This is the redacted text of an email I sent to my Queensland state MP on 9 December 2022 concerning the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill (Qld).
No alterations have been made to the substance of the text. In the original text, the cited sources were embedded as hyperlinks; here, I’ve pulled them out and made them APA 7 style citations to combat link rot.
As I assume you know, the Bill, if passed, will enable Queenslanders to change the gender on their birth certificate without first undergoing sex reassignment surgery (SRS), abolishing the existing system established by the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 2003 (Qld), under which SRS is a precondition for change of legal gender. The passage of this Bill is of vital importance for a number of reasons.
Owing to a relative lack of Medicare coverage (Healthdirect Australia, 2022) and the less-than-ideal socioeconomic conditions in which transgender Australians often find themselves (Bretherton et al., 2020), SRS is out of reach even for many trans Australians who desire it and for whom it is medically necessary (World Professional Association for Transgender Health, 2016). This means trans Queenslanders are liable to be denied accurate legal gender recognition on the entirely irrelevant basis that they are not sufficiently rich.
Employers across multiple sectors can require employees to provide them with birth certificate copies for their records, for instance to check work rights. When this requirement forces transgender people to out themselves to their employers, it facilitates anti-transgender workplace discrimination, notwithstanding that such discrimination may be unlawful (Australian Human Rights Commission, n.d.). Allowing trans Queenslanders to accurately register their own gender limits opportunities for unlawful conduct by eliminating a process step which allows it to arise.
Residential tenancy applications can require applicants to provide birth certificate copies as part of the application process. This can facilitate discrimination in housing in much the same way as described above. This is an increasingly urgent matter in the current economic conditions, in which the rental market is becoming increasingly brutal and unaffordable for tenants (Heagney, 2022) while pressures that are being relayed by market actors onto workers accentuate the marked socioeconomic disadvantage that transgender workers across the Anglosphere already face (Nath, 2018; Wareham, 2021).
Of Australia’s eight State and Territory jurisdictions, Queensland along with New South Wales are the only two where SRS continues to be a precondition for a legal change of gender (Pullos Lawyers, n.d.). It is obvious that having been born in Queensland does not make a person any more or less their gender than if they had been born in, for example, Victoria, yet Queensland law in its present state effectively suggests that it does. After twenty years of the present status quo, it is time the law was updated to reflect reality.
Moreover, when considering amendments to the Bill, I implore you to take the following stances with respect to any amendments proposed:
Support the flexibility of the language around sex descriptors in the current draft. Flexible sex descriptors are essential for the genders of nonbinary people to be recognised, and for intersex people to have documentation which accurately describes their physical characteristics.
Support making it optional for assigned sex to be recorded on birth certificates. This means that parents of intersex children will not be forced to commit to saddling them with a potentially inaccurate sex assignment, and trans children will have a better chance of not having to contend with an inaccurate assertion by the state about their gender.
Oppose the imposition of barriers to altering the record of sex other than the existing language in ss 39(2) & 39(3) of the Bill requiring a statutory declaration from a person 18 or over who has known the applicant for at least 12 months. Further barriers would encumber the Government with a duty which is not a good use of its resources and which it is constitutionally not well-equipped to execute.
I am asking you to take these positions because gender and the expression thereof are inherently specific to and determined by the individual. As it currently stands, State law recognises this — but as a “threat,” of sorts, that requires monitoring and checking. Queensland law in its current form effectively stipulates that gender is so volatile and dangerous that only certain kinds of people can be trusted with the right to determine it.
In actual fact, accurate gender recognition does not materially affect anyone except people who cannot access it, whom it affects a great deal. [Your party] has an ethical obligation to facilitate trans Queenslanders’ access to accurate gender recognition so that they can enjoy the same freedoms and access the same opportunities to which all Australians have the right.
Should you find yourself unconvinced of the necessity, utility, or desirability of the actions detailed above, I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you at your convenience to discuss it further.
Up to now, the standard format for this series included publishing in the first instance as a Twitter thread. Since I no longer have the constraints (or advantages) of Twitter shaping my work, the format might unintentionally slightly shift. Please let me know if it’s changed for the worse.
If you click on a footnote or inline citation, you’ll jump to the footnote or reference list entry to which it points; simply click the ‘Back’ button in your browser to go back to where you were.
#1
Trans patients are swapping tips online on where to find ‘friendly’ doctors who are willing to prescribe hormones to make them look more like the opposite sex.
First of all, may I say how delightful it is to see Cross taking part in News Corp’s long corporate tradition of suggesting that hormones are simply a skin-deep intervention which allow perverted, predatory, subhuman transgenderists to deceive their well-meaning, normal, fully human cisgender peers.
Now, the word “friendly” implies bias, like having a “friendly” judge. It might be possible to superficially get away with the use of the word “friendly” here if it were a direct quote with this meaning in context. However, the only online source which we know Cross actually consulted is a single reddit thread in which the word ‘friendly’ is not used in the OP1 (u/camxeli, 2022), and is only used in one comment, which describes a Brisbane-based trans health provider as having a “very comforting and friendly manner” (u/CafeCodeBunny, 2022).
The construction of the paragraph suggests that it’s decisive proof of bias to prescribe gender-affirming hormones at all. In fact, where they’re clinically justified, to not prescribe them would be medical negligence — because it would fall short of the relevant standard of care (Armstrong Legal, n.d.).
#2
Reddit is one go to site where the trans community shares information on which doctors are open to prescribing cross sex hormones quickly.
In the one reddit thread we know Cross actually consulted (u/camxeli, op. cit.), the OP was asking where to find informed consent model (ICM) care, because the first appointment he could secure at the Brisbane Gender Clinic was 11 months away.
Note that this would have been a particularly time-sensitive and urgent matter because the first appointment would have been the OP’s first opportunity to receive any gender-affirming medical care at all. He doesn’t say this; what he does say is that he’s 15. Forcing him through 11 more months of the wrong puberty could do significant damage which would be permanently impossible to reverse.
Cross is trying to make timely care look shady by asserting trans people are trying to get “friendly” doctors who will prescribe hormones “quickly”. “Less than 11 months for medical intervention on a matter of life-altering urgency whose time sensitivity is immediate,” however, is an objectively reasonable expectation by any metric.
#3
One person [u/JamieRoseCleverly, 2022 — Ed.] wrote on Reddit how they were prescribed ‘gender affirming’ drugs at a walk-in clinic in Queensland, after waiting about “’30 minutes for the informed consent and prescription, and another 15-20 minutes for the pharmacy next door to fill it”.
“Gender affirming” appears in quote marks, as if there were some debate about the wording. In the literature, gender-affirming therapies are referred to as such even by their most ardent opponents (e.g., D’Angelo, 2018; Malone & Roman, 2020; Clayton, 2022; etc.). “Gender-affirming” is standard terminology; News Corp is putting it in quote marks to convey a suggestion that it doesn’t have either the authority or the guts to make out loud.
While we’re on the topic of conveying suggestions, while the word “drugs” is perfectly clinically accurate here and often used in the technical literature, that’s not why News Corp uses it; it’s used because compared to “hormones” or “medication” it is much scarier, and therefore, for News Corp’s purposes, ideal.
It also ties into a common anti-trans narrative theme: namely, projecting artificiality onto trans people, portraying them as somehow unnatural and fake. Calling hormones “hormones” runs the risk of someone pointing out that hey the human body produces those too.2 Even “hormone blockers” sounds too close to something natural and real. “Drugs”? Now those could be anything. That’s the ticket.
Honestly the weirdest part of this paragraph is how Cross leaves in “and another 15-20 minutes for the pharmacy next door to fill it,” as if it were suggestive of something nasty. My pharmacy takes about 2 minutes to fill my prescription for estrogen; 5 on a slow day. Should they artificially take longer because I’m trans? What’s the objective here?
#4
There are lists of “gender affirming” doctors, who all approach patient care differently, being shared on government platforms.
The use of the word “platforms” here is slightly confusing, because it feels like it’s suggesting Australian governments are running public Mastodon instances or something (are they? I haven’t heard), but actually I think this is referring to, at least, the “gender incongruence” page on the Australian Government’s Healthdirect service (mentioned by Cross shortly afterward), which says:
You can find a list of gender affirming clinicians at TransHub [“Gender affirming doctor list,” n.d. —Ed] and AusPATH [“Providers,” n.d. —Ed].
This seems like another version of the narrative also favoured by the ABC’s Media Watch (Moreton, 2022),3 to the effect that “it’s wrong for government to cite or consult external experts in any way”. I personally have only ever seen journalists try that one when attacking trans people, and I expect other marginalised groups, because in any context other than discrediting authorities who defend marginalised people, it would be correctly recognised as blatantly absurd.
#5
News Corp is not suggesting doctors on these lists are doing anything wrong.
News Corp is in fact doing precisely that. Simply saying that they’re not doesn’t actually change it.
#6
The government’s own website HealthDirect promotes ‘gender affirming care’ and states that it is wrong for any health professional to try to change someone’s gender or identity.
It seems pretty obvious and straightforward to say PEOPLE_WITH_CONDITION need to get TREATMENT_FOR_CONDITION. Not seeing a lot of objections to “People with muscle aches need to get Nurofen.”
Healthdirect does indeed also state that
It is wrong for any health professional to try to change your gender or identity in any way.
This is also very obviously unassailably true. Part of the impetus for banning conversion therapy was the strength of the argument that trying to change someone’s identity is wrong even without considering direct observable material harm, because people have other human rights like autonomy and freedom of conscience, of which they would be deprived by an attempt to forcibly psychologically modify them, even if they weren’t otherwise harmed.
However, conversion therapy does do harm; it consistently leaves its subjects with lifelong psychological trauma (Blosnich et al., 2020; Forsythe et al., 2022). Then again, many other therapies which are widely accepted in clinical practice also inflict harms, which are accepted because the benefits outweigh them; anyone who’s been through chemo, or knows someone who’s been through it, has witnessed this principle in action.
If we accept for some dickhead reason that changing someone else’s gender is actually a clinically beneficial thing to do, then are the harms of conversion therapy worth it to achieve that end? No, because conversion therapy doesn’t actually do that. It has no demonstrated effectiveness (Higbee et al., 2020). Even in the terms in which its advocates claim to believe, conversion therapy can’t be justified because it doesn’t work.
News Corp’s careful framing implies that Healthdirect calling conversion therapy “wrong” is emotive and debatable. In reality, not only does conversion therapy have shitty ends, it can’t achieve them; Healthdirect calling it “wrong” is as close to objectively correct as any statement about science can get.
#7
However, it comes as a growing body of mental health professionals believe the government’s current advice is out of step with other countries around the world that have started taking a more cautious approach to medical and surgical intervention.
Oooh, which countries? I assume one of the usual suspects, so is it Britain (Moore et al., 2022)? Is it Sweden (Jaeger, 2022)? Please, go on, tell me more, I’m enthralled.
#8
TransHub, which provides resources for trans people and health professionals, promotes the informed consent model as best practice for GPs — which is when the doctor takes the patient’s lead and accepts their new gender identity.
I was unable to verify this claim. The summary of the informed consent model (ICM) is close enough that I’m not gonna argue with it here. However, the strongest assertions I could find by TransHub about the ICM, which are in its guidance for clinicians on the ICM (TransHub, “Clinicians: Informed consent,” n.d.), are subjectively very positive but don’t actually appear to amount to an endorsement as a single best practice (i.e., superior to other alternatives), simply a discussion of one option among many.
The strongest assertion I could find by TransHub that was relevant to the ICM was in the guidance for clinicians regarding diagnoses (TransHub, “Clinicians: Diagnoses,” n.d.), which asserted that “the requirement of diagnosis [of gender dysphoria] is no longer considered best practice”. This doesn’t actually enthrone the ICM instead, however. It simply — and correctly — places the traditionalist “gatekept” model which it discusses as one option among many.
#9
In some cases a prescription for cross sex hormones can be handed over in just two or three appointments.
Cross (op. cit.)
This is pretty clearly trying to tap into the unspoken and inarticulable feeling that many cis people have that there’s some minimum number of appointments it should take. In reality, like anyone else, trans people are entitled to have medical care no later than they need it.
#10
In many cases, no mental health professional needs to be involved.
Cross (op. cit.)
The suggestion here is that it’s somehow weird or even dangerous that the ICM doesn’t ordinarily require medical transition to receive signoff from a mental health professional (MHP).
Of course, what News Corp is relying on here is cis people’s, again, unspoken and perhaps inarticulable assumption (cis assumption) (cissumption?) that being trans inherently means you’re fucked in the head — or more specifically that you’re fucked in the head such that you can’t give informed consent (shuster, 2019). In reality, no aspect of transness impairs competence to consent in any way.
#11
For trans children, the parents need to agree to any medical intervention before drugs are prescribed and they need to be assessed by mental health specialists in what can be a significantly longer process.
The movement from the previous paragraph to this one gives this the effect of suggesting that trans kids can also be sloppily and quickly ‘rushed’ into ICM care.
In reality, the fact that parents and MHPs have to be involved means the kids are by definition not receiving ICM care, so even if ICM care were reckless and negligent the way News Corp needs it to be, the implication would still be a lie.
#12
However, psychologist Dr Roberto D’Angelo said some kids are still only having up to half a dozen sessions before being prescribed drugs.
News Corp somehow forgot to mention that Roberto D’Angelo is a clinical advisor to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a pseudoscientific anti-trans pressure group (Stahl, 2021; Kuper et al., 2022; Ring, 2022) which pretends to be supported by crowdfunding while actually being supported by large donations of opaque origin (Moore, 2021).
News Corp knew this, of course, but even if they hadn’t, D’Angelo isn’t exactly subtle about his views. His interaction with the public discourse is primarily through contributions to academic journals; on his profile on the academic social network ResearchGate (D’Angelo, n.d.), on the list of publications which he authored or co-authored, every publication since May 2018 (Clayton et al., 2021; Clayton et al., 2022; d’Abrera et al., 2020; D’Angelo, 2018, 2020a, 2020b, & 2020c; D’Angelo et al., 2020; D’Angelo et al., 2022; Malone et al., 2021) has been open advocacy for trans-hostile views. That’s 10 of his 13 listed publications, incidentally; talk about Riley’s law!4
#13
[D’Angelo’s] own assessment of the evidence for the benefits and harms of puberty blockers is that it is too weak and inconclusive for him to support prescribing them to children, even though ‘in some cases they can have positive effects’.
It’s unclear in what way D’Angelo’s opinion of “the evidence for the benefits and harms of puberty blockers” would be at all relevant even if he weren’t being paid to hold it. The nature of the alleged harms is such that the specialists qualified to professionally evaluate them are endocrinologists, neurologists, and rheumatologists. D’Angelo doesn’t appear to be qualified in any of those areas, nor does it appear he’s talked to anyone who is. His judgement is no more relevant than mine.
#14
[Charlotte Hespe] said that a lot of the kids are “troubled” and almost all of the ones she has seen have autism or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and so “it’s tricky to navigate safely”.
In the first place, the current global standard for trans healthcare — the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of care, version 8 (SoC 8) have something to say on this topic and they’re pretty clear about it:
There is no evidence to suggest a benefit of withholding GAMSTs[5] from TGD[6] people who have gender incongruence simply on the basis that they have a mental health or neurodevelopmental condition.
Even if those populations were completely separate — which they’re not, lmao (Rusting, 2018) — they should make up fewer than 4 patients in 10. Does Glebe Family Medical Practice only accept referrals from the local fidget spinner and model train emporium?7 What’s the story?
#15
[Hespe] said she tries to make sure her patients make “wise” rather than “irreversible decisions”.
The location of the quotation marks here strongly suggests this statement has been creatively chopped and screwed a bit. Whoever’s responsible for it, though, the intention is clearly to suggest that in this area, irreversible decisions and wise ones are mutually exclusive.
The reasons why this is a bad take and the reasons why someone would advance it anyway are both clear enough at this point that I don’t feel like I need to waste my breath further.
#16
Out of more than 100 patients [Hespe] has seen in 22 years, she said only one person, who wanted to transition as an adult female to a male, regretted the effects of being on testosterone and surgery. They now identify as gender neutral.
“She had three lots of surgery,” Dr Hespe said. “Had breasts off, had breasts put back on, had breasts taken off again.”
In the first place, are this person’s pronouns “they,” or “she,” or both?
In the second place, I’m wondering whether this is a permissible disclosure by Dr Hespe. This seems like it would make it exceptionally easy to identify the individual described, which seems — note that I am not a lawyer — as if it might be questionable under the medical privacy provisions of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).
In the third place, I think it’s significant that News Corp has chosen to report this part. Previously they’ve largely focused on the suggestion that trans kids are too young to decide to transition (or to stop puberty) and that they’ll regret it later. This seems to mark a further advancement along the narrative line established by e.g. Robinson (2022) — beginning to suggest that “they’ll regret it later, so they have to be stopped,” applies not only to kids, but adults, too.
This is a logical advancement to push for. After all, if you can bring yourself to levy immense suffering, permanent damage and possible death on kids simply because they were unlucky enough to exist around you while being trans, doing it to adults should be a piece of cake.
#17
Dr Hespe said the doctors need to make sure they “cross every single ‘t’ and dot every single ‘i’.” “If you don’t feel comfortable prescribing then don’t.”
This seems self-contradictory. You should “cross every single ‘t’ and dot every single ‘i’” — a saying which typically means being meticulous in your fulfilment of an established requirement, such as a standard of care — but also you can make a vibes-based choice not to?
I feel like there has to be an implied conditional statement here — if you want to prescribe, you need to make sure you cross every single t and dot every single i, but if you don’t, simply not “feel[ing] comfortable” is more than enough.
#18
Meanwhile, Dr D’Angelo believes it can take months or years of therapy for some people to work through all their problems. He said many kids questioning their gender are also struggling with social anxiety, making friends or there’s family dysfunction, and think changing their identity will help.
I mean even if this wasn’t Roberto D’Angelo, wow, no way, a therapist thinks people might need “months to years of therapy”? Colour me absolutely shocked. Seriously though, this is such a blatant attempt to deprive trans people of capacity. “Months to years”? That’s “indefinitely”. That’s “never”.
Moreover, “changing their identity” is, as I’m sure D’Angelo knows very well, a blatantly malicious misrepresentation of what it’s describing. There’s a reason it’s called “gender-affirming” and not “gender-changing” — it simply supports and upholds what’s already there.
#19
“Everyone now looks online when they are not feeling good about themselves,” Dr D’Angelo said. “Many of these young people feel desperate and are looking for a way to feel better. There’s a huge amount of material online which encourages transition which vulnerable, struggling and troubled teenagers may feel offers them a way out of their difficulties. Gender dysphoria and transitioning can sometimes seem like the explanation for their problems.”
Have we considered that “these young people feel desperate and are looking for a way to feel better” because they’re experiencing dysphoria, the condition literally defined as a clinically significant degree of feeling bad?
Have we considered that “vulnerable, struggling and troubled teenagers may feel” that “material online which encourages transition” “offers them a way out of their difficulties” because it actually does?
Have we considered that “gender dysphoria and transitioning can sometimes seem like the explanation for their problems” because they actually are?
#20
He said he’s worked with several people who have transitioned when they were young but regretted it, saying “regret can take up to 10 years”.
Convenient. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a single person who was confident enough to say they knew exactly where their life would lead them in ten years’ time. If any possible regret is waiting so far into the tall grasses of the future that you can’t possibly see it when you’re standing out on the fringe, the only rational decision is not to venture in at all. In fact, the decision to go anyway might very well be considered insane …
Anyway, isn’t probability fun? Two other doctors quoted in this article report having patient populations in which the rate of autism and ADHD is near 100%, when all the other data we have suggests that the most impossibly high upper bound conceivable should be less than 4 in 10. D’Angelo, a single therapist in private practice — in fact a psychoanalyst, not a specialty known for treating gender-diverse people with acceptance and kindness (Evzonas, 2020; Saketopoulou, 2022; etc.) — seems well on his way to including among his clients not only every detransitioner but every detransitioner-to-be on the east coast. I wonder how he fares with Scratch-its.
#21
He said one identified as male and had a mastectomy, a hysterectomy and ovaries removed. “When she came to see me she was identifying as male and very depressed,” Dr D’Angelo said. “She could not understand why as she had done everything she thought that could help (surgery), but she felt worse. It took two years to try and understand her history.
“She came to the conclusion she was not a man and that other things had led her to take these steps. It was eye opening. It was alarming. She only had a handful of appointments with a psychiatrist before transitioning. There were other more complicated issues that had not been adequately diagnosed and had never been addressed. She is now identifying as a woman. She is happy with her gender now but is dealing with enormous grief and is struggling to rebuild her life.”
While she’s not named, this has to be about Jay Langadinos — it’s a very specific backstory and the probability that D’Angelo has two patients who share it is realistically zero.
In that case, it seems apropos to introduce the facts that D’Angelo is leaving out; as Langadinos filed suit against her psychiatrist, Dr Patrick Toohey, and The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald reported on it (Szego, 2022), we’re lucky enough to have those facts on hand.
In short, the only “complicated issue” which Langadinos has alleged was unaddressed was social phobia, better known as social anxiety disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). SAD
is not a contraindication to transition
does not impair capacity to give informed consent (Cundill, 2020),
is — like everything else — not known to generate an illusory or transient sense of gender incongruence, and
Moreover, Toohey urged Langadinos to seek treatment for it and she refused. By Langadinos’ own account filed with the New South Wales Supreme Court, which Szego (op. cit.) cites, not only was her phobia clearly and concretely diagnosed, but the reason it wasn’t addressed was because she didn’t want it to be.
D’Angelo is clearly trying to suggest that Langadinos was failed by the system, but Langadinos made her own choices. No one had even the hint of a justification to intervene to stop her.
#22
A GP who prescribes cross sex hormones and puberty blockers to adults and children wishing to change their gender said they have to search for doctors like him that accept “patients are the experts in their own body”.
Once again, News Corp presents this as a matter of people “changing their gender,” rather than matching their bodies to the gender they have. At this point, it’s pretty safe to say it’s not accidental.
#23
[Matt Barber] said the vast majority of GPs in Australia have little understanding in this space, which is why people seek out “gender affirming” doctors.
This seems like it’s supposed to at least allow the interpretation that Barber is an arrogant egotist, but it’s actually just uncontroversially true. While actual useful data regarding practitioner competence in trans care is thinner on the ground than I would like, the little that exists isn’t promising.
By way of example,
Davidge-Pitts et al. (2017) found that in a sample of 411 United States practitioners who were members of the Endocrine Society, the proportion who said they’d never received training in trans healthcare was c. 81%.
Christopherson et al. (2022) found that of a sample of 188 GPs and nurse practitioners working with trans patients in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2019, the proportion who felt comfortable providing transition-related medical care was 30%.
Irwig (2016) found that among endocrinologists attending an American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists conference, the fraction able to answer a fairly basic knowledge question about trans endocrine care was an eye-watering 5% (!!). You’ve got to hope things have improved.
#24
He said in straightforward cases he is happy to prescribe hormones in just two sessions.
… I mean I already know the answer but is this supposed to be in some way wrong or bad?
#25
In Australia “doctors are free to operate under their own opinions and beliefs”, Dr Barber said.
In the UK doctors have to follow new national guidelines for children with gender dysphoria, including carefully exploring any mental ill health issues.
In the first place, this framing makes it sound like it’s complete open slather in Australia, which is not the case at all. As the article later admits, in an extremely minimising fashion and with clear reluctance, there are set standards of care and doctors risk legal action by violating them. Given that doctors’ chain of command usually ends with their clinic, however, practitioners across Australia have broadly varying levels of independence in interpreting and implementing those standards as they see fit, depending on what their employer permits.
This is not the case in the United Kingdom. The status quo — which is currently in the process of changing, but toward an unclear end — is that there is only one paediatric gender clinic in the whole of the United Kingdom, the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). “National guidelines” sound rather less impressive when you realise that they currently apply to a total of one clinic, which also contributes most of the data that underpin them, and which, in large part, directly writes them.
In the second place, UK doctors don’t yet “have to follow” any “new national guidelines” at all. The guidelines in question, which are the NHS Interim service specification for specialist gender dysphoria services for children and young people, are still in consultation and will be until 4 December (NHS England Specialised Commissioning, 2022). They have also been the subject of absolutely blistering criticism from every peak body that has at least one keyboard and internet connection (e.g., World Professional Association for Transgender Health et al., 2022).
The intention here is clearly that UK paediatric trans health practices should be understood as disciplined and careful, when they’re nothing of the sort — they’re an act of gleeful sadism motivated by the barely concealed inadequacy and resentment of an increasingly ailing UK government and increasingly openly reactionary British state.
#26
[Barber] said almost all of his patients, both adults and children, are neurodivergent — meaning they have autism or ADHD.
In the first place, “neurodivergent” doesn’t just mean “has autism or ADHD,” as much as I and other autistics and people with ADHD sometimes act as if it did.
In the second place, this claim is no less improbable coming from Barber than it was from Hespe. Then again — Barber’s home clinic Stonewall is only 500 metres from Windsor traino.
#27
[Barber] said he follows Australian guidelines promoted by AusPath — a group of health professionals working with trans people — that says gender affirming care is evidence-based and saves lives.
What an absolutely delightful paragraph. For relatively few words, there is so much going on.
AusPATH are the Australian Professional Association for Transgender Health, the Australian affiliate of WPATH, and the peak body for trans health in Australia. AusPATH are “a group of health professionals working with trans people” in much the same way that the Australian Army are “a group of people in green clothes who like guns”.
Being the peak body, AusPATH don’t “promote” guidelines; they set them. Nor is their setting of guidelines simply a matter of ineffectually wringing their hands and saying “well, doctors should do this, pretty please”. As noted above, civil action for medical malpractice rests largely on whether the defendant provided the standard of care which would be reasonably expected from a medical practitioner of that kind acting under those circumstances (Armstrong Legal, op. cit.). Those standards of care are precisely what AusPATH (and WPATH) define.
AusPATH can literally “promote” guidelines in the alternative common meaning to the one used here, i.e., raising them up: endorsing a protocol used by an individual clinic or in a small area, and distributing it under AusPATH’s aegis. That just effectively makes it another standard they set, though, not some other thing they’re shilling for.
Finally, the fact that gender-affirming care is evidence-based and saves lives isn’t a matter of what either Barber or AusPATH “says”. It’s simply true (Huckins, 2022; Matouk & Wald, 2022; Oliver, 2022; etc.).
#28
[Barber] said for kids aged 14 to 16 years it’s a grey area, as they need parental consent while those aged 16 to 18 should be able to consent.
This also isn’t a matter of Barber’s opinion. “He said … those aged 16 to 18 should be able to consent” makes it sound like he’s winging it: “Oh well, they should be able to consent, it’s fine, she’ll be right”. That framing suggests his practice is endangering children left and right.
In reality, he’s simply accurately, and perhaps even slightly conservatively, summarising Australian and Queensland law. People under 16 have to either get parental consent, or actively prove they’re Gillick competent.8 People over 16 are assumed competent by default (Legal Aid Queensland, 2022).
#29
But he said the rates of people regretting going on gender affirming drugs is ‘almost zero’ and those taking it see an upswing in their mental health.
Again, this is not simply something Barber “said”. Not only is it true that regret rates are close to zero, they have remained stable or dropped over time.
Smith et al. (2004) found that in a sample of 162 trans adults at 2 gender clinics in the Netherlands, the number who “expressed regrets” was 2 (1.4%).
Davies et al. (2019) found that of 3,398 British trans adults, the number who experienced transition-related regret was 16 (0.47%) or fewer.9
Turban et al. (2021) found that, among respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, of the 2,242 who reported a history of detransition, 54 (2.4%) endorsed “uncertainty or doubt around gender” as a factor.
The usual argument at this point is “oh but even one is too much!” which is obviously bullshit both on principle and in practice. For instance, Wilson et al. (2017), reviewing patient decisional regret around surgery — all surgery, of any kind — found that in the studies reviewed, the “average prevalence” of “self-reported patient regret,” which they described as “relatively uncommon,” was 14.4%.
Moreover, the fact that “gender affirming drugs” cause “an upswing in [trans people’s] mental health” is not realistically in any doubt.
St Amand et al. (2011) found “clear evidence that HRT is associated with improved mental health outcomes”.
Colizzi et al. (2014) found that “psychiatric distress and functional impairment were present” in a significantly lower percentage of subjects after 12 months of HRT.
Bouman et al. (2016) found that “the use of cross-sex hormones … appears to be associated with psychological benefits”.
I have about 40 more studies here on this topic and I could go on but 3 is enough because we all already know this. Only News Corp is pretending it’s news — I can’t imagine this is the first time someone’s said that sentence.
#30
[Barber] warned that if Australia followed the UK route and more barriers were put in the way of people seeking to transition it could result in people taking their own lives.
Yet again, this is clearly supposed to be at least open to being interpreted as an activist doctor intentionally overselling the politically correct narrative, and again, it’s simply objectively true.
“discourag[ing] social transition in pre-pubertal children” (WPATH et al., op. cit., s 6), even though denial of social transition is known to increase suicidal ideation (Pariseau et al., 2019);
refusing to “describe any process for provision of estrogen or testosterone therapies for older adolescents” (WPATH et al., op. cit., s 7), even though denial of access to HRT in adolescence is known to increase suicidal ideation over the remainder of the patient’s life (Turban et al., 2022);
a “‘psychotherapeutic’ approach, which was used for decades before being superseded by evidence-based gender-affirming care, [and] has not been shown to be effective” (WPATH et al., op. cit., s 9), even though the approach “is tantamount to ‘conversion’ or ‘reparative’ therapy” (ibid.), a form of torture (International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, 2020) which is known to be linked to increased incidence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempt (Turban et al., 2019; Green et al., 2020).
Once again, Barber’s statement is not a matter of opinion — scientific investigation has repeatedly and exhaustively shown it to be thoroughly factual in every way. News Corp’s decision to present it as simply a personal warning from one source spun heavily as dubious does not reflect a commitment to informing readers of the truth — but then again, that won’t be news to anyone.
Closing
I usually don’t bother wasting the effort required for a Several Problems on any News Corp outlet; “Never wrestle with a pig,” etc. (Quote Investigator, 2017). There’s basically no overlap between people who read my work and people who think News Corp is credible. This particular masthead is so well known for being toilet paper that there’s a local proverb (e.g., Page, 2016) and multiple songs about it: “Is it true, or did you read it in The Courier-Mail?” (e.g., Future Primitive, 2020; The Mangroves, 2022).
However, I think it’s occasionally useful to check in on them and see how everything is going over there on the other side – see what shape the hate campaign is taking today. News Corp is suggesting trans people are fake, artificial, predatory, a danger to kids, backed by a doctors’ plot and a captured state. It’s not good news, nor is it surprising., but keeping track of the tropes can be useful in determining where fires are being set, why, how — and, ideally, for whom.
Postscript
If you thought this article was good or in any way useful — I’m honoured! I hope you will consider supporting my work via Ko-fi, Patreon, or PayPal so I can continue to sustain the absolutely obscene and unremitting expenses of remaining alive.
If you thought this article was bad, please feel free to contact me at either of my two email addresses or any of my four million social media and messaging accounts. Annihilate me so that it will finally be over and I can finally rest.
(You can also contact me if you thought it was good, or if you’d like to say hi.)
Footnotes
1 — “Original poster,” or “original post,” depending on context (e.g., the OP said in the OP …).
2 — It really does! All exogenous hormones (i.e., hormones from outside the body — “hormone drugs,” if you will) currently standardised and widely used in gender-affirming care are bioidentical (i.e., exactly chemically identical to those produced by the body).
3 — Self cite lmao, cringe
4 — The maxim that “once you post transphobia you will never post normally again,” popularised by Alice Caldwell-Kelly (2020) of Trashfuture, who may have been quoting or summarising a remark by Trashfuture colleague Riley Quinn.
5 — Gender-affirming medical or surgical treatments.
6 — Transgender and gender-diverse.
7 — I have both of these conditions and am therefore allowed to make this joke.
9 — 16 subjects “expressed transition-related regret or detransitioned,” which are, while intuitively clearly associated, not mutually inclusive.
10 — Trans-eliminationists often claim that the data means nothing because it’s based on proxy parameters, typically suicide attempt and/or suicidal ideation. In doing so they’re seemingly relying on their audience not to realise that they’re saying “data about suicide doesn’t count unless you get it by interviewing people who are dead”.
References
American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.).
D’Angelo, R. (2020b, September 9). The man I am trying to be is not me. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 101(5), 951–970. doi:10.1080/00207578.2020.1810049. Retrieved 27 November 2022.
D’Angelo, R. (2020c, October 28). Who is Phoenix? [Commentary]. Journal of Medical Ethics, 46(11), 753–754. doi:10.1136/medethics-2020-106822. Retrieved 27 November 2022.
Davies, S., McIntyre, S., & Rypma, C. (2019, April 11–13). Detransition rates in a national UK gender identity clinic [Poster session]. 3rd European Professional Association for Transgender Health biennial conference: Inside matters — On law, ethics, and religion. Rome, Italian Republic. Retrieved 28 November 2022.
Originally published 17 July 2022; migrated to website 24 November 2022.
On or around 30 January 2019, in the Australian Greens Victoria, a paper titled Response to the paper circulated for the Workshop on Trans-Exclusionary Rhetoric (Gale & Vallins, 2019), was circulated by two members of the AGV State Council, Nina Vallins and Linda Gale. The paper is now typically referred to by a shorter title, Contending Views, of unknown provenance (that phrase never appears in the text).
Contending Views has several problems. Here are a few.
Content warning
This article includes two direct quotations from allegations of sexual assault.
Prologue
Contending Views was a response to discussion and proposals surrounding a motion (“Proposal,” n.d.) which was moved at the AGV State Council that month, which called for a firmer stance against transphobia within the AGV.
The core flaw of Contending Views — not particularly surprisingly, in hindsight — is that while it pays lip service to trans inclusion, at one point saying “women (including trans women),” it makes several assertions which are incomprehensible in that context.
In particular, Contending Views‘ philosophical framework requires that:
trans women are not women;
trans women are men, or are, at the very least, not presumed innocent of — so to speak — the sins of men.
I will highlight this in instances where it is clear and relevant.
#1
… the paper raises these issues [concerning trans-exclusionary rhetoric —Ed.] in a way which will inevitably provoke a vigorous internal debate which might be better addressed after the next1 Federal Election.
Contending Views does very pointedly make a show of objecting on the grounds of trans-agnostic issues like electoral tactics, State Council protocol, etc. However, most of its content is, in fact, engaging in the very debate that the authors claim to want to have not now, but later.
Consequently, it reads less as, “I am concerned that this debate might genuinely impair the performance of the party at the election,” and more “let’s end this debate— which we’ll do by us having the last word,” and then responding to any objections with “No I WIN! I WIN! I WIN! I WIN—“
#2
If ‘woman’ is a category predicated entirely on a person’s subjective self-identification rather than on an objective, identifiable fact such as biology, what are the policy and practical implications for these hard-won sex-segregated spaces or sex-specific affirmative actions?
Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)
The issue here seems pretty obvious: “woman” (and for that matter, “man”) is already a “category predicated entirely on” subjective identification — just generally by others, not the self. For all practical social intents and purposes, biology does not come into it.
Sure, a man might want to know whether the woman he wants to sleep with has a penis or a vagina. Nowadays, though, society generall and quite rightlyy avoids the thinking that Is she the right kind of woman for me to desire? and Is she the right kind of woman to be a woman? are the same question.
A woman can use gendered amenities, like a women’s toilet, because she says she is a woman and no one disagrees. If her gender is contested, the most invasive verification which is widely considered permitted is asking her to produce ID — which itself is a statement by the government saying they consider her to be a woman.
More invasive means of sex verification — such as groping someone, a violation to which both cis men and cis women regularly subject trans people — would be rightly considered sick and wrong if done to a cis person. It is telling that they only emerge where transphobia exists.
Even in modern history, the fact that your gender is what you say it is has been, verifiably, broadly uncontroversial. “Chicks with dicks” was never a polite, respectful, or — for lack of a better word — politically correct term, but it conceptualised the people it described as chicks, dicks notwithstanding.
This is also the paper’s first instance of “trans women aren’t women”. After all, if the authors believe trans women are women then they should have no problem admitting them to facilities which are for women; it wouldn’t be considered right to deny such admission to a cis woman. As the authors quickly make apparent, they are quite willing to fall down at that first hurdle.
#3
It raises serious practical social policy questions if any person who asserts ‘I am a woman’ is then without question to be granted access to women’s domestic violence shelters, women’s scholarships, and women’s change rooms.
Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)
Well, it might, if anyone were proposing that. Even cis women aren’t let into domestic violence (DV) shelters “without question” based on gender alone — not least because, while it isn’t known to happen anywhere near as often as cis men’s DV against cis women, it’s still entirely possible for a cis woman’s DV assailant to be a cis woman (DVConnect, n.d.).
Admission to DV shelters has always been a matter of judgement by whoever controls admission. The proposition is that since women generally are admitted, women who are trans, being women, should be admitted under the same circumstances under which a cis woman would be admitted.
Scholarships are comparable in that
they are also access-controlled by an authority with the ability to assess and determine good faith, and that
trans women, being women, should be able to access them under the same conditions as other women — not “without question”.
The mention of change rooms is a different matter — not factually, but rhetorically. The reference to change rooms conventionally implies physical presence, nudity, and sexual vulnerability — but, of course, cis women are already vulnerable to sexual violence by other cis women in such places. For instance, relevant allegations have been levelled against vocal trans-exterminationist Lily Cade:
Lily Cade assaulted me at my very first Xbiz awards in a bathroom stall directly after assaulting another girl in another bathroom stall.
[Cade] assaulted me on a party bus in front of a bunch of porn people. I went along with it so it would stop sooner and be less embarrassing. But she ruined my first exxxotica and i cringe every time i see her
It cannot “raise serious practical social policy questions” to admit women to a space for women. If the authors believe that admitting trans women raises such questions then the authors cannot believe that trans women are women. The question is what they believe them to be.
The choice to invoke sexual vulnerability makes the answer pretty clear. Current dominant culture promotes an instinctive understanding that sexual violence is characteristic of men. By implying that allowing trans women in a space puts cis women at risk of sexual violence, the authors imply that trans women are men.
Incidentally, while the other venues mentioned here haven’t been studied, there is no evidence that acknowledging that trans people can use the correct amenities for their gender makes anyone less safe (Barnett et al., 2018). There is, however, plenty of evidence that not acknowledging trans people’s right to use the correct amenities subjects them to more harassment and, indeed, sexual violence (e.g., National Center for Transgender Equality, 2015); this predates Contending Views but I can only assume it didn’t reach the authors.
#4
What does it mean for evidence-based policy if we record acts of violence committed by trans women as violence perpetrated by a female person?
It means our policy can be based on more accurate evidence, because we acknowledge violence by women as violence by women.
I admittedly find it a bit ironic that I’m reviewing this one, as the daughter of an entirely cis woman with a propensity for domestic battery, violent home invasion, and attempted murder. Women, cis and trans, are morally and often physically equally able to do harm.
This is incidentally obviously another case of “trans women are men”. Violence generally, like sexual violence, is the subject of a (not inaccurate!) dominant-culture understanding that it is usually male. Trans women could only affect “evidence-based policy” by contaminating women’s “evidence base” with a residual male propensity to do harm.
As with the other implications here, I am not aware of any evidence that trans women are more violent than cis women — but I am aware that they are vastly more likely to be made victims (UCLA Williams Institute, 2021).
#5
Should a man who has been convicted and incarcerated for sexual crimes against women be able, by asserting that they are now a woman, to therefore be housed in a female prison?
This is obviously another case of “trans women are men,” which the use of singular “they” does nothing to blunt — “they” is a word which cis people of all stripes are liable to abruptly discover if the alternative is calling a trans woman “she”.
In this case, the “trans women are men” isn’t entirely in the choice to invoke the (again, for this purpose, characteristically male) “sexual crimes” — it’s also in the deliberate construction of the hypothetical trans woman as simply “a man … asserting that they are now a woman,” reducing her womanhood to nothing more than a series of words.
The answer to the underlying question is, of course — accepting for the sake of argument, and wrongly, that prisons should exist — that prisons that confine women confine cis women even if they committed “sexual crimes”; trans women being women, they should confine them too.
There is incidentally an inline citation in the document at this point to a “prison review” by UK trans-eliminationist group Fair Play for Women (FPFW). The review (Fair Play For Women, 2018) is, to put not too fine a point on it, bullshit, and it doesn’t make any particularly careful attempt to appear not to be.
The short version is that the review asserts trans women are much more violent, and to make its claim, it exploits a quirk in British Ministry of Justice (MoJ) administration meaning that the only trans women whose genders are recorded are those convicted of particularly severe crimes (Harris, 2016).
To be crudely reductive: it’s much as if the MoJ had limited the registration of trans womanhood to prisoners convicted of murder and rape, and then FPFW had claimed 100% of all transfem prisoners were murderers or rapists. What the MoJ actually did, and what FPFW actually claimed, are only slightly diluted versions of this.
#6
Is it OK for lesbian women to prefer that their sexual partners have female anatomy, or is this transphobic and should they be encouraged to welcome sexual relationships with people with penises who identify as women?
Gale & Vallins (op. cit.)
Hoo boy.
Now, to start with, this rather unkindly assumes that cis women can’t get phalloplasty. Personally I think they should be able to if they want.
More seriously, what’s actually going on here is an intentional misrepresentation of the concept of the cotton ceiling. The core of the cotton ceiling concept is: If you find someone romantically and sexually attractive, but then you immediately stop finding them attractive because you found out they were trans, then there may be a degree of prejudice there that you need to examine.
The assertion has never been “… so therefore cis women are obliged to sleep with trans women”. You can’t litigate someone into having to fuck you, and if anyone genuinely thinks you can, then that person is not a safe person in any place, at any time.
Moreover, the fact that the core proposition of the “cotton ceiling” concept is true is immediately clear. For example, I might refuse to sleep with neurodivergent (ND) people on the grounds that they’re all speds2 who can’t consent (I’m ND and have been called a sped for it, hence why I picked this example).
If I were this bizarrely ableist person, then nobody would be entitled to force me to sleep with an ND person. However, even if I treated ND people with perfect civility in other ways, my position on romance and sexuality would still clearly be bizarrely ableist. “Cotton ceiling” means no more and no less than this.
Tangentially, TERFs like to claim “cotton” refers to cis women’s panties that trans women are unable to break into. The truth is, as usual with TERFs, the opposite — “cotton” refers to trans women’s panties and the fact that what’s stereotypically in them causes trans women to be defined in ways they are unable to break out of. This becomes really obvious when you consider that the “x ceiling” snowclone describes something which people unsuccessfully try to break through from beneath it, i.e., inside it — compare “service ceiling,” the highest altitude at which a given aircraft is usable. Nobody is trying to get to the glass ceiling from the emergency door on the roof.
The framing here also neatly erases the fact that plenty of lesbian cis women do have sexual and romantic relationships with trans women, who, as women, fall within the normal scope of their attractions. Much as with the few (the proud?) cis women who are violent assailants, the authors require the nonexistence of: those cis lesbians; their relationships; the girlness of their girlfriends.
And, of course, there’s another round of “trans women are not women” — this paragraph describes them as simply “people with penises who identify as women,” which in this case is not just reducing them to words but (that old TERF favourite) reducing them to reproductive organs. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think (Morissette, 1996)?
#7
Should a beautician be able to specify that she serves a female clientele only, and then be forced to wax the testicles of a person who now identifies as a woman [GenderTrender, 2018]?
As the inline citation makes clear, this is a reference to Canadian woman Jessica Yaniv.
Through 2018 and 2019 — relatively recent at the time of Contending Views — Yaniv filed 15 complaints of anti-trans discrimination with the Human Rights Tribunal of the Canadian province of British Columbia, naming various beauty practitioners who, or whose staff, were not trained to wax her testicles, and accordingly refused (Larsen, 2019).
The issue is, of course, that Yaniv cannot be legitimately treated as representative for one very simple reason: she didn’t actually want her genitals waxed. The tribunal found — in my opinion credibly — that Yaniv was looking for an excuse to litigate, for cruel amusement and financial gain (Little, 2019; Macnab, 2019; Stueck, 2019).
Moreover, Yaniv, as well as a manipulative sadist, was a racist and arguably a fascist; her targets were all of Indian origin. This appears to be because she agreed with a variant form of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory; while the Anglophone classical form of Great Replacement theory blames Jews (Jones D., 2022), Yaniv appeared to blame Indian people as well, or instead (Wakefield, 2019).
Beyond all of our laws and conventions, society unavoidably operates on a degree of good faith. There is no way to construct a hard-and-fast rule such that someone who wanted to abuse it could never find a way to do so. Yaniv wanted to do so.
We are going to eventually need to hammer out a solid logic allowing trans women with penises to get genital waxing services under the same circumstances where it is allowable for other women (e.g., cis women, and trans women with vaginas) and other people with penises (e.g., cis men and some nonbinary people). It’s not priority 1 on the trans agenda, but it’s in there.
In the meantime, however, if a sadistic racist trans women decides to harm racialised people, the problem is not that she’s a trans woman, it’s that she’s a sadistic racist. Fair enough though — the curse of being a TERF is, as many have observed (Clifton, 2021; Lavin, 2021; Doyle, 2022; etc.), you’re not allowed to condemn sadistic racists because they make up too many of your core constituents.
#8
Should doctors refrain from inquiring as to a person’s sex, even though we know that people experience some diseases differently depending on their biological sex, and respond differently to some pharmaceuticals?
This is my wheelhouse, so I’m gonna help myself to the wheel.
“Biological sex” insofar as it is relevant to disease experiences and drug response is not a monolith. For instance, an archetypal trans woman has an endocrine system in which the dominant sex hormone(s) are estrogen and possibly progesterone with minimal testosterone (e.g., Hembree et al., 2017; Cheung et al., 2019), one result of which is that she likely has relatively prominent breasts. For all but an infinitesimal proportion of cis men (Shulman et al., 2008; Shozu et al., 2014), these things are not both (or all) true.
For these reasons, trans women broadly have a lifetime risk of breast cancer which is closer to that of cis women than cis men — for every 10 cis women who develop breast cancer, about 4 trans women will develop it, but for every 1 cis man who develops breast cancer, about 46 trans women will develop it (de Blok et al., 2019). Indeed, this specific fact is currently used as an excuse to deny trans women progesterone (Prior, 2019), and has historically been used as an excuse to deny them any hormones at all — for a broader discussion of this kind of thinking and its impact, see Nelson (2019).
On the other hand, a trans woman has a prostate and therefore has a vanishingly small (but non-zero!) chance of developing cancer in it (Ingham et al., 2018). This would seem to be a slam-dunk in favour of the Trans Women as Essentially Men thesis … except that cis women also have prostates — historically euphemistically referred to as the Skene’s gland — and are fully capable of developing cancer in them (Dodson et al., 1994).
Similarly, there are many congenital disorders which have a much higher clinically visible prevalence (i.e., are much more often severe enough for you to know they’re there) in one assigned-sex group (typically, they are much more often clinically observable in cis women than cis men).
The thing is that trans people switch over as they transition. For example, sex hormones including estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are known to influence the symptomatic severity of Ehlers–Danlos syndrome/s (EDS), by causing changes in ligament laxity, chance of and healing of muscle injuries, etc. (Gensemer et al., 2021).
The nature of the influence is such that people with estrogen/progesterone-dominant endocrine systems seemingly tend to have worse EDS, and, accordingly, among cis people, cis women are more frequently diagnosed with it at a ratio of about 4 cis women to every 1 cis man (Castori et al., 2010; Hermanns-Lê et al., 2016; etc.).
One small case series (Boris et al., 2019) and a mountain of community-sourced anecdotal evidence indicates that HRT does indeed worsen or improve EDS and related complex chronic illnesses, depending on which HRT is taken; the evidence (ibid.) and community reports suggest that masculinising HRT makes it better, and community reports suggest that feminising HRT makes it worse.
Along the same lines, migraine is sex-linked; thus, as Jones Z. (2021) notes, as the “sex-determining” characteristics of trans women’s bodies change — in effect, as their sex changes — they develop a correspondingly greater propensity to migraine.
I can personally verify that both of these things are true because the hypothetical overly flexible transmigraineuse of the previous two paragraphs is me, which is why I picked those conditions to examine here. I’m definitely not the only one; at least one study (n = 1,363) suggests that the prevalence of EDS among trans people is more than 100× (!!!) that in the general population (Najafian et al., 2022). In the end, the reality is obviously that:
doctors do need to know about a trans person’s traditionally “sexed” characteristics;
the trans person is going to tell them that because it’s necessary to do so in order to get well, and suffering fucking sucks;
this has zero impact on whether that trans person is the man, woman, etc., that they in fact are.
#9
It is essential that we support trans women to have safe spaces which address the violence they experience while still allowing women to have their own safe spaces.
Which trans women will also be allowed into, right, because the authors recognise that trans women are women, right? … What’s that chirping noise?
This is separate-but-equal rhetoric, which, as hegemonic white supremacy made clear at Black people’s expense throughout the first half of the 20th century, is nothing more than a way to force marginalised people into facilities which are nowhere near equal, if they exist at all.
Being trans is not comparable to being Black. However, similarly-motivated and similarly-structured anti-minoritarian thinking, from many of the same authorities, underpins the authors’ rhetoric. It also underpins actions like the FINA, British Triathlon, etc., “open” category push which was current at the initial publication of this article (Evans, 2022; Ingle, 2022; George, 2022): it’s a way to force trans people to fuck off out of public life, while finding a convenient pretext to avoid accepting any blame for having forced that.
#10
Both trans women and women deserve to be safe; but in a world in which women’s concerns have been designated inferior to men’s for many centuries, we should not easily give up sex-specific spaces and opportunities for women.
And as the authors recognise that trans women are women, they shouldn’t have to give up sex-specific spaces and opportunities for women either, right?
Of course, in appealing implicitly to the scarcity of “sex-specific spaces and opportunities,” the authors also conveniently elide the fact that trans men exist, and about as many of them in absolute terms want to transition as do trans women (Leinung & Joseph, 2020), which should neatly balance out any transfem-related addition to demand.
There’s no really viable argument here that trans women being able to access these facilities somehow makes cis women less able to do so. However much digging one does, the only throughline here that one can dig up is that trans women have a “male essence” that means they deserve those opportunities less.
#11
If women are now no longer able to publicly acknowledge that an adult human male is a man, …
Oh well, so much for “women (including trans women),” mask predictably all the way off,4 yada yada (I don’t have enough energy right now to feign surprise).
#12
… this takes away from women the ability to describe their own lived lives:
This is interesting. Obviously the argument here is that:
“man” and “woman” are “sex classes” (we’ll go with it);
“man” is the dominant sex class;
trans women are men;
thus, including trans women in the class “woman” prevents that class from being rigorously defined and makes it meaningless.
We do know men are given dominance in society, but the question here is why. Is it their physiology? Is it their testosterone, their muscle mass? If so, it’s difficult to see how trans women can inherit that dominance when they generally have the same amount of testosterone as cis women (Hembree et al., op. cit.), and cis-female-range proportions of lean and fat mass and muscle when controlling for height (Nokoff et al., 2019).
The other obvious possibility is that it’s socioeconomic dominance, but it’s difficult to see how. Cis women are famously paid almost 20% less than cis men (Vandenbroek, 2020) — but trans people are paid even less than that, with trans women paid least of all (Wareham, 2021).
Cis women are discriminated against in employment. Statistically they appear to be less discriminated against than trans people, and there are laws against discriminating against women — there was a whole movie about this! — whose applicability to cis women has never been contested since their enactment.
Meanwhile, trans people can often legally be fired specifically for being trans; as Gillespie (2022) notes, the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 (Qld) s 28(1)(b) explicitly allows employment discrimination against trans people engaged in “the care or instruction of minors” because the “physical, psychological or emotional wellbeing of [those] minors” might be endangered by the mere fact that the person is trans.
The only way this societal “dominance” can somehow attach to trans women is by making a magical, metaphysical claim about their essence. Sure, they might be socioeconomically subordinate in every respect that cis women are, and some extra ones for the road, but they have an indelibly dominant inborn magical sex spirit, so dominant they must be.
#14
Women lose the language and ability to describe themselves even as women;
This would be slightly more effective in context if Gale & Vallins, who included this quote, hadn’t described themselves as women in literally the paragraph prior to the beginning of the quote. After all, you can only give up something you have possession of, and:
… we should not easily give up sex-specific spaces and opportunities for women.
It’s unclear how having to describe a sexually violent trans woman as a woman takes away the ability to describe her — unless you believe that being a woman and being sexually violent are fundamentally incompatible, i.e., you believe that women cannot commit sexual violence.
While sexual violence by cis women, as a category of acts, happens nowhere near as often and is nowhere near as systematic as the patriarchal sexual violence enacted by cis men, it demonstrably does happen (Stemple & Meyer, 2017). This line of argument needs it to be existentially impossible: to have never happened, not once, ever. This is clearly untrue and therefore unviable.
#16
Women lose the right to challenge the sexual enslavement and exploitation of members of their own sex class.
Oh, cool, trans exclusion and vaguely coded sex worker exclusion in the same strike. Spinifex Press would be proud.
Sex work is work, and continues to exist despite millennia of attempts to squash it. It’s criminalised and therefore marginalised work, but all that that actually achieves is denying safeguards, options, and justice to those engaged in it (Global Network of Sex Work Projects, 2017). Sex work can become enslavement and exploitation because its being pushed to the margins means society can pretend not to see it, and therefore pretend they don’t notice what happens to those engaged in it (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).
The fact is that regardless of their own views on the morality of the abstract concept of sex work, or of how it exists in reality, many people end up having to do sex work anyway. Due to their economic marginalisation, trans people — very much including trans women (Mock, 2014; Logie et al., 2017; Fisher et al., 2021)! — are among those people. If, by quoting Yardley, the authors are indicating they won’t advocate for sex workers because the ranks of sex workers include trans women … well, that’s on them.
#17
We are in a world of proscribed truth and compelled thought. Whatever your political stance, this should strike you cold with terror.
This is transparently not even vaguely true. Trans advocacy doesn’t make claims on “truth” or “thought”; it seeks material action. The fact that trans men are men and trans women are men, which has been validated by every test science has applied, justifies trans advocacy. However, the point of that advocacy isn’t to impose belief in that fact; it’s to get you to stop being a horrible little bastard to trans people.
This was, however, 2019, and this argument was new in this country back then so I suppose I can’t fault the authors for being fashion forward. Before them, the most recent people to argue it were Katter’s Australian Party (Hirst, 2018), who very obviously got it from Jordan Peterson (Beauchamp, 2018). Nominal eco-liberals and social-democrats borrowing from the open Christofascists of the KAP — does this prove horseshoe theory correct at last … ?
#18
Further, it is a central tenet of much feminist theory that the very concept of gender is harmful and should be rejected in its entirety.
This is a neat little bit of sleight-of-hand designed to slip past the theoretical knowledge of the informed feminist reader.
The “feminist theory” to which the authors refer is the mainline second-wave radical feminism of which TERFism is a mutation, in which gender is what the authors call “assumptions about … gender characteristics attributed to [one’s] … sex”.
The authors, however — and the TERF tendency in general — perform a magic trick by pretending that this is the same thing that trans people mean when they discuss gender, when what trans people mean is approximately “the state of being a man, a woman, or of another gender”.
In short, the authors are pretending that when a trans woman says she’s a woman, she’s actually expressing the view that all women are housewives or supermodels or what have you, and asserting that she’s one of those — when she is in fact just pointing out that she’s a woman. Trans readers may very well be particularly nettled by this, since they know that when a trans woman isn’t a supermodel housewife, these same TERFs use precisely that to pretend she’s not a woman.
#19
In this context, we should be able to challenge the choices of many women (including trans women) to present themselves in highly ‘feminised’ (gendered) ways.
In the first place, this is blatantly just leveraging stereotypes about trans women, namely that they’re all unconvincing patriarchal caricatures of traditionalist hyperfemininity — think Emily Howard from Little Britain (Plowman & Moore, 2003–2006): “I’m a lady!”.
In reality, trans women just present themselves like other women. There is, however, a kernel of truth here, albeit a distorted and mirrored one: trans women are subjected to an enforced expectation of hyperfemininity, but the people enforcing that expectation are those who ideologically agree with the authors of this letter.
In the second place, this is directly antithetical to the bodily autonomy which is an essential underpinning of feminist and leftist politics (Perry, 2017; Letzing, 2022). Why should Gale & Vallins be able to “challenge the choices of” any woman “to present [herself]” in any way? It’s not their fucking body.
#20
If the purpose of this workshop is to develop a proposal for a Sate Council decree that statements such as ‘There are two sexes,’ ‘The science is not conclusive,’ ‘This is an active debate in feminism,’ ‘Shutting down debate is censorship,’ or ‘Trans women aren’t the same as biological women,’ are banned within the Greens and would constitute behaviour worthy of censure, suspension or expulsion, this is totally contrary to a Greens ethos which encourages robust debate and the development of policy based on real evidence.
“There are two sexes” is not “based on real evidence”. Sex is a bimodal distribution; it has two peaks that it slopes up to. The fact that most people fit on the slopes of one of those peaks isn’t contested. This doesn’t mean — as the proposition “there are two sexes” requires — that every other contour on the map is flattened out (Novella, 2022).
Even if trans people didn’t exist, if you think that sex is a clean binary, and that intersex people are deviations from that binary, then you can’t adequately serve intersex people who know themselves to be complete and not deviating from anything at all; you can’t respect them for who they actually are (McDonough, 2022).
There’s no good reason to say “the science is not conclusive,” because good science can never be completely, eternally, invincibly conclusive; it always has to be open to change. The function of saying “the science is not conclusive” is to say that action can’t be taken because a specific point does not have literal 100% agreement, knowing full well that it is bound to never rise above 99.999…%.
In reality, action is justified if a consensus exists that it should be taken. Given that the authors were AGV State Councillors at the time, I — a former Queensland Greens State Council delegate myself — suspect they were very familiar with that principle indeed; Greens decision-making is extremely heavily consensus-based.
Despite attempts to rig it, such as Lisa Littman’s 2018 paper which spuriously proposed a “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” that was essentially “transgender because it’s cool” (Littman, 2018) — later shown at length to be complete bullshit (Bauer et al., 2021; Turban et al., 2022) — consensus exists on the proper treatment and accommodation of trans people to a degree which almost no other topic enjoys, with 93% of primary research publications between 1991 and June 2017 finding that transition improves well-being, and 0% finding that it causes harm (What We Know Project, 2018). The scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, which is a couple of points ahead at >99% (Lynas et al., 2021), is the only other well-known field of scientific endeavour whose core question has been so firmly answered.
In asserting that it’s valuable to say “the science is not conclusive” and it should not be a forbidden thing to say, here is what the authors are communicating: you must defer action which is supported by all of the evidence, because at some point in the future, an additional piece of evidence might be added that would cause the sum of human knowledge to pull a 180°. This is clearly ludicrous and not worth bothering with.
“This is an active debate in feminism”? Objectively it is not. TERFism is a residue of the second wave of feminism. Modern third- and fourth-wave feminism have consistently considered trans liberation to be integral to the feminist movement (Grady, 2018).
There could not be a more telling sign of this than that the very same “feminists” who represent the authors’ views have opted to cling onto existence by selling any legitimacy to groups like the Australian Christian Lobby (“Radical feminists … ?”, 2017) and the Heritage Foundation (Fitzsimons, 2019), which make absolutely no bones about considering the whole feminist movement their enemy (Shields, 2014; Whitehall, 2018; Iles, 2020; Hafera, 2021).
“Shutting down debate is censorship” is an old chestnut, the only purpose of which is to make it okay to incessantly and in bad faith invite someone to engage in debate and make free inferences if they refuse. It’s designed to normalise bombarding people, talking over them, and wearing them down; it’s not designed to make it any easier to seek the truth.
“Trans women aren’t the same as biological women” … well, trans women are biological women, so jot that down. Trans women aren’t the same as cis women, though, and nobody’s ever asserted that they are; simply that they are women, which they are.
This, more than anything else, illustrates that the authors both have no genuine commitment to debate and are fully aware that they don’t. This is noticeable because it’s a response to an element in the original motion: “Trans women aren’t the same as cis women”. We’ll come back to this in a sec.
When discussing legitimate debate, insofar as that’s a thing, we talk about “the terms of the debate,” like “the terms of an agreement,” because any actual debate has to be conducted on a common set of terms. Any debate not conducted in that way is posturing followed eventually by random noise.
The term “cis women” acknowledges cis women and trans women on an equal footing, and thus equally entitled to negotiate the terms on which debate should take place. This enables the debate to be a dialectic: a dialogue with the objective of finding truth.
The term “biological woman” is an appeal to a subset of essentialism known as biologism. Essentialism asserts that entities, usually people, are different from each other because of a difference in what they fundamentally, metaphysically, essentially are — a difference in their essences. Gender essentialism is the assertion of such a difference between, typically, (all) men and (all) women (Abrams, 2020).
Historically, while belief in a physically existing soul remained widespread — up to and even after the development of the modern scientific method in its basic form — scientists and other professionals charged with truth-seeking tried to find the physical soul, e.g., by looking for changes in body mass on death (MacDougall, 1907). They also tried to find its seat, the physical place in the body where it resided; for instance, Leonardo da Vinci hypothesised, quite sensibly given what was known, that it was in the optic chiasm, the junction of the optic nerves (Santoro et al., 2009).
One school of essentialist claims amounts to “finding the seat of the soul,” but for “soul” substitute the “essence” of whatever difference is at issue. Biologism is the faction of that school which locates the essence in the “biology” (typically not more specifically defined, at least not in any rigorous way). Gender-essentialist biologism asserts that cis women have the Female Biology, they carry the Female Essence, and that makes them the Real Women (Grosz, 1989). It establishes a hierarchy of womanhood legitimacy, with trans women all the way at the bottom.
This makes it impossible to have a debate which seeks truth, because Alice can’t advance or refine her position through “legitimate debate” with Bob when Bob believes that the mere fact that Alice holds that position means that Alice by definition does not have a legitimate right to debate.
A second ago we noted that the authors were responding to a line in the original motion. However, they also changed it, deleting the original “cis women” and substituting “biological women”. Their belief that their opponents had no legitimate standing to debate them was so strong that they felt free to literally reword a direct quote — they considered themselves legitimately able to define what their opponents’ position was, to the point of overriding those opponents themselves.
There is no reason to believe that truth-seeking debate would ever have been possible here — and none to believe that Gale or Vallins wanted it.
Closing
This article took me hours to write as a Twitter thread, and a couple of days to redraft as a WordPress post. It was one of the longer pieces I’d written, because it was one of the more conceptually dense works I’d had to analyse. Conceptual density is fine here — the authors were writing in the context of party internal politics, meaning they knew that baseline knowledge and acceptance of certain concepts was a given and that their audience spoke or at least understood their language.
The conceptual density and specialised language gives the impression, however, that this is somehow intellectually, discursively, of a better or higher quality than any of the News Corp or Ninefax op-eds which even at that time had already reared their ugly heads. It didn’t. It made it more of a pain in the arse to pull apart, but it didn’t make it any closer to being right.
Footnotes
The 2019 federal election, the date of which hadn’t been confirmed when Contending Views was written (see Fernando & Palin, 2019).
An insulting term for neurodivergent people, a portmanteau of “special education”.
“An excuse” because it’s spurious — “limited epidemiologic data generally do not show an association of circulating progesterone levels with risk” (Trabert et al., 2019).
This was early 2019 so, on further reflection, it may not be fair to criticise their less-than-ideal mask discipline.
If this article was in any way useful to you, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi, on Patreon, or by PayPal.
Grosz, E. (1989). Sexual difference and the problem of essentialism. In J. Clifford & V. Dhareshwar (Eds.), Inscriptions, vol. 5: Traveling theories, traveling theorists. Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Hafera, B. (2021, October 20). Feminism: An elite ideology. The Heritage Foundation (via Archive Today). Retrieved 24 November 2022.
Ingham, M.D., Lee, R.J., MacDermed, D., & Olumi, A.F. (2018, December). Prostate cancer in transgender women. Urologic Oncology: Seminars and Original Investigations, 36(12), 518–525. doi:10.1016/j.urolonc.2018.09.011. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
Trabert, B., Sherman, E., Kannan, N., & Stanczyk, F.Z. (2019, May 2). Progesterone and breast cancer. Endocrine Reviews, 41(2), 320–344. doi:10.1210/endrev/bnz001. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
Vandenbroek, P. (2020, November 16). Gender wage gap statistics: A quick guide. Statistics and Mapping Section, Parliamentary Library of Australia. Retrieved 24 November 2022.
The following text was written by Riana Pfefferkorn as a Twitter thread on her account @Riana_Crypto and was originally published on 10 November 2022, 16:13–16:32 UTC.
SCOOP from @alexeheath: Twitter’s chief privacy officer, chief compliance officer, and chief information security officer have all quit. Internal note warns that violating FTC privacy settlement could destroy the company but Elon doesn’t seem to care.
Nilay Patel (2022), citation pending
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
(Disclosure: I used to be Twitter’s outside counsel, and I spent some time on loan from my firm to the in-house legal team in 2014. But I have little personal knowledge and no privileged info about their security controls.)
As this story shows, the world’s richest man “does not experience human concerns,” per @edzitron1,2 (cf. @greatdismal:3 “The exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”4) Consequences, like taxes, are for the little people. (h/t @bhpascal5)
Normal companies have security & privacy controls and care about legal compliance. But this is not normal — that’s what has people worried. The Chief Twit’s track record shows “but that’s illegal” isn’t usually a persuasive argument. So too here.
In 2011, Twitter agreed to a 20-year FTC consent order over its data security practices. In May, FTC fined Twitter $150MM for violating the 2011 orders & issued a modified order.6 If Twitter so much as sneezes, it has to do a privacy review beforehand.
There are periodic outside audits, and the FTC can monitor compliance.
Per the order, a small team of senior execs is on the hook for making privacy & security decisions, which are legally binding on the company. And a senior officer has to certify compliance with the order annually to the FTC. This “everyone must self-certify” thing is nonsense.
Designation of a senior officer, or senior level team composed of no more than five (5) persons, to be responsible for any decision to collect, maintain, use, disclose, or provide access to the Covered Information; […]
Citation pending
Dollars to donuts, that small team mandated by the FTC order = all the people who just quit.
Respondent must submit a compliance notice, sworn under penalty of perjury, within fourteen (14) days of any change in the following: (1) any designated point of contact; (2) the structure of Respondent or any entity that Respondent has any ownership interest in or controls directly or indirectly that may affect compliance obligations arising under this Order, including: creation, merger, sale, or dissolution of the entity or any subsidiary, parent, or affiliate that engages in any acts or practices subject to this Order; (3) the filing of any bankruptcy petition, insolvency proceeding, or similar proceeding by or against Respondent.
Citation pending
Under the May order, the FTC can demand additional compliance reports, documents, & info from Twitter, and can interview employees if they agree to an interview. Hiding information from the FTC is a federal crime: just ask Joe Sullivan.
There’s already been one Twitter whistleblower. I bet there’ll be more, if people are quitting/getting fired because they’re being asked to do illegal stuff. Maybe they’ll whistle-blow even before he can bring in people from his other companies to do what they wouldn’t.
Here’s the thing: Why would anyone take the fall for him?! This isn’t the mob. Some executives would definitely face personal liability for illegal acts. I don’t know about lower-level employees (maybe @Popehat7 knows). After Joe Sullivan, I bet folks won’t feel like finding out.
I totally believe he doesn’t care about any FTC order, and wouldn’t hesitate to violate it even if it bound him personally (like the FTC Drizly order8). He’s shown he’s not afraid of the SEC. But regular mortals do worry about jail and lawsuits.
And he needs regular mortals. Technical, legal and (perhaps most important) human layers add friction and make it harder — not impossible, harder — for Twitter to do 10 illegal things before breakfast. At least not without the FTC & maybe Congress finding out.
He’s the boss, but he’s not a god. His whims are not self-executing. Nobody in their right mind will be like “yeah, sure, I’ll self-certify to FTC compliance, I’ll FAFO9 whether I’ll get investigated for perjury.” Even in a tech recession with jobs scarce: He just ain’t worth it.
Footnotes
Ed Zitron, writer and public relations consultant.
Zitron (2022).
William Gibson (b. 1948), essayist and science fiction writer.
Gibson (1986).
Brian H. Pascal, non-residential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
In re Twitter, Inc. (2022).
Popehat, a law-oriented blog; in this case, its primary contributor, Ken White, a criminal justice and First Amendment attorney based in Los Angeles, California.
In re Drizly, LLC (2022).
Fuck around and find out.
References
Gibson, W.F. (1986). Count zero. Victor Gollancz Ltd.
The following text was written by Hector Martin as a Twitter thread on his account @marcan42 and was originally published on 13 November 2022, 07:16–07:25 UTC.
Superscript numbers are footnotes. Subscript letters are Martin’s Tweet boundaries; subscript a points to the reference list entry which would usually be cited as (Martin, 2022a), for instance.
Scoop from within Twitter: small things are breaking, not enough engineers to fix them.
Noticed that notification counts are not showing? The BE1 service powering it is down since Thursday. A bug was filed, but the team that would fix it is full on with verification work.
Gergely Orosz, 2022, citation pending
Twitter is already slowly breaking, and it’s only going to get worse.
He says that Twitter was built to be resilient, and that means the core features will continue working even with a reduced workforce.
As a former SRE,2 I disagree with that conclusion.a
All large services and platforms are “built to be resilient”. But they are also extremely complicated, with countless internal interactions between microservices, configuration systems, load balancing and directing subsystems, networking fabrics, and more.b
These systems are built to be reliable in the face of things like machine failures, or entire optional microservices going down. That’s not what will take Twitter down. Twitter will crash and burn when a complex interaction between systems goes wrong and causes a cascade failure.c
Cascade failures are caused when a small failure within a system has secondary effects on other systems, and the systems in charge of keeping everything up end up taking everything down instead.d
There are many ways this can happen. For example, you can have a “packet of death” — some data that causes a system to crash. If the data is being delivered repeatedly, or stored persistently, it can cause anything that tries to process it to crash or hang.e
This doesn’t have to be an exploit or externally malicious data. It can just be a circumstance that the design never accounted for. Or simply random corruption. Or any number of things.f
I once had one of those at Google. A pipeline from a downstream team kept crashing because it was trying to process bad data that had come in via a system my team was in charge of. The data had the right format but the wrong shape.g
After digging through forensic logs I figured out what had happened was that a machine had kernel panicked, which had left unwritten filesystem blocks in a log file (Google ran without local data FS journaling at the time), and those stale blocks happened to contain valid datah from another file with the same container format, but different contents. That was dutifully processed and forwarded on, and ended up crashing every worker that processed it.
One kernel panic took down an entire processing pipeline because of a freak coincidence.i
In that case the machine that was the root cause wasn’t even my responsibility, so I just reported my findings and left it at that. The team doing the processing put in some workaround to skip the bad data. All this can be done in a timely fashion if you have the people.j
“The system processing the data should’ve been built to blocklist bad data that causes crashes!”
Yeah, yeah, there is always something that “could’ve been done to avoid the failure”.
It is impossible to identify and preemptively defend against all such freak circumstances.k
This is why you have engineers on call who know their systems inside out. So that when things do go wrong — and they will — they can be fixed quickly, before things escalate into a widespread failure.
I have many such stories from my short 2.5 years at Google SRE.l
There’s also the dumb human/machine interaction errors. Google Docs smart quotes once took down a whole cluster, because fooctl ‘very-important-username’ is a very different bash command from fooctl 'very-important-username'. m
Guess what: if you have fresh people from the wrong teams copying and pasting instructions, fixing one of these is going to take much longer than it should.
Team-team interactions are also critical. Often one team can quickly help mitigate an issue with another team’s systems.n
But if you have 1/4th the workforce scrambling to learn new systems while they also focus their efforts on Musk’s stupid idea of the day first, none of that is going to go well.o
So yes, Twitter will coast along, until a freak incident causes a whole core service to fail and there’s nobody to fix it quickly. Until an engineer new to a system makes a typo and brings it all down and there is nobody left who knows how to bring it back up.p
Until a critical system becomes overloaded because nobody was on the pager or nobody could react in time, and a traffic management cascade failure causes a bunch of upstream/downstream stuff to become overloaded and fail.q
You know what’s also notoriously hard with big distributed systems like this?
Bringing stuff back up when it all goes down.
What if the system your engineers use to log in to production systems is down?r
What if DNS or a similar global service underpinning everything goes down, and you can’t even find the IPs of the machines you are trying to reach?
What if there is a circular dependency between systems, such that you can’t bring one up if the other is down, and they both are?s
What if that circular dependence involves 8 different subsystems across multiple production clusters and nobody even realized it was there until now?
And then there’s thundering herd/stampede issues. When bringing back a whole subsystem, you need to do it gradually.t
Do all your internal systems have built-in traffic management that can do that and slowly open up the faucet to allow caches to prime themselves and things to recover gracefully? Has that all been tested? How long will it take until caches are hot and ready?u
In the end, it is very possible that Twitter will go down completely at some point in the next few weeks, and the remaining engineers will have no clue how to bring it back up, due to issues such as these. If the wrong combination of failures happened, it could take weeks.v
People think of servers as things you can just reboot and be fine. That’s not how this works. If you rebooted every single $FAANG3 server simultaneously right now, all of $FAANG would be down for probably months. Or worse. And that’s with functional teams. This stuff is hard.w
None of this is unique to any particular company. I’ve seen the Google war stories myself and been part of some. I’ve heard Amazon war stories. Twitter won’t be quite as bad because they aren’t as big as those two, but they’re big enough to run into the same kinds of issues.x
Here’s one more: I once removed every machine from a production cluster at Google due to a typo. That means they would be automatically wiped and formatted.
I happened to know the system in charge of doing this was deliberately throttled and there was a big red “PAUSE” button.y
I pushed the button, put the machines back into the database, unpushed it, and went on with my day.
Now imagine that scenario, except I have no idea and no training on that system and how to stop it, and everyone who did has been fired.z
On Twitter’s (and everyone else’s) cold boot problem[:]aa
Cascading data center problems: In or around the spring of 2021, Twitter’s primary data center began to experience problems from a runaway engineering process, requiring the company to move operations to other systems outside of this datacenter. But, the other systems could not handle these rapid changes and also began experiencing problems. Engineers flagged the catastrophic danger that all the data centers might go offline simultaneously. A couple months earlier in February, Mudge had flagged this precise risk to the Board because Twitter data centers were fragile, and Twitter lacked plans and processes to “cold boot.” That meant that if all the centers went offline simultaneously, even briefly, Twitter was unsure if they could bring the service back up.
“Black Swan” existential threat: In fact, in or about Spring of 2021, just such an event was underway, and shutdown looked imminent. Hundreds of engineers nervously watched the data centers struggle to stay running. The senior executive who supervised the Head of Engineering, aware that the incident was on the verge of taking Twitter offline for weeks, months, or permanently, insisted the Board of Directors be informed of an impending catastrophic “Black Swan” event. Board Member [redacted] responded with words to the effect of “Isn’t this exactly what Mudge warned us about?” Mudge told [redacted] that he was correct. In the end, Twitter engineers working around the clock were narrowly able to stabilize the problem before the whole platform shut down.
Mudge (2022), pp. 33–34, quoted in Green (2022) & Martin (2022aa–ab)
[…] Twitter was this close to badly crashing just last year. With all staff on board, they narrowly avoided it.
Next time this happens in Musk’s Twitter, it’s gone.ab
Footnotes
Back end.
Site reliability engineer.
“Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google,” five prominent American technology companies known for being “totally dominant in their markets” (Fernando, 2022).
This week, 13–19 November, is Transgender Awareness Week. Here is a précis of major international and Australian events since the last Transgender Awareness Week.
On 21 May, Australia had a federal election. Several candidates were openly anti-trans, with at least one prominent NSW Liberal candidate, Katherine Deves, being a career anti-trans activist (Wilson, 2022). Labor leader, now prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made some remarks in the media about trans issues which attracted criticism for being transphobic (Iqbal, 2022).
On 16 June, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) — the international governing body for professional cycling — announced a new policy which significantly tightened restrictions on trans women’s participation in professional cycling (Leggett, 2022). The policy is perceived as having intentionally targeted a single British trans woman cyclist, Emily Bridges (BBC Sport, 2022).
On 17 June, the Australian Greens Victoria (AGV) removed their new Convenor, Linda Gale, because she had been elected in an irregular and rule-breaking way that protected her (Baj, 2022b) from having AGV members find out she was a vocal anti-trans activist (Baj, 2022a).
On 20 June, the International Swimming Federation (Fédération Internationale de Natation, FINA) announced a new policy which effectively excluded trans women from competing in professional swimming (“FINA votes to restrict,” 2022).
The conditions under which the FINA Extraordinary Congress passed the policy have been scrutinised — apparently delegates were only allowed to see the 24-page policy 15 minutes before they were made to vote on it (Holmes, 2022). The policy is also perceived as having intentionally targeted a single trans woman swimmer, Lia Thomas (Newberry, 2022).
On 24 June, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent which guaranteed abortion access throughout the United States. As well as targeting cis women, the ruling also caused significant new problems and dangers for trans people who can give birth (Rummler, 2022).
In a separate concurrence, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas — who is, incidentally, the subject of lingering and unresolved allegations of corruption (Barnes & Marimow, 2022; Pilkington, 2022; Tomasky, 2022) — proposed that the ruling in Dobbs also provided grounds to overturn several other precedents of the same “substantive due process” type, including:
Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling making it federally legal for married people to use contraception;
Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 ruling making it federally legal to have private, consensual gay sex; and
all of which will have knock-on effects on trans people (for example, if their hormones are considered contraceptives, or if they can’t get legal gender recognition and therefore their straight relationships and marriages are considered gay under the law).
On 19 July, the UK Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (“Cass Review”) issued a recommendation (Cass, 2022) to NHS England that the UK’s single centralised paediatric trans healthcare service, the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London, be shut down and replaced by regionalised hubs to provide timelier and more appropriate care (Brooks, 2022).
This was widely misrepresented in international media (e.g., Bannerman, 2022; Ely & Dollimore, 2022; McLoughlin, 2022), at the instigation of anti-trans pressure groups (“The U.K. turns its back,” 2022; Transgender Trend, 2022; Women’s Forum Australia, 2022, etc.) as GIDS being shut down based on (the vague claim of) it being a danger to children.
On 5 August, an attempt was made to kill Canadian streamer Clara “keffals” Sorrenti, who is a trans woman, through “swatting” her (summoning armed police to her home) by calling in a false threat of mass murder in her name (Winslow, 2022). The harassment ultimately escalated to the point that Sorrenti was forced to flee to Europe (Wiggins, 2022).
On 19 August,The Australian published an interview with Oliver “Ollie” Hassett (then Ollie Davies), a detransitioner and activist (Robinson, 2019). They failed to mention that Mr Hassett was affiliated with Genspect (Hassett, 2022), an international anti-trans hate group (Moore, 2022).
On 30 August, the Report of the Inquiry into extremism in Victoria by the Victorian Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee was tabled in the Parliament of Victoria. The report noted transphobia as a path to radicalisation for Australian political extremists (ibid., p. 1), and “public debate” over trans existence as a significant factor in giving those extremists legitimacy (ibid., pp. 45–46).
On 5 October, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism released a report classifying two anti-trans groups active in Australia, Binary Australia and LGB Alliance Australia, as extremist hate groups (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 2022).
On 6 September, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) published its Standards of care for the health of transgender and gender diverse people, version 8 (Coleman et al., 2022), or “SoC 8,” replacing version 7 (Coleman et al., 2012) after an interval of just over ten years.
The SoC 8 attracted controversy at launch, and indeed well before it, during the lengthy period of stakeholder feedback and review. One reason was that it launched with well-sourced, well-evidenced age limits for paediatric medical transition, and then retracted them, restoring a higher age limit for which there was no evidence, under political pressure and the threat of violence (Eckert, 2022). Another reason was that it claimed unearned authority over intersex people (Carpenter, 2021).
A third major reason was that it supported some of its claims with citations to publications (Littman, 2018; D’Angelo et al., 2020; Littman, 2021) which are methodologically unsound (Restar, 2019; Leveille, 2021) and from authors associated with anti-trans pressure groups, like the “Institute for Comprehensive Gender Dysphoria Research” (Jones, 2022) and the “Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine” (Moore, 2021).
On 17 October, the ABC’s Media Watch broadcast an episode, “ACON & the ABC” (Adams, 2022) which attracted immediate controversy because it was factually inaccurate (Rogers, 2022; Salmon & Sobieralski, 2022) and because multiple anti-trans activists took credit for its content. Conversely, multiple commentators wrote evidence-based pieces responding to the episode, including Melbourne-based analyst Eleanor Evenstar1and me (Moreton, 2022).
On 29 October, UK media announced that new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak intends to strip trans people of human rights protections under British law by amending the relevant parts of the Equality Act 2010 (Wakefield, 2022). Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, a major trans-allied legal NGO, issued a public recommendation that trans people should leave England if they could (Maugham, 2022).
On 2 November,Bloomberg reported that Twitter’s new owner and incoming chief executive officer, Elon Musk, had directed staff to review the sections of Twitter’s hateful conduct policy which protect transgender people on the 238-million-user social media platform, with an eye to rewriting those sections or deleting them entirely (Riedel, 2022). Musk has a record of vocal transphobia (see, e.g., McHale, 2022) which has been examined in the context that his partner Grimes left him for activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is trans (Di Placido, 2022), and that his daughter, Vivian Wilson, came out as trans and disowned him (Saunders, 2022).
On 4 November, the State of Florida’s medical regulators voted to ban paediatric trans healthcare and forcibly terminate provision of care to any young trans people currently receiving it (Baisas, 2022). Significant concerns have been raised over the fact that the Florida state government, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, appears to have arranged the process from the word go to achieve a predetermined politically desirable conclusion (Luneau, 2022; Yurcaba, 2022a).
On 8 November, the United States held midterm elections for the whole US House of Representatives, one-third of the US Senate, 39 governorships, and various state and local elections. Analysts predicted a red wave election (Geraghty, 2022; Siracusa, 2022; etc.) — that is, a substantial victory for the right-wing Republican Party — but in the event, one failed to materialise (Alexander, 2022; Milligan, 2022; Smith, 2022).
The governing centrist Democratic Party will retain control of the Senate (“Democrats retain control of Senate,” 2022); the House of Representatives is likely to go Republican by a hair-thin margin, but may end up deadlocked (Bierman et al., 2022). Analysts have attributed Republicans’ underperformance, in part, to ignoring bread-and-butter issues in favour of constantly promoting anti-trans hate (e.g., Weigel, 2022). Meanwhile, several states elected their first transgender officeholders at county and/or state level (Childress, 2022; Duxter, 2022; Yurcaba, 2022b).
Overall impression
2021–2022 contained some bright spots for trans people, compared to the unremittingly horrible 2020–2021. However, the times that weren’t bright spots became even darker to compensate.
Footnotes
I’ve elected not to cite Ms Evenstar’s piece here not out of disrespect, but because it was published on Twitter, which is expected to experience considerable downtime in the near future. If or when the piece is published elsewhere, I will cite it here.
Cass, H. (2022, July 19). Further advice [Formal letter]. Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People. Retrieved 13 November 2022.
For context, the article is concerned primarily with matters pertaining to “Pride & prejudice in policy,” a panel discussion which took place at the University of Melbourne (UniMelb) on 4 October 2022. As the UniMelb event listing provides a lot of the material to which the original piece and this response refer, here’s an archive copy from the Wayback Machine (UniMelb School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, 2022).
The forum [trans ally protesters] interrupted — and tried to stop completely — was at the periphery of transgender issues …
Faine (op. cit.)
This is a curious assertion. Here’s the blurb from the University’s own event listing, in full:
On the face of it, a diversity and inclusion program and ranking index encouraging organizations to be more inclusive to gender and sexual minorities should not attract more attention or criticism than any other such initiatives (such as for race, or disability). Yet the UK’s Diversity Champions Programme and Workplace Equality Index, run by the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, has faced considerable scrutiny and censure, and many important public bodies have withdrawn from the initiatives.
Critics argue that the initiatives embed contested facts and values into policies, compromise public bodies’ independence and impartiality, and facilitate backdoor political lobbying.
Defenders counter that the program and index simply promote best practice in policy, and help employers to foster much-needed inclusion, support and understanding for LGBTQ+ employees. Some also see criticism of these initiatives as reflecting and reinforcing gender conservatism.
With many of our own public institutions signed up to similar initiatives — ACON’s Pride in Diversity employer support program and the Australian Workplace Equality Index — the aim of this event is to open-up a timely and balanced national conversation about the benefits, risks and tensions of these initiatives for Australia’s public institutions, and their employees.
Now, I’m just a simple dickgirl, but it seems to me that this “conversation” revolves around one question: Does free speech permit observing that institutions, social groups, or spaces are transphobic, or trans-allied, when they are in fact the thing in question?
It doesn’t seem to me that that’s “at the periphery of transgender issues”. It seems to me, in fact, that it must be at the centre.
#2
It is a small example of a bigger problem. If you demand respect, then you have to give it.
Faine (op. cit.), emphasis mine
How delightful, this one is getting another outing:
Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
tumblr user autisticabby (2015)
Because really, that’s very clearly what this is. The kind of respect which trans people “demand” is being called by their correct names and being recognised as their correct genders, as opposed to society pretending names are inborn and everyone was cis before May 2014.
Faine is suggesting here that it’s a fair exchange that to receive the respect they “demand,” trans people are also expected not to say boo when panels like the one at UniMelb discuss whether when they’re walking through a forest absolutely chock full of bear traps, they should be allowed to do so without a blindfold on.
#3
Until I started working at the ABC in 1989, I attended my share of protests. As a university student, I threw a few water bombs at the governor-general in the aftermath of the Dismissal (none of them got even remotely close), I raised my voice marching with many others over our national disgrace of race relations, and I joined in many other worthy and noble causes. I don’t mind a good protest — I consider it a signifier of a healthy democracy.
It therefore came as something of a shock this week to find myself being aggressively accused of transphobia, of creating a risk to other people’s health and safety, simply for wanting to have a discussion.
Faine (op. cit.), emphases mine
This seems like a non sequitur on a couple of levels.
Faine seems to be under the impression that because he protested at some point (the latest date he cites is 19 years before I was born) and he doesn’t mind when other people do it, it’s somehow more shocking or inappropriate that he might be protested himself? I don’t get it.
I’m in at least two demographics currently demonstrating for their own continued existence. I show up to our and others’ protests whenever my health allows. That doesn’t mean I have like … enough allyship tokens that picketing me for being, say, racist, would somehow be unfair.
#4
simply for wanting to have a discussion
Faine (op. cit.)
At the price of flagrantly violating Godwin’s law I will point out that the Wannsee Conference was also a discussion. So was the Last Supper, of course. The point is that “discussions” are perfectly capable of having consequences.
#5
The forum was called “Pride and Prejudice in Policy” and was hosted by the School of History and Philosophy of Science within the Arts Faculty of the University of Melbourne. Hardly a hotbed of reactionary or conservative thinking — quite the contrary.
UniMelb’s faculty also includes Dr Holly Lawford-Smith, associate professor of political philosophy, known (Weinberg, 2021) for No Conflict, They Said, an exercise in activism theatre consisting of the functionally unmoderated gathering of fictional anti-transfeminine smears on the pretext of documenting “the impacts on [cis] women of [trans women] using women-only spaces”.
I don’t normally go “Oh, this institution has a problematic student, that reflects on the school as a whole, we’ve got them now, hohoho!”, except that, for whatever reason, Clayton seems to consider her activism to be something she does in her capacity at UniMelb. For instance, Clayton joined Fine and two others from UniMelb in signing a 2021 open letter in support of Kathleen Stock (herself discussed elsewhere in this piece) and did so specifically as an affiliate of the School (Kaufman, 2021/2022).
Finally, the School’s honorary staff include Professor Sheila Jeffreys, well-known among the trans community for what we will politely call her outspoken views, which are well-summarised by the abstract of one of her papers:
Feminist analysis of transsexualism … has seen it as a deeply conservative phenomenon in which surgical mutilation is employed to maintain the genders of male dominance and female subordination. Transsexualism has a new face … in “transgenderism” which employs queer and postmodern theory to render transsexualism progressive. … “transgenderism” is also deeply problematic from a feminist perspective and … transsexualism should be seen as a violation of human rights.
Jeffreys (2008)
Now, of course, if a veteran of Our ABC says that the University of Melbourne is not a hotbed of reactionary or conservative thinking then as a good citizen I really have no choice but to believe him, countervailing evidence be damned, but presumably one can see how a different understanding could have been arrived at.
#6
The forum was a discussion about how diversity benchmark programs work.
Faine (op. cit.)
And the Dismissal was a discussion between Malcolm Fraser, John Kerr, and Gough Whitlam about how the Australian Government worked, specifically about who would be prime minister of Australia. I can’t see how Faine could reasonably have objected to that.
Seriously — anything done solely through the use of words by one or more parties can be characterised as a discussion. That doesn’t mean that such a characterisation is honest or fair.
Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling about our sex, known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex.
Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir’s statement that, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler’s claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection.
Hachette (n.d.)
I suppose we’d better not let Stock know that “nobody was questioning gender dysphoria”. She’d be heartbroken.
#8
But apparently some trans activists believe that even discussing benchmarking is to be equated with being transphobic.
Faine (op. cit.)
Anti-trans pressure groups seem to believe so, which is why they keep trying to “discuss benchmarking” explicitly as a vehicle to be transphobic. For example, the UK’s misleadingly-named Safe Schools Alliance, an anti-trans pressure group, are known for being absolutely fixated on the claim that being part of LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme definitively meant the Crown Prosecution Service was biased. They were so fixated on it, in fact, that they escalated all the way to HM High Court of Justice for England and Wales, where they got thrown out on the grounds that their claim blatantly could not stand up to any judicial examination whatsoever (Parsons, 2021).
Of course, this is only one of multiple anti-trans legal actions which have targeted the Diversity Champions scheme for no clear reason beyond “it exists”. Around the same time, For Women Scotland, another anti-trans group of dubious provenance, started claiming that by pointing out that the Equality Act 2010 protects trans people, Stonewall was actually inciting people to violate it. We know this because their collaborators at The Sunday Timesgleefully reported on it in autofellatingly extensive detail (Macaskill, 2021).
Weirdly, despite the fact that the legal rationale behind these efforts is shaky enough that they can’t survive the British equivalent of a district court, HM Government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission used them as an excuse to do what it had been under pressure to do for some time and exit the Diversity Champions scheme (McManus, 2021). Getting the human rights watchdog to decide it’s not actually all that interested in human rights — “just discussing” indeed!
#9
Not one word undermining the lived experience of transgender and gender-diverse people was uttered at the forum — nor was ever going to be.
Faine (op. cit.)
Understandable mistake, though, given who was on the panel.
Linda Gale is the former acting convenor of the Australian Greens Victoria, known for, uh … Well, let’s put it this way, at this point in the Twitter edition of this piece, I linked to a Junkee article headlined “The Victorian Greens have been hit with another transphobia scandal” (Baj, 2022). More about Linda in a second.
Professor Alan Davison of the University of Technology Sydney, for his part is a fervent opponent of “postmodern critical theory” — an opposition which, in the case of Davison’s specific ideological strand (Sun, 2019), as in those of his fellow travelers (Wallace-Wells, 2021), is not a coherent and principled philosophical position, as such. Instead, it’s a byword for cloaking entirely vibes-based conservatism in complex technical vocabulary and an academic veneer.
Naomi Cunningham, who contributed a video presentation, is the chair of Sex Matters, a British anti-trans pressure group. Sex Matters is best known because its more prominent executive director, Maya Forstater, believes conversion therapy should be legal as long as it’s anti-trans (Forstater & Joyce, 2021).
best-known in recent years for her trans-exclusionary public and academic discourse on sex and gender, especially for opposition to [amendments to*] the UK Gender Recognition Act and the importance of self-identification to establish gender identity, and for advocating that trans women should be excluded from places like women’s locker rooms or shelters.
Bettcher et al. (2021)
Finally, the whole panel was organised, according to Times Higher Education, by the aforementioned Cordelia Fine (Ross, 2022). This might have led some people to believe there was a non-zero chance that at some point, at least one word undermining the lived experience of trans and gender-diverse people might be uttered.
But no, our bad, clearly. That’s on us.
#10
“the three-person panel”
Faine (op. cit.)
Good point, Jon. Why was it a three-person panel? I’m sure when I originally heard about it, a fortnight before it took place, there were more people than that. Maybe it had something to do with someone securing the participation of Professor Sally Hines by not being entirely upfront with her about the facts:
When I agreed to take part in this event, I was unaware that it was a ‘debate’ with, as [Dr Hannah McCann] says, extreme anti-trans activists, or that it had such a specific focus on trans inclusion in LGBT EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] policy in HE [higher education]. I am no longer taking part.
As well as Hines, other withdrawals included Nicki Elkin from LGBTQ+ health promotion charity ACON, and the moderator, Paul Barclay, who was replaced by … you, Jon (Thomas, 2022). So you knew all of this already and didn’t mention it. Why was that, I wonder?
#11
To try to stop the forum from even being held, to yell at Peters that she is not allowed to discuss her lived experience — because doing so might be harmful to people who are not even there — is bordering on the absurd.
Faine (op. cit.)
lol.
Interesting that Faine pushes a woman in front of him to serve as a meat shield by claiming all of the criticism was actually directed at her. Bit unchivalrous, innit.
#12
[Linda Gale] was this year removed … after trans lobbyists objected
Faine (op. cit.)
I’ve noted before that Ninefax opinion writers really love the flexibility of the word after, and what it allows them to do (Moreton, 2022b*).
Given that what we know is actually when Linda Gale was removed, why was she able to be removed? — Oh yeah, it was because her election was mysteriously conducted in an irregular way which prevented anyone from finding out about her views:
Earlier this week, I took action under the party’s rules to have our recent election for convenor set aside, as the rules for the election weren’t followed correctly. Specifically, candidates weren’t given the opportunity to communicate with members about their candidacy. […]
Ratnam (2022)
#13
It’s hard to comprehend how a life-long feminist leftie … could be described as transphobic
But a respectful and sensitive discussion of issues that can be a major influence on our community must never be declared off limits.
Faine (op. cit.), emphasis mine
Damn right. When I want a respectful and sensitive discussion, I invite Linda Gale, Kathleen Stock, the Sex Matters lady, and Mr If-critical-theory-has-one-hater,-that-hater-is-me.
Trans people make up maybe half a percent of the population. It’d be a lot cooler if there were more of us, but the reality is that there is precisely one way our issues come to the attention of the broader community. Namely, as García & Badge (2021) prove in both bleak and vivid detail, it happens because the media moguls who believe they own the community hate the shit out of us, and they want the people they think they own to hate us too. Data from Islan (2022a–q), of the United Kingdom, demonstrates how absurdly hostile it is only a few more steps down the road we’re already on.
There certainly is a faction concerned with trans issues that wants more “influence over our community”. Naomi Cunningham, Cordelia Fine, Linda Gale, and Kathleen Stock are in that faction — and when it comes to getting that influence, they’ll climb over as many broken bodies as it takes.
#15
Attacking your friends does not help in the battle against real enemies.
Faine (op. cit.)
Which is why this article is not about Julie Peters, no matter how desperate Jon Faine is to use her as an ideological hostage.
#16
the champions of diversity must show they can embrace a diversity of opinion, too.
Faine (op. cit.)
Ah, the paradox of tolerance. It never gets old — which I suppose given how this decade has panned out so far is something it will have more and more in common with trans people.
* Denotes a citation to a Twitter thread I hadn’t migrated when I wrote this piece. To be removed later.
I am writing on 6 November 2022 and I have every reason to suspect Twitter is going to become completely inoperable for my purposes within the next couple of months.
This is the authoritative list of accounts elsewhere that are me. If an account claims to be me and it actually is me, I will prove it by updating this list and informing you that I did so.
On 17 October 2022, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Media Watch broadcast a segment, “ACON and the ABC” (Adams J., 2022b).
The segment has several problems. Here are a few.1
#1
Hello, I’m Paul Barry […]
Adams J. (2022b)
Well there’s yer problem! When it comes to problematic treatment of trans affairs, Doak (2022) informs us this isn’t Paul’s first rodeo. Sainty (2015) lets us know it’s not his second, either. That makes it at least his third, and as we learned in Goldfinger (Fleming, 1959): “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
#2
“PROF CORDELIA FINE”
Adams J. (2022b)
Interesting choice! I am familiar with Professor Fine, of the University of Melbourne, partly because of an essay by her, “Agenda bender” (Fine, 2021), published in The Monthly of August 2021. In that essay, Prof Fine:
frames the “impressive[ly] succinct” proposition that “women don’t have penises” so as to suggest that trans women are (at least) faintly ridiculous;
presents Dr Kathleen Stock, a British now-former philosophy professor and well-attested anti-trans activist (of whom more later), as a neutral or even trans-allied source, and falsely represents her as having been “smeared, defamed and deplatformed”;
implies that “a change of pronouns” isn’t sufficient to ‘make’ someone a “woman” (eliding the reality that “a change of pronouns” reflects the reality that someone is a woman);
claims that “gender identity theory” (i.e., trans existence and inclusion) is a “mandate that society divest itself of sex categories and rearrange itself psychologically, conceptually and practically around gender identities”;
claims that trans existence and inclusion is a “wholesale redefinition of concepts,” rather than an acknowledgement and integration of thousands of years of history;
dismisses out of hand any “claims that” the anti-trans ‘gender critical’ movement is anti-trans, and lies that gender critical activists “support trans people’s right to claim and express their gender identity and to live free from discrimination and abuse”;
suggests that systematic misogyny is a “sex-segregated” oppression in such a way as to imply that trans women are too “male” to experience it;
etc., etc., there’s more but by this far down the article I got bored. The point at which I am aiming here is that it might not be the case that Prof Fine is fully committed to an impartial factual account of events.
#3
People engaged in contemporary debates about sex and gender identity have been harassed, intimidated, verbally abused, gratuitously offended, viciously smeared and forced from positions, roles or other professional opportunities. Some of our participants have been victims of these tactics
Fine, in Adams J. (2022b)
For context: as the Media Watch transcript makes clear, Prof Fine is speaking about one of the more recent flashpoints of this campaign — a panel discussion she organised (Ross, 2022), Pride & prejudice in policy: What can our public institutions learn from the UK’s Stonewall controversy?, which took place on 4 October at the University of Melbourne (UniMelb). Those featured at the discussion included both the live panel and presenters on pre-recorded video. In all, the final speakers’ list consisted of (UniMelb School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, 2022):
Jon Faine AM, moderator
Prof Alan Davison, panellist
Linda Gale, panellist
Dr Julie Peters, of Deakin University, panellist
Naomi Cunningham, of Sex Matters, on video
Dr Finn Mackay, of the University of Bristol, on video
Dr Kathleen Stock OBE, late of the University of Sussex, on video
There were also a number of contributors who pulled out prior to the event:
Paul Barclay, original moderator
Nicki Elkin, of ACON, panellist
Prof Sally Hines, of the University of Sheffield, video presenter
Of the claims Prof Fine made about the participants in the event, the one that seemed most likely to produce a paper trail and therefore be possible to verify was “forced from positions,” so I followed it up. The two panelists to whom I determined this claim could be referring were Linda Gale and Dr Kathleen Stock.
Gale recently made headlines because she was removed as Convenor of the Australian Greens Victoria (AGV), the Victorian state member party of the federal Australian Greens alliance. It seems likely that Gale’s “engage[ment] in contemporary debates about sex and gender identity” did play a role in her removal; as I explained in a previous Twitter thread (Moreton, 2022b),2 Gale has a history of, how do you say, vocal and activist transphobia which likely motivated her opponents to search for an escape route.
While that explains why people wanted to find a reason to remove her, it is not, in and of itself, the reason she was able to be, and was, removed. We know that reason because AGV Leader Samantha Ratnam MLC explained it publicly:
Earlier this week, I took action under the party’s rules to have our recent election for convenor set aside, as the rules for the election weren’t followed correctly.
Specifically, candidates weren’t given the opportunity to communicate with members about their candidacy. […]
Ratnam (2022)
That is, Gale was removed because her election was inexplicably conducted in an irregular way which protected her from the possibility of AGV members finding out about her views. She wasn’t illegitimately turfed out for being a brave gendercrit; she was legitimately removed because she had not been legitimately elected. While her opponents were no doubt delighted to find that lever, if the election had been properly conducted, all they could have done was “float and sputter” (Staten et al., 2001).
Meanwhile, Dr Kathleen Stock, who presented by video, is often represented by sympathetic media (e.g., Kirkwood, 2022) as having been forced to resign her position at the University of Sussex. As I explained in a previous Twitter thread, however (Moreton, 2022c), that’s nowhere close to the truth.
To recap briefly: Dr Stock could absolutely have kept her position at the University of Sussex if she’d wanted, as senior University officials defended her with a spittle-flecked passion (see, e.g., University of Sussex, 2021a, 2021b & 2021c). The Guardian — a sympathetic platform for transphobes with an axe to grind if ever there was one (Strudwick, 2020) — relates that Stock resigned because of what they summarise as “a lack of support from her colleagues and the unions” (Adams R., 2021).
They also quote her own words from a BBC Woman’s Hour interview:
There’s a small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sorts of things I say and instead of getting involved in arguing with me, using reason, evidence, the traditional university methods, they tell their students in lectures that I pose a harm to trans students, or they go on to Twitter and say that I’m a bigot.
Stock, in Barnett (2021)
The Guardian further quotes Stock saying that her “personal tipping point” came:
… when I saw my own union branch’s statement, which basically backed the protesters and implicitly made it obvious that they thought I was transphobic and accused Sussex University of institutional transphobia.
Stock, quoted in Adams R. (2021)
In short — according to The Guardian, literally a byword for trans-hostile journalism — Dr Stock wasn’t forced out. For lack of a more diplomatic accurate term, Dr Stock flounced because people disagreed with and disliked her. Between Ms Gale’s improper election and Dr Stock’s voluntary resignation, the case for “forcing out” looks pretty thin.
Moreover, Professor Fine refers to anti-trans activists being
Now, as a trans woman on the internet, I can’t imagine what that must be like (!) (Collins & Tenbarge, 2022; #DropKiwiFarms, 2022; etc.). No, but really, it’s unfortunate that anti-trans activists are experiencing events they don’t like. The end goal of my activism and many others is for these folks to go away and leave us alone, and they won’t do it if they can’t be happy.
The reason I find the inclusion of this quote from Prof Fine interesting is because it illustrates that Media Watch considers these things to be newsworthy when they happen to cis people, whereas the destruction of trans people’s lives by the same tactics is commonplace, everyday, not worthy of note.
#4
a difficult conversation we need to have
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Mm … not that difficult for Paul Barry, apparently, who as previously noted has been carrying it on without obvious interruption for the better part of eight years.
#5
Faine lamented in The Age
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
I was previously aware of this, and even wrote a Twitter thread about it (Moreton, 2022i).3 I am interested to note that Media Watch doesn’t write its own factual summary of events and instead quotes Faine, even though his article (which is clearly marked ‘Opinion’), omits and misleads in several places, including:
characterising the UniMelb School of History and Philosophy of Science in such a way as to avoid mentioning its status as a hotbed of anti-trans activism;
suggesting “[n]obody was questioning gender dysphoria itself” when, for example, Dr Stock’s trademark position is doing precisely that, as the Booktopia blurb for her book Material Girls (Stock, 2021) makes clear (Moreton, 2022k);
suggesting it was ludicrous to expect that even “one word undermining the lived experience of transgender and gender-diverse people” “was ever going to be” “uttered at the forum,” without also mentioning that four panelists and the event organiser, Prof Fine, had either a record of activism in, or an outright formal involvement with, anti-trans organisations and related causes;
suggesting, via post hoc ergo propter hoc, that Linda Gale’s removal as AGV Convenor was because “trans lobbyists objected,” which is inaccurate for reasons already given;
suggesting it was “hard to comprehend” how “life-long feminist leftie” Gale could be transphobic, which was similarly inaccurate for reasons already discussed.
#6
simply for wanting to have a discussion
Faine (2022), in Adams J. (2022b)
I said this in my teardown of Faine’s piece (Moreton, 2022j), but I’m going to repeat it here: Anything done solely through the use of words by one or more parties can be characterised as a discussion. That doesn’t mean that such a characterisation is honest or fair.
#7
two trans activists had pulled out of the discussion, because they refused to share a platform
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This is a tad libertine with the facts. I like a bit of libertinism, but not with the facts.
Prof Sally Hines, who withdrew, publicly explained why:
When I agreed to take part in this event I was unaware that it was a ‘debate’ with, as [Dr Hannah McCann] says, extreme anti-trans activists, or that it had such a specific focus on trans inclusion in LGBT EDI policy in HE. I am no longer taking part.
Hines (2022)
It looks rather unavoidably as if event organisers curiously failed to advise Prof Hines of a few materially relevant facts when they secured her participation. Under those circumstances, it’s a little puzzling that Media Watch chose to represent Prof Hines’ withdrawal as, in effect, a flounce. Apparently “this is not what I agreed to” is only a valid reason to withdraw if it wouldn’t deprive the Right Kind of Person of the opportunity to debate you.
It’s even more puzzling to represent the withdrawal of Nicki Elkin and ACON as a flounce, given that Elkin and ACON withdrew because, according to their statement which Media Watch published and therefore presumably read,
Following a reassessment of risk, we determined that our participation in the event could compromise the safety of our staff and people in our communities.
Parkhill (2022)
Given Media Watch‘s later approving reference to “caution and safeguards,” one might have thought that they would consider concern for other people’s safety to be a good thing. Apparently this is not always the case.
#8
with people they claimed were anti-trans activists
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Realistically, there is no actual question: that claim is true. as I explained in a previous Twitter thread (Moreton, 2022l). Of the announced panel and complement of presenters,
Naomi Cunningham is chair of Sex Matters. Sex Matters is best known because its executive director, Maya Forstater, believes conversion “therapy” — the practice of attempting to force someone to change their gender or sexuality — should be legal to force on trans people specifically (Forstater & Joyce, 2022).
Linda Gale, already discussed, was sufficiently well-known for her transphobia that at least 6 Greens elected officials unequivocally backed the call for her to resign (Baj, 2022);
Dr Kathleen Stock, already discussed, was sufficiently well-known for her transphobia that 600+ of her colleagues in academic philosophy signed an open letter protesting her OBE on the grounds that she was “best-known in recent years for her trans-exclusionary public and academic discourse” (Bettcher et al., 2021).
(Prof Alan Davison has his own problems, but we’ll talk about them later.)
Any debate about whether these people really were anti-trans activists was long past its best-before date by the time this Media Watch episode went to air.
#9
the ABC’s Paul Barclay had also stepped down from hosting the debate after getting slammed on Twitter
Adams J. (2022b)
This is when Mr Barclay stepped down. Despite what I suspect Media Watch would like us to see, it doesn’t actually tell us why. Now, I was not able to locate a public copy of Mr Barclay’s reason for withdrawing from the panel when I went looking on the morning of 18 October. As far as I know, at date, 20 October, it has not been made public.
As I have mentioned on Twitter before, however (Moreton, 2022e & 2022g), in this kind of journalism the simple and apparently innocuous word “after” has a surprisingly checkered history because it can so easily be used to facilitate post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”), a particularly underhanded and probably fairly legally defensible way of leading people to your preferred false conclusion while all the while claiming you only ever told the truth. At this point, I question any usage of “after” that could possibly imply a causal link, as a matter of principle alone.
Incidentally, both of my excerpts I cited in the previous paragraph are with reference to articles about the closure of the UK paediatric gender service at the Tavistock Clinic, a subject which also comes up later in this very article. This may have something to do with Paul Barry’s apparent great interest in dealings there, e.g.:
(Barry, 2020)
#10
what exactly was the debate they wanted shut down?
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
It’s interesting that Media Watch tries to use its flimsy available excuse to force the framing of “wanting the debate shut down”; even at a first glance, it doesn’t quite fit.
The Media Watch piece earlier mentioned “eight or nine noisy trans activists” who wanted to shut down the debate. I’m hearing conflicting stories about them from trusted sources; I don’t know who they were, where they were, or what they did.
Luckily for me, Media Watch doesn’t seem to either, because it gives them no focus at all. Instead, it focuses on the 2 panellists who withdrew, and the 3 individuals quoted as a representative sample of Paul Barclay’s critics on Twitter.
The problem is that none of those individuals were agitating for the event to be shut down. Hines and Elkin chose not to participate because they felt they would be legitimising transphobia by doing so. Twitter users @EleanorEvenstar, @engagedpractx, and @nick_nobody expressed similar sentiments. Media Watch appears to have inflated this in order to help Faine victimise himself.
Anecdotally, this is representative of a broader pattern I’m witnessing in trans-hostile media coverage: if trans people or allies offer anything less than enthusiastic consent, journalists spin this as aggression justifying an overwhelming, full-spectrum counterattack.
#11
high-profile BBC radio host Stephen Nolan published a 10-part podcast
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This is referring to Nolan Investigates: Stonewall (Nolan & Thompson, 2021). The reference is, naturally, uncritical. It does not mention, to take one example — and I do mean one; I can see at least seven, but I don’t want to get derailed — that Nolan Investigates heavily features Malcolm Clark, co-founder and a director of LGB Alliance, an anti-trans pressure group reported by openDemocracy in April to have intimate access to senior UK ministers (Ramsay & Bychawski, 2022), which among other factors has led some prominent UK-based analysts — such as Moore (2022b) of Trans Safety Network — to characterise it as state-backed.
Clark’s leadership role at LGB Alliance seems relevant given that LGB Alliance Australia, which to the best of my ability to determine is not autonomous from its UK parent, has been identified by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (2022), a US-based team of analysts originating from the Southern Poverty Law Center, as a hate group. If I were recommended a podcast on Islamic theology, I’d like to know if they used Pauline Hanson as a primary source.
It also seems relevant because even among LGB Alliance directors — charitably a rather motley lot — Clark’s views are especially Uhhh Hmmm. For instance, he is on record saying the presence of LGBT+ clubs in schools is “unnecessary and potentially dangerous” because “the vast majority of children have not settled on a sexual orientation” and therefore LGBT+ clubs “would be an unnecessary encouragement” to “predatory gay teachers” (Parsons, 2020). Hell of a take from a guy whose mission is purportedly “asserting the rights of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men” (Hurst, 2019) against the onslaught of the tranny horde.
(Media Watch also doesn’t mention that Nolan Investigates‘ episode on British law heavily refers to Dr Kathleen Stock, but that’s understandable; it might give the correct impression that transphobes are not a popular mass movement founded on genuine concern but rather a small, malicious clique with unexplained power.)
#12
which topped the charts on Apple and Spotify
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This statement is slightly over-egging, but don’t worry (!) — it’s for a purpose. The impression this seemingly inconsequential statement seeks to give is that there is a “trans debate,” and that investigations into that “debate” have an organic popularity reflecting real public concern. This doesn’t quite match up with the facts.
First, this claim appears to be linked to a specific reference date, 23 October 2021, on which Nolan Investigates was respectively #3 and #4 in its relevant charts, according to podcast aggregator Chartable (2021). However, the charts in question were for ‘news podcasts in Great Britain,’ which is a slightly less earth-shattering accomplishment than “topped the charts” might be seen to imply.
In ‘all podcasts in Great Britain’ for the same date, Nolan Investigates made it to #32 at Apple and #80 at Spotify. For perspective, on Spotify’s chart for today, the same position is next to Baker Terry’s TV retread of new-’10s internet esoterica classic Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (Chartable, 2022b).4 This is particularly remarkable given that, as Media Watch knows very well given that it’s in the Variety article which at this point in the broadcast they’re just about to cite, Nolan Investigates‘ marketing was backed by the full weight of the British political and media class:
The podcast, which was the culmination of an eighteen month investigation, quickly rose to the top of the charts on both Apple and Spotify after its release last month and garnered numerous headlines as well as comments from members of parliament.
Yossman (2021); emphasis mine
More generally, claims in this genre (“best-seller,” “most-listened,” etc.) tend to float around any transphobic screed published by someone who knows the right people; I noted this last year (Moreton, 2021) at the release of Trans: When ideology meets reality (Joyce, 2021), by The Economist executive editor Helen Joyce. The thing about “best-seller,” for its part, is that it can mean, among other things:
‘book placed in the store in the position which will best sell it’ (Atkinson, 2022);
‘book the store is best paid to sell’ (Atkinson, op. cit.);
‘book bought in bulk by the author or their supporters with the intention of “hacking” the bestseller list’ (Barnett, 2020).
I have no specific reason to believe anything analogous happened with Nolan Investigates, but I will gently suggest that podcast listening figures might not mean quite as much when, as King (2021) reports, they’re faked often enough that Spotify has started cracking down on it (at least when the little people do it).
#13
This had reportedly turned up: ‘numerous instances of BBC internal policy and editorial output that appeared to breach the corporation’s own impartiality guidelines’
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
The Variety article in question is Yossman (2021). Under the circumstances I think this is a particularly interesting choice of pull quote. You see, when I watched the Media Watch episode, I saw this —
(Adams J., 2022b, 2m19s)
— which allows the viewer to take away the impression that Variety independently verified that those “instances” were indeed there.
However, I read the Variety article myself because I’m a pathologically suspicious and paranoid bitch, and I noted that the full paragraph reads as follows:
In the podcast, Nolan and Thompson questioned whether the BBC was too close to Stonewall, providing numerous instances of BBC internal policy and editorial output that appeared to breach the corporation’s own impartiality guidelines, as well as the Equality Act 2010, following communication with Stonewall in connection with these schemes.
Yossman (2021)
That is to say, it restates the original claim without comment, rather than — as Media Watch would seemingly like to convey — backing it up.
#14
These included Stonewall being consulted on the BBC’s style guide and recruitment language
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Far be it from me to oppose Aunty’s brains trust, but as far as I can tell, engaging brand style consultants to develop your corporate style guide seems … pretty normal (Upwork Team, 2022).
Moreover, if I wanted to develop LGBTQ+-specific style guidance, literally my first port of call would be the largest and oldest LGBT rights organisation in Europe, which … wouldn’t you know it, appears to be Stonewall, as hostile source Churchill (2021) admits.
#15
they had appointed the first-ever LGBT+ news correspondent and first gender and identity correspondent in BBC News
Thompson, in Adams J. (2022b)
Based. That’s all.
#16
we’ve corporately adopted the term LGBTQ+, Stonewall’s term
Thompson, in Adams J. (2022b)
Oh, I didn’t realise it was Stonewall’s term; Ring (2016) says it was GLAAD’s term, and judging from Ring (op. cit.), GLAAD appears to think so too. I imagine they’ll be devastated, but I’ll let them know.
Seriously, though, the fact that an entity uses or recommends a term does not mean that term belongs to that entity. That would stress me out enought that I’d be curled up in my bedroom (Shakespeare, 1600/2020, 2.2.57), puking (Shakespeare, 1623/2020, 2.7.151).
#17
That they’re all issues that Stonewall have lobbied on and that BBC has moved on, so that is prima facie evidence of Stonewall having some success
Thompson, in Adams J. (2022b)
What are the rest of us fags and trannies, chopped liver? Anecdotally I was using LGBTQ+ years ago, when I’d never heard of Stonewall the charity and had barely heard of Stonewall the riot. Stonewall the charity are heroes in my book, but they are very much rowing with the current here; they are not the prime mover.
Cultural change cannot be mandated from a single privileged point in the command hierarchy, no matter how high, and I think both the BBC and the ABC are fully aware of that fact.
#18
Many will say those changes are good
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
To recap, the changes in question are:
“first-ever LGBTQ+ news correspondent”
“first gender and identity correspondent”
“corporately adopted the term LGBTQ+”
“raising awareness of the importance of gender pronouns”
… Y– yeah, actually. I do think they’re good. Is there some reason they’re not good? Has something changed? The memo hasn’t reached me.
#19
one BBC journalist, Samantha Smith … [said] the BBC’s absolute core principle … was impartiality
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
I am going to gently suggest that given the somewhat crude pronouns joke in her Twitter bio —
(Smith S., 2022)
— Samantha Smith (@misssamsmith) may not be impartial on this topic.4
I am going to less gently observe that Paul Barry already knew this, because he was following her on Twitter — presumably related to him asking her to follow him only several days prior so he could send her a Direct Message.
(Barry, 2022)
Nobody was pulling wool over Paul’s eyes here.
#20
And paying money for Stonewall
Smith S., in Adams J. (2022b)
… One typically does pay money for consulting services, yes (?)
#21
and using Stonewall’s language
Smith S., in Adams J. (2022b)
I am tempted to remark that it’s Stonewall’s language; we’re just speaking in it. See #15 and #16, above.
#22
How is that independent? How is that impartial?
Smith S., in Adams J. (2022b)
I will be refraining from ordering Domino’s pizzas from now on, given the possibility that it might prevent me impartially reporting when they take an hour and a half to arrive.
#23
the AIDS Council of New South Wales, or ACON
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This is a thorny one. This is indeed the original expansion of AOCN’s name, but that appears to be deprecated; its current legal name is ACON Health Ltd, and its current trading name is ACON (Australian Business Register, 2019/2022).
On the one hand, it does neatly explain why it’s called ACON. On the other hand, it is clearly not being quoted here in the context of its original purpose as an HIV/AIDS charity, and indeed it is unclear why that purpose is relevant. I would like to assume the best, but in an environment where transphobes often refer to trans people as a contagion (see, e.g., Bauer et al., 2021, p. 224), well …
#24
a women’s anti-trans group called ACON Exposed
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This is an interesting claim. ACON: Exposed (n.d.) notes on its about page that feminists are members, but doesn’t appear to consider itself a women’s or feminist group; it refers to itself as “a loosely affiliated research group with no political links … [consisting of] ordinary individuals who believe that sex matters” (ibid.).
Of course, “anti-trans” is obvious — that’s the most symbolically loaded banana I’ve ever seen, and it’s not close.
(ibid.)
By tacking on the descriptor “women’s,” Media Watch appears to be pursuing either or both of two goals:
adding legitimacy by presenting this as self-defence by an oppressed demographic, namely women;
galvanising support by allowing it to be understood that women are disproportionately or only on the side of which ACON: Exposed is part, from which viewers could very reasonably infer that the opposite side must be misogynistic and hostile.
Unfortunately for Media Watch, the numbers don’t stack up: the women-versus-trannies binary doesn’t actually exist. Even on “TERF Island” itself, cis women have voiced majority support for trans rights by a margin which if applied to an Australian election would be considered an obliterating win (Sonoma, 2020).
#25
ACON’s ABC relationship manager offered editorial tips, including adding a help number
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This is fairly standard practice on stories about queer or trans issues which are potentially distressing or triggering, which these days seems to be most of them. Thomas (2022) provides an example published in August in the venerable Sydney Star Observer.
#26
regardless of how good or worthy these programs are … having them scored by a lobby group raises questions about ABC impartiality
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
First and extremely relevantly, as Switchboard Victoria CEO Joe Ball (2022) points out, ACON is not a lobby group; it is a health promotion charity. This is an important difference which I’ll get into in a second, but I am aware that it is true partly because up until all this bullshit I knew of ACON primarily for its health promotion efforts: ACON’s TransHub provides information about Australian trans healthcare to a quality and completeness which is, as far as I know, unparalleled.
What Media Watch is doing here is implying the existence of an improper relationship by relying on you to conflate “lobbyist” with “lobby group” and “state broadcaster” with “public service”. Here’s the shortest version I could get after a couple hours tearing my hair out. This is based on
the Lobbying Code of Conduct, hereafter in this section the Code, which governs lobbyists and the Government.
The deal is this:
Both “lobbyist” and “lobby group” are descended from an original common-language verb, “lobby” (“attempt to persuade public officials”).
“Lobbyist” is a term of legal significance defined by the Code: it is an entity which communicates or engages people to communicate with Government representatives on behalf of a third-party client (Code ss 5(1), 5(2), 5(4)).
“Lobby group” is a common-language term meaning “group participating in public discourse in order to influence policy”. To avoid confusion with actual lobbyists, such groups are often referred to as advocacy groups, campaign groups, or special interest groups.
ACON is a charity (Australian Business Register, 2019/2022), so it is not permitted for it to be a lobbyist (Code ss 5(3)(a), 6(1)(a)) and it would get its ass kicked if it tried (Act s 11). It has specific nonpolitical charitable purposes (health promotion) and is permitted to engage in extremely specific advocacy about policy changes that would make its job easier or harder (Act s 12(1)(l)).
However, this is irrelevant, because the “Government representatives” bound by the Code are ministerial staff, ADF personnel, and people employed or otherwise engaged by agencies which employ under the Public Service Act 1999 (Cth), i.e., public servants and public service contractors. ABC staff might work at the state broadcaster, but they aren’t public servants or public service contractors, so the Code does not govern them.
All this is of fundamental importance because, as this quote demonstrates in black and white, the bulk of Media Watch‘s argument is simply saying that ACON being “a lobby group” is prima facie evidence that its relationship with the ABC is improper, knowing that the viewer will assume the terms “lobby” and “ABC” have the meanings and implications necessary for that claim to be true.
Media Watch assumes it will get away with this based on a belief which it may or may not sincerely hold but which in either case it believes the Australian public to hold. The belief in question is, to paraphrase Vossen (2019), that there are two kinds of relations to gender: cis and “political,” i.e., that by existing, trans people are engaging in a political campaign, and thus that ACON’s advocacy for trans health makes it more likely to be true that any engagement with ACON is problematically political in and of itself.
Media Watch does all this to mask the fact that suggesting that an entity passing public comment on the ABC inherently compromises its impartiality is blatantly absurd; by that standard, I compromised the ABC’s impartiality with the thread this post is based on, and am compromising it further now by publishing the post. Guess I’m the Managing Editor now. That’s free speech for ya!
The obvious follow-up argument is “But it’s different because they’re paying,” to which the answer is apparently not actually. For instance, every company on US-based GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Index is rated fucking abysmal and doing fuck-all about it, despite the fact that they’re all paying to be there (Smith A., 2022). The fact is that you can’t make a corporate big boy do anything it doesn’t want to.
Media Watch knows this. This means that what Media Watch is objecting to is the fact that the ABC wants to be inclusive. That’s a significantly darker and more worrying discussion.
#27
Imagine … the ABC paying thousands of dollars to Greenpeace and winning prizes for running stories attacking the fossil fuel industry. Or paying money to the Australian Republican Movement and being rewarded for stories criticising the monarchy
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Hold up.
Media Watch implicitly sketches out a purportedly problematic editorial approach at the ABC by drawing attention to the following 9 specific actions:
ABC News reporting “having ABC staff march in Mardi Gras”
“the series First Day [Isdale & Stradling, 2020–2022], about a trans child”
“the ABC podcast series, Innies and Outies [Schafter, 2021–present]”
“adding a help number”
“fail[ing] to cover the … closure of the … Tavistock gender clinic” (more on that later)
“scant coverage of the [UK] High Court case [Bell v Tavistock]” (more later)
“ignor[ing] legitimate medical debate about caution and safeguards” (more later)
an alleged “lack of balance” in a Q+A panel (more later)
not citing a specific study in a story in April (more later)
Of these, I am excluding #8 because there’s literally zero chance that anyone making that complaint was acting in good faith (more later). Of the remainder, each can be categorised as being, from the point of view of critics, either ‘positive trans programming’ or being overcautious about risk of harm to the trans community. I can very well imagine circumstances in which the latter could be a problem. That’s not the issue.
The issue is that the hypothetical examples given both imagine attacks on an identifiable entity — “the fossil fuel industry” and “the monarchy,” respectively — which, notwithstanding that they would be objectively based (I’m doing sedition on WordPress! Hi AFP!), could give that entity credible grounds to claim having been harmed. None of the actual actions taken by the ABC and cited by Media Watch are attacks.
The implication here seems to be that either promoting positive programming about trans lives or protecting trans people from harm is itself an attack on someone else.
#28
what if the ABC also steered clear of debate on contentious matters, as it arguably does on transgender issues?
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
… are we to believe that trans issues are not contentious? You’re contending about them right now, and not only that, you’re contending about other contention! I’m contending additional to my original contention your contention about their contention! The conclusion here seems pretty clear!
#29
the ABC had failed to cover the controversial closure of the UK’s famous Tavistock gender clinic
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This raises two questions:
In what way was it controversial?
Why should it have been covered?
The process of closing the Tavistock Clinic was initiated pursuant to a May 2021 recommendation from the Cass Review (Cass, 2021). In short, Dr Cass recommended abandoning the overloaded single central clinic in favour of regionalised services. It’s not in any dispute, by the way, that this is why it was closed; even The Guardian, famously transphobia central, has no problem admitting it (Brooks, 2022).
Transphobes were, at least initially, overjoyed at the closure because “the Tavi” was their bête noire; they were led to believe they Got Our Asses and that the clinic was closed To Save The Children (I haven’t checked whether they have yet discovered that this wasn’t the case).
However, trans people were also pretty happy about this, because the Tavi sucked. It was factional, unreliable, chronically and deliberately underfunded, and kept many kids from receiving care until the wrong puberty they had been trying desperately to avert had already irreversibly hit them. Regionalised care, on the other hand, whips the llama’s ass. No one is unhappy about there being more care.
It seems like trans people not creating controversy is controversial itself, the same way when we don’t debate, we’re suppressing debate, and when we don’t say what we’re told to, we’re killing free speech. It’s like being a Millennial teenager all over again.
To the point, though: why would we have covered this? What the UK did was literally switch to our model. We already have regionalised care: the Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service in Melbourne; the Queensland Children’s Hospital Gender Clinic and Queensland Children’s Gender Service; etc. There is no news for us here. There is nothing to learn.
#30
it had given scant coverage of the High Court case against the clinic from Keira Bell [i.e., Bell v Tavistock]
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
This whole passage is just relentlessly Interesting™ from start to finish. For instance, I am Interested™ by Media Watch‘s decision to use the term “High Court,” without clarifying. To any Australian, that has a specific association: the High Court of Australia, the Commonwealth’s highest (“apex”) court.
If that’s what a “High Court” is — as is often the case — then that must be newsworthy, without doubt. There was no question at all that, for instance, apex-level US cases like Obergefell v. Hodges were of significant material interest to Australian viewers.
The problem is that in this case, a “High Court” is … not that. The court which heard Bell v Tavistock is HM High Court of Justice in England and Wales (“EWHC” in the reference list), the highest trial court and second-highest appellate court for England and Wales. In practical terms, suggesting the ABC had a duty to cover any decision of the High Court of Justice is effectively equivalent to suggesting the BBC has a duty to cover decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
#31
who alleged she had been rushed into treatment with puberty blockers without due care
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Bugger me, that seems pretty serious. Well, what did they find— oh, she lost.
Specifically, the High Court of Justice (“Divisional Court,” in legal jargon) found in Bell’s favour, but in Bell v Tavistock Appeal, the Court of Appeal (“EWCA” in the reference list) reversed, repeatedly asking the Divisional Court what the fuck they thought they were doing, not in those words (see the reference list entry for pinpoint citations). The UK Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal. The case is resolved, and not in a way which left any questions unanswered.
The inorganic nature of Media Watch‘s concern is rather highlighted by the fact that none of this is news anymore. The High Court of Justice decision was in December 2020, and the Court of Appeal decision was in September 2021, over a year ago, yet only since this August has Media Watch seen fit to bring it up.
#32
We also noted that the ABC had ignored legitimate medical debate about caution and safeguards
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
The episode to which Media Watch is referring here is Adams J. (2022a). They may be characterising themselves a little bit charitably. (P.S.: “Safeguards”? We’ll come back to that.)
What Media Watch noted in that story is that a number of other media outlets were reporting on the story. They referred, and only obliquely, to one primary “medical” source: the Interim Report of the Cass Review (Cass, 2022).
The Interim Report identifies several points of disagreement. Rather inconveniently for Media Watch, however, despite the Interim Report‘s commitment to a non-judgemental, neutral tone, reading it quickly puts to bed any question of a “legitimate medical debate”.
Every point of disagreement identified in the Interim Report has a well-established, international-consensus-backed answer:
But what if they stop being trans? (s 1.7): They don’t.
But don’t we need a working definition of what being trans is? (s 1.24): We have one. Look in the DSM-5.
But are trans kids really trans? (s 2.15): Yes. See #1.
But what if they stop being trans? (s 4.15): See #1.
What the Interim Report does, grudgingly and more or less against its will, is confirm (e.g., s 2.15) the existence of a right-wing faction of white-ant clinicians who will simply keep re-asking the question until they get the answer they want.
What it does not do is present any basis for the ABC to report or comment. Neither its context nor its content are applicable here.
#33
Two days later, ABC Sydney’s Josh Szeps invited Dr Philip Morris, who urges caution, to talk about these matters
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
First of all, lol, a doctor named Philip Morris. Whoever’s the god of nominative determinism, they’re having a perverse little giggle about that one.
Like everyone else, Dr Morris is entitled to have an opinion on trans healthcare — God knows I can’t stop him — but there’s no obvious reason why that opinion should be promoted as authoritative. Recall again that this is about paediatric trans healthcare. According to his website, Dr Morris specialises in addiction medicine, dementia, forensic psychiatry, general adult psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, medicolegal assessment, and memory disorders (Morris, n.d., “About Dr Morris”). It’s unclear where trans healthcare of any kind comes in.
Dr Morris is usually quoted in Australian mass media as president of the National Association of Practicing Psychiatrists (NAPP). This may have been avoided here because the ABC gets a bit more scrutiny than the publications usually associated with that trick, which are broadly acknowledged to be rags.
Since Media Watch doesn’t explicitly mention it, I won’t get too deep into NAPP, but I am intrigued to note that Dr Morris used NAPP to effectively self-publish a paediatric trans care “guide” (Morris et al., 2022) co-written with, among others, Dr Roberto D’Angelo, an affiliate of the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM). I have written before on SEGM. To recap:
they are effectively the executive politburo of a much broader-based anti-trans organisation, Genspect (Moore, 2022a);
of their major characteristics, one is anti-trans activism in a professional context that could be described as intense, bordering on frantic (see e.g. D’Angelo et al., 2020);
the other one is being funded by the internet equivalent of large suitcases full of unmarked bills (Moore, 2021).
Note that I am referring to Dr Morris as “effectively self-publishing” through NAPP on the assumption that they are fairly closely linked; as I noted in the original thread, the main contact number for NAPP is the same number given for Dr Morris’ mobile phone on his website:
(National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, n.d.)Morris (“Home,” n.d.)
#34
complaints from women about the lack of balance
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
One wonders if “women” was the most specific descriptor Media Watch felt they could get away with.
The first source quoted here is Angie Jones. I will settle for pointing out that Angie’s Twitter bio identifies her as co-host of a production (a YouTube vlog, as it happens) called TERF Talk Downunder (Jones, 2022) — wonder what that’s about (!)
The second source quoted is Astra Niedra, a wellness influencer who appears (Niedra, 2022a & 2022b) to be a fan of multiple anti-trans activists, including anti-trans dating app founder and failed scriptwriter Sall Grover (Grover, 2020; Runnels, 2020), British author Milli Hill (2021), and British author and failed scriptwriter J.K. Rowling (Rowling, 1997 & 2020; Miller & Erbland, 2018).
#35
A panel of MEN & one woman
Jones, in Adams J. (2022b)
This is a quote from Angie, but its significance here is that Media Watch doesn’t correct it, and indeed implicitly endorses it as correct by calling it a “concern” which the ABC went on to “meet”.
An Internet Archive snapshot (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2022a) reveals that the announced members of the 25 August Q+A panel at the time of Jones and Niedra’s complaints (22 August) were Kieren Perkins, Hannah Mouncey, Joe Williams, David Lakisa, and Catherine Ordway, all of whom had been announced 19 August. That includes two women: Hannah Mouncey and Catherine Ordway.
Angie’s Tweet obviously requires that one of the two women on the panel, Hannah Mouncey or Catherine Ordway, was a man. Dr Ordway is, to my knowledge, cis; Ms Mouncey, however, is trans (Zeigler, 2022). When the host of TERF Talk Downunder said one of them was a man, it’s pretty clear who she meant. Media Watch seems to think that’s fine.
#36
ABC then added a female athlete to its panel at the last minute
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Once again, one wonders if “female athlete” was the most specific descriptor Media Watch felt they could get away with. According to the Q+A transcript, the new panelist was weightlifter Deborah Lovely-Acason (Grant, 2022).
Not just any female athlete, our Deb, as we are informed by Binary Australia (2021) — like LGB Alliance Australia, classified by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (2022) as a hate group. As the cited press release from Binary attests, Lovely-Acason’s primary belief of current political note seems to be feeling wronged by the existence of trans woman athletes, most prominently her competitive rival Laurel Hubbard.
Of course, that’s current political note. Even Binary, normally so direct, is a little evasive on this one; in order to present the narrative that Deb was an apolitical professional radicalised by being screwed over, they don’t mention she was a failed Family First candidate at the 2012 Queensland state election (Electoral Commission Queensland, 2012).
N.B. I’ll be brutally honest, I didn’t have to do this research ex nihilo; I had the fortune of running into Deb when she was haunting Facebook comment sections last year. She doesn’t like transfem athletes at all, and she really wants everyone to know.
#37
campaigning Liberal senator Claire Chandler
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Ah yes, Senator Chandler, who in February this year said “her ‘Save Women’s Sport’ bill would give clarity to sports clubs that want to exclude transgender women from competition in women’s sport” (McLennan, 2022). Did Media Watch think we’d forgotten so soon?
#38
a study showing transwomen in the US Air Force ran on average 12 per cent faster than biological women
The Daily Telegraph, in Adams J. (2022b)
I have to imagine Media Watch were drooling over the chance to fit the terms “transwomen” (no space) and “biological women” into this piece. (We know there’s no space because Media Watch displays pull quotes on screen; this one shows up at approximately 10m14s:)
(Adams J., 2022b, 10m14s)
The study in question is Roberts et al. (2020). As it happens, I am familiar with this study, but it took some frustrating digging to find because seemingly no source wanted to mention the name of the ABC article it was cited in.
As Kirsti Miller, former national sports star and trans woman, pointed out in April (Miller, 2022), the study isn’t as broadly applicable as it’s made out to be, because the trans women and cis women groups weren’t height-matched. Trans women might appear to have an athletic advantage simply because they are taller — a quality which cis women are actually not forbidden from having. How do we know that this might be the reason? Because the study says so (Roberts et al., op. cit., p. 5), and because the lead author firmly restated it to PolitiFact (Valverde, 2021).
Many sources for a popular audience will waffle about height not being an advantage, such as Fritscher (n.d.) for Gannett’s AZCentral, who notes that “the relative advantages of height are frequently offset by other factors”. However, based on Khosla (1985), Fritscher also noted that “In medium-distance running, height may become an advantage” — including in the 1,500m, the exact event length studied by Roberts et al. (op. cit.).
#39
the concern here is that it is not impartial but one-sided
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
No way. The ABC, one-sided (Moreton, 2022a)?
Really (Moreton, 2022f)?
… I suppose I can see it (Moreton, 2022h).
#40
does it accept that its partnership with a lobby group, ACON, could be a problem
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Passing over the “lobby group” lie for a second, well, it depends. A problem for whom?
#41
insisting the newsroom remains in control of all content
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
I like this tactic because it’s a neat way of implying that the newsroom does not, in fact, retain control of all content, while evading the responsibility of actually making that case.
I am particularly tickled because the ABC FOI Disclosure Log (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2022d), which lists requests compelling the ABC to disclose information under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) and provides the information that was disclosed, has an entry for the disclosure used for this story, #202223-003. That disclosure yielded 204 pages of documents and correspondence in 2 PDFs (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2022b & 2022c). You’d think if there was an impropriety there’d be a slam dunk about it in there somewhere, but apparently not.
#42
it’s worth noting their representative pulled out of that Melbourne debate, claiming it was unsafe to take part
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Unsafe for whom? Here is the relevant part of ACON’s response to Media Watch‘s questions, which one would hope Media Watch had read.
[Q.] Why did ACON/Pride in Diversity withdraw from the Uni of Melbourne panel discussion, Pride and Prejudice in Policy?
[A.] The health and wellbeing of our staff and communities are paramount. Commentary on social media about the panel discussion in the lead up to the event had turned into a debate about trans people rather than our diversity and inclusion work.
It is harmful for our communities when their right to exist is debated in a public forum. Following a reassessment of risk, we determined that our participation in event could compromise the safety of our staff and people in our communities. Safeguarding the welfare of our people was our top priority.
It should be noted that other panelists also withdrew from this event.
Parkhill (2022)
The phrasing used by the Media Watch episode suggests that Elkin confected a tall tale of personal danger as a flimsy cover for pulling out from raw cowardice alone. However, ACON’s statement makes unambiguously clear that the actual concern was the wellbeing of others. In cis people, such concern would typically be considered not cowardly, but laudable.
Was the poor phrasing in the ABC’s report unintentional? If so, accidentally conflating “danger to trans people collectively” with “danger to Nicki Elkin,” and presenting both as cowardice, still implies that Media Watch considers trans people interchangeable and danger to them not worth avoiding.
#43
We also asked ACON if the ABC had ever lost points in the Australian Workplace Equality Index for critical or negative editorial coverage. And they told us:
“The manner in which the ABC covers LGBTQI issues editorially, or the tone or angle in which they are presented, does not impact their AWEI assessment.” (-Email, Nicolas Parkhill, ACON CEO, 14 October 2022)
However, the ABC has won points and awards for positive programming.
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
It’s not actually clear how these two things are supposed to be incompatible, which is the clear suggestion given the point vs. counterpoint phrasing here. The only example of points-winning positive programming cited by Media Watch was First Day (Isdale & Stradling, 2020–2022), which is a drama series. That means it’s fictional. That means it doesn’t interact with ABC journalists’ editorial approach in any way.
This whole quote is like saying that it’s incompatible for me both to be aware that the BBC is a viciously transphobic institution and to be delighted when Doctor Who (Strevens et al., 2005–present) does stuff which is extremely trans and cool as hell.
#44
emails … show an ABC journalist … receiving advice from ACON on the correct definition of the word family
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Oh fuck, really? “They’re letting fags and trannies redefine the family?” I already sat through the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, I don’t think I can do this again.
#45
changing the language and internal culture of a media organisation may still influence editorial values and programs’ story selection
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
If you persuade people not to be arseholes, they’re less likely to do arsehole things. Wait one, new wire story coming in from the Associated Press: SKY SUBJECTIVELY BLUE, WATER WET.
#46
Professor Alan Davison of the University of Technology Sydney
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
For the sake of decorum we’ll pretend I assumed Prof Davison must have extensive relevant experience. After reviewing his résumé (University of Technology Sydney, n.d., “Prof Alan Davison: About”), however, I was unable to determine from which part of his accomplished academic career in, apparently, musicology, it was supposed to derive. (My degree is also in music, but as proud as I am of our shared field, it has limits.)
I therefore consulted UTS’ record of Prof Davison’s publications (University of Technology Sydney, n.d., “Prof Alan Davison: Research outputs”), whereupon things became somewhat clearer. I was enthralled to note that Prof Davison’s most recent publication had the short title “Multiculturalism, social distance and ‘Islamophobia’” (Davison, 2022); I thought the quote marks around ‘Islamophobia’ were a particularly spicy choice.
My eyes were drawn, however, to a somewhat less recent publication in the same journal: “A Darwinian approach to postmodern critical theory: or, How did bad ideas colonise the academy?” (Davison, 2020).
As Wallace-Wells (2021) illustrates in The New Yorker, in 2020s political discourse, the academic meaning of critical theory observed by its original theorists has been decisively overtaken both in popular and academic discourse by its status as a floating signifier — no fixed, uncontested strict, meaning, but only a string of connotations, “hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, [and] elitist,” making it “the perfect villain” (Rufo, quoted in Wallace-Wells, op. cit.). This is particularly true of the subject with which Wallace-Wells is concerned: critical race theory (CRT).
Trans people will already be familiar with such empty signifiers; most will have dealt with an absolutely mindnumbing onslaught of cries of “gender ideology,” a slogan invented by the Catholic Church in the early-to-mid-1980s and going strong ever since. With the rise of CRT, however, right-wing activists are explicitly trying to link the two (see, e.g., Kao, 2021).
Davison (2020), boldly going where no (well, probably almost no) musicologist has gone before, certainly had plenty to say about critical theory, specifically postmodern critical theory (PMCT), its application in the social sciences (Agger, 2012). In the abstract alone, he calls it
a peculiar set of misbeliefs
Davison (2020)
characterised by
prevailing antirational explanatory models
(ibid.)
and
religious-like performativity and self-validating arguments
(ibid.)
I strongly suspect a combination of the political moment and Prof Davison’s publishing record, more than any relevant specialist expertise, may be the primary factors explaining his presence on the panel.
#47
we’re not suggesting the ABC should abandon its commitment to diversity and inclusion
Barry, in Adams J. (2022b)
Fair enough. You are simply suggesting that everything it does ot implement that commitment is evidence of bias, or even institutional capture. That’s not the same thing at all.
#48
The problem here is a media group partnering with and being rewarded by a lobby group — any lobby group. And how that could lead to perceptions of bias in coverage or to bias itself
ibid.
… You know, I’ve changed my mind. I think I can see the problem now.
(@Peggysknapsack, 2022)
For anyone not sure what they’re seeing here: fuck, I wish I was you. No, but seriously … but I am being serious. No, but for real:
This is a collection of receipts from the private Facebook discussion group for the Coalition for Biological Reality.
The Coalition for Biological Reality (here “CBR”) are an anti-trans hate group. (see, e.g., Jones J., 2022).
Nastassja Freischmidt (“Stassja Frei”) is CBR’s founder (Frei, 2022).
Catherine Anderson-Karena (“Kat Karena”) is or was a community liaison for LGB Alliance Australia (see, e.g., Anderson-Karena, 2022).
Rachael Wong is the CEO of Women’s Forum Australia, an explicitly anti-trans lobby group (see, e.g., Women’s Forum Australia, n.d.) which incidentally is named suspiciously closely to the rather more legitimate and reputable International Women’s Forum‘s Australian branch.
Kit Kowalski is a conspiracy theorist who was as of Saturday 15 October — anecdotally as of Tuesday 18 October, but the 15th is the last archive snapshot — contending in her Twitter bio that “ACON controls [the] Aussie govt” (Kowalski, 2022a). As of 19 October she had changed it to the rather more innocuous “AMA about ACON and the ABC” (Kowalski, 2022b), possibly because I had rather inconsiderately pointed it out the previous day (Moreton, 2022n).
Between them, based on their remarks, Anderson-Karena, Freischmidt, Wong, and possibly a few others appear to have effectively ghostwritten the episode through Media Watch‘s “senior producer,” who they refer to with she/her pronouns — suggesting they probably mean supervising producer Gabrielle Clark (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2022e).
I cannot say this surprises me overmuch; as I mentioned earlier, I noticed the piece referred to “safeguards,” specifically “safeguards in treating gender dysphoria in children”. “Safeguard” is a common word, but in the context of “the trans debate,” and especially the “debate” around paediatric trans healthcare, it is a specifically British term of art (see, e.g., Care Quality Commission, 2022) meaning looking after the welfare of vulnerable people, particularly children.
“Safeguarding” is often used by the British government, via “think of the children,” as a way of illegitimately-to-outright-illegally blocking trans people from accessing medically necessary care (e.g., Topping, 2022). It doesn’t have an organic presence in specialised or general Australian English; it gets here exclusively through people whose brains have been marinating in British TERFism for a while.
To the point, however, this makes it a lot easier for me to agree with Media Watch. This case is open and shut: The ABC has indefensibly compromised its impartiality and balance by partnering with a lobby group and giving it wholesale editorial control! Just not the one Media Watch meant.
I can certainly see how this would lead to “perceptions of bias in coverage,” given that it clearly led to “bias itself”! Given that this clearly cannot continue, the question — with all due respect — is:
What the fuck does the ABC intend to do about it?
Footnotes
#1
I obviously set about reformatting this from a Twitter thread and therefore had to build a proper reference list and in-text citations.
Superscript numerals are for footnotes.
Most citations are in APA 7 style (the style given by the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition).
Per APA style, legal citations are in AGLC 4 style (the style given by the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, 4th edition).
#2
A few too many self-cites in this piece [gigantic jerking-off motion]. Sorry!
#3
I reported Faine’s piece as being in The Sydney Morning Herald. This has to do with a technical quirk in Nine Entertainment’s web presence; namely, they serve a central corpus including at least most of their op-eds separately under all of their mastheads, which include both the Herald and The Age, and the Herald version is the one that reached my inbox. Given Faine is in Melbourne, describing events that took place in Melbourne, The Age version (Faine, 2022) is presumably the canonical one. (They are identical.)
#4
I like steelmanning, so I would normally have used Apple’s chart here because, as noted, Nolan Investigates ranked much higher on that one. However, Spotify’s chart was the only one which contained a nearby “landmark” that I recognised. The nearest production I recognised in Apple’s chart (Chartable, 2022a) was Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Caster (24 spots above, at #8).
#5
Since “Samantha Smith” and “Sam Smith” are common names, yes, I’m quite sure it’s the same one. @misssamsmith has previously noted having “used to edit politics programmes in one of the BBC regions”. Devaney (2017) writes in HuffPost concerning Inside Out South West, a newsmagazine program broadcast by BBC South West, one of the BBC English Regions, in the context of focusing on Samantha Smith, its editor.
Smith is quoted as saying “long experiences of … both reporting and presenting”. An archived 2014 webpage for Inside Out South West (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2014/2021) identifies an extremely similar-looking woman also named Sam Smith as its presenter.
Rather more prosaically — and infuriatingly after all that detective work — I found an Archive Today snapshot from close to nine years ago (Smith S., 2014) which establishes that at that time Samantha Smith @misssamsmith was the presenter of Inside Out South West. Oh well.
Interestingly, if Devaney (op. cit.) is an accurate representation then Ms Smith seems to have a newsworthy record of opinions about what her colleagues should look like, characterised by being conservative about skirt length and not overfond of “PC”.
P.S. If you wish to, you can financially support whatever it is I’m doing here through Ko-fi. However, please don’t feel obliged.
References
ACON: Exposed (n.d.). About. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
Adams, J. (Director) (2022b, October 17). ACON & the ABC (Season 2022, Episode 35) [TV series episode]. In T. Latham (Executive producer), Media watch. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
Agger, B. (2012). Ben Agger. In P.M. Nickel (Ed.), North American critical theory after postmodernism: Contemporary dialogues (pp. 128–154). Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137262868_7. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2022d, September 29). FOI disclosure log. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2022e, October 20). Media Watch: About. Retrieved 20 October 2022.
Australian Business Register (2022, October 20). Current details for ABN 38 136 883 915. Australian Government. (Current record version published 9 April 2019.) Retrieved 20 October 2022.
Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (2021, November 24). ACON Health Limited. Australian Government. Retrieved 20 October 2022.
Grant. S. (Host) (2022, August 25). Sports, inclusion and redemption [TV series episode]. In E. Vincent (Executive producer), Q+A. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional or a scientist. This is a lay summary of popular and scientific coverage surrounding the event.
Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the leading cause of infant mortality in the Western world (Raven, 2018). It is a condition where a child less than one year old dies suddenly (“Sudden infant death syndrome,” 2017). For a diagnosis to be made, a cause of death must not be found after an autopsy and an investigation of the scene of death (“Sudden unexpected infant death,” 2013).
In the time since SIDS was originally indexed, nobody has been able to determine why it happens (“What causes SIDS?”, 2017). We’ve assumed that it’s multifactorial, i.e., that multiple risk factors have to line up (Kinney & Thach, 2009; Byard, 2018). Most of the proposed risk factors are temporary and are not intervenable, i.e., they can’t be prevented from happening — things like a specific inborn susceptibility and a specific time in development.
The only intervenable risk factor which has been proposed is the presence of environmental stressors, i.e., factors in the environment or in the way the environment directs the baby’s behaviour (Kinney & Thach, op. cit.). Environmental factors which have been proposed include co-sleeping, i.e., parents keeping their babies in the same bed as themselves, potentially causing the babies to suffocate; overheating; side sleeping; stomach sleeping; and prenatal exposure to nicotine (Fleming et al., 1993; Sullivan & Barlow, 2001; Bajanowski et al., 2007; Moon et al., 2007; Lavezzi et al., 2010; Moon, 2011; Moon & Fu, 2012; Carpenter et al., 2013; Horne, 2014; Moon et al., 2016; Carlin & Moon, 2017; Young & Shipstone, 2018; Anderson et al., 2019; “What causes SIDS?”, op. cit.).
The death of one’s child is an unimaginably traumatic experience. SIDS further compounds that. Like unexpected deaths from unknown causes in general, deaths from SIDS must be extensively investigated (Kinney & Thach, op. cit.). We’ve thought for some time, and with some degree of confidence, that the mechanism by which SIDS causes death is through hypoxia (Duncan & Byard, 2018), i.e., it deprives vital organs, particularly the brain, of oxygen. Because of this, SIDS has to be distinguished from other hypoxia-related deaths.
One cause of hypoxia-related death is intentional child murder by suffocation (Kinney & Thach, op. cit.). Another mechanism (Bajanowski et al., 2005) is shaken baby syndrome (SBS), thought to result from physical abuse by vigorous shaking, which may not, however, have been intended to kill — that doesn’t make it any better but it does make it different from murder. SBS is mechanically the same condition as whiplash in adults, but while whiplash mostly causes injuries to the muscles, ligaments and discs of the neck, SBS appears able to cut off oxygen to the brain (Miehl, 2005).
In cases of SIDS, suspicion of both murder through suffocation and involuntary manslaughter through SBS necessarily falls on parents, who are very probably innocent and grieving the loss of their child. Even without alleging criminal or unethical conduct, however, parents — and particularly mothers — whose children die of SIDS often bear the stigma of having been careless, even if they took every possible precaution.
Dr Carmel Harrington, a sleep medicine researcher at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, in Western Sydney, NSW, is a mother whose son died of SIDS 29 years ago (“World first breakthrough could prevent SIDS,” 2022). On 6 May 2022, eBioMedicine, a division of The Lancet, published Harrington et al. (2022), who found that, compared to blood samples taken from healthy babies, blood samples from babies who died of SIDS contained considerably lower levels of butyrylcholinesterase (BCHE).
BCHE appears to play a role (Eggermont, 2014, pp. 278–280) in the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), the part of the brain that regulates the ability to wake up (Tapia et al., 2013; Peters, 2020). The ARAS is the same system which causes adults with sleep apnea of the obstructive (OSA) or central (CSA) types to wake up if they stop breathing for too long. BCHE deficiency may prevent the ARAS from kicking in, meaning that a baby who stops breathing simply continues to not breathe, and never wakes up.
This discovery is significant because if further research verifies a strong link between low BCHE and SIDS, it may be possible to develop screening to identify infants at risk of SIDS before they can die, and then to develop medical interventions to massively reduce or prevent SIDS altogether (Connell & Vidal, 2022; Ravikumar, 2022; Van de Riet, 2022).
Bajanowski, T., Brinkmann, B., Mitchell, E.A., Vennemann, M.M., Leukel, H.W., … & Beike, J. (2007, February 7). Nicotine and cotinine in infants dying from sudden infant death syndrome. International Journal of Legal Medicine, 122, 23–28. doi:10.1007/s00414-007-0155-9. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Byard, R.W. (2018). Chapter 1: Sudden infant death syndrome — Definitions. In J.R. Duncan & R.W. Byard (Eds.), SIDS — Sudden infant and early childhood death: The past, the present and the future. University of Adelaide Press; US National Library of Medicine. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Duncan, J.R., & Byard, R.W. (2018). Chapter 2: Sudden infant death syndrome — An overview. In J.R. Duncan & R.W. Byard (Eds.), SIDS — Sudden infant and early childhood death: The past, the present and the future. University of Adelaide Press; US National Library of Medicine. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Kinney, H.C., & Thach, B.T. (2009, August 20). The sudden infant death syndrome. New England Journal of Medicine, 361, 795–805. doi:10.1056/NEJMra0803836. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Moon, R.Y., Horne, R.S.C., & Hauck, F.R. (2007, November 3). Sudden infant death syndrome. The Lancet, 370(9598), 1578–1587. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61662-6. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Moon, R.Y., & Fu, L. (2012, July 1). Sudden infant death syndrome: An update. Pediatrics in Review, 33(7), 314–320. doi:10.1542/pir.33-7-314. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Raven, L. (2018). Chapter 4: Sudden infant death syndrome — History. In J.R. Duncan & R.W. Byard (Eds.), SIDS — Sudden infant and early childhood death: The past, the present and the future. University of Adelaide Press; US National Library of Medicine. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Sudden infant death syndrome (2017, January 31). US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Sudden unexpected infant death (2013, March 7). US National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; Internet Archive. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
Young, J., & Shipstone, R. (2018). Chapter 11 — Shared sleeping surfaces and dangerous sleeping environments. In J.H. Duncan & R.W. Byard (Eds.), SIDS — Sudden infant and early childhood death: The past, the present and the future. University of Adelaide Press; US National Library of Medicine. Retrieved 14 May 2022.
