My case against the City of Armadale.

Gay-rights icon Andrew Sullivan has written an article (see below) excoriating the LGBTQ movement for their stupidity in asking too much from the mainstream population. @FSUofAustralia @sullydish @michaelshermer @elonmusk @QuadrantOrgAu @Elagabalus39811 @Dittloff4Sense substack.com/home/post/p-200… I wrote the following piece in late 2022 warning about the same foolishness. quadrant.org.au/news-opinion… substack.com/@declanmansfiel… The Folly of Going Too Far.  The Promised Land is a symbolic dream and nothing more. Its satisfactions are beyond the reach of both individuals and society, irrespective of whether the tools used to attain happiness are politics, religion, science, economics, or philosophy. The supreme, contemporary irony, though, is that, while we’re living in an overtly moral age, it’s a fundamental, but often overlooked side of human nature to disturb our own and other people’s peace. All of us, to our shame, are guilty of naively or even deliberately choosing the wrong path. We do it continually throughout our lives. Dostoevsky said that if all human desire was indulged, we would still, through a quirk of psychology, destroy everything that makes our lives happy and meaningful. Eden, Jannah, Nirvana, the prelapsarian state of nature, the perfect world of the future, the false gods and snake oil of communism, feminism, socialism, fascism or environmentalism, (our wildest, febrile imaginings, in other words) are permanently outside — except in brief moments of pleasure or contentment — the horizon of tangible, durable and concrete human experience. Like Moses, then, we see the Promised Land, but it always remains tantalisingly beyond our reach. In the end, we take, if we’re wise and humble, the simple joys, and are grateful. What, you say, does the above deep and perhaps meaningless passage have to do with anything? Apart from a general observation, not much. But it does refer obliquely to the most monumental strategic blunder of modern times, which will probably take decades to undo. After centuries of stigmatisation and discrimination, homosexual people, or, in broader terms, the non-heterosexual minority, had not only seen the Promised Land from a distance, but had walked through its shady bowers, sunlit mountains and watered oases. A rejected community had reached their desired destination and were enjoying the fruits of both their exhaustive labours and their most pristine dreams. Everyone, or at least most people in Western liberal democracies, were happy. Suddenly nobody cared about other people’s sexuality. And then, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, extremists within the movement pushed everything too far. It wasn’t enough for gay marriage to be normalised, or for good-natured tolerance of different lifestyle choices to be accepted. A suite of radical claims was put before a confused public and no debate or dissent was allowed. Men were now women and women were men, and not in the ‘let us be kind to John or Jane type of way – sure what harm could it do?’ No, a man with an actual penis and testicles and the full physiology of an adult male was now a woman with all the rights and privileges traditionally reserved for females, and any argument to the contrary was ‘transphobia’, a sin for which the only just response was to be cast into the deepest realms of hell; either that, or have your life destroyed by being cancelled socially or professionally. In other words, the purest form of bullying behaviour, a prima facie example that would sit easily in even the most enlightened psychological textbook, was being weaponised to further an ideological agenda, and by the people who shout the loudest about ‘being kind’. The amount of anti-free speech, anti-democratic, anti-live-and-let-live ideological impositions on everyday people’s lives is extraordinary – and just as chilling in their implications. (Click on Substack link above).

There are many reasons I refused to do Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training. Inverting the concept of racism so that actual racism becomes institutionally embedded throughout society was one of them. Arguing, though, with people who are the products, for decades, of an education system, geared for social justice (another term for privileging group rights over individual rights), in nonsense is an impossibility. You can’t reason people out of an idea that they’ve never been reasoned into. We need to remove ideology from our institutions. The City of Armadale’s zealotry in the pursuit of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and transgender ideology is the consequence of a societal failure to prioritise truth over feelings, propaganda and ideology. In a bitter irony, though, the concept of truth has been replaced with wishful thinking, or, to echo David Hume, mistaking what, in the minds of zealots, ‘ought’ to be for what ‘is’. Embedding injustice into institutions is worse than any unintentional injustice, as can be witnessed by the death of Henry Nowak. We’re living in a completely unserious age. Enough of this jejune nonsense. @FSUofAustralia @SpeechUnion @AngusTaylorMP @PaulineHansonOz @AlboMP @mattjcan

‘Safety’ is used to silence dissent, promote ideologues, leave the non-committed in positions where they have no control over an organisation, and remove articulate opponents of the regime. And, worse, it’s a direct steal from communist bureaucratic control. Moreover, it explains how ideology informs the exponential growth in mental health disorders. If everyone is labelled neurodivergent, (ADHD, autism, etc.), then everyone is potentially unsafe. It’s also a passive aggressive, virtue-signalling way of appearing as the victim or hero of your own story. ‘Don’t you know, I did it to save my staff’. @FSUofAustralia @HeadWarriorTWM @Dittloff4Sense @Bernard_Lane @Elagabalus39811 @MRobertsQLD @jk_rowling @Glinner open.substack.com/pub/declan…

I wrote, I think, seventeen articles in the Spectator Australia and Quadrant Magazine touching on different aspects of transgender ideology and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

** An open letter to @AlboMP ** Dear Prime Minister Albanese, Let’s get one thing clear: women are adult human females. You know it, I know it, you even said it in the lead up to the last election when asked “what is a woman” by Piers Morgan. But we have a big problem. I’m sure you have heard, last week, the Federal Court delivered its judgment in Giggle v Tickle, the “what is a woman” legal case that has been fighting in federal court for the past four years. To put it very simply, there are two sides to this case: women, adult human females, who want to ensure that woman is a single-sex category in law and women & girls have access to single sex spaces. The other side, which includes your human rights commission, insists that men who claim to be women are women in the eyes of the law. The full Federal Court sided with the man who claims to be a woman. Yes. A male won the “what is a woman” court case. Giggle v Tickle has turned Australia into an international laughing stock. This decision is seismic. It means women cannot run women-only businesses for women. It confirms that the ordinary meaning of sex has been twisted beyond recognition. It means men can be women in law. The Australian Human Rights Commission, captured by ideology, has weaponised the sex discrimination act against women, the very demographic it was enacted to protect. They’ve even argued in court that men who claim to be women need pregnancy protections. They’ve pushed the view that sex is a spectrum, changeable, and that anyone objecting is the bigot. Is this something you agree with? Do you, Mr Prime Minister, think men need pregnancy protections in the law? And there are real-world stakes here: Girls at school are holding their bladders all day, refusing to drink water, because boys who claim to be girls are in their bathrooms and they don’t want them there. Women prisoners are locked in cells with male sex offenders who simply “identify” as women. Female athletes are losing podiums, matches and safety. This isn’t inclusion - it’s the demise of women’s rights. Prime Minister, some of your ministers say, “we need to protect trans rights”. With all due respect, sir, your government can protect so called trans rights without stripping rights from women and girls. Every other citizen manages to exist without demanding access to the opposite sex’s protected spaces. Why not try to get “trans rights” without destroying the rights of women and girls? Have you ever even tried?  The fact that Labor hasn’t even mentioned Giggle v Tickle and women’s rights - while Liberals, Nationals, and One Nation politicians speak out - tells us everything. This week has been silence from the Labor Party. No trans visibility day parades on this one. No pride posts. Why? What don’t you want Australians to know? You boast about your 50 per cent women in cabinet. Good for you - you can accurately recognise what a woman is when it suits you. But the rest of us aren’t allowed to without fear of punishment. And can I ask, if you filled that cabinet with 50 per cent trans women, would you still call it equality between men and women? Think about that. While the UK, the United States and even New Zealand are waking up, rolling back the nonsense and restoring sanity and realizing that gender ideology is a failed experiment, your government is turning Australia into the laughing stock of the world. “Giggle v Tickle” isn’t just a punchline overseas - it’s proof Australia is upside down. I want to tell you something really important: If you will lie about something as obvious as men being women, we can assume you will look us in the eye and lie about everything.  Tell the truth. Fix the Sex Discrimination Act. Reinstate clear biological, accurate definitions of man and woman. Protect women, girls and single-sex spaces. Actually do something. Because, at the moment, Mister Prime Minister, I’m doing your job for you.

The judgement in the Sall Grover case has galvanised people who were previously ignorant of transgender ideology and how it negatively impacts people’s lives. I posted this the other day. At the time of reposting, it had 134 views. It’s about how the ideology destroys people’s lives. It’s worth a repost. ‘Since that time, at the end of February 2025, I have been unemployed and without an income. I applied for multiple library positions similar to my job in the City of Armadale, but I was not interviewed. Word from the library grapevine says that I’ve been blacklisted. The contents of my two primary bank accounts have been exhausted, and I’m about to use my savings account to get through the next year — or, with luck, a year and a half. After that, I’ll access my superannuation. When I retire, four years hence, I’ll be broke, and I’ll need the pension to survive’.

Based on the summary in Giggle, they are relying on technicalities to deny Sall a victory. In other words, they are complaining about how it was argued. This is also designed presumably to make leave to appeal to the High Court tricky. A Court this captured by ideology and that can impose damages for speech because it feels like it is of considerable concern.

(See the full piece in the Substack link). The investigation into both allegations was ideological and the evidence presented by Human Resources to support the charges was flawed. I can say this with equanimity because the following claim, to give one example, there are many, proves that the City of Armadale were clutching at the proverbial straws to find me guilty. ‘It is alleged that you have requested — to communicate via email only with you.’ (Sic) In the Letter of Allegations (the formal document presented to accused parties), which included the above sentence, it does not say, even with the most generous interpretation of the ‘evidence’, what the City of Armadale claimed (see below). Human Resources and the management of the CoA library service accepted this allegation simply to pad their flimsy case about my alleged bad behaviour — to bulk nothing into something. Four nothings (there were four allegations) can appear as something if you lump them together. Also, they weaponised the City of Armadale’s Code of Conduct (in particular, the silencing of staff), because they thought nobody would ever know about their disingenuousness. Putting aside that only communicating by email while working as a Library Circulation Clerk is impossible, (you couldn’t do the job) I didn’t say what was claimed; in fact, the idea never entered my head. To support the accusation, HR submitted the following email written by me as evidence, which HR and library management included with a straight face in the Letter of Allegations. I’ll leave it to the reader to adjudicate which of the parties, me, or the City of Armadale, is being honest. It is, though, prima facie, the most flagrantly disingenuous and calculatedly dishonest reading of a text that you can imagine. This is the only email I ever sent to my accuser. It is in reply to an email. ‘Hi —, If I were to write an email every time a colleague made a soft comment about me (like I said to X about the USB) or a critical comment, which I’ve also experienced many times, I’d have written 10,000 emails since 2009. There are social reasons why we do the things we do. Declan.’ (It should say 2008, the year I began working in the CoA). Where does it say that I only want to communicate by email? It doesn’t. The accusation is a fabrication. Human Resources, instead of rejecting this allegation as the nonsense it was, formalised the complaint — the power to make an allegation formal, I should stress, lies with Human Resources and not the complainant, so something that should have been laughed at as risible, or treated as either frivolous or malicious was weaponised by the CoA to censor me. @FSUofAustralia @Elagabalus39811 @Glinner @andrewdoyle_com @Jilliantweeting @HJoyceGender @paddyjogorman open.substack.com/pub/declan…

youtu.be/noWh8SSeRCo?si=fcbF… In other words, (watch the video) ‘psychosocial’ crimes are nonsense. Words are not violence and everybody, everyday, can be offended by something they hear. The City of Armadale, following the Western Australian State Labor Government, which introduced ‘psychosocial’ crimes into law, is arguing that the City had a legal obligation to investigate why I refused to do Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training (and punish my wrongdoing by forcing me to attend). The fact that ‘psychosocial’ crimes, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and transgender ideology, are all part of a generalised attack on freedom of speech, which is being introduced by governments in liberal democracies throughout the world, hides, (borrowing a concept from Heidegger), what I’ve previously called — the Hermeneutic Circle of Social Justice. Heidegger argued that instead of attempting to understand something by starting at A and progressing along a rational, empirical path to Z, you sometimes have to enter the Hermeneutic Circle at any point and slowly gain knowledge until you understand the concept at every point in the circle — and that it is impossible to understand the concept without engaging in and completing this process. Woke ideology, in all its complexity, can only be understood from this perspective. It’s a multifaceted assault on everyday morality, ethics, science and common sense from multiple directions at once, and individual people usually only understand the part of the overall process, (which is purposefully hidden in the background), that concerns them. They understand, in other words, one part of the Hermeneutic Circle. Hence, when the City of Armadale’s legal representative argues that the City were legally required to investigate ‘psychosocial’ crimes, he was, whether he was aware, or unaware of the fact, only engaging in one part of the circle and was completely oblivious (to give him the benefit of the doubt), that he was being played by ideologues like the proverbial fiddle. Bad legislation and bad law are only parts of the Hermeneutic Circle of Social Justice. It’s a multifaceted assault on freedom of the individual, hiding behind, in its separate spheres, ‘being kind’, which is underpinned by the equality agenda, which was first introduced into political theory, in its modern form, during the French Revolution, and which, like a zombie, refuses to die, no matter how many tens of millions of lives have been lost in the interim, simply because it is parasitic on people’s decent impulses. It is not ethical or moral for society or the individual to deny reality. Language consequently is how we negotiate the world. Words, or ‘psychosocial’ crimes, are not violence. Freedom of speech is thus paramount to a civilised society, and the City of Armadale and its management have no right to force employees to adhere to any political, religious or philosophical ideology, no matter how ‘kind’ it may appear on the surface. @FSUofAustralia @peterboghossian @glukianoff @Elagabalus39811 @Glinner @stellaomalley3 @SexMattersOrg

The Fight for Institutional Neutrality: Mansfield v. City of Armadale The issue centers on Declan, a long-serving library worker who spent around 15 years at the front desk before becoming caught up in a dispute over workplace ideology, free speech, and institutional neutrality. After objecting to mandatory DEI training on philosophical grounds and later writing publicly about his concerns, he says the situation escalated into accusations, internal pressure, and treatment he believes amounted to discrimination because of his beliefs. Following his criticism, he says he was labelled a bigot, investigated for misconduct over a minor incident, and pressured to comply with the ideology or face termination. Feeling targeted and unable to work under those conditions, he resigned and is now pursuing legal action with support from the @FSUofAustralia More broadly, the case raises questions about whether public institutions should enforce particular ideological views, how dissenting opinions are treated in the workplace, and whether disciplinary processes can be used to silence disagreement. Concerns about censorship, reputational harm, and the right to hold independent political or philosophical beliefs have now pushed the matter into the legal arena. Today marked a major turning point, with a hearing at the State Administrative Tribunal to determine whether Declan’s discrimination claim against the City of Armadale can proceed or be dismissed. Supporters say the outcome matters not just for Declan personally, but for wider questions of freedom of speech and belief in public institutions. People who want to follow the case, watch the documentary, or support his legal fight can do so on the Free Speech Union Australia page: freespeechunion.au/supportde… The page includes Declan’s Story, updates on the case, and options to donate toward his legal expenses.

My mood this morning (turn the volume up). youtu.be/uwiTs60VoTM?si=U7hh…

'The CoA’s response, though, in an unintended irony, goes further. The city state that my claims ‘lacks substance’. The city’s allegations against me were four nothings combined into a hazy something. Even internal Human Resources communications reflect this — ‘we didn’t have much to work with’. The CoA’s response also claims that the allegations levelled against me were a ‘standard human resources response to a formal grievance regarding “malicious gossip” and “deliberate exclusion” of a colleague’. The ‘malicious gossip’ was me discussing why my accuser, who worked for twelve years as a ‘showgirl’ in drag shows, had been moved to other libraries within the CoA without explanation. This was before I was officially informed that she had made a complaint about me to HR. Being moved without commentary from management was unprecedented. I wasn’t alone in being curious about this. Everyone in the CoA library service was talking about why she had been moved. The ‘deliberate exclusion’ of a colleague, was me, in a room with one person present, saying ‘X put a USB in a computer, you’re not supposed to do that’. Putting public USBs in a council computer was verboten in the CoA. The supreme irony, though, is, if I had wanted to exclude her, I could have walked three metres to the branch librarian’s office and reported her breaking the rules. I didn’t, because, although she was not easy to work with, which was the consensus among CoA library staff, I believe minor issues among staff should not be shared with management. Rushing to the boss every time something annoys you is a recipe for an unhappy workplace. Her sin, if it can be described as such, is that she was simply a transgender zealot, who regularly corrected people’s speech and wrote transgender propaganda on Teams chats. Human Resources, in the Letter of Allegations, also claimed I said management had mismanaged the process. This is true. I am guilty as charged. I heard in early August that I was accused of ‘bullying and harassment’ and I was only officially told about the allegations in October, so management were guilty of mismanagement. Either that or I’m a time traveller. Or better still, I am gifted with the powers of telepathy'. @FSUofAustralia @Glinner @salltweets @KirralieS @Jilliantweeting @Elagabalus39811 @peterboghossian @Dittloff4Sense substack.com/profile/4694725…

My hearing before the State Administrative Tribunal of Western Australia begins on the fifth of May. freespeechunion.au/supportde…

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a mind-plague that drives its advocates to perhaps the greatest state of credulous wish-fulfilment in history. Even a cursory glance at its principles proves it’s singularly stupid and irrational. Kindness, for example, which is touted relentlessly by DEI activists, is one of many virtues, but it is only kind when it’s tempered by truth telling and prudence. Which side of the debate in the video do you support? The measured, cautious, rational, scientifically valid voices of the free speech advocates, or the emotional, anti-reason and anti-commonsense agitprop and hysteria of the people trying to silence ideas they don’t like. This is essentially what happened in the City of Armadale: manic authoritarianism in the garb of being kind. The censorship manifested in two ways in the CoA — as calm, methodical, bureaucratic destruction. (Nurse Ratched’s exist, and all they need is a little bit of power — they come in both sexes) — also as screaming, swizzle-eyed madness, the latter of which was encouraged by the City of Armadale. Innocently, for example, calling a trans person by their ‘deadname’ (I didn’t do this), or saying that medical staff should be allowed abide by their conscience (I definitely said this in response to a question), is not an excuse for hysterical bad behaviour. The person who asked me the question didn’t like my answer and started repeating, for probably two minutes, while growling and hissing in a raised voice, ‘don’t say that, don’t say that, don’t say that’. This happened at the front desk in the most public part of the library. It was the frankly the most mad interaction I’ve ever had with another human being. This was the environment created by the City of Armadale (and its library service). I didn’t report multiple examples of unacceptable behaviour to management, but the trans zealots reported the most innocent behaviour by me. They even told the branch librarian that I was reading books in the lunchroom that they didn’t like. She came into the lunchroom to check what books I had on my shelf. (On another note, they even tried to have the annual Harry Potter night cancelled). Anyone remotely acquainted with me knows that I read all the time. I had dozens of books on the shelf over fifteen years and probably five or six of them were about identity politics, trans and postmodernism. But even that was too much for the zealots. (Some of the authors they tried to cancel are linked below). ‘Neutralise, silence and eliminate it out of the space’. If you listen intently, they say it out loud. youtu.be/N0nYhnYLR0g?si=ysyf… @FSUofAustralia @Glinner @Elagabalus39811 @AbigailShrier @ConceptualJames @HJoyceGender @jk_rowling

I’m starting to believe that institutional capture has destroyed western civilisation — rule of law, liberal democracy, free markets, individual freedom — for generations. @FSUofAustralia @Glinner @salltweets @Elagabalus39811 @SwipeWright

Perhaps because I’d spent so much time in Australia, the attitudes outlined in the article hit me like a brick to the face when I lived in Ireland in the 2000s. The public sector was rife with this type of delusion, although the Australian public sector isn’t much better.

Read and share if you would like to. @ActiveLesbians @womensvoicesau @lgballiance_aus @DecMansfield @MsCarriggofreal

True.