The ABC’s Religion and Ethics Division first came to our attention when it published a kidtransing propaganda piece the day after the story broke about the judgment in Re Devin, in which the judge sternly criticised the kidtransing practices at the Royal Melbourne Children’s Hospital gender clinic, and excoriated the expert evidence provided to the court by Professor Michelle Telfer, one of Australia’s foremost gender medicine experts.
R&E is in our spotlight again due to its publication of a laudatory article, by one Professor Paula Gerber, about the Full Federal Court’s finding that Sall Grover had engaged in discrimination by kicking a man-who-says-he’s-a-woman off her women’s networking app, Giggle. And the ABC’s subsequent rejection of a piece Grover herself prepared as a counterweight.
This new episode shows how firm the hold of gender identitarianism is upon the ABC’s mindset.
A few examples:
The ABC says it knocked back Grover’s piece because of her alleged ‘categorical claims’ and ‘overstatement’. Gerber made loads of categorical claims too, starting with her claim that Roxanne Tickle is a ‘transgender woman’, when in fact he’s not a woman of any sort; and going on to her claim that ‘the Federal Court decision in Giggle for Girls v Tickle puts an end to any debate about who is a woman’, when debate about that continues to rage in pubs, coffee shops, and chat rooms up and down the country.
The companion piece R&E eventually published, by Professor Neil Foster, points out even more of Gerber’s categorical claims and overstatement: her misleading account of a Sri Lankan legal case; a false assertion about CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women); and her idle speculation on the potential effect a Grover win would have had for lesbians.
Gerber’s claims and overstatements slipped easily through R&E’s editing chain because they were gender-identitarian claims: Gerber’s article was published just three days after the Federal Court decision was handed down. You can’t tell me it was subjected to the kind of care the ABC reckons it takes ‘when publishing anything involving trans rights’. It sure wasn’t subjected to the same level or kind of scrutiny as Grover’s drafts were.
Grover asserted, in the last of the three draft pieces she submitted to the ABC:
The ABC thinks this is an ‘inaccuracy’. Even Media Watch – whose segment of 29 June, ‘Giggle Gagged’, was generally critical of the ABC’s treatment of Grover – describes the assertion as a ‘claim’ which is ‘not nearly so straightforward and remains a matter of contested legal interpretation’.
Oh, really?
Here are the pre-2013 definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act:
You’ve got to be way down the rabbit hole to deny that definitions containing the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ aren’t biological.
The ABC objected to the fact that Grover’s article didn’t mention that the Sex Discrimination Act allows for single-sex spaces through a variety of exemptions, such as for sport and religious purposes. This is breathtaking: the Full Federal Court finding, by accepting that a man-who-says-he’s-a-woman is in fact a woman, wipes those exemptions off the map, doesn’t it? The Foster article makes that point. At least, I think it does – the good prof’s discussion of sections 7D(1) and 7D(2) of the SDA proved a tad convoluted for the likes of me. And apparently for the ABC as well.
And who, at the ABC, applied this mindset to Grover’s offerings? Scott Stephens, R&E’s online editor, told Grover on 12 June that he was ‘checking with a couple of fellow senior editors on some matters’ to do with her third iteration of her op-ed. On 18 June, he was ‘just waiting for a colleague to get back to me’. On 19 June, it would appear he’d heard from that ‘one particular colleague whose input I was awaiting’ – and advised her that the ABC’s decision was not to publish.
Media Watch asked the ABC to identify those involved, and got a curt and non-informative reply:
‘Audio managers’? For an online op-ed? Who does the ABC think it’s kidding?
And ‘Editorial Policies advisors’? Who might they be? Gurus from ABC Queer, maybe? As an Australian taxpayer, I’d like to know. As a women’s rights activist, I’ve got my suspicions.
However, it’s not just the ABC’s internal mindset that’s the problem: there’s also the external pressure brought to bear. I mentioned above R&E’s earlier drama around their publication of a kidtransing propaganda piece. Six weeks later, in response to a dribble of complaints and an approach from child psychiatrist Catherine Llewelyn, they published a counterpiece. Which attracted a massive deluge of complaints: 183 of them, which rocketed R&E into the top 10 most complained-about divisions of the ABC for the 2024-2025 financial year.
And even though none of those complaints were upheld by the ABC Ombudsman, and even though the Ombo recognised the role of what it called the ‘growing and organised expression of audience bias’ in generating complaints, and even though the Ombo urged ABC journos ‘to avoid being fearful’, the experience clearly rattled Scott Stephens. He alludes to his concerns in this regard more than once in the course of his email correspondence with Grover, for example:
In these circumstances, I suppose we owe R&E some credit for, in the end, publishing Foster’s piece as a counter to Gerber’s. But, as a mate of ours put it:
An evangelical Christian, at that. So what we’re presented with is a pro-Tickle case presented by a woman – a lesbian, at that – and a pro-Grover case presented by a male evangelical Christian. This supports the position the ABC’s been operating upon for years, namely that there are just two sides to this issue: secular progressives vs religious conservatives.
What’s more, readers could be left with the impression that gender identitarianism is generally a women thing, which it isn’t. As can easily be seen from Women Speak Tasmania’s recent compilation of prominent Australian cases where individuals and groups have faced negative consequences for holding or acting on positions critical of gender identitarianism. Most of such individuals and groups are women.
A piece by Sall Grover would’ve provided the ABC an opportunity to present a women’s-rights perspective on the issue in the voice of a woman – something the ABC has done only very rarely.
Will Sall Grover ever get a go at the ABC? Linton Besser closed his Media Watch segment on 29 June by suggesting she should:
We wholeheartedly agree. On both counts.