"Trans Rights, Women's Rights, Gay Rights, Oh My!” with Professor Robert Wintemute
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2025
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when the fight for women's equality collides with transgender rights? Is the anti-trans nastiness of the Elon MAGA-verse now winning? Or is it mere chaff in a new legal regime that privileges gender identity over feminism and gay rights? Where are we, exactly, in the gender wars?
The question of who counts as a woman, once banal, is now a cultural lightning rod, shaping debates over prisons, sport, health care, and child rearing.
Professor Robert Wintemute is one of the world’s leading human rights lawyers. A lifelong gay rights advocate and an early contributor to international transgender rights frameworks, he has since revised his view, arguing for a balance between trans inclusion and sex-based protections for women.
He joins Josh to explore how we got here, what has changed, and what co-existence might look like.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gatay humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. It's been one of the most dangerous, |
| 0:09.5 | thornyest, most hazardous subjects to broach for the past five years, really. The question of |
| 0:15.4 | whether we can have conversations about women's only spaces, women's only prisons, women's only |
| 0:19.8 | rape crisis centres, women's only athletics carn women's only prisons, women's only rape crisis centres, |
| 0:21.2 | women's only athletics carnivals, without raising the question of what exactly is a woman. |
| 0:27.1 | In many political campaigns, it's even been a gotcha question that some journalists have |
| 0:31.4 | posed to unwitting politicians. Can you define a woman? A question that would have seemed |
| 0:37.0 | banal ten years ago has been up and down and in and out and so topsy-turvy it leaves your head spinning. |
| 0:43.5 | Where are we on these wars between transgender activists, women's rights activists, frequently known as transgender exclusionary radical feminists or turfs. And the gay rights movement, |
| 0:57.4 | Robert Wintermute is a world expert in this field. He's a gay gentleman himself who started out |
| 1:04.1 | as a human rights campaigner on behalf of transgender people and was fundamental in one of the |
| 1:09.5 | founding documents about transgender rights around the world |
| 1:12.4 | and has since modified his thinking somewhat, earning him the ire of some trans activists. |
| 1:19.7 | And this year, a few months ago, New South Wales, the state where I live, the most populous state in Australia, enacted a law, the Equality Legislation Amendment, |
| 1:29.7 | LGBTIQA Plus Act, 24, although it came to effect in 2025, which now allows people in my state |
| 1:38.5 | in Sydney to change their registered sex without undergoing any surgery, introduces non-binary as a recognized |
| 1:45.8 | descriptor, and basically is just a self-reporting. A woman in New South Wales is somebody who |
| 1:52.2 | fills out a form saying that they are a woman and nothing more. So if you thought that the |
| 1:57.9 | transphobic extremes of Trump and Elon had set back the trans rights movement, |
| 2:02.8 | it's worth noting that legislatures and courts take a long time to catch up, |
| 2:07.2 | and many of the most extreme trans ideas from 2020 and 2021 are only now being enacted as the law of the land across many jurisdictions in the West. |
| 2:17.7 | Robert Wintermute, today's guest, has written a new book about this. |
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