The NSW Parliament crumbled to the trans lobby on 17 October and passed Alex Greenwich’s ghastly ‘Equality’ bill.
Jeremy Fernandez, trans-lobby moonlighter, heralded the imminence of this triumph for misogyny on News at 7 by telling us the bill would ‘allow transgender people to update their birth certificates without gender-affirming surgery’.
‘Update’, Jez? Surely we’re all – including ‘transgender people’ – only born once? Surely the event can’t be ‘updated’? It’s not even what the bill says – the bill doesn’t talk about ‘updating’, it talks about ‘altering’. So where did Jez get this term? That becomes clear later in the bulletin when Prince Alex comes on to tell us: ‘A trans person will be able to update their birth certificate without needing to remove a sex organ’. So there you go. ‘Our’ Jez is adopting the language of the NSW Parliament’s prime misogynist, the bloke who schmoozed into law abortion legislation that totally omits the term ‘woman’! This’ll go down well with Jez’s mates at ACON, but it’s an outrage to us and most other people.
To be fair, the news item as a whole wasn’t too bad, by ABC standards: It included a range of voices opposed to the bill, headed by a representative of Australian Feminists for Women’s Rights – it’s a rarity for the ABC to acknowledge that opposition to sex self-ID comes from anybody except Christians. So maybe a small posy is even in order for political reporter Nick Dole. Not for Jez, though.
Or for Joe O’Brien either, whose introduction to his ‘report’ – if you could call it that – some 48 minutes into the bulletin on ABC News 24 on 18 October, not only uses the Greenwichese term ‘update’ but also employs ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as synonyms, a classic trans-lobby piece of gaslighting. What’s more, his whole ‘report’, which lasts four and a half minutes, is basically just an opportunity for a supporter of the legislation – Paige Johnson, a ‘transgender person’ on Newcastle City Council – to spout gender-identity ideology at length; there’s no alternative viewpoint provided, and the word ‘women’ isn’t once spoken by either interviewer or interviewee. Joe puts just four questions to Johnson, all Dorothy Dixers; the one that takes the cake being: ‘And what do you make of some of the opposition arguments through this process regarding this, that it could be exploited somehow?’
‘Somehow’, Joe? A variety of submissions to the NSW Parliament Committee set out the likely effect of the bill on women’s sex-based rights in quite precise and specific terms, Joe, not vague at all: Are you not familiar with them? And when Johnson answers the question by laughing and saying ‘Oh, Joe! It’s just ridiculous!’ – before going on to disingenuously misstate the nature of the opposition arguments by making out it’s all about showing a birth certificate when you use a bathroom – Joe does absolutely nothing to clarify the ‘arguments’ he’s alluding to or curb Johnson’s obvious misogynist mockery and derision.
Nor does Joe pull Johnson up when Johnson states: ‘This means a whole lot for our community, and if you’re not part of the community it doesn’t affect your life at all.’ Doesn’t affect our lives at all? Apart from the destruction of women’s sex-based rights, there’s also the hair-raising Schedule 3, which makes it a crime to state that a man-who-says-he’s-a-woman is actually a man unless you’ve got his permission to do so. Freedom of expression, freedom to tell the truth: in the bin! And what about Schedule 7 (which further legitimates pimps and other prostitution profiteers) and Schedule 8 (which fosters commercial surrogacy), both of them snuck in there by Prince Alex the Master of Trojan Horsemanship? How do these schedules not affect the whole of society? (And how, if it comes to that, do they advance equality?)
Joe’s last question is: ‘And does it feel like Australia’s becoming a more accepting place to live?’ Not for women it doesn’t, Joe, and not for anybody conscious of biological realities. If you got out more and spoke with people in plain English, you’d know that.