Image: Chess is a game of 2 sides – Pragg vs Ju Wenjun | Photo: Vladimir Jagr
By Vera Figner
On 31 October 2022, ABC TV gave us an Australian Story about the uproar surrounding the decision by the principal of Citipointe, a Christian school in Brisbane, to issue an enrolment contract requiring parents to agree that homosexuality was a sin, and stipulating that students would only be enrolled on the basis of what was called ‘the gender that corresponds to their biological sex’.
Prestigious ABC broadcaster Geraldine Doogue introduced the program, saying that we’d be hearing ‘from both sides’. The two sides being:
a) those who agree with the principal and
b) those who want schools to both accept LGB students and allow students to sex self-ID.
Those two sides have actually got a lot in common, though: They both conceive of sexual orientation and gender identity as a single entity. If you accept/reject the first, they both agree, you accept/reject the second.
However they’re not a single entity and in some respects they clash. As the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights puts it:
Sexual orientation rights are necessary in eliminating discrimination against those who are sexually attracted to persons of the same sex.
Rights relating to sexual orientation are compatible with women’s sex-basedmrights, and are necessary to enable lesbians, whose sexual orientation is towards other women, to fully exercise their sex-based rights.
However, the concept of ‘gender identity’ makes socially constructed stereotypes, which organize and maintain women’s inequality, into essential and innate conditions, thereby undermining women’s sex-based rights.
Or as LGB Alliance Australia puts it:
In our view, current gender ideologies are pseudo-scientific and present a threat to people whose sexual orientation is towards the same sex …
Beyond your ‘two sides’, Geraldine, are students, parents, teachers, and general citizenry who support LGB students, and support boys wearing dresses to the school formal if they want to, but are concerned about boys-who-say-they’re-girls
• playing girls’ sports even though they’re bigger and stronger
• winning girls’ athletic comps
• using girls’ toilets
• using girls’ changing rooms
And punishments being designed for girls who object.
When do these concerns get a gig on the ABC, Geraldine? They sure didn’t on Australian Story on 31 October.
We’re against religious indoctrination in schools. That includes being against the unscientific trans-extremist gender identity cult. Let’s hear more voices and more nuanced discussions.
Let’s hear more facts.
Let’s hear from women and girls.