What is wrong now was wrong before

The past is not the same as the present. This startling insight was delivered by former Australian PM Julia Gillard during a recent lecture at the University of Manchester, in response to a question from Women’s Rights Network’s Cath Dyson. The latter had asked Gillard whether, when she changed the Australian sex discrimination law to define “woman” by gender identity rather than sex, she had considered some of the “unintended consequences”. An example Dyson gave was that of Sal Grover, who was told by a court that her woman-only app could not exclude males who claimed to be women. Gillard’s response was that during the 2012 parliamentary debates relating to changes to the Sex Discrimination Act “the issues […] were not raised by anyone because they simply weren’t a matter of public debate the way they are today, so it was a different time”. 

So we can take that as a “no”, then. The consequences of replacing sex with gender identity in law, thereby enabling any man to claim access to female-only spaces and resources, just weren’t a thing back then. How could those amending legislation possibly be expected to consider the impact of doing so? Aren’t they only meant to reflect on the implications if and when it’s fashionable? It is a totally ludicrous answer. It would be ludicrous even if there had not been submissions from women’s and lesbian groups pointing out the risks. It would be ludicrous even if prominent feminists such as Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys had not been sounding the alarm for years. No one should need it pointed out to them that in a society where men hold significant power over women and misogyny remains deeply embedded, changing the law in this way risks becoming an abuser’s charter. Clearly Gillard knew sexism was real — 2012 was a year in which she won plaudits for “lambasting” misogynist opponents — but chose to play dumb when it came to understanding the difference between sex and gender, and why protections for women exist at all. 

“It was a different time” is one of those magic, arse-covering phrases that stands in the place of an actual apology

Even now, it is not clear whether Gillard believes any mistakes were made. God forbid that she might yet end up on the wrong side of history. She is hedging her bets. If the time comes when removing all protections for Australian women and girls is generally recognised to have been a mistake, she can reiterate that things were different — so different! — back then. If, on the other hand, the pressure of sunk costs means that no one dares to backtrack, well, she hasn’t specifically said she wouldn’t do the same thing today. She has simply declared herself not responsible because she didn’t really think about it, and no one else who mattered did, either.  

“It was a different time” is one of those magic, arse-covering phrases that stands in the place of an actual apology. It absolves the speaker and condemns “the past” for any potential errors made in his or her name. In the UK in 2012, it was a phrase often heard in relation to Jimmy Saville, alongside intimations that people knew he was abusing children, but also, they didn’t, since truly seeing it wasn’t the done thing. The way it was used implied we had since entered an age of enlightenment, in which nobody who denied child abuse or covered it up in the past would do so today. Yet when the same demographic who raised concerns about Saville during his lifetime — older women — dared to express specific concerns about safeguarding and male sexual entitlement in 2012, they were sidelined, and continue to be sidelined today. “Different times” operates as a kind of cycle. You never have to listen to whistleblowers in the here and now because they can be dismissed as stoking moral panic. Then, as I argued in my book Hags, “the moral panic that turns out to have been correct stops being classed as a moral panic and is magically transformed into yet more evidence that the past was another country and hence cannot be used as a framework with which to judge the present”. You’re free to carry on making the exact same mistakes as before. 

An endless succession of “different times” means that whatever ill-advised thing you’re doing in the name of “progress” can be excused in the future by the fact that “no one” was saying anything against it. Or maybe some people were, but they were bad people who were against it for bad reasons, and being right for the wrong reasons is worse than being wrong for the right ones. It may be that in the future, people look back in horror at Baroness Cass using the example of a child “transitioned” as a toddler and now terrified of being “outed” as a justification for continuing with the dangerous puberty blocker trial. It may be that people find it shocking that the Scottish government fought to keep male prisoners housed with vulnerable female inmates. It may be that people consider it utterly absurd that women were smeared and hounded for asking for the bare minimum in terms of recognition and protections. 

Alas, we can’t possibly know yet. Even though none of us have ever really stopped being aware of what sex people are or that the worst men will exploit every available loophole, “different times” always allows us to pretend we are dealing with an entirely different situation and context. It did so in the past, and it continues to do so today. It takes a brave sort — someone braver than Gillard — to dare to admit that some things never change.