If you have been watching the aftermath of the Barbie movie, you might have learnt a lot about the Right. The most important lesson is that everything is sex.

Barbie, like almost every “woke” development now, is a “groomer.” Poor Stereotypical Barbie thought she’d fixed the world for women’s equality, and now it turns out she’s a demonic force.

The American radicalising Right had been allowed to like Barbie because, for them, she was only about training girls in the utterly unattainable standards of femininity to which they must devote their lives. It’s all clothes and makeup and the perfect figure. Be pretty/perfect. Be still and silent.

Barbie the movie reminded the moral minority starkly that there was a more dangerous side to the doll than that. She threatened to teach their daughters (white liberal) feminism. Aw heck no.

Barbie has no reproductive organs and, for this Right, woman has no other purpose. Woman is utterly defined by her ability to spawn. Biological essentialism is back with a vengeance. No reproductive rights for you, girlfriend. No contraceptives or ability to initiate divorce. No vote. No career. Get baby fever and know your God-given place.

The opening scene of the film is sin made celluloid. Bored girl children are being socialised into deadening domesticity over their baby dolls, when sexy Barbie appears causing a violent orgy of destruction. Smash those baby dolls, little sisters.

The movie’s central tension between Barbie Land and Patriarchy makes clear that Barbie, for all the damage she does, is meant to help girls aspire to a role in the civic space, or even in space.

More dangerous still is the fact that Ryan Gosling’s Ken reveals the Right’s “truth” about the feminist project: the neutered man. Cue spasms of incel horror. The Right completely missed that the film’s joke was about the movie industry: Ken was being put in the female role in movies. Instead he was perceived as another weapon in the ginned up Masculinity Crisis.

Some on the Right saw what the Left saw: Barbie ultimately leaves the gender dynamic pretty much untouched. They could see Barbie’s conclusion (spoiler alert) in a visit to the gynaecologist as a reinforcement of their anti-trans sentiment: sex is genitalia. I prefer to see it as a pro-trans message: this woman chooses her womanly genitalia.

The Right loathes the concept of “gender.” “Sex” is all, binary and heterosexual.

Sex – identity and act – at least for women, must be sacred and reproductive.

The idea of blurring,“races” or sexes, is a nightmare for the bigots on the Right. And so their performance of gender online is about sexual polarity.

The Right’s performance of gender is only out-dramatised by one sector: drag artists.

For the Right’s men, they are inspired by the fascist posturing of figures like Bronze Age Pervert with constant inspiration from the muscled White warriors of the ancient world. In a homoerotic act, they ogle the glistening muscles of the biggest men. No wonder Melbourne’s gym-junkie Nazis turn out in black shorts instead of black shirts. Hello sailor?

The women of the Right have moved from the honeytrap sexual appeal of their earlier influencers like Lauren Southern to the Tradwife. In this performance of Barbie-like submissive femininity, they hope to tempt women to the glories of domesticity, to catch the Right’s baby-fever.

Some on the young Right also saw a warning that Barbie Land conveys for men. Barbie Land has been equated to “the longhouse.” The Right used to fret about “the cathedral,” a description of the modern world which argued that the liberal establishment had destroyed everything. Only a revolution into patriarchal and authoritarian monarchy could save the nation. The cathedral has become the longhouse, emphasising the shift in focus. The longhouse says that the feminisation of the modern world is the true crisis.

Apparently before those muscled Greek idols forged everything worthwhile about civilisation – including manly architecture – people lived in matrilineal longhouses ruled by the Den Mother. That society was barbaric, muddy and lame. Just like Barbie Land (minus the pink).

The destruction caused by this modern feminised, diverse, and excessively egalitarian world – a new longhouse – has apparently fostered cross-breeding between “races.” It has led, oh horror, to moral destruction in not just extra-marital sex but the existence of LGBTQIA+ people in public. Even worse, they exist in front of children.

If gender ceases to be about wholistic identity and freedom of choice about how the individual presents themself to the world, and instead is a representation of genitalia, everything becomes unavoidably sexual.

There is safe sexual where men are manly and women are cute.

There is dangerous sexual where this mandated binary is confused. Any LGBTQIA+ presentation that does not abide by that binary represents a derangement of genitalia.

Thus the existence of LGBTQIA+ people – or feminists – in front of children is “grooming.” In the Right’s obsession with genitals, this “deviant” presentation of gender is advertising confusing or aberrant genitalia.

This is why a story book that includes a family with two penguin dads or someone with non-binary gender identity is described as “pornographic” in the Moms for Liberty purges taking place in American schools and libraries. A Mem Fox picture book with a woman discreetly pictured in a bath was removed for being pornographic.

And so anyone who merely supports the equal existence of LGBTQIA+ people will find themselves labelled a “groomer” by online commentators. One community member fighting the Florida book bans explained the intent: This entire effort is “designed to put LGBT people back in the closet and keep us there.” Ron DeSantis’s recent campaign ad made clear that his presidential campaign was pursuing that very goal.

A figure that epitomised the clash of worlds in Barbie was Dr Barbie. The vast majority of normie viewers probably never noticed that the actor, Hari Nef, is trans and that’s just fine. It’s the performance not the “sex” that counts. For the Right, this was one of the appalling efforts by the demonic Left to “indoctrinate” their children with “pornography.”

The same cohorts that are driving the attacks on LGBTQIA+ existence are the ones hyper-sexualising prepubescent children in kiddie beauty pageant displays which border on “child sexual abuse material.” Florida is the driving force in the war on Queer. It is also the state where “conservative” rural mothers partake in the highest number of child beauty pageants of anywhere in Republican America where these grotesque displays dominate. Apparently the only safe place to display sexualised womanhood in Purity Culture America is on the pre-teens. No wonder these are also the states supporting child marriage most vehemently.

These mothers treat their children like Barbies.

Barbie was a lot of fun. The lessons the Right are taking from it, however, are scary. Any of us living in a secular world where incels are a laughing stock and the domestic goddess is a cookbook need to pay attention.

Our efforts towards an inclusive and egalitarian world are a call to revolution for them. America is showing us what they intend as theocratic Right forces table ever more laws to constrain sexuality.

The same forces are at work in Australia. The IPA is trying to drum up a parents’ rights campaign (which translates to radicalised Right wing parents dictating what everyone’s children learn at school). The attempt to stop Big W stocking a guide for parents on how to talk to children about sex was precisely the game plan. The campaign to make this an Australian battle is underway.

Don’t ignore them. They are sure as hell not ignoring you.

There may be some Coalition politicians and Murdoch employees who are motivated by genuine racism to oppose the Voice to Parliament. Some might believe First Nations Australians are unworthy. Some probably believe in “reverse racism.” That, of course, is the belief that there is a correct direction for racism to travel.

Some undoubtedly believe in a myopic fashion that there is no inherent disadvantage to being indigenous in settler-colonial nations. There is endless research to establish how historical decisions and policy entrench disadvantage and foster social ills; it is not, as some Coalition politicians might argue, the result of a “bad” nature.

For many more Coalition politicians, however, one presumes the decision to oppose the Voice is strategic. They don’t care who is hurt in the process, just as they didn’t care about the escalated persecution that accompanied the plebiscite on marriage equality.

The Coalition and media friends are using the Voice (just as they used refugees) as an implicitly racist tool to galvanise their own vote, but more importantly to divide the electorate. It is part of our conscious echoing of the CRT argument that is burning through America, fighting acknowledgement of systemic disadvantage in that country.

CRT is “critical race theory.” This is a university law school discipline that examines the elements of the racist past that continue in current institutional structures. A Right-wing agitator, Christopher Rufo, stole this term for school studies to allow “conservative” parents to fight any attempt to teach a less bowdlerised view of history and society.

As is standard practice, Sky Australia, The Spectator and other radicalising organs borrowed the American CRT gambit for use in Australia. It can be deeply uncomfortable for Australians brought up on comforting patriotic myths to have their offspring bring home age-appropriate stories of the Killing Times and Blackbirding (sugar slavery). It is shocking to read the ghastly story of cold-blooded massacres of our First Nations people: it is estimated that we killed in various ways around 90% of the Aboriginal people here when colonisation began. It is chilling to envision Australians dropping kidnapped and enslaved Pacific Islanders in the ocean rather than bothering to return them home. Their unmarked graves are strewn across our sugar plantations, with 30% killed by the brutal conditions.

Forgetting can be even more crucial than remembering in the forging of a patriotic narrative.

Deploying race divisions has been crucial to American politics. White southerners were reconciled to the appalling conditions they were granted by the plantation-owning class by the certainty that the worst of them was better than the best Black man. The workers have been divided and disempowered by the resentment fostered between White and “Coloured” workers.

Such was the disgust for Black people that when legal changes forced the desegregation of public swimming pools built during the public works era of the New Deal, communities shut them down for years. They denied themselves the use of these communal facilities rather than share them with Black townsfolk. This dynamic continues in Republican state logic. Most Republican states refused federal money to grant the poorest Whites medical cover because it would aid Black people too.

America’s winner-takes-all capitalism fosters a “myth of scarcity.” This in turn promotes a resentful, zero-sum psychology where another group’s progress is “our loss.”

Australia’s economic model was not one driven by this model of capitalism. Our labour shortages made for a strong class of worker who achieved notable rights. We were considered a labour model in the early decades of the 20th century to the distress of capitalists who planned fascist revolutions. Our neoliberalism saw a less toxic negotiation between capital, state and worker.

In 1975, however, Milton Friedman brought his American winner-takes-all neoliberalism to Australia. His acolytes, like Peter Costello, founded “think tanks” including the HR Nicholls Society to destroy the strength of the Australian worker. The IPA followed them, turning from promoting Australian neoliberalism – Economic Rationalism – to the ultra-free market neoliberalism that so excited America’s richest.

Our society now displays the damage caused by decades of cynical “trickle down” economics and the crippling of worker strength. Just as in America, our chasm between rich and poor is at historic levels. Wealth is now generational, with the American model and our copycat version having almost destroyed aspirational dreams.

While the Labor Party continues to govern more for the nation, it has still embraced the truisms of this debunked economic model. The Coalition, by contrast, governs for the richest. This is the reason that it also copies the Republicans’ culture war battles, aiming to win a majority and government with grievance rather than sound policy.

Dahlia Lithwick described America’s Republican voters thus recently: the “majority of White Americans continue to vote against interest for parties and ideologies that directly contribute to their economic decline.” This is the position for most Coalition voters in Australia. As in America, the strategists are activating racism to promote this grievance.

The Voice to Parliament is not, as they lie, a “third chamber” of parliament or any other such threat to equality. It is literally nothing more than an advisory body to try to ensure that the best policy is deployed to reverse the deep disadvantage faced by First Nations people. It is placed in the constitution to ensure that cynical governments in the future cannot abandon it. The design of the body itself will be built by parliamentary consultation with First Nation representatives.

Some who reject the Voice do so because they believe it to be a sop. The depiction of it as a threat to land ownership is a pathetic and dangerous slander: it is, however, a handy distraction from the prospect of a wealth tax that could raise $29 billion a year.

The idea that society is a zero-sum enterprise where anything gained by anyone else is stolen from you is a distortion of fact and a miserable basis for community. We must not let a wealthy, self-interested elite divide us with racist lies to ensure their own continued grasp on our common wealth.

This essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations.

One of the highlights of recent travel was seeing the Queen of Ireland, Panti Bliss, perform at the Soho Theatre. This esteemed drag performer was pushed to the fore of Ireland’s 2015 marriage equality campaign and came to lead it to its successful vote.

Rory O’Neill, her creator, describes her as a “giant cartoon woman,” but her most recent performance is less “transgressive, punk underground” Jessica Rabbit and more Grande Dame. Panti is the glamorous aunt you wish you had.

The story that unfolds over the “If these wigs could talk” show is brilliantly crafted. It is a stand-up routine and monologue that makes the audience fall in love with Panti before sharing what it was like to grow up illegally gay in Ireland, and so much more that you must experience without spoilers.

O’Neill began his adult life in art school, but Panti became his living, breathing, evolving work of art. Far more influenced by the vaudeville spirit of British drag and the oral tradition of Irish drag than the glamorous and polished version commonly seen from the USA, Panti has a long history of outrageousness. O’Neill’s creation has also done more than most of her compatriots to foster the embrace of LGBTQAI+ existence in Ireland. Her Noble Call at the Abbey Theatre is one of her most, and justly, famous contributions.

In the documentary about Panti, Queen of Ireland, O’Neill describes the marriage equality campaign as the final battle for equality even though, at the time, he felt uncertain that the Queer world needed this badge of bourgeois normality. What O’Neill knew is that the worst brute could marry, but somehow Queer people were not considered worthy.

It is deeply frustrating that this recent achievement of legal equality in 2015 in Ireland and the USA, and 2017 in Australia, is not the final battle after all. Queer people are once more at the barricades – if they are paying attention – as the Christofascists emanating out of America and Europe lead the battle to erase LGBTQIA+ existence.

The ultraconservatives made it clear at the time that the sky would fall if access to marriage was broadened to same-sex couples. In fact, the sky remained in place, but the billionaire-funded groups that mobilised against extending access to marriage then are now funding the fight to ensure only “traditional” gender and sexuality are legal.

Their initial targets are an intentional conflation of two different categories of people: drag performers and trans people.

Trans people are their gender. Drag, by contrast, is a performance art. In mainstream representation it is largely carried out by cis gay men, but many drag performers and traditions are trans. Performative gender such as drag is at least as old as the theatre itself. And trans existence pervades history and societies; scientific research is illustrating that gender is much more complex than conservative faux-science likes to pretend.

Drag, however, can be outrageous and sexy. Trans people are a tiny minority and can be very visible making them an easy target for cowards. Fewer people know a trans person than know lesbian and gay people. All of these factors enable propaganda manipulating confusion to find fertile soil. Cis people, firmly embedded in their birth-allocated sex, can find it impossible to understand gender dysphoria.

This makes it easy for Christofascists to combine these two categories with all the lies and myths that were told to keep gay men persecuted. None of these categories are dangerous to women or children. Groomers and pedophiles are found in churches, scouts and youth groups, not at drag story hour. The primary threat to women, children – and trans people – remains bad cis men.

Australia has not fully descended into the US attack on LGBTQIA+ people broadly and the UK’s persecution of trans people. The fact that Neo Nazis have joined the women pretending to support women by demonising another vulnerable group alienates most Australians from this toxic bigotry. We cannot, however, be complacent: both Media Watch and 4 Corners recently platformed people of suspect reputation.

The right is more cunning than the centre and left. It sees that history is bending towards diversity and inclusion; it’s determined to fight that development with every word, act and dollar. It coopts the language of rights while aiming to rob everyone except themselves of rights. It exploits the media’s attempts to play fair and balanced by promoting disinformation-heavy bigotry and exterminationism as just another perspective.

Organisations in Australia illustrate the international blurring of goals in their efforts to drive us towards ultra-conservative social positions. The Australian Marriage Alliance body converted its pre 2017 focus on defeating marriage equality to its new manifestation – Binary Australia – which campaigns against any blurring of strict male and female categories.

Citizen Go has recently begun to include Australia in its global far right campaigns. It is a Spanish ultra-conservative Christian platform designed to counter progressive petition sites like Avaaz, Change.org or Get Up. Its funding and board boast a grim roster of figures. Its site shows that it is combining campaigns against the “UN’s LGBT agenda” with fighting against the Voice to Parliament (alongside other ultra-conservative Christian bodies).

Far right groups are eager to use unsuspecting women as gateways to their brutally patriarchist ideology to broaden support. We saw women drawn into the space over covid, combining concern about pandemic health measures with conspiracy stories of tunnels full of abducted children being farmed for hormones. These issues have been subsumed into a campaign based on disinformation about trans healthcare. These women often do not realise that their own human equality and independence is threatened by these far-right fellow travellers.

In looking back at the Irish marriage equality debate, Rory O’Neill joked that he hoped Queer people “don’t end up becoming as boring as everybody else.” The frightening developments that dominate the discussion now make that moment seem a golden age of acceptance. Panti Bliss is asking you not to allow these forces to win, driving us back into the dark ages of persecution of LGBTQIA+ people.

It’s now up to the rest of us to become radical, resistant and irritating. Don’t let the Christofascists drive Queer people back towards the disdained fringe, to exile, to suicide. Whether you are standing up for people’s right to live their gender or embrace their art, you need to be out there standing against the threat alongside those under attack.