Recently Liberal Senator Claire Chandler was in the news for her anti-trans bill seeking to boot people she doesn’t like out of sport. She is indeed one of the biggest anti-trans campaigners in the Senate.

Late last year, Chandler published a post about Australian bureaucracies being ‘captured’ by the ‘gender industry’ on a blog called ’11th hour’, run by an American campaigner called Jennifer Bilek. More about her in a moment.

In her own words, Chandler railed about “A dangerous agenda which erodes the rights of women and girls is being sold to bureaucrats by a lobby group and slipped into public policy under the guise of ‘diversity and inclusion’. ”

But who really has the dangerous agenda? Bilek’s 11th Hour, where Chandler seems content to hang out, is quite the half-bakery.

Anti-fascist Christa Peterson did a dive into Bilek last year on Twitter but the summary is basically this:

Jennifer Bilek is a David Icke-endorsing conspiracy theorist who comes out a particularly nasty American ecofascist tradition. The GC movement now widely believes that there is suspicious and nefarious funding behind the trans movement.

A very influential figure in this is said Bilek, who wrote the very popular Federalist piece in 2018 and at this point has just done a ton of the ‘research’ GC people cite.

Basically all the big ‘gender critical’ people follow her. Bilek is well embedded in the movement, not some random person on the fringe.

The ‘incisive investigations’ that GC people are so impressed by argue that trans people are a psy-op to ready us to put Google in our heads and feed our bodies to the machine. This is Bilek’s whole thing. It’s in the Federalist piece, it’s in everything.

You don’t have to dig very deeply to find rhetoric that is as extreme as it is loopy.


Bilek is obsessed with the idea that trans rights movements have shady billionaire funding. But most disturbingly, Bilek began explicitly endorsing anti-Semitic theories about, in her words, ‘the Jewish aspect’ of all this.

She doesn’t hide it, it’s right there.

So why is an Australian senator publishing anti-trans pieces on a platform run by an explicit anti-Semite?

Chandler’s piece there came out well after Bilek’s anti-Semitism became common knowledge.

The article Claire Chandler wrote is still up, but an archived version is here in case it gets deleted: https://archive.ph/s3DBX

Tasmanians should be very vary of a Senator who, while tasked with representing us, prefers to spend her time entertaining the perverse, inane, discriminatory and racist tropes of the American far-right.

Hat tip to Tom Westmoreland for picking up on this.

Juliette Rosenthal is a Tasmanian-born former federal public servant who worked in the area of policy development and analysis. She returned to Tasmania after retiring and is patiently learning how to grow olives.