Australia’s peak health body for men distances itself from conservative group’s International Men’s Day campaign | Gender

A group espousing anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments is running an International Men’s Day (IMD) campaign similar to a government-funded campaign aimed at “supporting men and boys.”

The Australian Men’s Health Forum (AMHF) is the peak government-funded body for men’s mental and physical health and has been coordinating the IMD, an annual event on 19 November, since 2017. This year’s theme is “supporting men and boys.”

Meanwhile, the Fatherhood Foundation, which trades as Dads4Kids, says it is the “global digital driving and coordinating charity for IMD.” It is a conservative Christian organization focused on reinforcing traditional gender roles, and its theme is “celebrating men and boys.”

Both sites have very similar domain names and logos, but AMHF is not affiliated with Dads4Kids.

“AMHF is not affiliated with any International Men’s Day website that does not support this inclusive approach to marking the date,” AMHF chief executive Glen Poole said.

It’s unclear which group came up with their logos or domain names first, and there’s no suggestion that either group deliberately copied the other, only that the two campaigns are similar.

To co-ordinate Australia Day, the AMHF collaborated with international founder and University of the West Indies academic Dr. Jerome says he was invited by Teelucksingh, while Dads4Kids says he worked with Teelucksingh.

Much of Dads4Kids’ public material promotes anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, and it has been pushing for fathers’ rights in family custody battles for over two decades.

Warwick Marsh is the founder of Dads4Kids and IMD’s self-described global digital coordinator. In a post about this year’s IMD, Marsh wrote that both masculinity and femininity are under attack, but the greater danger is masculinity.

“The attack on men is so brutal that masculinity is in danger of extinction,” he wrote.

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In a post earlier this year paying tribute to conservative commentator Charlie Kirk (reposted from a different group), Kirk was quoted as saying “feminism must be defeated if the West is to be saved” and that “having children is more important than having a good career.”

In 2024, Marsh’s son and Dads4Kids chief executive Nathaniel Marsh wrote that his conclusions from a clip he watched constituted “strong evidence that feminist ideology is a cancer on society” and that men’s rights academic Janice Fiamengo was “‘anti-feminist'”.

Warwick Marsh wrote to government inquiries, citing a document he published called “21 reasons why gender matters” in which he said “extreme feminists and gay activists” were trying to minimize differences between the sexes.

He described transsexuality as a “deceptively violent disease” and used quotes describing homosexuality as “perverse”, falsely accusing it of a host of social ills.

He wrote that “healing is possible” and that “many people have abandoned the homosexual lifestyle.”

He was sacked as health ambassador in 2008 over the document, which then-health minister Nicola Roxon described as “pretty disgusting”, but he continued to reference the document in his presentations.

In his submission to a 2009 bill, he talked about the “lifestyle choice” of those who “want to engage in unnatural homosexual sex.”

In his submission to the 2023 bill to amend the family law, which aims to protect women and children from domestic violence abuse and promote the safety and needs of children, Marsh said the law is “based on daddy phobia, radical feminist ideology.”

The group was accused by LGBTQI+ activists in 2017 of trying to politicize Father’s Day and claiming victimization in the gay marriage debate.

Poole said that in 2011, UK IMD coordinators developed a diversity and equality statement explaining that the IMD’s goals applied “equally to men and boys regardless of their age, ability, social background, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, religious beliefs and relationship status”.

Professor Michael Flood conducts research on men, masculinities and gender at Queensland University of Technology.

She said she was initially “hostile” to the IMD because “in many ways it represents anti-feminist perspectives on men, women and gender”, implying parallels with International Women’s Day and framing men as victims.

But now he speaks at IMD events. “Over the last decade, I have seen an increasing number of events and discussions about IMD, acknowledging the mental health, suicide and other types of real disadvantage some men face, but without a broader anti-feminist framework that bothers me,” he said.

“So, although I still have some ambivalence about that day, I am also happy to talk at IMD events about men’s health and the connections between men’s health and the Man Box, for example, or about broad societal expectations around masculinity and the harm these can do to men and those around them.”

Flood said it can be “difficult” for some to determine whether an IMD event is anti-feminist, but these days most of them are “well-intentioned efforts to address real forms of harm that men face.”

He said that although the day was “a tool to legitimize anti-feminist views”, it was “compensable”.

Multiple IMD events are not affiliated with Dads4Kids or AMHF. Guardian Australia has contacted Dads4Kids for comment.