Liberal senator Claire Chandler has claimed Australian bureaucrats are erasing women.

In a new op-ed she lays out the enormous amount of money and time that has been wasted in redefining the term woman to include men.

In August last year, the federal Department of Health decided to dedicate resources to deleting more than fifty references to ‘women’ from a pregnancy COVID19 vaccination guide, replacing them with ‘pregnant person’. Not only was this a mind-boggling waste of resources during a pandemic, but the removal of specific sex-based language undermines the accuracy of health advice for pregnant women. So why did they do it? 

This month, the Department of Health finally answered my questions, submitted seven months ago, about who asked them to delete the word “woman” and why they went along with it. The Department’s answer was that it receives “a benchmark and suggestions” on “the use of inclusive language” from the lobby group Pride in Diversity. Services Australia was presented with a ‘Gold Employer’ award by the same lobby group this year, apparently around the same time it was starting to re-label mothers as “birthing parents”. All up, more than thirty federal Departments and Agencies have been paying this lobby group for advice and staff training on so-called ‘inclusive’ language.

Chandler pointed out that the majority of Australians are not interested in redefining words such as woman or mother. She also highlighted the disturbing trend of lobby groups being paid tax-payer dollars to advocate for their political agenda.

These activist positions taken by bureaucrats not only fly in the face of the evidence and public opinion, but they have real-world detrimental consequences for women. Governments around Australia and internationally are increasingly allowing males to self-identify into women’s spaces and facilities, even housing male rapists in women’s prisons, with predictably devastating results.

Over the last three years, I have not been able to find a single government Agency or Department prepared to agree that a woman is a member of the female sex, let alone agree that single-sex services are an important tool for the participation and safety of women and girls. Public servants who have contacted me privately say that expressing such a normal, mainstream view in their workplace would be career-limiting and contradict the ‘inclusivity’ staff training that many Departments engage lobby groups to conduct. Yet it is abundantly clear to the vast majority of Australians that this ideology, which drives such appalling disregard for women, should have no place in the public service we pay for.

Binary spokeswoman, Kirralie Smith, commended the senator on her continued good work.

“It is staggering that so few politicians are willing to speak and defend the truth. Biology matters and it is being rejected or ignored for the sake of appeasing a small group of lobbyists,” she said.

“Senator Chandler has been persistent and consistent in her efforts to call this dangerous nonsense for what it is.

“Women are being excluded from their own spaces and services for the sake of a few males who appropriate the female sex.”