I don’t take part in this sisterhood jamboree. Why? Let’s start with the Big Lie

March 8, 2026 — 4:00am

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Women are being lied to. Worse, the liars are often other women. Today is International Women’s Day. I no longer participate. The annual event perpetuates a Big Lie that women are in all respects the equal of men. This is nonsense.

Women are as intelligent, capable, determined and analytical as men. But we are not the same. Simply, biologically. We are the sex evolutionarily designated to bear children and nurture them with our bodies. Awash with hormones geared towards that process – even, tragically, when the equipment betrays us. The Big Lie tells us to ignore our physiognomy, but bodies have a way of making their wants and needs known. International Women’s Day upholds a model of womanhood which teaches us to override those sensations.

I will be forever grateful for a handful of feminists who have taken it upon themselves to warn young women that we were being lied to.

In the early 2000s, journalist Virginia Haussegger wrote a column for this masthead, titled “The sins of our feminist mothers”. In it, she lamented that her generation had been sold on a lie of “you-can-have-it-all” feminism. Haussegger is an impressive career woman, who discovered too late that her biological clock had ticked over past midnight. “I am childless, and I am angry,” she wrote. “Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female........

© Brisbane Times