We’ve said it before, Aunty, and now we’ve got it say it again: Just because Kirralie Smith is a right-winger it doesn’t mean you can tell lies about her.
The lie this time? Spoken by reporter Hagar Cohen on 7.30 on 28 August: ‘The director of lobby group Binary Australia Kirralie Smith has spent years campaigning to ban trans players from sports across Australia.’
No she hasn’t! She’s spent years campaigning to ban men-who-say-they’re-women from the women’s category of sports across Australia. It’s not the same thing at all. (Which isn’t a right-wing position, incidentally: it’s a view held by people across the political spectrum, and also – as Cohen actually told us later in the segment – by the international governing bodies for world cricket, cycling, swimming, rugby, etc.)
This big fib about Kirralie Smith came in the context of a thoroughly fawning piece about trans soccer player Riley Dennis, who’s just won a vilification case against Smith in a NSW local court.
And was reinforced throughout Cohen’s piece. For example, in informing us of the position taken by the international governing bodies which have banned transwomen from the women’s category of their sports, Cohen described what they’d done as adopting ‘rules to effectively exclude transwomen from the sport’: quite untrue.
At another point, Dennis related that, due to the campaign against his presence in the North West Sydney Football (NWSF) Premier League women’s comp, he’d ‘thought about quitting soccer. And just going away from all this. Because I knew if I quit, if I stopped playing, it’d all go away.’ As if quitting soccer were his only alternative. Why not join the men’s comp instead? That, too, would just as effectively make it ‘all go away’. An obvious question for Cohen to ask, but she didn’t ask it. And joining a men’s team would be a reasonably realistic alternative too, as was demonstrated by the fa’afaine soccer player Jaiyah Saelua, who played central defender in the American Samoa men’s soccer team at the 2019 Pacific Games.
Telling a straight-out porky wasn’t the only problem with Cohen’s item. It was riddled with other inaccuracies, irrelevancies and omissions. Professor Ada Cheung was brought in, as she often is, especially now that the ABC’s had to abandon its former gender-identity favourite, Michelle Telfer. This time the reporter did tell us Cheung’s the head of Melbourne University’s Trans Health Centre (ie hardly disinterested or impartial) – the ABC hasn’t always done this – though the on-screen label just described her as an ‘endocrinologist’.
Cheung confidently informed us that the international sports governing bodies that have banned transwomen have done so ‘because they’ve presumed that transwomen are men.’
Well, no, Professor: it’s because they’ve studied the subject, and brought considerations like fairness and safety – and physiology! – to bear.
Cheung went on to explain why it’s incorrect to ‘presume’ that transwomen are men: ‘There are these huge shifts in body composition that occur in the first twelve months of feminising hormone therapy’. But are such ‘shifts’ enough to undo the effects of male puberty? An obvious question, but Cohen didn’t ask it. It was irrelevant to the issue at hand anyway, since – as we were informed a bit later in the piece – Football NSW’s policy is that ‘at the grassroots level you can play according to whatever gender you identify with’. So no feminising hormones necessary. Cohen still chose to leave the irrelevancy in.
We were also subjected to Cheung saying: ‘Fairness is really subjective and it really is difficult to account for every single physical characteristic we have in the human population.’ So, is Cheung in favour of abolishing the entire women’s category? How does she feel about age- and weight-restricted categories? The Paralympics? All equally dismissible as merely ‘subjective’ and too ‘difficult’ to be bothered with? We may never know – Cohen, certainly, had no interest in quizzing her on the subject.
But most infuriating of all were the omissions. The piece gave us to understand that the only objection to Dennis’s presence in the NWSF women’s comp came from Kirralie Smith and her ‘fellow anti-trans campaigners’, ‘strangers’ with ‘nefarious purposes’ who ‘just don’t like us and don’t want us to play sport’. No mention of the women in other clubs in the comp who, out of fairness and safety concerns, have left rather than play against Dennis’s team the Flying Bats. No mention of the indignant parents who won’t let their daughters take the field against the Flying Bats because it was ‘so disheartening for them’. No mention of the proposal to move the Flying Bats to a mixed-sex comp. No mention of the senior club official who criticised Football NSW for lack of transparency, in that ‘the girls don’t know if they are going to be playing biological males or not’. No mention of the community meeting where an NWSF director informed attendees: ‘If you forfeit two games in the season there would be disciplinary action handed out. If there was a concerted effort by teams to forfeit games against a particular opposition [an obvious reference to the Flying Bats], that would be viewed as an act of discrimination.’ These manifestations of community opposition, and the suppression of dissent brought to bear by authorities, surely deserved a place in Cohen’s story. But didn’t get one.
I could go on and on about the 7.30 piece. But I won’t. Though I should add that Cohen’s effort this time was no worse than usual in the ABC’s reporting on the issue of men-who-say-they’re-women in women’s sport. The practice Cohen employed – of reporting a ban on men-who-say-they’re-women in the women’s category as a ban on them from sport altogether – was already well-established: here’s a headline from ABC TV News NSW in March 2023:
And the practice is still general: here’s an example from ABC Online just two months ago:
Nor is Cohen alone in her uncritical grovelling before men who’ve invaded women’s sports. Here’s the ABC News 24 team going gooey over a male basketballer who’s spruiking his documentary series about his ‘battle to compete in a sport she [sic] trained for her [sic] whole life.’
The practice of disregarding the experiences of women athletes is also strongly entrenched in the ABC News bubble.
The ABC needs to get real on this issue. Do some research, tell the truth, ask some probing questions, give airtime to a wider range of viewpoints. Be fair and truthful about women. Even Kirralie Smith.