that reconciliation is unfinished business. And I also want to... I'm going to be having... I've got a PowerPoint which is on a loop that I'm going to just be playing while I'm talking. And if you've got questions about the PowerPoint, which you may have at the end, please I'm happy to take questions about that. And that's kind of in parallel with the talk that I'm giving. So research is being conducted on diverse anti-gender mobilisation campaigns in Europe. And I'm interested in thinking about this research beyond Europe and in the Australian context. And I'm considering how ideas and tactics from diverse European campaigns may inform Australian campaigns. And my specific focus is on how anti-gender campaigners are seeking to influence the provision of education about gender and sexuality in Australian schools. During... on Eric Fassan and I apologise at the outset for my appalling French. It never recovered from high school. And his study of gender norms and sexual democracy in France. I consider how anti-gender campaigners deploy common sense understandings of gender in order to oppose discussions of gender, sexuality and diversity in education. I also touch on the challenges of negotiating diverse gender perspectives in ways that can attend to religious freedom and sexual freedom. But I want to begin with a story about gender and education that involves me and my dad. In 1997 I had literally just commenced my PhD and I had flown into state to attend a weekend induction outside Deakin in Geelong. My dad drove down from Melbourne to collect me from following this weekend away. He's always been incredibly generous in this respect. I had found the weekend to be intellectually stimulating and was keen to talk. On the drive home dad asked what my PhD was going to be about. And in order to avoid talking about queer theory or sexuality I told him what was going to be about gender and education thinking that that would be easy. I thought, and so dad and I do not share worldviews when it comes to gender and sexuality and I didn't want the long ride home to be awkward. My response prompted another question. What's gender? I gave him my best rendition of Judith Butler. He listened, paused, and commented that all I needed to know was that there are boys and there are girls. And that was all any of us needed to know. The conversation turned to other topics at that point. Dad's response reflected what many still believe. There are boys and there are girls and they are meant to be together. The fact that it hadn't worked out quite this way for two of his five children never seemed to shake dad's faith in the power of this basic Catholic teaching. And I can attest that it's still firm today. I recollect this conversation at the outset of this talk because it speaks to me of the common sense of gender. It also signals my belief that it is important to be able to talk about gender sex and sexuality in ways that can reflect the complexities learned within the field of gender studies, but do this in a way that can appeal to the common sense of gender. Plain speaking about gender I think has been key to the success of anti-gender mobilization campaigns. And the key point is that academic and activists within this space need to engage in conversations about these campaigns in ways that expand these common sense understandings without talking down to people who share beliefs like those expressed by my dad. So what is an anti-gender campaign? Many people have asked me in the last few weeks. I understand this idea of an anti-gender campaign building on the work of Roman Cujar and David Paternotti to describe and they use it to describe European campaigns that are in opposition to many things. Progressive gender equality manifested in challenges to marriage equality, abortion, reproductive technologies, gender mainstreaming, sex education, sexual liberalism, transgender rights, anti-discrimination policy, and even to the notion of gender itself. In the Australian context, one might argue that the heated national campaign against the Safe Schools Coalition is one example of an anti-gender campaign in Australia. And the Safe Schools Coalition is a national coalition of organisations that promote inclusive school environments for same sex attracted and gender diverse students. So I'm trying to situate this campaign that's been happening in Australia as but a small cog in a series of campaigns that are happening internationally. In Australia, these campaigns involve several actors. And two of these, the one I'm going to focus on most today is the Australian Christian lobby. But I think that the Catholic Church in Australia has also been quite focused on attacking this idea of gender and the way I'm trying to describe today. In pointing to the Catholic Church, I also wish to underscore the diverse perspectives on issues related to gender, sex and sexuality associated with both Catholicism and Christianity. I don't think that this is a settled issue within those organisations either and I want to be clear about that at the outset. Such campaigns are increasingly being understood as part of the transnational movement and the Catholic Church, at large, I think is part of this movement. So understanding the Safe Schools campaign as a purely Australian phenomenon could be read as a case of methodological nationalism. In sociological discourse, such campaigns might be described as a moral panic or sex panic. Jenna Servine talks about sex panics as meaningful inscripted forms of political communication and which moral entrepreneurs seek to reinforce conservative ideas about sexuality. The notion of an anti-gender campaign expands on this understanding of moral entrepreneurs focused on sex, which has been, I think, the subject of much of the recent contestation related to the Safe Schools Coalition to think explicitly about the emergence of movements, which are being described as anti-gender. Esther Kovats, writing about the emergence of anti-gender movements in several European countries, goes on to connect these movements in part to the rise of the far right in Europe. I think that we can also see very strong instances of this in the US, which I think will be another part of this paper, but no room for that today. She notes that these movements are mobilising against the enemy that they call gender ideology, gender theory, or genderism. Under these labels, various issues are united and attacked by conservative, partly fundamentalist groups of society. So liberal green or leftist politicians, women's rights activists, LGBT activists, gender policy officers of public administrations, and gender studies scholars have found themselves put into the same gender ideologist or genderist box by these movements. Kovats hopes that by studying these anti-gender movements, it might be possible to better understand what enables them to mobilize successfully in some contexts and not others, and to grasp the broader societal and political framework that provides fertile ground for them. Importantly, Kovats also dismisses, and this is a really important point, the idea that these interpretations of gender are in any way naive. She says that anti-genderism, the idea that anti-genderism is a misunderstanding by ignorant people, and that if the concept of gender and gender equality is just explained in a more understandable way, then they will know that there is nothing to fear. And I think that often educational imperatives around gender and sexuality are trying to educate people in the right way to think about gender and sexuality. I think that people really are pushing back very strongly against that, and I think that that's part of what's going on here. So, far from being a misunderstanding about gender, Sarah Brack and David Patanotte, in a piece entitled Unpacking the Sin of Gender, highlight the ways in which the term gender ideology is being crafted to perform a particular rhetorical labor. It's conjuring a vision in which the spheres of beliefs and ideas are separated from the sphere of reality, and gender is allocated to the former, thereby undermining the knowledge production and truth claims of many decades of gender studies scholarship. By invoking both common sense and hard sciences, such as biology or medicine, they aim to dismantle a wide array of research in social sciences and humanities, and notably, but not only, research that's inspired by a post-structuralist approach. In one piece I read in an interview with somebody who used to work for the Vatican, but doesn't anymore, there was a comparison of Isis and Judith Butler as a binary, which I think is like an interesting manifestation of how the problem of gender is being arched up. Grasping the ways in which gender ideology constructs gender studies is important in attempting to unpack some of the particularities of critiques on programs like the Safe Schools Coalition. But what's also required is an examination of the increasing popularity of ideas associated with gender ideology. In part this paper is intended as an argument for the need to not only attend to specific campaigns against gender, but also to look to the bigger picture and inquire into why such campaigns are gaining purchase in Australia and internationally. Eric Fassan, who's a French sociologist, is useful in thinking about the answers to these questions. He argues that in France nowadays the interrogation is not so much as used to be the case, how can one be a homosexual, but rather with the same disbelief, how can one be a homophobe? I think this is quite important and thinking about debates in Australia that are going on now. I think it's very hard to be like publicly homophobic, to say that it's not okay to be gay. Certainly I think that an institution like this, like publicly stating a position of homophobia has become more difficult, but I think that positions related to gender have a different inflection and that's an important part of why this moved agenda I think is happening and that's part of Fassan's argument. This shift is echoed in opposition to the Safe Schools Coalition in Australia. I think they were really focusing on issues about gender in regards to Safe Schools that they were saying was like beyond the bounds. Opponents recognising community issues in relation to LGBTI communities have focused on the well-being of children, not on the production of homophobic rhetoric. Because of increasing support for marriage equality, strategies have needed to be developed that can garner support for critiques of gender ideology but not be read as explicitly homophobic. So Fassan asks how polemics against gay marriage can turn into a polemic against the theory of gender. For him this transition can be traced back as far as 1995 and the Catholic Church's response to the First Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and the evocation of Jude Butler's theory of gender associated with the influential text Gender Trouble. Publications of the Roman Catholic Church, Fassan argues, set out to delegitimize gender studies because the field he argues suggests that there exists no such thing as a natural man or a natural woman and questions to what extent there exists any natural form of sexuality. The theologians in this lexicon must express fears that the denaturalisation of sex operated by gender logically leads to the denaturalisation of sexuality as evidenced in claims for opening marriage to same-sex couples. So these debates about the common sense of gender are ongoing and they have spread into many different country contexts as the slide suggests, including Australia and Fassan sees the need of these campaigns in the concerns of Catholic theologians regarding marriage equality. He sees that as the seed of this debate, but also like going back to the 90s and Beijing and some of the conversations about how gender was defined post that conference are really interesting to revisit in light of debates happening now. In the piece entitled The Uses and Abuses of Gender, Joan Scott and a story and a key figure in the foundation of gender studies in the US takes a different view. She argues that gender is a site of struggle about what counts as natural and what counts as social and she really emphasises that these don't divide simply along right and left lines. These debates about gender are misunderstood Scott suggests if they are reduced to discussions of sexual progressivism. For her questions of gender are indivisible from questions of sexual difference. She asks why are there men and women? Must there be one or the other? Why not both? The nature of the attraction between these bodies, these are questions for which there are no single rational or unconscious answers she says. So Fasson and Scott draw attention to the ways in which debates about sexuality have become associated with debates about gender and Scott highlights the unresolvability of questions of gender while Fasson perceives these debates as a struggle of democracy. I find both explanations helpful in attempting to unpack the anti-gender campaigns in Australia. So following on from this discussion of the anti-gender campaigns and this notion of gender ideology, I want to briefly look at an anti-gender campaign in France and Australia. Critiques of gender and its role in the denaturalisation of sex have been the subject of many heated protests in France. Most recently in debates against marriage equality in 2013 and in debates about a school program designed to educate students about gender beyond the frame of inequality that was launched in 2014. Alastair Bridges writing about the gender education reform program which was called apes et de legalité characterises it as aimed at combating sexism and gender stereotypes. He argues that the idea of the program was to teach children that some differences between the sexes are biological but others are socially constructed. It was met with fierce pressure from conservative and religious parents, angry that their children were being taught gender theory at school. And there were huge demonstrations in France around this issue. It was a massive political issue. So Bridges notes that the movement against the education program reunited practising Catholic members of both the middle class and the Catholic bourgeoisie but the movement also reverberated strongly through Muslim communities in the lower class. The far right has also added its voice to the movement. So campaigns based on an opposition to gender theory have proven to have a very broad base in France. And as Fassin notes the redefinition of these campaigns is about the theory of gender made it possible to move between the two battlegrounds on the one hand marriage and on the other school because it meant it was possible to draw lines between the debates about gay marriage. Even once legislation supporting it was passed. So I could say this issue is still live because it's related to gender. This was a politically astute manoeuvre he suggests because schooling unlike marriage equality is always a concern for the vast majority. Camille Robchier historian of French history, gender and sexuality also argues French protests against gender ideology in education have been crafted with very particular political agendas in mind. She writes the theory of gender is a discursive strategy devised by the Vatican and taken up by numerous Catholic activists and intellectuals to counter the rhetoric of equal rights for women and gays and lesbians. In making these connections Robchier goes on to argue that these debates about gender are very specific to France. I'm not sure that's the case. And she cites one French politician who in the context of debates about marriage equality in France in 2013 describes the theory of gender as even more dangerous than same-sex marriage in adoption because it killed nature. In the Australian context debates about marriage equality have also been continuously conflated with debates about safe schools and questions of gender. As Jules Stark reported in the sitting morning Herald last year David Van Gen, president of the Australian Marriage Forum, makes no secret of the fact that his criticism of safe schools is linked to opposition to marriage reform. Parents need to understand that the genderless agenda is a package deal. If they vote for marriage equality they are voting for safe schools on steroids and agreeing to relinquish control of their child's moral education to sexual radicals he said. So debates about marriage equality are also clearly linked to debates about safe schools by progressive advocates. So Tien and Brady, a leader of the successful marriage equality movement in Ireland who is now here in Australia is quoted by Stark as saying that in a predominantly Catholic country parents were warned that LGBTI advocates were trying to destroy the family and influence the way children were taught in schools. Explicitly linking debates about gender and sexuality to education and families, Fussin argues, offers opportunities to broaden the base beyond any one specific single issue. This contention is important in understanding the Australian context and speaks to the potency of the campaign against the safe schools coalition. This isn't to say that people weren't genuine in their opposition to the work of the safe schools coalition. It is to argue the safe schools campaign was a useful vector for introducing broader concerns about gender sexuality, education of children into broader debate. It also suggests that anti-gender mobilisation campaigns will likely have lives beyond debates about marriage equality and following on from the successful attacks against the safe schools coalition. And so with this in mind something popped up in front of me when I was thinking about these mobilisation campaigns and so I've been thinking about how the Australian Christian lobby is thinking about gender ideology and the ACL explicitly connected gender ideology to their campaign against the safe schools coalition in an online blog entitled, when will children be safe from gender ideology? And this was posted in November 2016 by Wendy Francis, the ACL's Queensland director. Francis writes that sadly the safe schools coalition material remains captured by gender ideology. Right now parents are able to push back against the radical ideology underpinning the safe schools program but everything will change if same-sex marriage is legalised she warned. Anyone who thinks the same sex marriage political movement will stop at the marriage altar is sadly misguided. Promoting cross-dressing use of genderless toilets and whole school participation in same-sex marriage rallies is not what parents expect from an anti-bullying program. The possibilities for our danger are endless here. What is meant by the term gender ideology is not explicitly outlined in the blog but it is linked to how schools deal with matters related to gender and sexuality in areas that might be considered to be subject to debate within the broader community. The concerns expressed by the ACL in relation to the safe schools coalition share many of the hallmarks of campaigns against gender being waged internationally in places such as France, Ontario, Canada and Columbia as I demonstrated in the slides. But what surprised me most in reading about the ACL's anti-gender campaigning in Australia is the scope of their campaign and the sorts of concerns they are articulating about the place of studies of gender in the curriculum. In August last year the ACL made an unsuccessful submission to the Board of Studies of Teaching and Educational Standards in New South Wales. The ACL's submission focused on the draft English curriculum particularly targeting its focus on gender perspectives. The ACL's submission argues for the removal of definitions of gender and critical literacy which are found in the glossary of the draft syllabus because they say separating the sociocultural role of a person's sex, male or female gender from their biological sex has no basis in genetics or sexual development. The ACL also expressed concern about how the draft curriculum encourages exploration of the ways notions of gender identity are constructed in language and values of the text because this is an area laden with cultural and political sensitivities. For the ACL the associated risks in teaching young people about gender are elaborated in their submissions in the New South Wales curriculum authority. They argue some teachers may not be equipped to cope with all these perspectives and avoid personal bias in their teaching as they start to tackle notions of gender that may be unfamiliar to them or they may be ill equipped with students who are yet to form their own sense of self and are trying to relate to a character or perspective. The ACL and Joan Scott both underscore how difficult it is to pin down the idea of gender. Scott writing in 2013 argues rather than as I had mistakenly thought becoming clearer over time gender has become more elusive, the site of contestation, a disputed concept in the arena of politics. There are of course still feminist uses of the word but it is now a term of reference across the political spectrum with effects sometimes very different from the ones feminists originally intended. So in seeking to intervene in debates about gender and the uses of gender, different issues are being brought together that are impossible to separate. For example, relations of power between men and women, sexual difference, different beliefs regarding sexual and gender identity and their malleability, ideas about marriage and monogamy and religious and sexual freedom. These topics all surfaced in the ACL submission which includes testimonies from students and parents who express concern that their ideas about sex, sexual values and sexuality will be critiqued by peers and teachers in classroom contexts and I can tell you that for teacher educators it's a huge concern for them as well that whenever they talk about gender or sexuality that it will be misconstrued and therefore they just don't want to talk about it. The ACL submission also argues for the removal of the cross curriculum learning area difference and diversity from the syllabus because words such as diversity and difference are politically laden terms broad enough in the meaning that their placement within the curriculum, particularly with reference to gender may allow for the politicization of the curriculum. So the campaign against the Safe Schools Coalition was successful in bringing about the defunding of that program though the campaign against the use of the term gender and in opposition to cross curriculum learning related to diversity and difference was not successful. The new stage six English curriculum has retained the language that the ACL thought problematic in both instances. While the public may be less familiar with the campaign related to the English curriculum in the eyes of the ACL these two campaigns I think are very much related. Both campaigns seek to shine a light on how gender is understood in schools and in the broader community and to make an argument for very specific types of understanding. One that's I think clearly at odds with many scholars in gender studies I think actually many scholars in gender studies don't even know that this sort of thing is happening around gender ideology. Implicit within this critique is the idea that the curriculum can be a neutral document guiding teachers in how to teach young people about society in a way that can treat all perspectives without bias and not have any political influence on the formation of young people's character. But we know that all schooling will have an influence on the formation of young people's character and issues related to gender, sexuality, sex and religion will always play a part in education regardless of whether schools are labelled as religious, independent or public and regardless of whether schools make this explicit in their curriculum. Gender identity, religious and sexual freedom in Australian education I'm coming to the ends. So in writing about the field of gender studies in Belgium Sarah Brack a sociologist of gender and sexuality at the University of Amsterdam bemoans what she terms the rise of gender light. She perceives this as the result of the under theorising of the concept of gender. The notion is all too often collapsed into sex and functions as a binary sociological parameter without any meaningful investigation into cultural construction, she writes. Brack also characterises gender light as discussion of gender without feminism, gender without power but also gender without sexuality, race or ethnicity and I would add religion and culture. Drawing on Brack what might be preferred by the ACL is something akin to gender light in which gender is easily likened to biological sex. I think this is an idea regularly mobilised in campaigns for gender equality within government and industry. Writing about debates regarding gender in France facin bemoans the ways in which the concept is mobilised in the name of democracy. For façade a democratic approach to gender as one founded in critique. A place where the order of things is presented explicitly as a social not a natural order steeped in history and thus subject to change. Fundamentally political and thus an object of critique. Liberty and equality become legitimate claims whose very definitions are at stake in these political struggles concerning both gender and sexuality and to my mind for many gender studies scholars this is kind of still the way that critiques of gender I think operate within this idea of critique that doesn't really I think make much admission for belief and I think that that's a problem in the way that gender critiques get articulated and why we also become very adversarial very quickly. Joan Scott is critical of Fusson's vision of sexual democracy. She rejects his thesis that debates about gender are a function of world historic confrontation between the forces of order and the champions of change the conservative defenders of patriarchy and the progressive proponents of sexual democracy. The Scott gender as a category in a field of study continues to be important when it is not a guide to static categories of sexed identity but to the dynamic and contested interplay of imagination regulation and transgression in the societies and cultures we study. Gender studies she writes should provoke an ending set of questions and open the way to new thinking. Gender is a perpetually open issue and when we think it has been settled we know we're on the wrong track. So returning to my point of departure in this lecture and the story about me and my dad Scott's response to Fusson I think is a useful bookend. She is careful to undo the fantasy that questions of gender can be settled. This is something I knew intuitively if not theoretically at the time of my conversation with dad about my thesis. But I suspect that I thought that my shiny new gender expertise meant that my understandings of gender had more value than his perspective. Almost 20 years later I feel much less settled about questions of gender. This feeling can certainly be troubling when one feels called upon to defend a particular gender perspective and not just ask unending sets of questions. Well I may be less sure about how gender might be defined. I am more committed to finding opportunities to do research and to stage public conversations such as this one related to the intersections between gender sexuality religion and education. There is much public dialogue about religiosity gender and sexuality in Australia today but I think these conversations are too often staged in adversarial tones. Supporters of marriage equality are currently trying to cultivate conversations across Australia about this important topic in ways that resist this approach. Researchers in feminist theory and gender studies I think have an important role to play in these debates trying to expand common sense understandings of gender, sex and sexuality in Australia. Indeed for me one of the lures of coming to ANU was the opportunity to engage better with key politicians cultural institutions and policymakers on questions regarding religion belief, sexuality, gender and education. This engagement will draw on my own work and others work in these areas of research. It will also seek to resist the temptation to assume the progressive position on questions of gender sex and sexuality. That's it. Thanks very much Mary Lou that was absolutely fantastic as I expected and every bit is good. I guess my question here is around the construction of young people and it's a quite a simple question but it's a question I think is important in the sense that this to me seems to be something that is very much imposed upon young people as a category as a framework as a you know diagram of how one should be in their you know and the politics around that but I'm kind of interested in why young people aren't part of the conversation more and what that says too about that discourse of them being you know the objects of this and the subjects of it but often marginalized and silenced in the process and so I'm just thinking in a very radical thought and in a different type of alternative society or reality how this might be worked out by young people themselves without any of the discourse and frameworks that are being imposed upon them. It's a great question. Obviously there's lots of reasons why that's not happening in terms of like you know political structures and sensitivities but putting those aside I think that there are like amazing things that young people are doing that we don't often often hear about. So if you think about the Safe Schools Coalition for instance and also minus 18 like minus 18 is like largely run by young people and the resources that were most controversial were resources produced by young people themselves and they like so and I think that those resources spoke to a lot of people and a lot of young people about how they're thinking about gender now and they were very powerful resources and they were you know so the minus 18 resources are still up and they're still being produced but it's a matter of getting the word out about them as well but I think that there are also like great parodies of you know conservative ways I think and progressive ways of thinking about gender online. So there's a whole lot of online cultures happening that are you know expanding the way that we understand these things and if you think about something like Facebook and it's 37 gender categories or whatever it is like that's speaking to how young people I think are imagining like what gender is today which is not within a binary I don't think. So I just wanted to ask the question I guess about the kind of work that the category of gender is being asked to do and the well so at the end there were you sort of said you know that you think there's something really important to be done in the area of expanding common sense understanding of gender I absolutely couldn't agree more. I guess it seems to me that there's also that thing where the concept of gender ends up bearing the burden of being the one denaturalizing concept and you know I think a lot of the issues that someone like Mora Gayton's raised many years ago about the sex gender distinction you hear those things play out again and again and again and I suppose so I guess my question is given that it you know we're not kind of talking about an innocent process of education here like we're talking about an absolutely agonistic struggle what sort of a role in bringing about some kind of change is played at the level of attack you know at the level of saying actually what about this category of family for example you know why shouldn't it be asked to do the work of denaturalizing itself this category of marriage or because it does seem that one of the issues that people who are trying to think through gender questions get stuck with all the time is they're always being asked to be included in a main mainstream that excluded them in the first place so I have been thinking of doing a project called Australian Family Planning for that reason like that's trying to think about you know the idea of the family and really trying to expand that idea of the family because gender is so loaded I think it touches on a lot of I don't think it gets us out of the problem of gender entirely but I think that you're right it can be a powerful whenever but whenever I've talked to people about that project I just end up in conversations about family planning as it was imagined you know I think quite a while ago and I think that anybody who knows anything about family planning now knows it's much more complicated than that but the resonance of family and trying to play with that and subvert it is as much harder to do I think as well so it's but it's a great it's a great point I think yeah it's actually following on from that I mean so is this work okay I mean it's interesting to think about the relationship between teachers and family because of course the teacher acts in like a parentis in that's there you know that's their legal status in relation to the child so if they're acting like a parentis it really questions it raises the question of the parentis bit because you know it suggests that the kind of ways in which they're a bit of a pivotal point in these much as you were saying these much broader contestations around the family you know the heterosexual heterosexual normativity of the family and of course this is an absolutely fundamental category in the new right you know the rise of the the new right that we're seeing in the particularly in the States I think but also in Europe I mean and that's one of the reasons why I'm quite focused on this now in Australia because I think that actually ideas around gender are going to become hotter and I think that we you know we really saw with the election of Trump I think a lot of progressive commentators really missed the importance of progress of like ideas about gender and the part they were playing of their people I think saw Trump talk about women in a particular way and that that meant that women wouldn't support Trump and they didn't think you know I think as much about and other people have said this like the Supreme Court and questions about abortion and family that I think are fundamental to a lot of people and I think that trying to like I mean for me what I would like to see is like ways in which young people can be engaged in conversations at school around these issues that but not in ways that foreclose it either way and I think that they're that really both modes of address often really just closed down the conversation in advance and that's like one of the parts of the ACL submission that I think that I kind of agree with is that it's actually I think become harder to say like well actually I'm homophobic and then to have a conversation about that rather just say well you know you're an ignorant person and like you know just get with the program and so I think that and but for teachers in their loco parent as they're like and there's no sexuality education at all given to teachers so then how does that like compound all these issues as well? Thanks Mary Lou I was really interested you talking about some of the research about how these sort of anti-gender campaigns have been born out of fears of these sort of denaturalization of sex and then the and in turn and sort of as greater fears about the denaturalization of sexuality which leads to questions about the family and all of that kind of stuff I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about sort of progressive moves to try and read sort of almost renaturalized sexuality in particular with the sort of born this way narrative and to a lesser extent renaturalized sex with sort of ideas about transgenderism for example being a biological trait or something that's something that's genetic and whether you think why do you think this is occurring as a narrative and do you think it's a reaction to that and do you think it's potentially effective or not effective reaction to this sort of can you know this denaturalization reaction to the need denaturalization if that makes sense it does make sense like I think that the answer is that there's lots of different reasons why people go to essential arguments around trans issues like there are around gay and lesbian issues and those questions are unsettled I think still in both camps and I think that and people like I know I know people who use the biological arguments in schools to try and just to try and get a foot in the door to talk about trans stuff in schools and like it might be that they don't necessarily agree with all of it but they think this is a way that I can have a conversation about this in the space of schooling and that's the most important imperative right now so I think that some of it's strategic but I think that some of it is quite conservative and some of it is like a sense that like really sex is completely naturalised and I was like that debate that you had with Helen Razer and who was the other person Guy Rundle like that has been like spinning in my mind that conversation about like their attack on queer theory and like how they're thinking about queer theory and calling it into question and I think it's a really important sort of conversation to have in light of what you're asking so I just wanted to jump in there and just point out that the biology is at least as complex and conflicted and as much a field of debate around endocrinology genetic you know the genomics of genetics of sex as any social sciences and like in Cordelia Fine's testosterone wrecks that just came out some of the features yeah yeah is I think a part you know really speaking to that incredibly powerfully yeah testosterone wrecks which is Cordelia Fine's latest book which is really trying to it's popular sort of since yeah yeah truth yeah yeah thank you I'm not sure that I have a question I want to tell you about Poland I was actually really fascinated something came out of the printer the other day and it was one of the papers and I started reading it it was about this under the gender campaign in Spain sorry in France and I was really fascinated by it because it's been happening in Poland in a farm of ferocious and hydraulic way for a time now and I suppose the intersection and I think Poland would be a really interesting case study for you because unlike France and correct me if I'm mistaken this is the country that has a concordant with Vatican so the intersection of farm education Catholicism and enabling spaces to discuss gender sexuality and I think a lot of people have said fear and I think to me fear is a critical agent in the debate because it is to my mind a lot about the fear of the future and the state and parents want to have some control over what's taught at schools and it's also very interesting case study Poland because there's absolutely no way that teachers could be openly you know rainbow in their workplace effectively this is the country where everybody's undergoing Catholic education even though schools nominally aren't Catholic and you can opt out but if you do you'll be stigmatized so there are a lot of very interesting you know things to be illustrated there but just to be very short because this is your lecture not mine I think the problem in Poland in terms of generating any kind of space for the discussions around gender and sexualities this as soon as these discussions are started you immediately touch upon a whole broad range of moral values like family marriage but also the notion of nationality and it is extremely difficult to kind of keep track what is being discussed at the same time it becomes very emotional it's almost like a form of a crusade so because of introduced this element of comparison I would like to hear your reflections on perhaps how how kind of good or how positive the debate of gender and sexuality has been Australia on the kind against this campus of you know international events debates and and sort of lack of ability to even you know offer some very basic legal protection to young people who are in education and they feel they don't fit in with Catholic ideology with the division between you know sexual male and female and cultural male and female I've just written a piece about the safe schools controversy and one of the things I think about it I'm using the idea of counterpublics and in order to try and think about the safe schools debate and what it might because I think that people have often focused on the safe schools debate and the harm that it's done and I'm trying to think about what it's enabled and in that paper and I think that like I found lots of newspaper headlines about penis tucking and chest binding and I think that maybe for the first time in like like I found one of those headlines in a regional area in Queensland and I think that it's interesting that that is what people woke up to in the morning and they who got to read that headline who got to think for the first time this is a thing so even though so I think that there's the there's the sanctioned public conversation that's going on in places like Poland and there's the fear about what the debates might you know unload here because of what happened with the safe schools coalition debate but I also think that interesting interesting moments are opening up as well because of the proliferation of discourse about gender and sex and gender bathrooms and all these things like you know I think that I'm not saying it's all good by any means but I'm saying it's also people's I think common sense understandings are being inevitably expanded by these things thanks Mary Lou that was really extremely interesting and I would like to go back to your original excuse me your original disclosure about your discussion with your father and this notion that there's real binary you know the most simple way of seeing gender in society but going into the field of social psychology there's been an enormous amount of research into attempts to measure characteristics or traits of individuals according to whether they're masculine or feminine and you know about the Ben questionnaire and all of that sort of thing and and the empirical results have generally found that there's a mixture there's I mean everyone has a mixture of one or the other now admittedly the questionnaire itself could reflect stereotypes you know rather than other kind of natural tendencies or things of that nature in terms of what we think a masculine person is or a feminine person and things of that nature I'm interested in knowing whether or not this kind of research and the findings of this research because social psychologists I think have generally argued that no one is purely one or the other you know so this binary doesn't exist in the way even people see themselves so does this have any kind of role to play in the debate that you're talking about I think that that post-structuralism and social psychology get equally dismissed as being pseudoscientific or you know waffle so like I mean there's gobs it's kind of a bit like climate change there's lots of good work and lots of interesting things to be seen if you read but I think that it doesn't necessarily penetrate and that's not because it's not there right what about the notion of stereotypes though because all of this is built on the notion that we haven't we have an impression of how people fit somehow in this in this spectrum yeah and there are there's an enormous amount of research on on not only just stereotyping and the consequences of it and gender is one of the areas that's very much stereotype in fact it seems to me that many of the things that are reflected in this debate are based on stereotypes to some extent and yet there's a lot of research on counter stereotyping how you can combat this and it's it's a I appreciate your attempt I think that again it's like I think that there's also an issue is like how do you how do we speak back to belief because kind of like what you're doing there is saying well here's you know there's all this research and like but like if I want to have a conversation with my dad about gender like dad just tells me what the catholic church says about gender and that's his heartfelt belief is this is what gender is there's boys and there's girls and that's all I need to know and he doesn't want it to get any more complicated than that and I don't think and I think that that is like that sort of rhetoric and is really linked to how people are talking like one of the things I didn't get to in the paper is how Eric Fassan is linking these debates in France to anti-intellectualism which I think is really another part of what's going on here and also part of the appeal of talking in common sense ways about gender and not bringing good research into the conversation so I think that we need to find ways to make the research part of the common sense without you know asking people to you know go and read the sorts of very useful studies that you're talking about like how can we inject those into I think public debates in terms of the question of how do we speak back to believe I mean it seems to me the really important point you made a little while back was that that actually just waking up to a headline that you know may not do something progressive that may not you know I guess troubling those kind of categories of what would look like progressive thinking and what wouldn't I mean isn't that how you speak back to belief is just by actually something new coming like pricking the surface and coming into the consciousness that then enters discourse and so maybe in a way you know I guess that's probably what kind of keeps you going with difficult things is to actually sort of think well I may not be sort of seeing any evolution in sight here but you know could we have had this conversation 20 years ago I mean one of the like I've been doing work like related to this for quite a while now and I had a student who was a very Christian young woman it's how she described herself in one of my classes at Monash and she came to me after a class where I talked about sexuality and she said she wanted to talk to me and I was kind of like sucking in thinking you know how's this going to go and she said I think I'm queer and I thought she was about to come out to me which you know wouldn't be the first time and she said I'm queerly religious and she wanted to have a conversation about like how her ideas about religion like you know were kind of similar to my ideas about you know gender and sexuality and like you know could we talk about that which I thought that was a moment when I thought that that sort of opening was happening and neither of us were trying to convince each other of the rightness of our positions but we were looking for places where and Pellegrini talks about places where religion and sexual feelings touch which I find a really useful idea for trying to think about this stuff