Back in 2022, when Paul Barry had a go at his fellow-journos at the ABC for not reporting on the closure of the UK’s Tavistock youth gender clinic, one Julia Holman – who was at that stage the executive producer at RN Breakfast – commented:
We’ve had plenty of occasions since then to point out things that were happening here in the gender-identity space that the ABC just outright ignored – for example, these, these, and this – and now we’ve got another one.
On 3 April, Justice Andrew Strum delivered a judgement in a case called Re Devin. He issued an order to stop the mother of a 12-year-old boy from continuing to take the child to an (unnamed) children’s hospital gender clinic, or from otherwise seeking to have him prescribed puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. In the process, Strum sternly criticised the practices at said children’s hospital gender clinic, and excoriated the expert evidence provided for the mother’s side by one of Australia’s foremost gender medicine experts (anonymised as Associate Professor L, but we all have a good idea who he was referring to).
The likes of the Murdoch press and The Catholic Weekly have hailed Re Devin as a landmark ruling, one that could have wide-reaching ramifications not just for youth gender treatment but also for the practice of suppressing details of family court proceedings such as (in this case) the identity of the gender clinic involved and the name of Associate Professor L. Is it indeed a landmark decision? Will it lead to change in suppression practices? Should it lead to change in suppression practices? Well, don’t bother turning to the ABC for sensible informed reportage and/or discussion of such issues: If you google ‘Australian Broadcasting Corporation Strum’ all you’ll get is:
Otherwise, crickets.
Oh, not quite: A day after The Australian published the first media report on Re Devin, the ABC’s Religion and Ethics portal saw fit to publish an online article by a trans-identified British philosopher entitled
and embellished with these give-away subheadings:
To be fair, the article does mention in its introduction some of the various moves to ban puberty blockers (Queensland, the National Health Service in the UK, the 28 January Trump Executive Order – not the Strum decision though) but then proceeds to argue against them.
Is it just a coincidence that the ABC posted this article so soon after the Strum decision became public? The naughty TERFs at Women Speak Tasmania don’t think so.
And frankly, we don’t think it’s a coincidence either. But Aunty’s getting a bit desperate if she’s got to use the Religion and Ethics portal to keep in ACON’s good books. So we – yet again – call on the ABC to free itself of ACON’s AWEI scheme – for the sake of its independence, its integrity, and a renewed sense of what’s newsworthy.