Letter of the Day

We are not all one

IT may well be time that Australian women “woke up to what is happening to their rights in the name of diversity and inclusion, as Rita Panahi asserts (“Opinion, 15/3).

However, the so-called modern feminist movement has been split in two since second-wave feminism in the 1970s, before trans activism became an issue of popular parlance.

Believing in “the sisterhood” even back then was no more than a delusional fiction-as illustrated by some prominent women writers and media celebrities who decried feminism as an anathema to womanhood.

What else is new now?  Indeed, in this newspaper’s Hot Topic column this week about what Hollywood women wore at the Oscars, some women readers disparaged the female stars for their revealing attire.

Rita should watch a 1939 Hollywood movie called The Women, in which an all-female cast “bitches” its way through a narrative about female jealousy and power struggles.

Maybe it’s time the social expectations that “all women support women” were highlighted as unrealistic and irrational. Women’s own individual experiences have shown this to be the case.

The trans debate has simply catapulted a new bomb into the old discussion circle, or circus, about women’s rights.

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