Similar logos, different views: Australia’s peak health body for men distances itself from conservative group’s International Men’s Day campaign
A group that espouses anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments is running an International Men’s Day (IMD) campaign that is similar to a government-funded campaign aimed at “supporting men and boys”. The Australian Men’s Health Forum (AMHF) is the government-funded peak body for men’s mental and physical health and has coordinated IMD, an annual event on 19 November, since 2017. This year’s theme is “supporting men and boys”. Meanwhile the Fatherhood Foundation, trading as Dads4Kids, says it is the “global digital driving force and the coordinating charity for IMD”. It is a conservative Christian organisation focused on reinforcing traditional gender roles and has “celebrating men and boys” as its theme. The domain names and logos of both sites are very similar, but the 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’s chief executive officer, Glen Poole, said. It was not clear which group came up with their logos or domain names first and there is no suggestion that either group has deliberately copied the other, just that the two campaigns are similar. AMHF says it was invited to coordinate the Australian day by international founder and University of the West Indies academic Dr Jerome Teelucksingh, while Dads4Kids says it works with Teelucksingh. Much of Dads4Kids’ public material promotes anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments and it has pushed for the rights of fathers in family custody battles for more than two decades. Warwick Marsh is the founder of Dads4Kids and the self-described global digital coordinator of IMD. In a post about this year’s IMD, Marsh wrote both masculinity and femininity are under attack, but the greater danger is to masculinity. “The attack against men is so ferocious that masculinity is in danger of extinction,” he wrote. Sign up: AU Breaking News email In a tribute to conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this year, a post (reposted from a different group) quoted Kirk as saying “feminism must be defeated for the west to be saved” and that “having children is more important than having a good career”. In 2024, Marsh’s son and Dads4Kids chief executive officer, Nathaniel Marsh, wrote that his takeaways from a clip he had watched were that “feminist ideology is a cancer on society” and that the men’s rights academic Janice Fiamengo made “a strong case for being ‘anti-feminist’”. Warwick Marsh has written submissions to government inquiries referring to a document he published called “21 reasons why gender matters”, in which he said “extreme feminists and homosexual activists” have sought to minimise the differences between the genders. He described transexuality as a “deceptively fierce disorder” and uses quotes describing homosexuality as “perverse”, falsely blaming it for a range of social ills. He wrote that “healing is possible” and “many have left the homosexual lifestyle”. He was fired as a health ambassador in 2008 for the document, with then health minister Nicola Roxon calling it “quite abhorrent”, but he continued to refer to the document in submissions. In a submission to a 2009 bill, he talked about the “lifestyle choice” of those who “want to engage in unnatural homosexual sex”. In a submission to a 2023 bill on a family law amendment aimed at protecting women and children from family violence abuse and at elevating the safety and needs of children, Marsh said it was “based on a father-phobic, radical feminist ideology”. In 2017 the group was accused by LGBTQI+ activists of trying to politicise fathers day and trying to claim victimhood in the same-sex marriage debate. Poole said that in 2011, the UK IMD co-ordinators developed a diversity and equality statement clarifying that the objectives of IMD applied “equally to men and boys irrespective of their age, ability, social background, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, religious belief and relationship status”. Professor Michael Flood researches men, masculinities and gender at the Queensland University of Technology. He said he was initially “hostile” to IMD because “in many ways it represented anti-feminist perspectives on men, women and gender”, implied a parallel with International Women’s Day and framed men as victims. But he now speaks at IMD events. “In the last decade I’ve seen a growing number of events and discussions about IMD that acknowledge issues of mental health, suicide, other genuine forms of disadvantage that some men face but without the broader kind of anti-feminist framing that had trouble me,” he said. “So while I still have some ambivalence about the day, I’m also happy to speak at IMD events talking about, for example, men’s health, and the links between men’s health and the Man Box or broad social expectations of masculinity and the harms they can impose on men and those around them.” Flood said it could be “tricky” for some to spot whether an IMD event was anti-feminist or not, but that most of them these days are “well-intentioned efforts to address genuine forms of harm that men face”. He said while the day had been a “vehicle for legitimising anti-feminist views”, it is “redeemable”. Multiple IMD events are not affiliated with Dads4Kids or AMHF. Guardian Australia contacted Dads4Kids for comment.







