Here is a copy of an email I sent to Larissa Waters, outgoing Greens Senator for Queensland, as her constituent. I am publishing it for the record.

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Dear Senator Waters,

I hope you are well.

As your constituent, I am writing to you regarding the Sex Discrimination and Other Legislation Amendment (Save Women’s Sport) Bill 2022, introduced by Senator Claire Chandler (Liberal, Tasmania), last week.

This Bill is functionally unnecessary and lacking in empirical support. It is also a Trojan horse for a wider rollback of the rights of transgender Australians – rights which already had relatively fragile legislative protection in Australia, and which are now coming under a sustained attack in the national media which looks unlikely to relent any time soon. In addition, this Bill breaks new and unprecedented ground by overtly targeting children under 12 years of age for discrimination and social exclusion.

Moreover, this Bill conflicts directly with policies currently endorsed by the federal Australian Greens, including at least Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women and Girls, Aims 14 and 31(a), and Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Intersex, Principle 7 and Aims 8(h), 20, 22, 26, 28, and especially 31.

Consequently, I hope that you will choose to actively oppose this Bill with the resources available to you, and that should it come before the Senate again, the Australian Greens – and if it comes prior to the election, you yourself – will vote against it.

Sincerely yours,
Isabelle Moreton
(address withheld)

This is a response to the piece “No absolute right in clash of biology and gender,” written by Janet Albrechtsen (2022), dated 15 February 2022, carried by The Australian.

Context

The Australian is the only nationally-distributed daily newspaper in Australia. It is a News Corp Australia property with a cross-platform audience of approximately 2.4 million readers as of September 2019. It is particularly noted for its rabid conservative partisanship (Taylor & Collins, 2012).

Janet Albrechtsen (1955–) is the chairman of the Institute for Public Affairs and an opinion columnist at The Australian. She is a former commercial solicitor and law academic. Her other bylines in Australian media have included The Age, The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the right-wing extremist magazine Quadrant; international media bylines include the National Post and Vancouver Sun of Canada, and The Wall Street Journal in the United States and Asia.

Headnote

Raquel Rosario Sánchez, who is Dominicana, is named in accordance with Spanish-language conventions; she has a paternal surname, Rosario, and a maternal surname, Sánchez. Typically, someone with this name form is referred to by either the first or both surnames (e.g., “Rosario” or “Rosario Sánchez,” respectively). Some English-language outlets render these names like English double-barrelled surnames (e.g., “Rosario-Sánchez”). My impression is that “Rosario Sánchez” is her preference, so that is how I have rendered her name here.

Teardown

This clash between the rights of biological women and trans women won’t magically resolve itself or go away.

Albrechtsen (2022)

In the first place, “biological women” is conceptually incoherent; it is not possible to construct a biologically-based definition of womanhood which includes all cis women and excludes all trans women.

In the second place, Albrechtsen asserts a conflict of rights but does not even try to demonstrate that any such conflict exists.

In a weekend interview with The Times, Tony Blair didn’t shy away from telling his party to resolve the conflict.

Albrechtsen (2022)

He certainly didn’t (Thomson, 2022). Why the opinion of a retired politician should matter is unclear.

JK Rowling has worn the worst of the hatred and threats of violence that emanate, one assumes, from a small but vocal section of the trans community.

Albrechtsen (2022)

The basis of the assertion that Rowling has “worn the worst of … hatred and threats of violence” is unclear.

However, much more interesting is the choice of wording “one assumes.” One assumes – says the voice of the author – one doesn’t know. We assume it’s not all of them, we give them the benefit of the doubt, because we’re nice, civilised people who use reason and logic. But for all we know, all of those nasty, conniving transgendereds could be in on it. Which would be very convenient because it would give us a casus belli against every single last stinking one of them.

[Adele’s] Twitter critics said “her cancellation is in the mail”,

Albrechtsen (2022)

I was unable to verify that either anyone criticising Adele has said this or that anyone summarising criticism of Adele has said this. I am aware that at least one person targeted by the press over Adele has locked their account for reasons of personal safety, so they might have said it – but I can’t be sure.

accused her of being a TERF – a trans-exclusionary radical feminist,

Albrechtsen (2022)

I was unable to verify that anyone has accused Adele of being a TERF.

– and a transphobe for using her platform “to call for the destruction of the trans community”.

Albrechtsen (2022)

This is a lie. The words quoted here are from @puumph (2022a), a passionately transphobic Twitter user who was speaking sarcastically (@puumph, 2022b), and indeed expressed some degree of unease that they had been misinterpreted (@puumph, 2022c). Of course, I expect someone at The Australian knew that – and waved this article through anyway.

The wretched witch-hunt of women who want their biology recognised, not expunged, is barbaric.

Albrechtsen (2022)

The resemblance of this statement to reality is sufficiently limited to make it difficult to figure out what precisely it is supposed to portray.

British Labour MP Rosie Duffield said last week she was considering defecting to the Conservative Party because Labour leader Keir Starmer has refused to acknowledge that only women have a cervix. Starmer’s view is that this is “something that shouldn’t be said; it is not right”.

Albrechtsen (2022)

In the first place, this is categorically untrue. Ms Duffield said she was considering defecting to the Conservative Party because Conservative MPs had been “incredibly supportive” and seemed less prone to infighting, and because she didn’t feel like sharing a party with “Corbynistas” and the “tiny fraction” of supporters of trans rights in Labour (Chantler-Hicks, 2022). However, admitting that would mean conceding that supporters of trans rights have much more democratic power, and thus must make up a much larger portion of the community, than it would be convenient for Albrechtsen to admit. Consequently, she is forced to lie.

In the second place, let’s pretend for a moment that this wasn’t a lie. If that were the case, it would still be unclear how a leader who refuses to publicly agree with one of their MPs on a single ideological point which is not endorsed by any party body and is deeply unpopular with the general public is “witch hunting” that MP, which is the implied accusation here. As someone who has worked in Westminster system politics before, that just seems like Political Communications 101.

In the third place, if Ms Duffield is willing to defect to the (nominally) opposite party solely because her leader is insufficiently transphobic – notwithstanding that that party’s policies are deliberately targeted to cause material harm to women specifically (see, e.g., Wright, 2019) – then Ms Duffield is objectively not defecting out of her concern for the rights of women, and her departure cannot be said to be entirely unfortunate.

In the fourth place, Sir Keir is quite correct. It is neither morally correct nor objectively accurate to say something which is untrue; women are not the only group who have cervixes. Trans men, and nonbinary people assigned female at birth, also often have them too.

Trans activists targeted [Raquel Rosario Sánchez] for believing female-only spaces such as change rooms and domestic violence shelters should be for biological women only

Albrechtsen (2022)

To the best of my ability to determine, trans community advocates said Ms Rosario Sánchez was a TERF who was spreading hate about trans people, and they protested a talk she gave (Minchin, 2022).. They did this because Rosario Sánchez was and is prominently and actively involved (Smith, 2022) with Woman’s Place UK, which is an anti-trans hate group (see, e.g., Duffy, 2020).

Rosario Sánchez was not persecuted for her beliefs; people protested her because she used a public platform to launch an unprovoked public attack on a vulnerable marginalised group with essentially no remaining capacity to defend themselves. Community advocates’ characterisation of Rosario Sánchez seems substantially accurate. Albrechtsen’s characterisation of them does not.

Disciplinary procedures against one trans student who targeted [Rosario Sánchez] were dropped after the student arranged protests to disrupt the hearing.

Albrechtsen (2022)

In the first place, the use of the word “one” here implies that it is possible a number of community advocates may have engaged in conduct sufficient in the University’s opinion to justify disciplinary proceedings. However, in reality, proceedings were only ever opened against one student, “AA.”

In the second place, the use of the word “after” here implies that the protest, which took place in June 2018, was the direct cause of proceedings being discontinued. In reality, proceedings appear to have continued for over a year, through July 2019 (Smith, 2022). There is no chance this is an accident; it is simply a blunt attempt to imply that correlation does, in fact, equal causation, with the intention of causing the audience to believe a lie.

In the third place, I was not able to find any source which asserted, as Albrechtsen has done, that AA arranged the protests. This is significant because the assertion that AA arranged the protests frames those protests as an entirely petty and vengeful action undertaken at the behest of someone with a significant network of influence. It seems entirely plausible that the protests were substantially ideologically motivated – which would, again, indicate a stronger degree of opposition to transphobia in the community than it would be convenient for any conservative source to convey.

One of [Rosario Sánchez’s] supervisors resigned from the university, complaining administrators “allowed the disciplinary hearing to be sabotaged”. “All we want to do is have a conversation (about gender issues) … so we can come up with solutions.”

Albrechtsen (2022)

The words attributed here to Dr Emma Williams (Humphries, 2022) are textbook examples of a rhetorical strategy known as “just asking questions” – that is, framing one’s aggressive and repeated attempts to prosecute an ongoing debate as “just asking questions,” and then claiming that when the opponent turns down your offer to do anything from wasting their time to suspending their civil rights, they are “clearly operating in bad faith,” which means you automatically win.

The first hard but inescapable fact is that rights collide. There is no utopia where everyone gets what they want. Accommodations must be made if rights are to be given to one group without trampling on the rights of another group.

Albrechtsen (2022)

It seems sufficient to note that, like everyone else who has ever made this argument, Albrechtsen cannot name which specific rights are colliding, and to move on.

The next fact is that no right is absolute or unconditional.

Albrechtsen (2022)

This is quite extraordinary. The general problem to which trans people are subjected is a lack of natural justice (Goldner, 2021), i.e., the intervention of the law and the state to deny them their natural rights, which are held to be universal, fundamental and inalienable. Given the pivotal importance of that conception of natural rights to classical liberalism, a political philosophy of which Albrechtsen (2016) presents herself as a passionate supporter, one might think this would have jumped to her mind immediately. Then again – one can reason anything away with the right motivation.

Where did Kumanji [sic] Walker’s right to life end and Rolfe’s right of self-defence start? Where does a woman’s right to an abortion stop and a fetus’s right to life start? It is not my task to explore these thorny issues, …

Albrechtsen (2022)

In the first place, his name was Kumanjayi.

In the second place, Albrechtsen is explicitly taking a position on both the “thorny issues” she names. She unconditionally endorses “a fetus’ right to life,” a concept from Roman Catholic theology specific to the anti-choice movement. She also unconditionally endorses Zachary Rolfe’s “right of self-defence,” notwithstanding that the existence of grounds on which Rolfe could have been engaging in self-defence by shooting an apparently restrained and unarmed Blak 19-year-old three times at point-blank range is sufficiently unclear that Rolfe is now being tried for Walker’s murder (Gibson, 2022).

In the third place, the IPA is a public policy think tank. Albrechtsen’s task as its chairperson, which I understand is her primary occupation, is literally to explore “thorny issues,” and she has already explored these specific “thorny issues” from her public platform (e.g., Albrechtsen, 2008).

The right of biological women and girls not to be hurt or disadvantaged when playing sport against biological males, especially body contact sports, deserves protection even if this limits the right of trans women

Albrechtsen (2022)

In the first place, as previously discussed, no such right exists because its referents are incoherent, so it’s like saying “the right of colourless green ideas to sleep furiously.”

In the second place, the intention here, under all the ideological masturbation, is obviously to say “The right of cis women and girls not to be hurt or disadvantaged when playing sport against trans women and girls, especially body contact sports,” etc. This specific phrasing is overbroad – presumably intentionally so – because there are some sports in which cis women would be at risk of injury or disadvantage when playing sport against trans women but would be at the same quantity and quality of risk playing against other cis women, because those risks are intrinsic to the sport and not associated with the competitors’ sex assignment category.

That is to say, this framing demands that trans women be subjected to expectations that cis women would not; deliberately chooses expectations that are impossible to fulfil 100% of the time, even for cis women; and then characterises the fulfilment of those expectations as something to which cis women have a “right.”

In the third place, the charitable reading of this framing is that cis women should never be at greater risk of injury or disadvantage when playing against trans women than they would be when playing against other cis women. In that case, it seems apropos to note that I was not able to verify that such a risk differential has ever existed.

What, for example, do Sharma and co say to the parents of pubescent girls who are angst-ridden enough about their own sexuality without having to share a tent at a Girl Guides camp with a 15-year-old biological male who identifies as a girl?

Albrechtsen (2022)

This is a reference to the dismissal of Karyn Lisignoli as chief executive officer of Girl Guides Western Australia for damaging GGWA’s reputation by being publicly transphobic. Lisignoli claims she was acting out of concern for the safety of Guides placed in this entirely hypothetical situation.

The obvious response to Albrechtsen is: do these concerned parents exist? The inclusion of trans girls in Girl Guides WA is directed by its Constitution (Girl Guides Western Australia, 2018, “Constitution”). Sections 18.2(b) and 35.2–3 of that Constitution provide that it may only be amended by a 75% supermajority of eligible voting members (i.e., adult members, as well as Girl Guides aged 15 years and over) present at a Special General Meeting of the GGWA association. The Secretary must be advised of amendments to be considered at an SGM no less than six weeks before the Meeting, and the membership must be advised no less than 28 days prior.

The practical upshot is that when it came to allowing trans girls into the Girl Guides, everyone with GGWA voting rights, including the very same 15-year-old cis Girl Guides Albrechtsen implies she is defending, was given an opportunity to express their views on the floor of the association and by vote. Given that opportunity, of the people who cared enough to show up, at least 75% were in favour of trans girls’ admission. For perspective, every Australian constitutional amendment proposal which was supported by that percentage of voters at a referendum is now law.

In essence, Albrechtsen’s position here is a barely cloaked argument for the unchecked and arbitrary rule of the few, based on the fact that those few happen to agree with her.

Or about the rights of parents who send their daughters to a single-sex school deliberately and perhaps for religious reasons, and want the school limited to biological females?

Albrechtsen (2022)

In the first place, “biological females” is an incoherent concept, etc., etc.

In the second place, can Albrechtsen show that these so-far-hypothetical parents actually exist?

Or to devout Muslim parents …

Albrechtsen (2022)

This is basically a restatement of the previous point, but I did need to take a break here to process the thought that Janet Albrechtsen (2015, 2017) has ever cared about the feelings of any devout Muslim to have ever lived.

who don’t want their 12 or 13-year-old daughters to share toilets or dressing-rooms with biological males?

Albrechtsen (2022)

It is interesting to note that the daughters were 15 years old a second ago. It is also interesting to note that Albrechtsen does not explicitly note the age of the hypothetical trans girl students whose collective character she is so eager to smear. If they are sharing spaces with 12- and 13-year-old cis girls there is every possibility that they, themselves, are also 12 or 13. Of course, that would mean that Albrechtsen is imagining 12- to 13-year-old children as hyperviolent and hypersexual – which says rather more about her than anyone else.

It is a complex task to find the right accommodation between competing rights.

Albrechtsen (2022)

Which is presumably why Albrechtsen has used this column to imply that trans people should be denied their gender’s ordinary rights to, among other things, competent reproductive healthcare, change rooms, domestic violence shelters, protesting, playing sports, being part of Girl Guides, going to school, dressing rooms, and any and all non-residential toilets. This is fine and completely sustainable. As a genius, I agree.

Closing

I found it difficult to get properly mad about this article. I advise Albrechtsen to update her library of transphobic tropes – the ones she has are old hat and deeply passé. The intention of this article may have been to own the libs, but it barely managed to rent them.

References

Albrechtsen, J.K. (2008, April 18). Against an Australian charter of rights. Wall Street Journal Asia. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

Albrechtsen, J.K. (2015, July 29). Multicultural folly of denying ‘Islamist ideology’ in terrorism. NewAgeIslam; Archive.today. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Albrechtsen, J.K. (2016, March 22). Voices of liberalism will add cachet to Canberra. The Weekend Australian. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Albrechtsen, J.K. [@jkalbrechtsen] (2017, May 10). Moderate Islam not looking so moderate. [Quote Retweet]. Twitter. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Albrechtsen, J.K. (2022, February 15). No absolute right in clash of biology and gender. The Australian. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Chantler-Hicks, L. (2022, February 11). Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield has been ‘tempted’ to join Tories amid ‘harassment’ from Labour members. Kent Online. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Duffy, N. (2020, December 1). Lush admits donating thousands to anti-trans pressure group Woman’s Place UK. PinkNews. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Gibson, J. (2022, February 17). Officer tells Zachary Rolfe murder trial Kumanjayi Walker was ‘struggling’ with police before shots were fired. ABC News. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

Girl Guides Western Australia (n.d.). About us: Governance. GirlGuidesWA.org.au. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Goldner, S. (2021, August 2). Equity and natural justice under the law – all genders at the intersections. Queen Victoria Women’s Centre. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Humphries, W. (2022, February 12). Bristol University ‘too scared of trans lobby to defend its students’. The Times; Archive.today. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

Minchin, R. (2022, February 12). University denies trans bullying claims by feminist PhD student. Evening Standard. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

[@puumph] (2022, February 9). Who’d have thought #Adele was a transphobe and would use her platform to call for the destruction of the trans … [Tweet]. Twitter; Archive.today. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

[@puumph] (2022, February 10). Obviously Adele stating that she ‘really loves being a woman’ does not make her Transphobic. Nor does it give people … [Tweet]. Twitter. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

[@puumph] (2022, February 10). If Adele gets cancelled because of my Sardonic shit-post I’m going to be in a lot of trouble with my … [Tweet]. Twitter; Archive.today. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

Smith, J. (2022, February 1). Raquel Rosario Sánchez won’t be silenced. UnHerd; Archive.today. Retrieved 18 February 2022.

Taylor, T., & Collins, S. (2012, December 1). The politics are personal: The Australian vs the Australian curriculum in history. The Curriculum Journal, 23(4), 531–532. doi:10.1080/09585176.2012.731015. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Thomson, A. (2022, February 11). Tony Blair: ‘Voters don’t want a situation where women can’t talk about being women’. The Times; archive.today. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

Wright, A. (2019, November 13). Why a vote for the Tory party this December is a vote against feminism. Harpy Magazine. Retrieved 19 February 2022.

This is a response to the piece “Transgender school policies are a safeguarding nightmare,” written by Stassja Frei, dated 12 February 2022, carried by The Spectator Australia.

Spectator Australia is the UK magazine The Spectator plus its Australian supplement, which was launched in 2008. The Spectator is owned by Press Holdings, which is owned by Sir Frederick H. Barclay, and which notably also owns the UK’s Daily Telegraph.

Stassja Frei is a “feminist” activist credited with founding the Coalition for Biological Reality, a TERF pressure group (Binary Australia, 2021).

My points of difference with Frei’s article, and where applicable the truth’s points of difference with the article, are more or less as follows.

Many parents will be shocked to learn that schools around Australia already have policies that allow male students to use the toilets, change rooms, and even overnight accommodation meant for girls. There is no requirement to gain consent from other students or to inform parents.

Frei (2022)

Of course, Frei means that these schools have policies which allow trans girls to use the toilets, change rooms, and even overnight accommodation meant for girls. There is no requirement to gain consent from other students or to inform parents because those things are typically not required in order for girls to use facilities meant for girls.

In May last year in Loudoun County, Virginia, USA, a 15-year-old girl was raped in the female school toilets by a ‘gender fluid’ male student wearing a skirt.

Frei (op. cit.)

Frei leaves enough detail out of this assertion to qualify it contextually as a lie. In the Loudoun County case, the attacker and the victim had a pre-existing sexual relationship, and the attack happened in the girls’ toilets because the victim invited the attacker to meet her there before telling him she wasn’t interested in having sex (“What really happened …?”, 2021). While the attacker was indeed wearing a skirt (Jouvenal, 2021), there’s no evidence he was trans or that it was a factor (“Students walk out,” 2021).

This changes precisely nothing about the attacker’s culpability for his conduct. However, Frei is attempting to use the story here in a misleading way, to support a narrative of opportunistic bathroom violence by trans girls and women against strangers. No part of the Loudoun County case backs that up.

Gender identity policies in schools also discourage female participation and achievement in sports.

Frei (op. cit.)

Frei provides no evidence that this is the case. Per Hitchens’ razor, claims which can be made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Girls shouldn’t be labelled bigots for wanting to play sports exclusively with and against other girls.

Frei (op. cit.)

When trans girls are — correctly — admitted to girls’ teams, the right of the cis girls on those teams “to play sports exclusively with and against other girls” is not infringed in any way. Consequently, if a cis girl is “labelled [a] bigot,” it clearly isn’t because she wanted to counter an infringement of that right.

Moreover, this is a deceptive implication — stating that “x shouldn’t happen” to give the impression that x is happening, regardless of whether or not that’s true, while maintaining the fallback position that technically you never actually said x was happening.

Thomas competed for three years on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swimming team before taking female hormones and being allowed to compete in the women’s division.

Frei (op. cit.)

Frei leaves enough detail out of this assertion to qualify it contextually as a lie. Thomas started HRT in 2019 and didn’t start swimming on the women’s team until 2021. For context, leading researchers on the subject of trans people’s athletic performance (Roberts et al., 2020) consider that it is “realistic” that adult trans women athletes will have normalised athletic performance relative to their cis peers at the Olympic level (Avery, 2021), well above the level at which Thomas swam.

While not directly relevant to the substance of Frei’s argument — if that term can be applied here — it seems apropos to mention at this point that at no time in this article does Frei ever refer to Lia Thomas by the pronoun “her.” Instead, she insistently refers to her by her surname, Thomas, which is also a male given name.

While that fact means that in this case this is likely intended to be implicit misgendering, referring to trans people solely by their names and refusing to use their pronouns is also a rhetorical tactic called “degendering,” which is often deployed punitively against trans people generally and trans women in particular.

Thomas has smashed records

Frei (op. cit.)

This claim appears to have come via an extensive game of telephone, through The Washington Post (Maese, 2022) and possibly through Wikipedia, originally from an article in Swimming World Magazine (Rieder, 2021).

Precisely which records is important. Thomas has broken meet and pool records for the events in which she’s competed — which isn’t at all unusual. She does not hold any national records. This is notable precisely because “records,” unqualified, suggests “records” as in “records” — i.e., it suggests that Thomas is the fastest swimmer in the country, or the fastest swimmer in that kind of event in history, which is simply not the case (Zeigler, 2022). Thomas’ times reflect a swimmer who is certainly very capable, as is expected of someone at her level, but not magic.

and in one long-distance race, beat the next best female swimmer by 38 seconds.

Frei (op. cit.)

“Long-distance” is the key here. In long-distance races in any discipline, the intervals at which athletes arrive at the end of the race are much wider than in shorter-distance races.

The race in question was the women’s 1,650-yard freestyle at the 2021 Zippy Invitational (“Women’s Swimming & Diving,” 2021). Thomas was placed first, with a time of 15 minutes 59.71 seconds; the second-placed competitor, her teammate Anna Sophia Kalandadze, recorded a time of 16:37.44 (“2021 Zippy Invitational,” 2021, pp. 85 et seq.).

The contention here might be that it would be impossible for a cis woman to set that kind of time. However, the Division 1 record, discussed above, which is the applicable record at this level of swimming and is given on the Zippy Invitational results sheet, is seven seconds faster than Thomas’ time and appears to have been set by a cis woman.

The contention might then be that no cis woman could possibly lead another cis woman by that much. However, Kalandadze had that kind of lead over the 10th-placed competitor, Marij van der Mast (17:18.74), and everyone below her (there were 34 competitors total in that event).

The contention seems to be that a trans woman must be cheating if she sets a record or simply wins an event, notwithstanding that other women do that all the time. Frei puts in a lot of work here to make Thomas’ results seem impossible, almost alien, but unfortunately simply comes across as hating to see a girlboss winning.

If this wasn’t demoralising enough for Thomas’ female teammates,

Frei (op. cit.)

I assume not, given that the feats which Thomas has managed with which Frei takes issue are feats which have previously been accomplished by cis female swimmers competing in the same league as those on the UPenn team, comparable to them, and presumably in some cases even on the team.

they have also been told they have no right to complain about Thomas being naked in the women’s change rooms.

Frei (op. cit.)

It is unclear how anyone would believe in good faith that there existed a right to complain about a woman being naked in a women’s change room.

Thomas is open about dating and being attracted to women.

Frei (op. cit.)

Frei appears to take issue here with the fact that Thomas is openly sapphic (i.e., a woman who loves women). While I am fully aware that this is deployed to transphobic and transmisogynistic effect here (“Thomas isn’t a lesbian woman, Thomas is a straight man!”), it’s clearly double-edged. The other edge is homophobia, of a particularly regressive strain — “homos mustn’t be allowed in our changing rooms” was passé by the time I graduated high school in 2011 (e.g. Roberts, 2005).

Australian school girls should never be subjected to the possibility of voyeurism, indecent exposure, and sexual harassment in their toilets and change rooms — not even in the name of gender identity equality.

Frei (op. cit.)

This is, of course, another deceptive implication, as discussed above. In this case, however, it also erases the fact that cis girl students are already “subjected to the possibility of voyeurism, indecent exposure, and sexual harassment in their toilets and change rooms” — by other cis girls. It erases the actual violence that cis women do to other women in order to demonise trans women for allegedly presenting a threat that in reality simply does not exist (e.g. Solnit, 2020).

Tangentially, “even in the name of gender identity equality” doesn’t roll easily into the ear in this context — this sarcastic and contemptuous display of lip service to trans rights doesn’t mesh well with Frei’s attitude, and indeed career history, of anti-trans vitriol.

In their ‘Guide for Schools,’* transgender lobby group Transcend Australia advises that on overnight accommodation, ‘If the dorm rooms are separated by gender, the student should be permitted to be accommodated in the dorm room which aligns with their gender identity.’ Will schools also be handing out free condoms on overnight trips? The morning after pill?

Frei (op. cit.)

This is an attempt to monster trans teenage girls by sexualising them — portraying their mere presence in the correctly gendered space in a gender-segregated accommodation unit as ethically or materially equivalent to sexual intercourse. Frei’s apparent eagerness to sexualise teenage girls — or even people she incorrectly perceives as teenage boys — raises some particularly troubling questions.

Transcend Australia’s A guide for schools (2020) can, incidentally, be found on the reference list.

Or just gas-lighting the girls into feeling guilty over their desire for physical privacy?

Frei (op. cit.)

It is unclear how girls’ right to physical privacy in spaces containing one or more girls would be in any way infringed by the presence of one or more additional girls.

Anecdotal evidence from around the world indicates that girls are skipping school when they have their period in order to avoid unwanted interactions with males using the girls’ facilities. Some are avoiding drinking whilst at school to reduce the number of ‘all gender’ toilet trips.

Frei (op. cit.)

“Anecdotal evidence,” in this context, may as well be “I made it up.” This allegation is sufficiently crucial, and sufficiently pivotal to any policy approach we should adopt going forward, that Frei’s refusal to substantiate it should cause it to be set aside until and unless it is solidly substantiated.

All this is reminiscent of countries like India

Frei (op. cit.)

It’s always fascinating to see white people criticising actions they don’t like for which other white people are responsible by comparing them to POC and POC-majority states.

where a lack of single-sex, safe public toilets leaves girls stranded at home without access to an education.

Frei (op. cit.)

This leaves out a critical part of the discourse surrounding public toilets in India — namely, that they specifically are single-sex toilets designated for men, and not women (Patel, 2021). The issue in India isn’t that women have access to toilets but those toilets are gender-neutral and thus unsafe; it’s that women have basically no toilet access, full stop. Universal gender-neutrality of toilets would actually be helpful in this case.

When a school in the UK announced at their morning assembly that the girls’ toilets would be made gender-neutral without mentioning the boys’ toilets at all, the moment the assembly finished a large horde of young boys went directly to the former girls’ toilets and ran around laughing. But no girl and no teacher had the right to question them or demand they leave,

Frei (op. cit.)

In the first place, this is a particularly irritating hallmark of TERF screedsmithing — providing absolutely no location or date details whatsoever. There is just enough information to make me think “Hang on, I want to know what happened here so that I can call bullshit in a nuanced and surgical way.” However, the intention of pieces like this one is that the reader should uncritically drink them in without following up their references, so of course Frei provides just little enough information to make constructing a Google query very difficult indeed.

In the second place, the way this paragraph is constructed makes it clear to anyone but the most obsequiously uncritical reader that something is being left out. The entire point of this article is that people the author perceives as boys/men are actually being treated as girls/women, and the author has a problem with that. In this case, if a large horde of young girls went directly to the girls’ toilets, etc., other girls would absolutely have the right to question them and teachers would absolutely have the right to demand they leave — so the question arises, what is different here? What are we not being told?

For the record, I cannot find a specific single story which corresponds exactly to the description here — I was able to find a piece from the Daily Mail naming Moredon Primary School in Swindon, Wiltshire (Dollimore, 2021), and a piece from The Times of London referring vaguely to “Scottish secondary schools” in general (McCann, 2021), but neither correspond exactly, and the Times piece is paywalled so I was unable to retrieve further information on that front.

We need to stop accepting the narrative that sexuality and ‘gender identity’ are in any way comparable,

Frei (op. cit.)

This is particularly interesting because the only person to have compared sexuality and gender identity in the context of this article in any way is me, writing this response. Frei obviously wasn’t writing this article for me responding to it. She has not actually pointed out any such comparison — this is a sharp left turn which disorients the reader, presumably intentionally.

Moreover, although I certainly did make a comparison between sexuality and gender identity, and many such comparisons are regularly made by people who share my views, there is no “narrative that sexuality and ‘gender identity’ are in any way comparable” in respect to any of the circumstances and conditions that Frei addresses in this article.

It is one thing to allow religious schools to teach a religious design for sexuality,

Frei (op. cit.)

It certainly is one thing! Not a good thing, but a thing.

it is another thing entirely to demand that all Australian schools obliterate biological sex as a legitimate basis for decision-making.

Frei (op. cit.)

There are multiple layers of pure ideology here, each of which require a slight rotation of the analytical lens.

On one level, “demand that all Australian schools obliterate biological sex as a legitimate basis for decision-making” is clearly hyperbolic and unserious language from the get-go. As a former teacher, there are many things I wish I could have obliterated from the educational environment — John Thompson Piano Course, I’m coming for you — but no one alive is that existentially capable.

On another level, very few of the decisions to which Frei objects in this piece are even arguably linked to anything which could conceivably be called “biological sex.” The question of Lia Thomas’ attraction to women is a question of sexuality — which, as Frei says, is not comparable to gender identity at all. The question of students’ safety in toilets is not linked in reality to any aspect of sex — the only link is Frei’s unevidenced implication that any additional risk of sexual misconduct correlated with the presence of cis men is somehow innate to some aspect of their biological makeup that trans women are asserted to share, a philosophical stance referred to as bioessentialism.

On yet another level, where an argument can be made about something called “biological sex,” it is unclear that a decision would need to be made. The fact is that inasmuch as sex can be “objectively” determined at all, gender transition changes it. Lia Thomas is statistically within the observed range of ability for female swimmers generally, notwithstanding any advantage that Frei believes she should have given her assigned sex at birth. Moreover — given that, as Frei explicitly mentions, Thomas competed on the equivalent men’s team prior to her transition — she clearly earned her place honestly, rather than being an incompetent coasting on a testosterone-fuelled afterburn, which in any event would be deeply physiologically implausible.

‘Gender inclusion’ policies do not protect gay kids. They put lesbians at just as much disadvantage and increased risk as every other female student.

Frei (op. cit.)

Lesbian cis girls are already at the same disadvantage and risk from their girlhood, or more correctly society’s misogyny, as are all other girls. There is no evidence that correctly gendering trans girls increases this disadvantage or risk. However, gender inclusion policies do protect gay kids — they protect trans girls, including bisexual and lesbian ones, from being forcibly grouped with cis boys, to whom society gives strong incentives to enforce transphobia in ways that do defenseless trans girls unprovoked harm.

It’s time we recognise the unfair impact that gender identity policies are having on female students.

Frei (op. cit.)

For us to recognise this impact, it would need, in the first place, to be shown to exist.

Boys too will be uncomfortable changing in front of girls claiming a male gender identity, but they’re not at risk of unwanted pregnancy, period shaming, rape (at least, not on the scale that girls are), or losing to female sports competitors.

Frei (op. cit.)

Frei obviously holds that trans boys are girls. In the first place, this allows her to erase that trans boys are at risk of rape, trans boys who have ovaries and uteri are very much at risk of period shaming, and gay and bisexual trans boys are at risk of unwanted pregnancy. For someone who holds that trans boys are girls, and who professes to be concerned for their welfare as with “all other” girls here, Frei shows a genuinely shocking unconcern here. On reflection, it may not after all be particularly shocking, given how willing Frei was to openly and unashamedly sexualise trans girls earlier in the piece.

In the second place, current Endocrine Society guidelines (Hembree et al., 2017) permit trans boys to start taking hormones at 16 years of age — 10th or 11th grade equivalent — and taking testosterone above the body’s set point, as with masculinising HRT, does indeed appear to change athletic performance characteristics (Ivy, 2021). If it were true, as Frei asserts, that trans boys are female, then cis boys would be at very great risk indeed of losing to “female” competitors — but, because trans boys aren’t female, they’re not.

Australia does not need a Loudoun County rape to get these policies right.

Frei (op. cit.)

Nor, if such a rape happened here, would Australia need Stassja Frei to lie about it.

Parents, teachers and students are encouraged to submit their stories around poorly thought through gender identity policies to indefenceofchildren.org. Anonymity guaranteed.

Spectator Australia (Eds.), in Frei (op. cit.)

In Defence of Children — which appears to be run by Moira Deeming, a city councillor in Melton, Victoria, and committed transphobic activist (Millar, 2021) — appears to be an attempt to catch in a second bottle the debatable lightning that first sparked Holly Lawford-Smith’s No Conflict They Said. The intent appears to be to paper over No Conflict They Said‘s central flaw — namely, that it subsists on using the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (Holkins & Krahulik, 2004) to run interference for bitter, bigoted, mean-spirited and obviously false transphobic bullshit (Weinberg, 2021) — by using “Think of the children” to prompt readers to switch their brains off completely. Time will tell whether it works.

If you liked this piece, please feel free to chuck some coins in my ko-fi — like many people I am currently between jobs, and in moderate to severe need of medical care that doesn’t come cheap.

References

A guide for schools: Information on supporting trans, gender diverse or non-binary students to affirm their gender (2020, August). Transcend Australia Ltd. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

2021 Zippy Invitational — Ocasek Natatorium — Results (2021, December 5). Penn Athletics. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Avery, D. (2021, January 5). Trans women retain athletic edge after a year of hormone therapy, study finds. NBC News. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Binary Australia (2021, April 27). Australia protests against gender clinics. Gender Awareness Australia Ltd; archive.today. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Dollimore, L. (2021, September 11). Primary school headteacher makes toilets gender-neutral before furious parents force U-turn. Mail Online; archive.today. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Frei, S. (2022, February 12). Transgender school policies are a safeguarding nightmare. Spectator Australia; Archive.today. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Hembree, W.C., Cohen-Kettenis, P.T., Gooren, L., Hannema, S.E., Meyer, W.J., … & T’Sjoen, G.G. (2017, September 13). Endocrine treatment of gender-dysphoric/gender-incongruent persons: An Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 102(11), 3869–3903. doi:10.1210/jc.2017-01658. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Holkins, J., & Krahulik, M. (2004, March 19). Green blackboards (and other anomalies) [comic strip]. Penny Arcade. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Ivy, V. [@SportIsARight] (2021, February 6). The reason EXOGENOUS T is banned (as doping) is that when you ADD testosterone ABOVE your set point, then you … [Tweet]. Twitter. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Jouvenal, J. (2021, October 25). In case at center of political firestorm, judge finds teen committed sexual assault in Virginia school bathroom. The Washington Post. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Maese, R. (2022, January 10). A transgender college swimmer is shattering records, sparking a debate over fairness. The Washington Post. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

McCann, D. (2021, November 26). Schoolgirls rejecting mixed toilets over boys’ bad behaviour. The Times; archive.today. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Millar, B. (2021, July 26). Melton councillor’s ‘transphobic’ questions criticised. Star Weekly. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Patel, M. (2021, November 10). Unequal access to toilets remains a worry, and is central to global feminist movement. The Indian Express. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Rieder, D. (2021, December 7). Lia Thomas, transgender swimmer from Penn, swims fastest times in nation; controversy brewing. Swimming World Magazine. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Roberts, S. (2005, October 28). Homophobia is alive in men’s locker rooms. The New York Times. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Roberts, T.A., Smalley, J., & Ahrendt, D. (2020, December 7). Effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen: Implications for sporting organisations and legislators. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 55(11), 577–583. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2020-102329. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Solnit, R. (2020, August 10). Trans women pose no threat to cis women, but we pose a threat to them if we make them outcasts. The Guardian. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Students walk out of Loudoun schools over sex assault concerns (2021, October 26). NBC 4 Washington. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Weinberg, J. (2021, February 26). Philosopher launches anti-trans website; colleagues & others object. Daily Nous. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

What really happened in Loudoun County? How a claim of sexual assault fuelled a culture war (2021, October 26). Independent. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Witz, B. (2022, January 24). As Lia Thomas swims, debate about transgender athletes swirls. The New York Times. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Women’s Swimming & Diving finishes second at Zippy Invitational (2021, December 5). Penn Athletics. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Zeigler, C. (2022, January 6). 6 truths and myths circulating about Lia Thomas, trans athletes and women’s swimming. Outsports. Retrieved 13 February 2022.

Dear Mr Marles,

I hope this letter finds you well. I am an Australian voter. I am writing because as of today I have been given to understand (Poxon, 2022) that the position of your office is that it would be “too risky” at this time for Labor to support any initiative for the suspension of Centrelink mutual obligations. I question your office’s position for a number of reasons. Some are as follows.

Mutual obligations have never worked. They “ha[ve] no effect on the likelihood of being employed, but adversely [affect] the quality of that employment,” and “hinder rather than help the unemployed return to employment” (Gerards & Welters, 2021a & 2021b). They subsidise employers’ engagement of labour and exert downward pressure on wages (Productivity Commission, 2002, pp. 2.6–2.7); they disaffect their unwilling “participants” from society (Warburton & Smith, 2003); they are a colossal waste of public money (Aston, 2016). Moreover, even under what were considered normal conditions prior to the pandemic, mutual obligations placed an unnecessary strain on the administrative resources of Australian businesses — a strain which they could well do without, and have explicitly asked to (Henriques-Gomes, 2021).

Under the present conditions, mutual obligations forcibly expose job seekers to a highly transmissible (Burki, 2021), highly virulent pathogen which is not only potentially lethal, but is now known to be a frequent causative agent of disabling, quality-of-life-destroying chronic disease (Malik et al., 2021; Poudel et al., 2021; Shah et al., 2021) by mechanisms which are becoming better-understood and verified empirically at a rapidly increasing rate (e.g. Guedj et al., 2021; Ortona & Malorni, 2021; Pretorius et al., 2021, etc.).

Job seekers are forced to live on a payment below the poverty line (Melbourne Institute, 2021), are consequently exceptionally likely to have been forced into poorer-than-usual health (Tinson, 2020), and are therefore at strongly elevated risk of severely adverse outcomes in terms of both acute and chronic clinical course (Mahase, 2021).

Advocating the suspension of mutual obligations is directly consistent with the ALP’s current National Platform (2021); I refer you in particular to items Foreword.7, Foreword.9, 1.12, 1.16, 1.17, 1.22, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.9, 4.7, 4.65, 4.93, and 5.35, among others. Failing to advocate for such a suspension directly contradicts the letter and spirit of the National Platform for similar reasons.

Far be it from me to teach grandmother how to suck eggs, or to impugn the competence of a Party with such an unblemished reputation for the skilful management of crises of public trust (e.g. Miller et al., 2020). However, those asking the Party to support the suspension of mutual obligations are asking the Party to advance a simple, straightforward, unambiguously practically necessary implementation of the principles to which it has already publicly committed. They are also asking it to support increased social participation, prudence in public spending, reduced red tape for business, and upward pressure on wages — not to mention the rescue of the Australian citizen from the individually inexorable onward march of systematically avoidable pain, disability and death.

Supporting a suspension of mutual obligations would demonstrate Labor’s compassion and its competence in virtually every soundbite-friendly aspect of public policy at the same time. Failure to support a suspension raises pressing questions about the seriousness of Labor’s commitment to winning the next election — and unseriousness at this juncture is arguably ethically (and very possibly electorally) unforgivable.

If you and the Party will not support a measure which is very clearly to the Party’s own benefit and to the benefit of society in general, Australians as a whole deserve to know why, in very clear and thorough detail, and the number who will not be satisfied until they know may prove critical to the Party’s future.

With due respect,
Isabelle Moreton

References

Abolish mutual obligations (n.d.). GetUp. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

ALP National Platform: As adopted at the 2021 Special Platform Conference (2021, March). Australian Labor Party. Retrieved 22 January 2022.

Aston, H. (2016, February 15). Work for the dole is inefficient and unreasonable and should be dismantled: ACOSS. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Burki, T.K. (2021, December 17). Omicron variant and booster COVID-19 vaccines. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, online. doi:10.1016/S2213-2600(21)00559-2. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Gerards, R., & Welters, R. (2021a, May 23). Does eliminating benefit eligibility requirements improve unemployed job search and labour market outcomes?. Applied Economics Letters. doi:10.1080/13504851.2021.1927960. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Gerards, R., & Welters, R. (2021b, July 12). ‘Mutual obligations’ hinder rather than help jobseekers to find work. Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, ANU Crawford School. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Guedj, E., Morbelli, S., Kaphan, E., Campion, J-Y., Dudouet, P., … & Eldin, C. (2021, August). From early limbic inflammation to long COVID sequelae. Brain, 144(8), e65. doi:10.1093/brain/awab215. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Henriques-Gomes, L. (2021, May 28). Australia’s welfare mutual obligations do not improve likelihood of employment, job agencies say. The Guardian. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Mahase, E. (2021, July 7). Covid-19: Adults in poorest areas are almost four times more likely to die, inquiry finds. BMJ, 374, n1728. doi:10.1136/bmj.n1728. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Malik, P., Patel, K., Pinto, C., Jaiswal, R., Tirupathi, R., … & Patel, U. (2021, August 31). Post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PCS) and health-related quality of life (HRQoL)—A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Medical Virology, 94(1), 253–262. doi:10.1002/jmv.27309. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Melbourne Institute (2021, November 1). Poverty lines: Australia — June quarter 2021. University of Melbourne. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Miller, P., Hundley, I., Hassett, M., Knight, M., Sanaghan, B., … & MacKenzie, B, et al. (2020, June 16). This is another nail in the coffin of public trust. The Age. Retrieved 22 January 2022.

Ortona, E., & Malorni, W. (2021, September 16). Long COVID: To investigate immunological mechanisms and sex/gender related aspects as fundamental steps for a tailored therapy. European Respiratory Journal, in press. doi:10.1183/13993003.02245-2021. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Pretorius, E., Vlok, M., Venter, C., Bezuidenhout, J.A., Laubscher, G.J., … & Kell, D.B. (2021, August 23). Persistent clotting protein pathology in Long COVID/Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) is accompanied by increased levels of antiplasmin. Cardiovascular Diabetology, 20, 172. doi:10.1186/s12933-021-01359-7. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Poudel, A.N., Zhu, S., Cooper, N., Roderick, P., Alwan, N., … & Yao, G.L. (2021, October 28). Impact of Covid-19 on health-related quality of life of patients: A structured review. PLoS ONE, 16(10), e0259164. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0259164. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Poxon, J. [@JeremyPoxon] (2022, January 21). just got a call from the shadow employment services minister, telling me it’s “too risky” for labor to be calling … [Tweet]. Twitter. Retrieved 22 January 2022.

Productivity Commission (2002, June 3). Independent review of the Job Network: Inquiry report. Australian Government. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Shah, R., Ali, F.M., Nixon, S.J., Ingram, J.R., Salek, S.M., & Finlay, A.Y. (2021, May 25). Measuring the impact of COVID-19 on the quality of life of the survivors, partners and family members: A cross-sectional international online survey. BMJ Open, 11(5), e047680. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2020-047680. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Tinson, A. (2020, July 25). Living in poverty was bad for your health long before COVID-19. The Health Foundation. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

Warburton, J., & Smith, J. (2003, November 11). Out of the generosity of your heart: Are we creating active citizens through compulsory volunteer programmes for young people in Australia?. Social Policy & Administration, 37(7), 772–786. doi:10.1046/j.1467-9515.2003.00371.x. Retrieved 21 January 2022.

This post was originally written for a community group in the area where I live. It is presented in a superficially edited form here.

Hey everyone — it is Transgender Awareness Week (13 to 19 November 2021).

Trans people are generally defined as “people whose gender is not the same as the sex they were assigned at birth.” Related terminology includes:

• binary (adjective): of or pertaining to the two most popular genders, “man” and “woman.”
• cisgender (adjective): having a gender corresponding to the sex you were assigned at birth, i.e., not being trans;
• nonbinary (adjective): of or pertaining to a gender which is anything other than solely “man” or “woman”;
• transfeminine (adjective): of or pertaining to trans women and other trans people of feminine genders;
• trans man (noun): a man who was assigned female at birth;
• transmasculine (adjective): of or pertaining to trans men and other trans people of masculine genders;
• trans woman (noun): a woman who was assigned male at birth.

Throughout the English-speaking world, the percentage of the population who currently identify themselves as being trans on large-scale surveys is approximately 0.5% (Collin et al., 2016; H., 2017). Assuming a future of greater acceptance and awareness, which is not a given, that number will likely go up. Accepting 0.5% for the sake of argument, that means the number of trans people who live here is approximately:

• 129,515 in Australia;
• 26,000 in Queensland;
• 19,000 in Greater Brisbane.

Here are a few notes that I hope will be of some use.

Don’t assume that people didn’t get a specific gender-affirming therapy because they didn’t want to, or because they weren’t “man” or “woman” enough. In Australia, even access to hormone replacement therapy (HRT), generally considered the foundation of most medical transition, is dicey. Contrary to the “Big Pharma” conspiracy theory, manufacturers and governments regularly take no action to ensure that trans people have any access to gender-affirming therapies at all. Manufacturers don’t bother to maintain consistent supply (Simons, 2020). When there is consistent supply from the manufacturer, there may not be Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approval (Cheung et al., 2019) even for products that are uncontroversial abroad (Molteni, 2016). When a product has both consistent supply and TGA approval, it may not be covered by the PBS for gender transition, even when its use in that context is beyond doubt, e.g. the testosterone blocker bicalutamide (Randolph, 2018).

In terms of gender-affirming surgeries (a diverse category, serving both men and women, of which the notorious “op” is a very small part) the options are even more limited. Even though medical consensus indicates that gender-affirming surgeries are medically necessary and should not be considered cosmetic or elective (Coleman et al., 2012), Medicare coverage does not reflect this. Theoretically, out-of-pocket costs will run to at least several thousand dollars; realistically, they will run to several tens of thousands of dollars (Hunter, 2021), which many, perhaps most, trans Australians, being economically disadvantaged (Bretherton et al., 2021), will never be able to afford.

All this having been said, if someone confirms to you that they didn’t get a specific surgery because they didn’t want it, that doesn’t make them less their gender. A trans woman who chooses not to alter the testosterone-affected bone structure of her face, for instance, is still a woman.

General healthcare for trans people is badly tainted by “trans broken arm syndrome” (Bisshop, 2017) — known to fat people as “fat broken arm syndrome” (Paine, 2020) and to cis women as “hysteria” (Vanvuren, 2017). Broken arm syndrome, in all its forms, consists of attributing someone’s health problem, or potentially all of their health problems, to a single variable which is inseparable from who they are, and refusing to consider anything else. “Trans broken arm syndrome” is so named because the joke is that a trans woman breaks her arm after falling onto concrete, she presents to a GP, and the GP says, “Well, sir, the problem appears to be those female hormones you’re taking, so I’ve taken the liberty of cancelling your script.”

In terms of violence against transgender people, 2021 has been the deadliest year since records began (López, 2021). It would be illuminating to know the situation in Australia specifically, but unfortunately, unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, we don’t collect data on gender-related hate crimes so we have no idea at all (Lavoipierre, 2019).

Many trans people use singular “they” pronouns. This is often treated as a 21st-century affectation, and as being grammatically incorrect on the basis that “they” is exclusively plural. Neither is true. The use of singular “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun in mainstream English literature is first attested in 1375 (Baron, 2018).

Many trans people use neopronouns, i.e. sets of third-person pronouns other than he, she or they, such as thon/thons/thonself, xe/xyr/xemself, ze/hir/hirself, etc. These are also not new; neopronouns have been coined and circulated constantly since the 1300s (Yuko, 2021). Being unusual doesn’t make them wrong.

Someone deserves to be addressed by their chosen name even if they cannot legally change it. For instance, given that trans people are disproportionately likely to be unemployed for reasons directly attributable to their trans status (Bretherton et al., op. cit.), it is disproportionately likely that someone might find themself on JobSeeker and unable to afford the $200 required to change their name in Queensland.

Trans people are nominally legally protected from discrimination, primarily by the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Act 2013 (Cth). However, unfortunately, there are employers who are willing to ignore the Act because they know that transgender people are economically disadvantaged and unlikely to be able to go to court.

Trans people have existed forever. Elagabalus, Roman Emperor 218-222, appears with a high degree of certainty to have been a trans woman (Mijatovic, n.d.). Prince Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, a medieval Jewish translator from France, wrote a lament for having been born male (“Commemorating Transgender Day of Remembrance,” 2015). The Public Universal Friend, who was nonbinary, was active as a Quaker preacher from the 1770s through the 1810s (Schmidt, 2020). James Barry, a trans man, served as Inspector General of British military hospitals in the late 1850s (Ortenberg, 2020). Private Albert Cashier, a trans man, served in the Union Army during the American Civil War (Vago, 2019). Frances Thompson, a Black trans woman, became the first trans person to testify before the US Congress in 1866 (“HRC honors Frances Thompson,” 2021). Michael Dillon, a trans man, worked as a recovery-vehicle driver and fire watcher during the Blitz (Casey, 2021). Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman, World War II veteran and later celebrity and nightclub singer, started her transition in 1952 to tremendous media attention (Long, 2010).

While “Nazi book burnings” are treated as a general category, the books they are most famous for burning are the archives of the Institute of Sexual Research, the gender clinic in Berlin (Bauer, 2014). Partly due to that burning, many of the techniques innovated by the Institute in the 1930s have not yet been re-implemented today (Kohn, 2016; Jones et al., 2021).

Finally — progress is not assured. Hungary and Poland have passed stringent laws framing LGBT people’s existence as a form of “ideology” and ejecting us from public life (“Poland LGBT,” 2020; Reid, 2021). In the UK, the BBC recently published an article framing trans women in particular as being systematically sexually predatory; the article was based virtually entirely on fabricated sources, primarily anti-trans hate group Get The L Out (Factora, 2021), as well as a cis woman, Lily Cade, who also happened to be a violent predator targeting other cis women (Wakefield, “BBC,” 2021) — a fact of which the BBC was aware before publication but chose not to disclose (Wakefield, “Trans,” 2021). The same cis woman then went on to call for the mass ‘execution’ and ‘lynching’ of trans women (Wakefield, “Lesbian,” 2021), to minimal response from the BBC (Nolan, 2021).

In Australia, there is a concerted push from within the Coalition to force trans people out of public spaces, currently using “save women’s sports” legislation (Lewis, 2021) — which has been well-established as entirely baseless (Strangio & Arkles, 2020). The Australian Labor Party is refusing to take a strong stance, or really any stance, on trans rights, because it doesn’t want to be seen as a “grievance-based organisation” (Harris, 2021). In New South Wales, One Nation is advancing the Education Legislation Amendment Bill (NSW) 2020, which would have the effect of purging transgender teachers and students from the education sector (Lawrie, 2021).

They are quite capable of forcing us back into the closet and into effective nonexistence. They have done it numerous times before and they can do it again. We need you to stand up for us. Please do not look the other way.

References

Baron, D. (2018, September 4). A brief history of singular ‘they’. Oxford English Dictionary.

Bauer, H. (2014). Burning sexual subjects: Books, homophobia and the Nazis destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin. In G. Partington & A. Smyth (Eds.), Book destruction from the medieval to the contemporary (pp. 17-33). Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137367662_2.

Bisshop, F. (2017, December 7). What is ‘trans broken arm syndrome’?. QNews.

Bretherton, I., Thrower, E., Zwickl, S., Wong, A., Chetcuti, D., … & Cheung, A.S. (2021, January 12). The health and well-being of transgender Australians: A national community survey. LGBT Health, 8(1), 42-49. doi:10.1089/lgbt.2020.0178.

Casey, M. (2021, June 1). Ireland’s remarkable trans pioneer: ‘People thought I was a woman, but I was just me’. The Irish Times.

Cheung, A.S., Wynne, K., Erasmus, J., Murray, S., & Zajac, J.D. (2019, August 5). Position statement on the hormonal management of adult transgender and gender diverse individuals. Medical Journal of Australia, 211(3), 127-133. doi:10.5694/mja2.50259.

Coleman, E., Bockting, W., Botzer, M., Cohen-Kettenis, P., DeCuypere, G., … & Zucker, K. (2012, August 27). Standards of care for the health of transsexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people, version 7. International Journal of Transgenderism, 13(4), 165-232. doi:10.1080/15532739.2011.700873.

Collin, L., Reisner, S.L., Tangpricha, V., & Goodman, M. (2016, March 25). Prevalence of transgender depends on the “case” definition: A systematic review. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 13(4), 613-626. doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2016.02.001.

Commemorating Transgender Day of Remembrance (2015, November 20). EshelOnline.

Factora, J. (2021, October 26). The BBC’s latest transphobic screed is a mockery of journalism. Them.

H., M. (2017, September 1). Why transgender people are being sterilised in some European countries. The Economist.

Harris, R. (2021, March 11). Albanese’s slimmed down policy platform lashed by LGBTI community. The Sydney Morning Herald.

HRC honors Frances Thompson, a black transgender hero (2021, February 22). Human Rights Campaign.

Hunter, G. (2021, February 17). Gender reassignment surgery. Finder.com.au.

Jones, B.P., Rajamanoharan, A., Vali, S., Williams, N.J., Saso, S., … & Smith, J.R. (2021, January 20). Perceptions and motivations for uterus transplant in transgender women. JAMA Network Open, 4(1), e2034561. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.34561.

Kohn, A. (2016, May 24). How the Nazis derailed the medical advances around sexual reassignment surgery. Timeline.

Lavoipierre, A. (2019, November 20). Why is it so hard to work out how many transgender people have been murdered in Australia?. ABC News.

Lawrie, A. (2021, June 14). Friends, Jagged Little Pill and transphobia in the NSW Legislative Council. alastairlawrie.

Lewis, J. (2021, July 31). Senator Claire Chandler doubles down on anti-trans views. Star Observer.

Long, T. (2010, December 1). Dec. 1, 1952: Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty. Wired.

López, C. (2021, November 13). 2021 is on track to be the deadliest year on record for trans people. Insider.

Mijatovic, A. (n.d.). A brief biography of Elagabalus: The transgender ruler of Rome. In A. Mejia, A. Mijatovic, S. Barajas, A. Benck, A. Klebine, … & A. Herrera (Eds.), Challenging gender boundaries: A trans biography project by students of Dr Catherine Jacquet. OutHistory.

Molteni, M. (2016, October 11). Trans women can fill their estrogen prescriptions—for now. Wired.

Nolan, E. (2021, November 4). BBC removes Lily Cade contribution after transphobic remarks spark outrage. Newsweek.

Ortenberg, R. (2020, October 20). How history keeps ignoring James Barry. In Science History Institute (Eds.), Distillations: Using stories from science’s past to understand our world. Science History Institute.

Paine, E.A. (2020, December 14). “Fat broken arm syndrome”: Negotiating risk, stigma, and weight bias in LGBTQ healthcare. Social Science & Medicine, 270, 113609. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113609.

Poland LGBT: Diplomats from 50 countries call for end to discrimination (2020, September 28). BBC News.

Randolph, J.F. (2018, December). Gender-affirming hormone therapy for transgender females. Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology, 61(4), 705-721. doi:10.1097/GRF.0000000000000396.

Reid, G. (2021, October 6). Hungary’s path puts everyone’s rights in danger. Human Rights Watch.

Schmidt, S. (2020, January 5). A genderless prophet drew hundreds of followers long before the age of nonbinary pronouns. The Washington Post.

Simons, M. (2020, May 20). Patients frantic over mysterious global shortage of HRT medications and contraceptive pills. The Guardian.

Strangio, C., & Arkles, G. (2020, April 30). Four myths about trans athletes, debunked. American Civil Liberties Union.

Vago, M. (2019, June 16). Meet the trans man who fought in the Civil War. A.V. Club.

Vanvuren, C. (2017, May 18). The history of hysteria: Sexism in diagnosis. The Talkspace Voice.

Wakefield, L. (2021, November 3). Lesbian porn star platformed by BBC calls for mass ‘execution’ and ‘lynching’ of trans women. PinkNews.

Wakefield, L. (2021, November 4). BBC cuts transphobic porn star from reviled anti-trans article — but refuses to delete it. PinkNews.

Wakefield, L. (2021, November 4). Trans sex worker went unpublished by BBC because she didn’t ‘fit their narrative’. PinkNews.

Yuko, E. (2021, June 29). Beyond they/them: What are neopronouns?. Rolling Stone.

A couple of weeks ago, my very good friend Melissa Dahn @two_n_minus_one sent me a link to Keith Power’s “Sleeping In The Cold Below” from the soundtrack of Digital Extremes’ Warframe. She cursed me; I have not stopped listening to it since. I haven’t really thought about a musical piece at length since I quit the industry in 2020, but this one set my analytical neurons going hard enough that the ADHD medication I took to spend a couple hours writing about it had to run to catch up.

This piece is a fantastic use of the sea shanty form because of:

• how it respects the shanty and other associated forms and their origins
• how it moves beyond them

For those who aren’t familiar, and to be fair, my computer can’t run it so I’m not firsthand familiar, Warframe is a far-future space-fantasy MMO third-person shooter. In-universe, “Sleeping In The Cold Below” (“Sleeping,” so my fingers don’t fall off) is associated with the capitalist/theocratic oligarchic—megacorporate faction known as the Corpus. Plot-wise, the song is from the quest Call of the Tempestarii, which utilises the established devices of Warframe lore to tell essentially the story of the Flying Dutchman.

The broader in-universe context in which the piece is placed seems appropriate. While shanties arose in many companies and workforces, their earliest development, and the earliest documentation of that development (The Quid, 1832, p. 222 et seq.), is associated with the British East India Company (BEIC), famously a transnational megacorporation with its own private military and police forces (Bryant, 1978), political sovereignty (Stern, 2012), and de facto sovereign legal immunity (Forsyth & Upadhyaya, 2013), an entity arguably of near-equal power to the State to which it was formally subject.

Given that the fictional context is an adaptation of the myth of the Flying Dutchman, the megacorporate element has additional resonance. The original Dutchman was described as a man-of-war (Barrington, 1795/2004, p. 30) in the service of the Dutch United East Indies Company, the VOC (Mambra, 2021), another de facto megacorporate state and perhaps the only one greater than the BEIC itself (Taylor, 2013). Economic and political power on this order cannot be said to adhere to many other real-world seedbeds of shanties, but within Warframe‘s context it describes the Corpus absolutely.

The composition and structural form are very period — the piece is in the call-and-response form typical of authentic sea shanties (“A history,” 2021), with the shantyman (caller) providing the primary musical line during their calls, with no accompanying vocal harmony and minimal orchestral detail apart from the rhythm section. Aside from general principles, one very specific salute is that the response chord progression opens E^♭—B^♭—Cm—Gm (VI—III—iv—i), harmonically identical to (and coincidentally at a similar tempo to) the response section of “Soon may the Wellerman come” (c. 1865), which was enjoying a resurgence of viral popularity in the months preceding “Sleeping’s” release (e.g. Evans, 2021).

The orchestration is also very period: male gang vocals are used as part of the rhythm section; the winds appear to include pennywhistles and fifes; the strings include fiddles and mandolins; the main drum is a frame drum that sounds like a bodhrán; and the auxiliary percussion includes a chain — all of which are standbys of authentic and imitation naval and nautical music (Agnew, 2011; Barton, 2011; Davis, 2021). When the main orchestra is brought to bear at around 0m35s, the occasion is marked by a rising glissando from the upper winds, suggesting the mournful sounding of a steamship’s whistle, which is mildly anachronistic for sea shanties, which were killed off by the age of steam (Alden, 1882), but in this context is an honoured thematic device.

Where the piece has traits that are not typical of the average shanty, those traits often still comply with the rules of other genres and styles contemporary with the shanty, despite the overall modern sound of the piece. This is particularly evident in the final verse, which ceases to be a shanty (by definition a rhythmic work song) because it abandons a rhythmic marching beat and percussion, but which introduces the lament bass harmonic progression and utilises free rhythmic timing, both well-attested devices of Western art music of the Romantic period,¹ which was contemporary with the shanty form’s rise. Even lyrically, the bridge (“… When it’s my time to go / Won’t you lay me down …”) is a fairly traditional elegy/lament of the “Unfortunate Lad” genre seen more lately (Waltz & Engle, 2021) in, e.g., the “St James Infirmary Blues” (Redman, 1928: “When I die, want you to dress me …”).

Despite “Sleeping’s” links to the historical shanty form and its contemporaries, however, the reason I think I’m obsessed with this piece is how it moves beyond them.

The shanty rose and fell pretty much entirely within the 19th century, predating the mass integration of women into the workforce (Yellen, 2020). In “Sleeping,” the shantyman is Damhnait Doyle/Captain Vala Glarios — Doyle is the featured contralto vocalist, and is also the VA for Vala, the antagonist of Call of the Tempestarii, from whose point of view the song implicitly takes place. By focusing on a female vocalist and a female commander, “Sleeping” sets itself apart from the male-dominated classic form.

The framing of the song around Doyle’s vocal compass also affects the compass used by the male harmony vocalists, i.e., they have to adapt to her, rather than the other way around. My experience as a choral performer and arranger is that especially for performance works emulating this genre, the vocal compass will typically be determined with an eye to keeping the basses in the G₂—D₃ range in order to show off their impressive resonance. Altos are notoriously underused and neglected in choral music (Meek, 2014); framing the entire song to show off the capabilities of a featured contralto vocalist marks a strong break with that tradition.

I mentioned before that where “Sleeping” steps outside the shanty form it often does so in a conservative fashion, respecting other period forms, but even that conservatism can often produce a modern sound. One of the key rules of common practice period vocal harmony (e.g. Onyemachi, n.d.) is that the top and bottom voices should move in contrary motion where possible (when the top voice moves up, the bottom voice should move down, and vice versa). The choral response sections of “Sleeping” follow this rule, as well as the other common practice vocal harmony rules, with what sounds like absolute faithfulness, but they produce a distinctively modern sound specifically because of the way they use this well-travelled device.

There are certainly aspects where “Sleeping” steps boldly outside the form altogether. For example, syncopation is ubiquitous in modern popular music, but is not typical of the classic shanty form, which was obsolete before syncopation in its modern usage became prominent. In most prominent examples of the classic shanty form, the lyrical and rhythmic emphasis is typically kept on the strong beats, and shorter words are stretched over multiple notes as necessary to preserve that emphasis. “Sleeping” is interesting in that the call is reliably unsyncopated, but the response, containing the title lyric, is reliably syncopated, distinctively synthesising two musical dialects that never lived in the same time.

Even beyond the vocal aspect, the orchestration of “Sleeping” subtly sets itself apart from the form it imitates. There are a couple of relevant examples — pan flute is used to provide some orchestral accents, and sustained, booming, low-pitched piano intervals are used to fill out the bass register in mid-song; neither instrument tended to show up on English or Dutch merchantmen — but the most prominent example is the bassline proper.

For much of the song, the bassline is an ostinato (repeating pattern) consisting mostly of 3 beats of G and one beat of D. The ostinato instrument sounds fairly similar to a hurdy-gurdy/organ drone. Like the steamship whistle, this is technically anachronistic — in this case, too old; the hurdy-gurdy is strongly associated with the Renaissance (Nypaver & Fredrickson, 2020), comfortably before the 19th century which birthed the shanty. However, the ostinato includes a portamento (pitch bend) from G to D and back again — a difference of seven full semitones. Hurdy-gurdy drone strings cannot pitch-bend that far, and the kind of organ being discussed here (which as a keyboard instrument had discrete pitch keys) could not pitch-bend at all. While portamento was possible in the art music of the time, it was thought of negatively when it was thought of at all (Potter, 2006). Use of portamento in a bass ostinato is a distinctively 21st-century touch.

Finally, “Sleeping” does an excellent job of lore integration. A considerable risk of trying to make a work that relies on a fictional conceptual vocabulary — in this case, a song set in a fictional universe — is unintentional, or at least unwanted, bathos, i.e., what is often referred to as “melodrama” or simply “cringe.” When you try to insert original fictional words and concepts into a classic real-world form, the result can often be unintentional comedy because there is too much of a dissonance between the shiny new poorly developed thing and the rich storied form into which it is being inserted (as with, e.g., Battlestar Galactica — “frak” is a 1:1 replacement for “fuck,” but it just doesn’t hit the same way).

On the other hand, if you try to insert a classic real-world form into a cutting-edge speculative story without modification, that also seems pretentious and bathetic because you are trying to set up a poetic resonance between the image-heavy past and present and your weightless future (the way that, if you depicted a drumbeat being used literally to organise the activities of a starship, it would probably just be kind of silly).

“Sleeping” navigates this really well by observing a “bridge” of lyrical concepts which are applicable both to the merchant marine of the 19th century and the grim darkness of the far future. In no particular order:

• “Sailing” is something that both ocean and space vessels can do, using respectively a conventional sail and a solar sail.
• “Sailing to the sun” has a wealth of meanings. Sailing ships can sail to the sun, i.e. they can move under wind power in an eastward direction. However, space ships can also sail to the Sun; they can move toward Sol in a “sailing” fashion, i.e. by moving quickly and with little resistance typically using momentum imparted by an initial surge of force, like a baseball sailing over a fence, or like a rocket sailing into orbit.
• “Sleeping in the cold below,” without context, evokes the concept of dying and being sent to Davy Jones’ locker, the sailors’ hell, overseen by the demonic Davy Jones. In this case, it describes death in the Void, in Warframe canon a “hellspace where science and reason failed” (“Codex entry: Excalibur,” n.d.) with its own demonic avatar, the Man in the Wall.
• “Where the winds don’t blow” at first appears to be an out-of-place exclusively oceanic image; you can only have wind in an atmosphere, there is no atmosphere in space, therefore there is nothing for wind to blow in, no expectation that the wind should blow, and the statement “where the winds don’t blow” seems nonsensical. However, stars also have atmospheres, and stellar coronae emit solar wind, the kind used by solar sails. “Sleeping” refers to a journey into the Void, an extradimensional plane which contains no stars — and where the winds therefore do not blow.

Where non-real-world concepts appear, the text focuses on describing them poetically, rather than trying to shoehorn in exposition through song. Lore character Parvos Granum has a fully articulated cybernetic golden prosthetic hand — a less talented or more ironic lyricist might have focused on the robotic nature of the hand. Instead, the text focuses on the fairly timeless image of a golden hand. In the two instances where Warframe-specific concepts appear (“Granum Crowns,” “Solar Rail”), they are couched in a sufficiently rich lyrical context for even a naïve listener to immediately understand them.

In sum, I guess my point isn’t that “Sleeping In The Cold Below” is a piece everyone must subjectively love or be wrong — I subjectively loved the shit out of it, but I can quite easily understand if a neutral observer might take it or leave it. It is, however, my firm opinion that “Sleeping In The Cold Below” exhibits craftsmanship which is thorough and involved to an incredible degree.

It’s not that the song itself is, must be, epoch-defining — it’s great, it’s fucking astonishing, but many things are. It’s that a (single or collective) composer who can write this is a composer whose thought processes I feel humbled and challenged by. If they can do this, what else can they do?

Footnotes

1. Musicology nerds will say that the lament bass is not a Romantic device because it was attested as far back as the Baroque, for example famously in “Dido’s lament” from Dido and Aeneas (1689). They will be technically correct, the best kind of correct. In this post, I am referring to the resurgence of the lament bass in the Romantic through the musical form called the complaint or lament, which relied on the lament bass as an essential part.

References

Agnew, V. (2011, February 8). A Scots Orpheus in the South Seas: Encounter music on Cook’s second voyage. Journal for Maritime Research, 3(1), 1-27. doi:10.1080/21533369.2001.9668310.

A history of sea shanties (2021). Royal Museums Greenwich.

Alden, W.L. (1882, July). Sailor songs. Harpers Magazine.

Barrington, G. (2004). Voyage to Botany Bay and sequel (SUP Classics ed.). Sydney University Press. (Original work published 1795.)

Barton, L. (2011, June 22). Interview — Waves of emotion: What makes a great sea shanty?. The Guardian.

Bryant, G. (1978). Officers of the East India Company’s army in the days of Clive and Hastings. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 6(3), 203-227. doi:10.1080/03086537808582508.

Codex entry: Excalibur (n.d.). Digital Extremes.

Davis, B. (2021, February 19). What kind of drum did pirates use?. mvorganizing.org.

Evans, N. (2021, January 23). Wellerman [YouTube video]. YouTube.

Forsyth, C., & Upadhyaya, N. (2013). The spectre of Crown immunity after the end of Empire in Hong Kong and India. Asia Pacific Law Review, 21(2), 253-265. doi:10.1080/10192557.2013.11788275.

Mambra, S. (2021, September 3). Ghost ship: The mysterious Flying Dutchman. Marine Insight.

Meek, A.G. (2014, February 5). An alto’s-eye view of choral music. Your Classical.

Nypaver, A., & Fredrickson, A. (2020, August 11). What is a hurdy gurdy? — Meaning, music & parts. Study.com.

Onyemachi, C. (n.d.). 5 important contrapuntal motions every classical musician must know. Hear and Play.

Potter, J. (2006, November). Beggar at the door: The rise and fall of portamento in singing. Music & Letters, 87(4), 523-550.

Redman, D. (1928). St James infirmary blues [performed by Louis Armstrong]. YouTube.

Stern, P.J. (2012, December 21). “A Politie of civill & military Power”: Political thought and the late seventeenth-century foundations of the East India Company-state. Journal of British Studies, 47(2), 253-283. doi:10.1086/526759.

Taylor, B. (2013, November 7). The rise and fall of the largest corporation in history. Insider.

The Quid, or tales of my messmates: Being a colection [sic] of yarns, ditties, quid-ditties, and od-ditties — By a steerage passenger (1832). W. Strange.

Waltz, R.B., & Engle, D.G. (2021). The unfortunate rake [File No. VWL108]. In R.B. Waltz & D.G. Engle (Eds.), The traditional ballad index. California State University, Fresno.

Yellen, J.L. (2020, May). The history of women’s work and wages and how it has created success for us all. Brookings Institution.

Who taught us transphobia, and what the fuck is going on?

Typically, in the citation style I am using here — APA 7 style — sources would be sorted in alphabetical order by author surname, then by date of publication. However, I have opted to use two different sort orders, detailed below.

The citation to Estrada (2012) is to the paper itself via Sci-Hub.se, in the interests of accessibility. Given Sci-Hub’s legally contested status, the link will likely be dead before the end of 2021. However, sufficient information remains available that a future reader should be able to track down the original paper and possibly access it through another Sci-Hub mirror or similar website.

Evidence of trans people’s existence before modern institutional transphobia

Sources in this section are sorted roughly by the historical era of the person or people whom they examine.

Morgan, C. (2017, May 2). Evidence for trans lives in Sumer. Notches.

Ball, S. (2017, November 11). The chill Roman priests who worshipped a goddess and castrated themselves. Vice.

Mijatovic, A. (n.d.). A brief biography of Elagabalus: The transgender ruler of Rome. In A. Mejia, A. Mijatovic, S. Barajas, A. Benck, A. Klebine, … & A. Herrera (Eds.), Challenging gender boundaries: A trans biography project by students of Dr. Catherine Jacquet. OutHistory.

Nambiar, S. (2017, January 1). A brief history of hijra, India’s third gender. Culture Trip.

Whitaker, B. (2016, July 26). Part 2: A history of ambiguity. In B. Whitaker (Ed.), Transgender issues in the Middle East. Medium.

Estrada, G. (2012, January 16). Two Spirits, nádleeh, and LGBTQ2 Navajo gaze. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35(4), 167-190. doi:10.17953/aicr.35.4.x500172017344j30.

Brandman, M. (2021, June). We’wha (1849-1896). National Women’s History Museum.

Kalonymus ben Kalonymus: Transgender history gets a pat on the head (2017, October 16). Cuil Press.

Gallant, L.D. (2020, December 18). The trial and travels of Eleanor Rykener: A transgender woman and sex worker in 14th century England. ArcGIS StoryMaps.

Holmes, J.J. (2019, December 8). Twitter has a field day discovering Public Universal Friend, genderless Quaker of the 1700s. LGBTQ Nation.

Gabbatt, A. (2017, August 22). What trans soldier Albert Cashier can teach Trump about patriotism. The Guardian.

Riedel, S. (2019, February 27). James Barry is not your Rorschach test. Them.

Who is currently creating transphobia?

Sources in this section are sorted by date of publication without respect to author surname.

Leveson Report: Press has failed to respect the dignity of trans people (2012, November 29). PinkNews.

Kaveney, R. (2017, December 5). Transphobia is the latest weapon in a raging culture war. red pepper.

Barker, M.J. (2017, December 27). 2017 review: The transgender moral panic. Rewriting the Rules.

Dommu, R. (2018, May 21). Why the British media is so transphobic. Them.

Gleeson, J.J. (2018, June 27). Trans ethics, not gender ideology: Against the Church and the gender critics. Verso.

Blondiau, E. (2019, June 12). 5 trans Catholics on the Vatican’s rejection of their gender identity. Vox.

Jacques, J. (2020, March 9). Transphobia is everywhere in Britain. New York Times.

Robertson, G. (2020, June 12). Where J.K. Rowling’s transphobia comes from. Vanity Fair.

Penny, L. (2020, June 16). TERF wars: Why transphobia has no place in feminism. Medium.

Pearce, R., Erikainen, S., & Vincent, B. (2020, August 10). TERF wars: An introduction. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 677-698. doi:10.1177/0038026120934713.

Duffy, N. (2020, September 29). Liz Truss lavished praise on anti-trans think tank Heritage Foundation just weeks before equalities minister appointment. PinkNews.

Butterworth, B. (2020, October 30). BBC staff told attending LGBT pride protests in any capacity can breach new impartiality rules. i news.

Wells, V.S. (2021, January 20). British media is increasingly transphobic. Here’s why. Xtra.

Karijo, A. (2021, March 31). Stop imposing your imperialist Western transphobia on my people. openDemocracy.

Parsons, V. (2021, March 31). Transphobia in Commonwealth countries is an injustice left over from British colonialism. It’s time we addressed it. PinkNews.

Hughson, G. (2021, May 27). Who’s financing the ‘anti-gender’ movement in Europe?. NAM News & Opinion.

Wilson-McDonald, A.N. (2021, June 7). Eastern Europe’s anti-gender movement and what it means for America. Ms magazine.

Crikey recently published a piece (Deves, 2021) by anti-trans activist Katherine Deves. There were a number of places in which the writing, editing and truth value of the piece was less than satisfactory, so I decided to point them out.

This piece is written with the intent of being readable in a linear fashion from start to finish, but its primary intent is as a fisking — an exhaustive, line-by-line refutation — and expansion of a similarly-structured Twitter thread I wrote on the subject. I expect if it is used in the future it will primarily be used for reference purposes, but I think I may also write a redux of this piece to make the same arguments in a more efficient fashion.

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Glossary

As I would like this post to be transparent to a non-trans audience, here is a glossary of selected terms used.

Androgens. The class of hormones which regulate the development and maintenance of male characteristics. Notable androgens include testosterone (T), dihydrotestosterone, and androstenedione.

Argument from ignorance. The assertion that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false, or vice versa.

Assigned female at birth (AFAB). What happens to a baby of whom it is said “It’s a girl!”

Assigned male at birth (AMAB). What happens to a baby of whom it is said “It’s a boy!”

Australasia (noun). A region comprising at least Australia and New Zealand, plus a number of neighbouring islands (varying depending on the specific sense of “Australasia” being used).

Canard. An idea or piece of information that is false, especially one that is spread deliberately in order to harm someone or their work.

Cisfeminine (adjective). The quality of the gender of someone who was assigned female at birth and has a predominantly feminine gender identity and presentation.

Cis (adjective). Cisgender.

Cisgender (adjective). Of a person, having a gender identity corresponding to the sex one was assigned at birth. Coined by analogy to “transgender,” but replacing the prefix trans- (“on the other side of”) with cis- (“on this side of”).

Dogwhistle, or dog whistle (noun). An item of coded or suggestive language used in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition.

Endogenous (adjective). Having a cause or origin within the body. Opposite of exogenous.

Endosex (adjective). Of a person or their body, having socially or medically normative sex characteristics. Opposite of intersex.

Estrogen (noun). A category of sex hormones responsible for the development and regulation of the female reproductive system and secondary sex characteristics. Notable estrogens include estrone (E₁), estradiol (E₂), estriol (E₃), and estetrol (E₄).

Exogenous (adjective). Having a cause or origin outside the body. Opposite of endogenous.

Feminising HRT (noun phrase). The HRT regimen taken by trans women and other transfeminine people. Typically includes an antiandrogen (“T blocker”), an estrogen, and occasionally a progestogen.

Gonad (noun). A mixed gland which produces an organism’s gametes (sperm or eggs) and sex hormones (most prominently estrogens, progesterone, and testosterone).

HRT (abbreviation). Hormone replacement therapy. The medication regimen taken by trans people to effect physiological changes in their body toward their identified gender.

Intersex (adjective). Of a person or their body, having chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals which do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.

IOC. The International Olympic Committee, the body that organises the Olympics.

Karyotype (noun).

1. The process of determining the number of chromosomes an individual has and any variations within those chromosomes.
2. A test which makes that determination.
3. The number and nature of the chromosomes detected by such a test.

With regard to meaning #3, a karyotype is usually given in the format (number,sex chromosomes). For example, someone with karyotype 46,XY has 46 chromosomes, including X and Y sex chromosomes.

LGBTQ+ (abbreviation). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and related communities. A relatively current popular usage (with slight variations) because it seems to strike a balance between inclusivity and practicality.

nmol/L (abbreviation). Nanomoles per litre, an SI derived unit for the concentration of a substance within a solution.

Nondimorphic (adjective). The quality of development of sex characteristics, etc., other than as would be expected for an individual of that nominal sex within that species.

Pronouns (plural noun). In this case, specifically third-person gendered singular pronouns: he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs.

Realpolitik (noun). An approach to politics based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral and ethical premises.

Sexual dimorphism (noun). The condition where two sexes of the same species exhibit different characteristics beyond the differences in their sexual organs.

T (abbreviation). Testosterone.

TERF (abbreviation). Trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Used here in general reference to the anti-trans movement as a whole.

Transfeminine (adjective). The quality of the gender of someone who was assigned male at birth and has a predominantly feminine gender identity or presentation.

Transmasculine (adjective). The quality of the gender of someone who was assigned female at birth and has a predominantly masculine gender identity or presentation.

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1. Deves degenders Laurel Hubbard.

The article focuses on NZ weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who is a trans woman. At no point does Deves refer to Hubbard with any feminine-gendered term whatsoever; she does not refer to her using either an honorific (Miss, Mrs, Ms, etc.) or a singular feminine third-person pronoun (she, her, etc.). Where Deves refers to Hubbard specifically, she refers to her only by her name.

This is what I have heard described as “punitive degendering,” a tactic in popular use by transphobes against trans people. A relatively recent prominent example occurred when a teacher in the US state of Virginia was fired for refusing to use a transmasculine student’s pronouns at all and referring to him only by his name, despite having made multiple previous agreements and been given multiple chances to do otherwise (Armus, 2019).

2. Deves calls Hubbard a “transwoman.”

“Transwoman” is not a term which enjoys currency in the trans community; the preferred term is “trans woman,” with a space (Gender Minorities Aotearoa, 2020). The reason is that “transwoman” frames transness as a fundamental and defining aspect of the subjects’ womanhood, implicitly setting them apart and marking them as a third gender (Trans Guernsey, 2021). The fact is that trans women are women in the same sense that cis women are; “trans” is simply a descriptive adjective, like “tall” or “Australian.”

While “transwoman” was once a relatively standard term in general use, and it is not at all uncommon for it to be used innocently by people who don’t know, it is now sufficiently strongly associated with TERF politics to be widely recognised as a dogwhistle.

3. Deves refers to Hubbard as “male-born.”

This is a fundamental misrepresentation of “birth sex” as something metaphysically real, intrinsic, and immutable. In actual fact, sex is assigned at birth — i.e., a clinician says, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” — by visual inspection of the genitalia (Reiner, 2002).

However, this is insufficient to actually determine sex; even the relatively conservative mainline model of “biological sex” which is currently conventional holds that there are multiple determinants of sex, including chromosomes, genitalia, gonads, and hormone levels (Sax, 2002; United Nations Committee against Torture et al., 2016). Consequently, sex assignment at birth is essentially a best guess for functional reasons, rather than a statement about a material reality.

This also means Deves’ argument contradicts itself at a very fundamental level; for more information on that, see #27 below.

4. Deves refers to Hubbard as a “trans-identified male.”

This particular framing of trans womanhood is both offensive and objectively inaccurate. However, that isn’t why it’s interesting; trans women are subjected to many things that are offensive and objectively inaccurate.

What makes it interesting is what it conveys about Kath Deves. “Trans-identified male” is a well-attested, widely-recognised dogwhistle (Mouche, 2020; Stone, 2020; Spectrum, 2021). It is used specifically because (Mouche, op. cit.) it avoids acknowledging a trans person’s actual gender; more than any notional linguistic function it might have, it is a term of deliberate exclusion and disrespect.

5. Deves refers to Helen Joyce’s book as “bestselling.”

This is a minor quibble, but while “bestselling” is an extremely broad term at this point, using it to refer to Joyce’s book is stretching it arguably further than it bears. For example, Joyce herself is currently waxing triumphant over her book being #7 on the Sunday Times general hardbacks bestseller list (Joyce, 2021) — a list noted for having a threshold for entry so low that “the list doesn’t mean anything,” and for at least one case of an author simply buying up half their own print run to get to roughly where Joyce is (Hoffelder, 2020).

At date, on the Amazon Kindle bestseller charts, the currently released Kindle edition of Joyce’s book is sitting around a comfortable 16,000th overall. It appears to have been the subject of what is known as “category hacking” (see Gaughran, 2021), putting it in the Transgender Rights & Expression category; in that category, it is currently trailing the 2011 edition of Jan Morris’ Conundrum and the 2016 audiobook edition of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl.

6. Deves suggests “women’s bodies were designed.”

This is, once again, a minor quibble, but this choice of words implies the acceptance of a teleological argument, i.e., that complex functionality in the natural world must have been designed by an intelligent creator (“An intelligently designed response,” 2007). The teleological argument is essentially the philosophical spearhead of the creationist movement (Scott & Matzke, 2007).

There’s an air of “it’s turtles all the way down”. TERF groups worldwide have consistently had, and continue to have, durable relationships with far-right Christian groups, including organisationally cooperating with, sharing strategy with, and even being funded by them (Baker, 2017; Barthélemy, 2017; Burns, 2019; Glenza, 2020; George, 2021). The anti-trans movement’s general plan of attack has typically been consistent with a specific document issued by the US Family Research Council in 2015 (O’Leary & Sprigg, 2015). The wave of state-level “protecting women’s sports” legislation in 2020 was spearheaded by the Christian-conservative Republican Party. The lawsuit against trans athletes described in #14, below, was bankrolled (Ennis, 2020) by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a well-known Christian anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group (Percelay, 2015).

Deves is part of Save Women’s Sports Australasia, which describes itself as a satellite group of Speak Up For Women NZ. SUFW—NZ represents itself as non-partisan and non-religiously-affiliated (Speak Up For Women NZ, 2019), and claims to be funded by small private donations, as other TERF groups have in the past (Baker, 2017). However, its primary political allies have been the socially conservative New Zealand National Party (Small, 2021), led by Judith Collins MP, who is considered unusually Christian (Latif, 2020).

Deves’ use of the teleological argument here, therefore, may be a Freudian slip, or from another point of view an example of “crossing the streams.”

7. Deves engages in not only lies and damned lies, but statistics.

the average adult man has 41% more non-fat body mass, 50% more muscle mass in his legs, and 75% more in his arms than the average adult woman.

Deves (2021)

Deves frames this statement in a way that suggests it directly applies to Laurel Hubbard and other transfeminine athletes. However, it indisputably does not — feminising HRT is robustly established as causing a significant increase in body fat percentage and decrease in lean mass (Klaver et al., 2017; Klaver et al., 2018; Suppakitjanusant et al., 2020) and decrease in muscle mass (Radix, 2016; Tangpricha & den Heijer, 2017; Wesp & Deutsch, 2017; etc.).

Even without taking into account the magnitude of these effects, their existence means that representing the athletic parameters of cis men as applying to trans women is overtly false.

8. Deves implies trans women’s performance is enhanced by testosterone.

[The IOC’s limit for trans women of] 10 nanomoles per litre [of testosterone] is still many times higher than the average [cis] woman. As disgraced former cycling champion Lance Armstrong knows only too well, testosterone is a very efficient performance-enhancing hormone.

Deves (op. cit.)

There is a fundamental flaw in this argument, but we’ll come to that in a second. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that athletic performance is linked directly to endogenous testosterone (the amount of testosterone being produced and processed by the body).

First, if it is true that athletic performance is linked directly to testosterone levels, then it’s relevant that every feminising HRT protocol includes testosterone blockers. Standard blockers include cyproterone acetate/Androcur and spironolactone/Aldactone (Hembree et al., 2017); other commonly used blockers include bicalutamide/Casodex (Randolph, 2018) and enzalutamide/Xtandi (Fishman et al., 2019). All are used for and are known to be effective in suppressing testosterone produced and/or processed to within the range normal for cis women, hence their use.

In the second place, however, all this is rendered irrelevant by that fundamental flaw: There is actually no link whatsoever between endogenous testosterone and sports performance (Ivy & Conrad, 2018). Cis male athletes with unaltered endogenous T (“UET”) of 0.5 nmol/L are competing against cis male athletes with UET of 40 nmol/L with no perceptible competitive disadvantage. The reason for this is that every person’s body is used to processing a given level of endogenous T. Performance benefits are only available if, as Lance Armstrong did, you artificially boost your T levels above the set point by taking exogenous T (i.e., T produced outside the body).

Consequently, the degree to which trans women’s endogenous production or processing of testosterone is suppressed is irrelevant; due to their high UET set point, they receive less benefit per nmol/L T than cis women with the same serum T level.

9. Deves asserts that “sex is a spectrum” is a subjective belief.

The contention that “sex is a spectrum” is a subjective belief is a fairly popular trans-exclusionary canard (Rosario Sánchez & Graham, 2019; Wright, 2020; Wright & Hilton, 2020). It is not, however, substantiated by the science. For example, on the topic which is the focus of Deves’ article — testosterone levels — there is significant overlap between endosex cis men and endosex cis women (Keevil et al., 2017).

In general, there is simply no meaningful professional controversy over the spectral distribution of sex (Ainsworth, 2015; Brusman, 2017). Every trait recognised as a determinant of sex — karyotype, mutation profile, genital structure, gonad morphology, hormone levels — has a panoply of options which manifest in a massive variety of different sex phenotypes. It is estimated that the total number of people displaying distinctly nondimorphic sexual development not qualifying for specific classification could be almost 100 times larger than the total number of people who are officially intersex (Blackless et al., 2000).

10. Deves contradicts herself on “biological sex.”

99.98% of human beings are born unambiguously, immutably and observably male or female, and the material reality of being born into a male or female sexed body cannot be overridden

Deves (op. cit.)

Deves is calling for the universal application of rules based on binary sex assignment at birth. However, even the extremely conservative figure she cites here — the lower-end estimate of the number of babies born with ambiguous genitalia (Witchel, 2018) — makes that philosophically impossible; even if it were the case that only 0.02% of human beings were not able to be classified as endosex male or female at birth (and, for the sake of simplicity, trans people didn’t exist), that would still prevent the universal applicability of rules based on binary sex assignment at birth.

11. Deves alleges a “collision of incompatible, competing rights.”

Since Deves fails to note which specific rights are incompatible or competing here, this appears to be a reference to the general TERF canard of “sex-based rights.” This is an import from the UK anti-trans agglomeration; it did not stand up to scrutiny there (Gellman, 2021) and has not travelled well.

12. Deves implies that sporting organisations are caving to pressure.

“Nobody wants to be seen as failing to play along with this notion of progressivism, nobody wants to be accused of failing to demonstrate sufficient allegiance, …”

The main problem with this argument is that it is not, in fact, true; sporting authorities have been and continue to be quite comfortable with opposing progressive trans politics and openly antagonising trans athletes, with or without a demonstrable purpose. The State of Texas was content to compel teenage trans boy Mack Beggs to wrestle in the girls’ division in 2019, notwithstanding that as he was taking exogenous testosterone, he did in fact have a demonstrable advantage (Reuters, 2017). World Athletics, then the International Association of Athletics Federations, was quite happy to exclude trans women with greater than 5 nmol/L testosterone in 2019 (Francis, 2019). The only reason the IOC was not able to further tighten its regulations on transfeminine athletes in 2019 was because the science did not in fact allow it to do so (Ingle, “IOC delays,” 2019).

Plenty of people are quite comfortable with being seen as opposing trans participation in sports, in the national and international spotlight. Arguably the number is in fact increasing. The idea, despite this, that people are under pressure to “play along” and “demonstrate sufficient allegiance” is a construction deliberately designed to allow the reader to feel enough victimhood to justify striking back.

13. Deves says “nobody is stopping to think about what ‘inclusion’ actually means.”

Given that Deves knows, at a bare minimum, that the IOC regulates the circumstances under which trans athletes can be included, and does so in order to achieve a specific set of circumstances, Deves therefore certainly knows that the proposition that “nobody is stopping to think about what ‘inclusion’ actually means” is untrue.

14. Deves presents her hypotheses about “what happens to women and girls” as fact.

When [trans women] are included in the female category, what happens to the women and girls? They miss a spot on the team, they self-exclude, they are withdrawn by their parents, they are silenced if they resist, they lose out on the opportunity for prizes and scholarships and are threatened with loss of sponsorship.

Deves (op. cit.)

This is, false on a couple of levels. I decided to examine “they are silenced if they resist” in a separate bullet point (see #15, below) because it isn’t of a piece with the rest, which I will examine in this one.

In the first place, “they self-exclude” and “they are withdrawn by their parents” are not actually valid arguments for negative effects on cis women in any case. If trans women and girls are included in women’s sports, and cis women or girls choose to withdraw, or cis girls are withdrawn by their parents, the root cause isn’t trans women and girls’ (invisible) “biological advantage” — because one hasn’t been demonstrated to exist.

What has been demonstrated in any such cases is that the party that chooses to withdraw feels sufficiently strong dislike toward trans women to believe things about them that have no meaningful prospect of being true. Transphobia is not trans women’s responsibility; to suggest otherwise is victim-blaming, of an all too familiar kind.

In the second place, “they lose out on the opportunity for prizes and scholarships” is an oft-cited canard with no basis in fact. The “prizes and scholarships” argument has been circulating for years, but as of late March this year (Newberry, 2021) — and to the best of my ability to determine, since then — it has never actually happened, to the point of NCAA coaching personnel explicitly speaking out against the perception that it had (Quimby, 2021).

One of the flagship cases for this argument is the one brought by co-plaintiffs Alanna Smith, Chelsea Mitchell and Selina Soule, arguing that “forcing them to compete against [trans girls] isn’t fair, shatters their dreams, and destroys their athletic opportunities,” and advancing the argument that trans girls had an insurmountable biological advantage (Ennis, 2021).

However, that case was undermined from the word go. As it turned out, both Mitchell and Soule had beaten trans athletes in the year prior to filing the case (Ennis, 2020). Within eight days of the news conference announcing the case, Mitchell, whose athletic scholarship to NCAA D1 school William & Mary (deSimas, 2019) apparently survived intact, twice defeated one of the girls she had claimed to be unable to beat (Webb, 2020). Soule, meanwhile, also chose to go to an NCAA D1 school, but did not qualify for a scholarship — and ultimately, while she has gotten to run at Charleston, she did not perform sufficiently well even to get onto the track and field roster there (Ennis, 2021).

15. Deves says that opponents of trans participation in sport are “silenced if they resist.”

This assertion does not stand up to critical examination, at either the macro- or micro-level. For being silenced, opponents of trans participation have an absolutely remarkable record of either being extensively quoted and cited in, or actually writing for, major platforms such as the Daily Mail (Morgan, 2021), The Economist (“Why are transgender Olympians …?”, 2021) The Guardian (Ingle, “How can we end … ?,” 2019), the National Review (Holcomb, 2021), NBC News (Yurcaba, 2021), the New York Post (Spitznagel, 2021), Sky News Australia (2021), USA Today (Stanescu, 2020; Mir & Schilling, 2021), and Yahoo! News (Schorr, 2021).

Even this specific article opposing trans women’s participation in sport is in Crikey, “the most popular website in Parliament House” (Latham, 2005). If your political philosophy can be uncritically published and endorsed in an e-zine noted for its popularity with the people who literally govern its country of publication, “silenced” may not be the word.

16. Deves calls Dr Joanna Harper a “transactivist”.

This specific and rather inorganic verbal construction is fairly obviously designed to parallel “transwoman.” This is typical of anti-trans language games; the previous term du jour for people defending trans rights was TRA (trans rights activist), clearly intended to evoke an association with the incel-adjacent movement known as men’s rights activists or MRAs.

At date, “transactivist” is emerging as a replacement for “TRA,” the former term having become too obviously a loaded, pejorative dogwhistle. The first page of Google for “transactivist” returns results showing uncritical use of the term by Lily Maynard, Mumsnet, and Wings Over Scotland, among other individuals and groups known primarily for their anti-trans political orientation (“Weekly wanker #017,” 2013; Livingston, 2018; Lewis, 2019).

17. Deves frames Dr Harper as the driving force behind the IOC’s Consensus.

In particular, in not describing who was actually on the committee, Deves allows the impression to be given, in effect, that Dr Harper flimflammed an assortment of well-meaning generalists into making concessions to the woke mob. In actual fact, the membership of the committee included (International Olympic Committee, 2015) two former IOC Medical & Scientific Commission chairmen, as well as senior international experts in genomics, gynaecology, paediatrics, sports sciences and medicine, and urology.

By an interesting coincidence, the members of the committee included two academics from the Karolinska Institute (KI), which was then and is now notorious for either becoming entangled with (Dhejne et al., 2011; Williams & Dhejne, 2014), or leaning into (Gräffin et al., 2021; Parsons, 2021), scientific legitimisation of transphobia. The KI academics who were present had previously explicitly voiced the opposite stance to Dr Harper, in Chand v. Athletics Federation of India et al. (2014) — yet Deves makes no representation that their presence led undue weight to a biased view.

It is not in serious dispute that the committee was more than qualified to evaluate the evidence placed in front of them (i.e. Harper, 2015), and that they made their decision on that basis.

18. Deves calls Dr Harper’s work “methodologically flawed.”

This is a particularly interesting assertion to present as objective and well-established fact. It appears to be traceable back to an opinion piece published on Medium (Lee, 2019). The writer of that piece openly refuses to cite sources for her analysis and makes a number of unevidenced assertions about how Harper’s work must have been done — yet Deves presents this as if it were widely accepted and wholly uncontroversial.

19. Deves implies that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

A year later, committee panellists acknowledged a “paucity of evidence” on this issue

Deves (op. cit.)

What Deves is doing here is executing an argument from ignorance — giving undue weight to the idea that additional research will necessarily change the Committee’s position on the issue. A lack of evidence does not, in and of itself, imply anything whatsoever (Altman & Bland, 1995).

20. Deves claims offhand that the IOC has “chosen to ignore recent research.”

I would love to investigate this claim in more depth, but Deves does not clarify or provide supporting material to establish what she meant — not an uncommon trait, as trans-hostile reactionaries tend to find it rather inconvenient to be bound by the empirical facts.

In any case, however, inferring from context, it appears possible that Deves is taking advantage of a delay in the IOC’s action to falsely portray it as taking no action. The IOC moved to tighten its rules to exclude more trans athletes in 2019, but suspended implementing the changes after strong and consistent objection from medical and scientific experts (Ingle, “IOC delays,” 2019). The final form of the rules changes is scheduled to be implemented after the Tokyo Games; the announcement is attracting significant trepidation from trans athletes who fear that after almost two intervening years of increasingly vicious anti-trans campaigning, the new rules may constitute anything up to a complete rollback and ban of any trans participation whatsoever (Lavoipierre, 2021).

If the new rules confirm the status quo or liberalise participation standards further, the onus will continue to be on Deves and her co-ideologists to show that “recent research” was not taken into account in their formulation. If the new rules are stricter than the current rules, however, Deves will only be incorrect insofar as she will have shown ingratitude for the IOC’s support of her position.

21. Deves makes spurious claims about “competitive advantage.”

It is extraordinarily naive or wilfully ignorant of the IOC to trust that this will not be exploited by any athlete or nation seeking to gain even the slightest competitive advantage.

Deves (op. cit.)

This argument is critically undermined by the fact that the current guidelines were in place at the Rio 2016 and PyeongChang 2018 Olympics and yet no athlete and no nation “sought to exploit” them then — before Tokyo, no trans athletes ran at all. It is further undermined by the fact that there have, in fact, been no recorded cases of any athlete or entity seeking to exploit trans inclusion guidelines in any sport in which they exist. The IOC cannot come to a trust position other than the one it has on the strength of the evidence that actually exists.

22. Deves alleges that “the rules themselves are broken.”

Hubbard, Wolfe and Barrett are not technically cheating, they are not breaking any rules, but when male-born transgender athletes are allowed to compete with women it is clear that the rules themselves are broken.

Deves (op. cit.)

This is a rhetorically interesting and well-crafted paragraph which manages to pack in a particularly dense psychologically charged payload.

In the first place, of course, “not technically cheating” is over-specific in a way which is difficult to read other than as a deliberate accusation. Cheating is, by definition, rules-based: it requires one to subvert the rules in order to obtain unfair advantages. Given that Hubbard and Wolfe — and Barrett, who has been dragooned into this paragraph from the Paralympics apparently for rhetorical effect — are “not technically cheating,” they are actually not cheating in any sense. To imply that there might exist a sense in which they are cheating is a false accusation.

In the second place, “the rules themselves are broken” is a deft use of double meaning. Charitably, the intended meaning is that the rules themselves are inconsistent and nonfunctional. Viewed with an eye to Realpolitik, however, it is a metaphysical restatement of the accusation of cheating — Hubbard, Wolfe, and Barrett may not have broken the rules, but they broke The Rules. Essentially, Deves is implying that there exists an objective moral code which excludes trans women from participating in sports, and presumably relying on her readers, most of whom will be cis, not to notice.

23. Deves uses the false classification “biological male.”

“Biological male” is an attempt to put cis men and trans women in the same box because they were both assigned male at birth. However, like most of Deves’ other attempts to identify trans women with cis men, this classification is fatally flawed.

As we previously discussed, even the more conservative existing models acknowledge multiple determinants of “biological sex” — chromosomes, genitals, gonads, and hormones., at minimum None of those characteristics and no combination of those characteristics is effective in establishing the hard male—female divide to which the label “biological sex” aspires.

24. Deves uses “androgenised” to mislead.

“Due to their androgenised bodies, transwomen have substantial and observable performance advantages … a male’s physiology gives him greater speed, strength, size and stamina”

The only sense in which trans women were “androgenised” is that they once had higher than normal levels of serum testosterone. Of course, Deves avoids mentioning that trans women on HRT are highly estrogenised.

She also avoids mentioning that after starting HRT, trans women lose speed (Harper, 2015), strength (Scharff et al., 2019), and stamina (Harper et al., 2021). Size is a backup argument seemingly intended to evade other criticism, but equally unfounded — even people who underwent a testosterone puberty are not by definition taller or broader, and cisfeminine professional athletes are statistically more likely to be significantly larger (Chang, 2016).

Even if a height differential had existed, professional sports do not typically impose height limits — hence, for example, the infamously often misrepresented MMA bout between Gabi Garcia (6’2”) and Destanie Yarbrough (5’6”), both of whom are cis women. Arguments about the relative size of trans women athletes are, in my experience, never based on a genuine concern about any putative safety and fairness issues that might exist; they are intended to evoke an image of trans women as hulking, musclebound, predatory animals.

25. Deves engages in not only lies and damned lies, but statistics (Pt. II).

Allyson Felix, the fastest woman in the world, is annually beaten by 15,000 men and boys. The world champion US women’s soccer team were beaten by under-15 schoolboys 5-2, as were the Australian Matildas by under-16 schoolboys, 7-0.

Deves (op. cit.)

I would investigate this in depth except that the fundamental objection to it is quite simple: Once again, Deves is knowingly taking statistics about cis men and applying them to trans women, to whom they are not applicable for reasons previously explained.

26. Deves says intersex people are “be[ing] weaponised.”

intersex people repeatedly request for their congenital medical conditions not to be weaponised in this cultural debate around gender

First, Deves commits a historical error by treating the intersex and LGBTQ+ communities as entirely discrete and having no overlap. Intersex people are part of the LGBTIQ+ acronym not (or not only) out of some sort of perceived symbolic resonance, but because they are demonstrably more likely to be LGBTQ+ — over 10 times as likely to be queer (Jones et al., 2016; Gates, 2011) and up to 40 times as likely to be trans (Furtado et al., 2012; Collin et al., 2016). More directly, intersex people are in this fight partly because they are being dragged into it by the side Deves represents.

Second, intersex and LGBTQ+ people have historically worked together because dominant societal norms of sex and gender are used to police both groups out of existence (UN Human Rights Office, 2016). While the failures of LGBTIQ+ groups to serve the particular needs of intersex people have been the subject of comment from both LGBTQ+ and intersex perspectives (Cabral, 2016; Kaggwa, 2016; Koyama, n.d.), the idea that there is no solidarity between intersex and LGBTQ+ people is straightforwardly false (Intersex Human Rights Australia, 2012/2021). To assert that it is the case is characteristic of the “divide and conquer” strategy used to defuse movements for change since time immemorial (Xypolia, 2016).

27. Deves says Christine Mboma, Beatrice Masilingi, and Caster Semenya are “biologically male with Y chromosomes.”

This is false on a number of levels.

Masilingi and Mboma do not have Y chromosomes; that assertion by Deves is straightforwardly false (Berkeley, 2021). According to the Namibia National Olympic Committee, Mboma and Masilingi have been excluded because they have higher-than-average levels of serum testosterone (Namibia National Olympic Committee, 2021). Semenya, meanwhile, has a Y chromosome. However, that does not make her biologically or in any other sense male, for reasons well explained by Savulescu (2019), and she was assigned female at birth (BBC News, 2009).

More fundamentally, this introduces an(other) irreconcilable contradiction in Deves’ line of argument. As I’ve mentioned, “biological sex” is a fatally flawed basis for categorisation, but obviously we have to accept it here arguendo in order to evaluate it. The problem is that no matter which determinant of sex you use, there’s no way of fitting all of Deves’ targets in the same box.

• If Hubbard is “biologically male” because she was assigned male at birth, then Masilingi, Mboma and Semenya are biologically female because they weren’t.
• If Hubbard and Semenya are “biologically male” because they have Y chromosomes, then Masilingi and Mboma are biologically female because they don’t.
• If Masilingi, Mboma and Semenya are “biologically male” because they have high serum testosterone levels, then Hubbard, who has had GCS and is on HRT, is biologically female because she doesn’t.

28. Deves uses the term “disorders of sexual development” (DSD).

Much like “trans-identified male,” the importance of this choice is what it indicates about the author. Brusman (2019) notes that “many intersex advocates argue against the use of DSD as it implies that they need to be ‘fixed.’” Holmes (2011) remarks that DSD “works to paper over a problematic understanding of morphological variation as disease” and “reinstitutionalises clinical power to delineate and silence those marked by the diagnosis[, which is] precisely the point of the new terminology”. This is reflected in community attitudes: Jones et al. (2016, p. 95) noted that 60% of survey respondents characterised their bodies as intersex, while only 3% characterised their bodies as DSD.

In the context of her notional concern for the intersex community, Deves’ choice to use such a deeply disliked and potentially problematic term strikes an odd note. It is, however, fully consistent with media style guidance issued by the Christian-Right-affiliated (Baker, 2017) anti-trans organisation calling itself the Women’s Liberation Front, which stipulates (WoLF, 2021, p. 7) that both “intersex” and “DSD” may be used, but that “DSD” is preferred.

29. Deves invokes the old canard of “protecting women.”

The female sports category must be protected for biological females

Deves (op. cit.)

The notability of this canard isn’t internal to Deves’ argument; it’s external and historical. The arguments of organised bigotry are often set-dressed in such a way as to appear to arise seamlessly from the actions and qualities of the people they oppress. In reality, however, those arguments are almost always simply arguments previously used against completely different groups, then broken and now reforged to serve another day, like some sort of shitty Andúril.

The “innate superiority in sports” argument falls into this category. Its fundamentals are much the same now as they were when the argument was deployed against Black people (Kerr, 2010): the proposition that a demographic is genetically predisposed to athletic dominance; the assertion of the existence of population biological differences without evidence; dismissal of individual effort as a factor in a marginalised group’s success; the reduction of wide variation in human complexity to an unsustainable and oversimplified us-and-them binary; and reliance on a dominant-group readership to feel threatened enough by the relevant minority not to check any of the facts.

While it would be untrue to say that trans people and Black people’s oppressions are fundamentally comparable, it would be true to say that the same bigots have persisted in oppressing each, and those bigots have consequently reused the same tropes.

30. Deves says the issue is a lack of “accept[ance] and inclusi[on] of gender non-conforming males.”

Trying to frame gender variance in male-assigned people and trans womanhood as synonymous is not only contradictory to trans women’s understanding of their own womanhood, but contradictory to the prevailing medical model of gender dysphoria, which is widely considered rather conservative and incomplete.

While transness may entail gender-variant expression and behaviour, trying to conflate the two phenomena intentionally ignores that gender variance is a variance in external gender performance. Transness, meanwhile, is uncontroversially acknowledged (Turban, 2020) as encompassing aspects including one’s relationship to and comfort with gendered peer groups, with gendered social performance and ritual, with shared gendered experience and empathy, and with one’s own body. Acceptance of gender variance in all of its considerable depth and beauty is of vital and indispensable importance — but no amount of acceptance of “gender-nonconforming men” will make trans women stop being women.

31. Deves makes a fallacious claim about what “men” “expect.”

“[cis] men must … [stop] expecting [cis] women and girls to sacrifice the opportunity to play safely and fairly in their own sports.”

This is wrong on two fairly simple levels.

1. Since trans women’s participation in sports has not led to any demonstrable safety or fairness differential, nobody is expecting cis women or girls to sacrifice anything whatsoever.
2. This line of attack presents trans rights as something forced on cis women by cis men. However, cis men have been consistently shown to be more conservative on trans rights than cis women, and it’s not close (Carroll et al., 2012; Stones, 2016; Morgan et al., 2020). The presentation here of a specifically man-powered attack has little to do with reality, but much to do presenting protection of women as a justificatory motive for violence by men, a tactic used to legitimise conflicts from the local to the international (Sjoberg, 2016).

32. Deves falsely implies that trans women are athletically dominant.

This claim is long since discredited, but enjoys continued currency among transphobes because it “feels true.”

Trans people comprise approximately 0.6% of the population. If they were proportionally represented among athletes, of, e.g., the Tokyo Olympic cohort of 11,326, there would be approximately 68 trans competitors. There are 3 total: Laurel Hubbard and Chelsea Wolfe, who are trans women, and Quinn, who is not. Another transfeminine athlete, Tifanny Abreu, failed to qualify.

Of course, since the guidelines which allowed Hubbard and Wolfe to qualify for the Olympics were introduced in November 2015, the claim has been insistently made that there will be a delayed wave of trans women taking over women’s sport.

In August 2011, the US National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) introduced a trans policy that required 12 months of testosterone suppression for trans women. In the intervening time, precisely one trans woman has won a championship title — CeCé Telfer, who took out gold in the Division II 400m hurdles in 2019. Telfer’s time was 2 seconds behind the Division II record and 4 seconds behind the Division I record; meanwhile, in the 100m hurdles, she came 6th. As with the Olympics, a total of 1 gold medallist trans woman out of 70,000+ female athletes in 10 years is in fact a severe underrepresentation proportional to population.

Over the timespan over which formal trans inclusion has meaningfully existed, the prophesied wave of trans women conquering all women’s sports has thoroughly failed to materialise. Under those circumstances, there is no available charitable interpretation of Deves’ “commitment to the bit.”

33. Crikey endorses Deves’ framing.

“What do you think? Do male-born transgender athletes have a right to compete in women’s sports, even if it puts female-born athletes at a biological disadvantage?”

By including this italicised paragraph at the end, Crikey states that it endorses the “male-born” / “female-born” dichotomy, and that it treats the idea that cis women might be at a “biological disadvantage” against trans women as being credible, despite having no basis — other than partisanship — to do so.

34. Deves wouldn’t have a platform if Crikey didn’t platform her.

Some months ago, I watched Kath Deves spreading anti-trans hatred in the comments on a conservative Australian Senator’s Facebook page. She got comprehensively schooled by the first pro-trans commentator to come along, even though that person was clearly fairly jaded and not paying much attention. Even though her opponent wasn’t trying, it appeared easy to publicly show Deves up in an environment where her only legitimating authority was herself and the strength of her arguments — where her opponents had an equal right of reply and she wasn’t legitimised by a well-known masthead.

The anti-trans movement has been characterised by growing support in the upper echelons of the political and media class, but virtually no actual grassroots activism backing it up. The reason is, quite frankly, that assuming a free marketplace of ideas exists, this ideology is not in demand. When Crikey chose to platform Deves, it chose to intervene in the market and prop up an ideological offering which could not survive on its own. Given that the ideology in question is actively harmful and has historically served an onramp to ideologies that were even worse, it is unlikely Crikey‘s decision will soon be forgotten.

Conclusion

This article didn’t have to be published. It made false statements about anatomy, biomechanics, endocrinology, evolutionary biology, genetics, myology, paediatrics, publishing, and urology. It misrepresented the “debate” around trans inclusion, the English language, the intersex community, the political orientation of the mass media, the politics of gender variance, status quo in US politics, and the trans community, and it did so almost certainly knowingly and maliciously in every instance.

Moreover, it contained a sufficient number of obvious dogwhistles that any editor worth their salt could have and should have been alerted to the fascist-friendly and ideologically-driven content of the article, to at least the degree necessary to fact-check it.

If Crikey editorial staff didn’t notice any of this, that calls into question their suitability as editors. If Crikey editorial staff did notice these things and ran the piece anyway, that calls into question the journalistic credibility of the organisation as a whole. I have a fair idea which, but I expect it will eventually be confirmed. That day can’t come soon enough.

References

_{Please note that I do not link to TERF websites, as doing so increases their search engine rankings. I suspect it also increases the number of crawlers which will archive their content. As I don’t want TERF content to remain available long-term, I don’t intend to make that any easier than it has to be.}

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• 

• 

Today I am celebrating 1 year on hormone replacement therapy (HRT)! It was one of the better decisions I have ever made and I think more people should make it. Here is how it has gone for me so far.

This post contains

1. detail of my medications
2. the physical effects I expected and how I experienced them
3. the psychological changes that HRT has effected
4. some additional changes which are not known to be from HRT, but which might be
5. my future plans
6. my special thanks to people I cannot personally tell

Note

Some effects of HRT cannot be described without fairly explicit physical detail. I will write a separate post about them and will amend this paragraph accordingly to link to it when I upload it.

Medications

Antiandrogen

My antiandrogen is bicalutamide, which comes as a 50mg oral tablet. I take 25mg, i.e. one half tablet, once per day.

I specifically requested bicalutamide. The PBS-approved medications for gender transition at the time were spironolactone and cyproterone acetate, per Endocrine Society guidance (Hembree et al., 2017). As bicalutamide is not PBS approved, it costs significantly more.

Estrogen

My estrogen is in tablet form which I take sublingually. From about July—August 2020, I was on estradiol valerate 2mg/day. In about August, it was stepped up to 4mg/day, my current dosage level. In about April 2021, due to supply issues (Australasian Menopause Society, 2021), I had to switch over to estradiol hemihydrate, at the same dosage level.

For estradiol valerate, I took Bayer Progynova 2mg. For estradiol hemihydrate, I took Novo Nordisk Estrafem 2mg, then Mylan Zumenon 2mg. As of mid-2021, according to my pharmacist, Zumenon has PBS approval for transition HRT; Estrafem does not and is approximately 10 times the price.

Progestogen

I am intending to start progesterone 100mg/day, at a dosage of 100mg every two days, taken rectally (by “boofing”), as is increasingly usual for progesterone (W, 2018/2021), which has low oral bioavailability (Fotherby, 1996). The progesterone I have is Besins Healthcare Prometrium 100mg (capsule).

Effects

Breast development

As above, prior to starting HRT, I had some breast development, up to maybe a Tanner II. At date I think I have developed to approximately Tanner III. For a variety of reasons, I haven’t bothered actually measuring.

Thinning/slowed growth of facial/body hair

To my eye, my facial and body hair have not appreciably thinned. Growth has indeed significantly slowed; I would say facial hair grows at <20% of its previous rate of growth. Body hair might be growing slightly faster but I haven’t been keeping track.

Cessation/reversal of male-pattern scalp hair loss

Yes indeed. Prior to starting HRT I had lost a significant amount of hair. I don’t know how much hair I had lost off my crown because I couldn’t bear to look, but could see the front edge of my bald spot through dry hair if I tilted my head forward more than a little. I had significant recession in my hairline on both sides; over the left temple my hairline had receded most of the way toward the crown. I also had diffuse hair thinning to the point that if I walked through rain I could easily see my scalp.

After 12 months HRT, I can no longer see my bald spot through my hair at any angle. My hairline has filled in considerably and there is no longer more pronounced recession over my temples. The general mass of my hair also seems to have thickened considerably; there’s enough to run my fingers through.

Softening of skin/decreased oiliness and acne

Prior to HRT I was told I had unusually soft skin. The softest part of my skin was the inside of my forearm. Most skin on my body now feels like that to the touch.

I became much less oily and sweaty from pretty much the moment I started HRT, like turning off a switch. My hair developed more apparent volume as a result and I smelled a lot better (although my actual body odour is not significantly different in quality, there is less of it).

I didn’t have much acne prior to starting HRT but have had none since that I can think of.

Redistribution of body fat in a feminine pattern

Prior to HRT, I had most of my fat on my upper body, in a pseudo-hourglass shape that stopped at my hips, leaving basically no fat on my legs (a body shape I described as “two toothpicks in a meatball”).

At 1 year on HRT, my thoracic and abdominal fat seems to have migrated downward a couple of inches, clearing off the bottom of my ribcage and accumulating around and slightly over the iliac crest of my pelvis. I have a belly, but it now seems to rise relatively less far above the rest of my abdomen. In addition, I have more fat on the back of my thighs.

Decreased muscle mass/strength

As far as actually moving my arms or legs went, I didn’t notice that I had more difficulty picking up a given load or that it felt subjectively heavier; I did notice that I burned energy faster carrying it.

I noticed more changes in structural muscles. There were two changes that were particularly important to me. The first is that, although I have always had trouble maintaining a straight, upright posture, that difficulty seems to have somewhat worsened. However, I don’t believe this is an effect of HRT; rather, I believe this is a congenital condition for which testosterone compensated and which estrogen is decompensating (see Unverifiable, below).

The second is that prior to HRT I had some overdevelopment of the muscles of the neck, shoulders and (for some reason) jaw; this was persistent even accounting for changes in fat mass. I had assumed this was due to supporting my (disproportionately large) head, but never medically verified that. On HRT, all of those have slimmed down considerably, although I have no subjective change in the feeling of moving my head.

Widening and rounding of the pelvis

As I started HRT at 25, the expected degree of widening and rounding is zero. I have no reason to doubt that, but have noticed what seems like a slight outward movement of the greater trochanter of each femur. I have no way of verifying that this has in fact happened and no explanation for why it might have happened if it did.

Decreased sex drive

Prior to HRT, my sex drive was pretty much just there as a kind of background noise. I didn’t want it to be there; I felt that it distracted me, took up my valuable time, and subtly impaired my judgement. I tried to ignore it as much as I could, and was aggressively uninterested in sex to the point of being (for lack of a better word) frigid.

On HRT, the level of ambient sexual neediness which I found so unpleasant has basically cratered. I no longer feel that my time is being wasted, that my judgement is impaired, or that I have to put effort into ignoring my sex drive. For a couple of days every several weeks I do wake up feeling annoyingly horny but that’s about it. I also feel much more comfortable with the idea of actually having sex.

Decreased fertility

No idea. I’m honestly not sure I was fertile to begin with.

Voice changes

Feminising HRT is not expected to prevent, reverse or induce any major voice changes. However, as a former professional voice user (baritone singer and public speaker), I have noticed minor changes. In general,

• my natural vibrato seems to be a tad steadier and healthy vocal production seems to be easier
• I feel I have better fine pitch control over the upper half of my singing range
• I need somewhat less preparation to produce high notes and somewhat more preparation to produce low notes; it is no longer assured that I can produce a low note without warming up
• it is physically less strain to use head voice and somewhat harder to use chest voice than it previously was

Psychological changes

Prior to HRT, I had near-constant suicidal ideation with frequent peaks in intensity. Especially during peaks, I was completely incapable of self-soothing, tended to angrily defend myself against people trying to calm me down, and tried to kill myself multiple times. On HRT, I have much less frequent suicidal ideation, much less frequent peaks in intensity, much less intensity of suicidal ideation, a somewhat improved ability to self-soothe, an ability to listen to those around me, and have not tried to kill myself.

Prior to HRT, I had a great deal of difficulty expressing emotional warmth. On HRT, I feel much more able to express happiness, love, and appreciation.

Prior to HRT, I felt my negative emotions much more in my body; anything that made me angry or distressed would evoke a somatic sensation like severe heartburn. I felt professional and romantic insecurity and jealousy very deeply and painfully. In addition, it wasn’t unusual for any prolonged period of negative emotion to lead to an uncontrollable, seemingly unprovoked spiral into a significantly worse headspace of self-hatred. On HRT, my negative emotions are much less visceral; I still feel some professional jealousy, but little to no romantic or sexual envy of any kind; and spiralling is much less frequent.

Prior to HRT, I was never completely calm, to the point that “clearing my mind” and “slowing down” were nonsense concepts to me. On HRT, while my mind is still fairly frenetic and frazzled, I have the capacity to clear it and slow down without having it rocket out of my control.

Prior to HRT, in retrospect, I felt that I had an extremely atomised, bitsy way of looking at problems in front of me, unable to connect one thing to the next or develop a cohesive picture of the entirety of a situation. On HRT, I feel that I have significantly better cognitive functioning as regards strategic planning, motivation and execution.

Prior to HRT, I was effectively incapable of editing my own written work; I couldn’t tell whether my arguments were well-structured, whether I had chosen the right words to effectively express a particular sentiment, or at what point I should stop writing. On HRT, I became much better at assessing structure and word choice, and at ceasing to write when I was done.

Prior to HRT, I found it very difficult to take in anything I was reading without actively taking notes on it. On HRT, this is still the case to some degree, but nowhere near as much so.

Prior to HRT, I felt like my lips and tongue were thick and difficult to manage. On HRT, I no longer feel that.

Changes not known to be from HRT

These are things I have observed changes in since starting HRT, and which I think are conceivably linked to starting HRT, but which are not noted as being HRT-related by any resource of which I am aware.

Changes in ADHD

I was diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder predominantly inattentive type (ADHD-PI) in late 2017, a couple of years prior to starting HRT. I was prescribed stimulant medication to treat it; for the first couple of months of my transition, I was on a medication regimen which (seemingly unintentionally) forced me to cyclically detox (2 weeks on, 2 weeks off). This was stressful, mostly due to the functional impairment, but did allow me to observe differences in my cognitive functioning with and without medication but with HRT.

I felt that, at baseline, relative to my previous symptom severity, I had moderately better concentration, moderately better executive functioning, and moderately better memory; still certainly poor enough to qualify for clinical diagnosis, but noticeably less severely impaired than without either HRT or medication.

Changes in ADHD medication response and withdrawal symptoms

Since 2017, I have taken dexamphetamine sulfate 5mg instant-release oral tablets to handle my ADHD. Prior to HRT, the amount of medication I needed in order to function increased extremely rapidly, going from my starting dose (10mg/day) to the maximum legally allowable dose (30mg/day) in 18 months de facto. I still don’t completely understand why this happened. My medication response was also poor, with a constantly shortening period of peak effectiveness; prior to HRT, I would certainly have no more than 2 hours of peak effectiveness, but sometimes as little as 30 minutes.

On HRT, my dosage requirement has stopped escalating and may have diminished slightly (I can occasionally get through the day accidentally taking 20mg/day without realising I have done so, which would never have happened before). The period of peak effectiveness has also increased markedly; it is not now usually less than 2 hours, but can be up to 5 or 6 (I don’t know what is influencing this variation).

In addition, when I had to detox from medication prior to HRT, it was an absolutely brutal experience involving major depression, suicidality and deep dissociation, to the point that the most recent time I detoxed prior to HRT, I had to go to my GP after two days and explain how bad it was. This has been almost completely relieved on HRT; the only really noticeable effect is simply having to deal with the annoyance of unmedicated ADHD. In some ways I actually find it preferable to be unmedicated for ADHD now (but I need to function at a normal level so unfortunately the pills stay).

Changes in anxiety and motor skills

I am a pianist, which prior to COVID-19 was my primary occupation. Prior to HRT, I had a bachelor’s degree level of qualification and skill, but also had to work exceptionally hard to keep it up. I experienced fairly considerable stage fright and had to practice hard enough to avoid any mistakes, because one or two mistakes would often cause me to irrecoverably lose my nerve, which also made it effectively impossible for me to solo, improvise or ad lib. I also had relatively poor “luck,” meaning that no matter how hard I practiced a piece and my degree of competency and fluency prior to the performance, I would usually end up making an unanticipated audible slip-up on the day.

On HRT, I found that my “luck” sharply and immediately improved; I developed fluency faster and was much less prone to unanticipated slip-ups, as well as experiencing a noticeable immediate improvement in my sight reading skills. I no longer lost my nerve after mistakes and developed greater confidence with improvisation and ad lib.

Factors that I think may have influenced this include: that areas of the brain known to be generally female-shifted in trans women are known to be involved in motor execution, learning, planning and preparation, and movement selection, sequencing and amplitude; the previously described increase in “strategic” thinking; the previously described relief of anxiety and increase in emotional resilience.

Ehlers—Danlos syndrome

I have always had subclinical symptoms of a hypermobility spectrum disorder or Ehlers—Danlos syndrome hypermobile type (hEDS). These have gotten somewhat worse over the past year, in particular my joint hypermobility, my back pain, and my existing difficulty staying upright for long periods of time. This is consistent with estradiol’s known role in hEDS symptoms (Bird, 2017).

Migraine

This was a late addition to this post. On 18 July I experienced a transient visual disturbance. It was mostly on my right side and consisted of an “oil slick” or “shimmering” effect making it impossible to read text with my right eye. I was ordered to go to the ER but they turned nothing up. I’ve since been advised it was a migraine aura. Unfortunately, “priming” with high levels of estrogen, followed by a drop in estrogen concentration, appears to be a trigger for migraine (Reddy et al., 2021), as does use of oral estradiol (Women’s Health Concern, 2020).

Reversible cognitive dysfunction

I was experiencing increasing issues with primarily word-finding, and secondarily alertness, concentration, memory, quickness and efficiency of thought. In a previous draft of this post, I had this down under “fibromyalgia?” — this is a similar presentation to cognitive dysfunction in fibromyalgia (“fibro fog”).

However, I now have an alternative hypothesis which I think is more compelling. Someone suggested to me that I might be experiencing iron deficiency, which is linked with cognitive impairment (Jáuregui-Lobera, 2014). As it turns out, in people not experiencing menstrual bleeding, higher serum estradiol acts on the body’s homeostatic mechanisms in a way which actually decreases iron levels (Miller, 2016). When I started taking vitamin C, which enhances iron absorption (Lynch & Cook, 1980), the brain fog episodes decreased. When I started taking a dietary supplement including 5mg iron, the brain fog episodes decreased dramatically further. I am therefore operating on the hypothesis that it was to do with iron.

Sense of smell

My experience in this area was fairly consistent with anecdotes by other trans women regarding having a blunted sense of smell prior to HRT and a much stronger sense of smell once on it, which may be linked to estradiol’s known role in olfactory performance (Kanageswaran et al., 2016).

Sleep

Prior to both ADHD diagnosis and HRT, I could not sleep earlier than 2am. ADHD medication pulled that forward to about midnight. After I started HRT, it seemed to pull back further to about 10 or 11 PM, which may be linked to estrogen’s known role in regulating circadian rhythm (Morin et al., 1977).

Temperature regulation

Prior to HRT, I was virtually always uncomfortably warm. On HRT, I feel much cooler.

Visual impairment

I was fairly astigmatic and had worn glasses for several years before starting HRT. After HRT, I noticed a small but perceptible drop in visual acuity. The reason I think it is linked to HRT is entirely anecdotal — an AFAB friend who was also taking exogenous estrogen also reported a drop in visual acuity.

Future plans

Hair removal

My plans to remove hair from my face and body are currently at a standstill. I have no spare money and no means of transport to get either laser or electrolysis, a situation which is likely to continue for some time specifically because my body and facial hair will be a component in determining my “professional presentation” and therefore employability, meaning the fact that I have them will prevent me from getting rid of them.

Legal updates

My plans to change my name are currently at a standstill for the same reasons as removing my facial and body hair — changing my name costs more money than I have at any one time.

Wardrobe

My plans to regender my wardrobe are at a standstill, etc. While op shopping is an option in theory, I have a fairly large build and a lot of weight, meaning op shopping is not an option for me in fact. I also have no bras, which is becoming increasingly problematic but equally unsolvable. In addition, due to increasing decompensation of my EDS-like symptoms, etc., I would benefit from acquiring corsets (for lower back support) and combat boots (for ankle support), but have little to no capacity to do either.

Conclusion

I came into this transition not sure that I was going to enjoy it. Some things about my life have changed; I have had to take more care of a body that I used never to be invested in; I had a few spills and scares along the way.

However, altogether, this is one of the better decisions I have ever made and I intend to keep it going until the end.

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Special thanks

There are certain people without whose help and influence (intentional or otherwise) I could not have transitioned. For the sake of brevity I am omitting people I personally knew or was working alongside at the time they originally inspired me. Some of these people I do know now, and have the honour of being their friend; some of them are or were public figures who will never know me. I owe them my thanks nonetheless.

In alphabetical order by surname, I wish to thank Helen Barton, Arthur Chu, Bridget Clinch, Émilia Decaudin, Madeline Deutsch, Laura Jane Grace, Heron Greenesmith, Éilis Harney, Zinnia Jones, Amanda Jetté Knox, Anne Ogborn, Penelope Pilbeam, Will Powers, Jerilynn Prior, Jordan Raskopoulos, Julia Serano, SOPHIE, Chase Strangio, Susan Stryker, Linda Tirado, Dr Clara Tuck Meng Soo, Robert Pirsig, Kristin Tynski, M Veselak, Aly W., and Asher Wolf.

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References

Australasian Menopause Society (2021, June 23). Menopausal hormone therapy and non-hormonal options shortages in Australia — update 23 June 2021. Menopause.org.au.

Bird, H. (2017, August). Hormones and hypermobility (version 3). Hypermobility Syndromes Association.

Fotherby, K. (1996, August 1). Bioavailability of orally administered sex steroids used in oral contraception and hormone replacement therapy. Contraception, 54(2), 59-69. doi:10.1016/0010-7824(96)00136-9.

Hembree, W.C., Cohen-Kettenis, P.T., Gooren, L., Hannema, S.E., Meyer, W.J., … & T’Sjoen, G.G. (2017, September 13). Endocrine treatment of gender-dysphoric/gender-incongruent persons: An Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 102(11), 3869-3903. doi:10.1210/jc.2017-01658.

Jáuregui-Lobera, I. (2014, November 10). Iron deficiency and cognitive functions. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 10, 2087-2095. doi:10.2147/NDT.S72491.

Kanageswaran, N., Nagel, M. Scholz, P., Mohrardt, J., Gisselmann, G., & Hatt, H. (2016, August 5). Modulatory effects of sex steroids progesterone and estradiol on odorant evoked responses in olfactory receptor neurons. PLoS ONE 11(8), e0159640. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159640.

Lynch, S.R., & Cook, J.D. (1980). Interaction of vitamin C and iron. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 355, 32-44. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1980.tb21325.x.

Miller, E.M. (2016, March 15). Hormone replacement therapy affects iron status more than endometrial bleeding in older US women: A role for estrogen in iron homeostasis?. Maturitas, 88, 46-51. doi:10.1016/j.maturitas.2016.03.014.

Morin, L.P., Fitzgerald, K.M., & Zucker, I. (1977, April 15). Estradiol shortens the period of hamster circadian rhythms. Science, 196(4287), 305-307. doi:10.1126/science.557840.

Reddy, N., Desai, M.N., Schoenbrunner, A., Schneeberger, S., & Janis, J.E. (2021, March 10). The complex relationship between estrogen and migraines: A scoping review. Systematic Reviews, 10, 72. doi:10.1186/s13643-021-01618-4.

W, A. (2021, March 10). Administration of oral progesterone capsules rectally instead of orally for greatly improved efficacy in transfeminine people. Transfeminine Science. (Original work published 29 December 2018.)

Women’s Health Concern (2020, October). Migraine and HRT. British Menopause Society.

Head notes

Where I refer to political parties, I also mean the Coalition, which is an alliance of several parties de jure but functions as a single party de facto. This is to avoid having to use a term like “blocs” or “groups” to refer to the class of Australian political parties, when the Coalition is the only ‘party’ which isn’t a single party.

Glossary

2GB. A radio station owned by Nine, broadcasting in the Sydney area on 873 kHz AM.

#80aDay. A hashtag campaign initiated by the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union and associated with the AUWU and the Antipoverty Centre. Refers to the political demand that all income support payments should be raised to a rate equivalent to $80/day.

ABC. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia’s public broadcaster. Closely equivalent to the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); loosely equivalent to the US’ Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

ACT. The Australian Capital Territory. A Territory enclaved within New South Wales where the national capital, Canberra, is located. Analogous to Washington D.C., with the difference that the ACT is represented in Parliament.

ACTU. The Australian Council of Trade Unions, the largest trade union peak body in Australia. Equivalent to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL—CIO) or the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC).

AEC. The Australian Electoral Commission, which organises, conducts and supervises Australian federal elections, by-elections and referendums.

AFL. Australian rules football. Played by two teams of 18 players each, using a prolate spheroid football similar to a rugby ball. Originally inspired by English public school football before that tradition branched into rugby football and “soccer” (association football).

AFLW. Australian Football League Women’s, the semi-professional Australian rules football league for female players.

Dan Andrews. See Daniel Andrews.

Daniel Andrews. Australian Labor Party politician. MLA for Mulgrave, Victoria, since 20 November 2002. Leader of the Australian Labor Party (Victorian Branch) since 3 December 2010. Premier of Victoria since 4 December 2014.

ALP. The Australian Labor Party.

Antipoverty Centre. @antipovertycent on Twitter.

#auspol. Hashtag. Syllabic abbreviation — Australian politics.

Australian Labor Party. Australia’s primary liberal party. Centre-left. Socially liberal. Closely equivalent to the US Democratic Party. Functionally equivalent to the Starmerite wing of the UK Labour Party; Momentum voters would be more likely to vote Greens.

Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union. A union representing unemployed, underemployed and unwaged workers. @AusUnemployment on Twitter.

The AUWU’s name also serves as a metonym for the constellation of organised and unorganised groups left of liberalism.

AUWU. See Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union.

Blak. An adjective denoting Indigenous Australian status.

Boandik. An archaic orthography for Bungandidj.

Boonwurrung. An Australian Aboriginal people, part of the Kulin nation, whose territory includes part of what is now the city and suburbs of Melbourne.

#BTPM. “Break the poverty machine.” A hashtag campaign initiated by the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union and associated with the AUWU and the Antipoverty Centre.

Bungandidj. An Aboriginal Australian people in southeastern South Australia and western Victoria, whose traditional land stretches about 30 km inland from the mouth of the Glenelg River at Nelson, Victoria.

Bunnings. A household hardware chain. Analogous to the US’ Home Depot.

Cashless Debit Card. A Centrelink-affiliated program in which welfare recipients are issued a debit card onto which 80% of their welfare income is quarantined; they also lose control over bill payments, which are transferred to automatic by Centrelink. The card

• is privately managed by Indue Pty Ltd
• does not allow the user to gamble, purchase alcohol, or withdraw cash
• only allows users of the card to buy products at sellers who can take Visa or MasterCard and who are specifically approved

Centrelink. Services Australia’s Centrelink Master Program. The entity administering Australia’s social security income support programs. Corresponds to the US Social Security Administration or the UK Department of Work and Pensions.

Coalition. Australia’s primary conservative bloc. Simply the Coalition — there has never been another Coalition that was historically important, and there is unlikely to be another one.

The Coalition has two primary member parties:

• the Liberal Party of Australia
• the National Party of Australia

There are also several other parties which are related to the Liberals and Nationals but other than by being state divisions of one party, and/or which do not inherit the Liberal—National Coalition relationship:

• The Country Liberals (Northern Territory) is a merger of the formerly independent NT Liberals and Territory Country Party (the NT branch of the Country Party, the federal organisation which would later become the National Party). While they sit as one unified party in the NT Legislative Assembly, federal Country Liberal legislators caucus with one party or the other; MPs typically caucus with the Liberals and Senators with the Nationals.
• The Liberal National Party of Queensland is a merger of the formerly independent Queensland Liberals and Queensland Nationals. While they sit as one unified party in the Queensland Parliament, federal LNP legislators caucus with either the Liberals or the Nationals.
• The National Party of Australia (S.A.) is the South Australian state affiliate of the National Party, but is independent and not part of the Coalition.
• The National Party of Australia (WA) is the Western Australian state affiliate of the National Party, but is independent and not part of the Coalition.
• The Tasmanian Nationals exist organisationally as an affiliate of the National Party of Australia, but have no representation anywhere, are not registered with any electoral commission, and are effectively in abeyance.

Coles. Formally, Coles Supermarkets Australia Pty Ltd. A supermarket, retail and consumer services chain. Has around 27% market share as of 2020 (Roy Morgan, 2020).

CPRS. The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The Rudd government’s proposed emissions trading scheme for greenhouse gases.

The CPRS has since formed a rhetorical cudgel for Labor supporters to beat Greens voters with. While, like the “tree Tory” argument, this line of attack has little basis in fact, it persists through strength of messaging and weight of numbers.

Crikey. An electronic magazine launched in 2000.

Dan. At date, if not otherwise specified, typically Daniel Andrews.

Dan stans. A colloquial pejorative label for uncritical admirers of Premier Daniel Andrews of Victoria. Emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dog the boys. A colloquial expression meaning “betray one’s male friends.” Generally used lightheartedly.

💧 (“droplet emoji”). Used in display names, etc., to indicate droplet Twitter affiliation.

Droplet Twitter. Known by a variety of other nicknames (“droplet Twitter,” “teardrop Twitter,” “drips”). An informal grouping of Twitter users. The grouping was officially initiated in April 2019, when Simon Holmes à Court posted a Tweet which read:

i’m putting a [droplet emoji] before my twitter name until the government of the day commits to a *proper* inquiry into #watergate.

care to join me #auspol?

Holmes à Court (2019)

Notionally, the grouping is unified by a political demand for an investigation into WaterGate. However, in practice, droplet Twitter affiliation is simply a general signifier of liberalism and centrism.

Gadigal. An Aboriginal Australian people whose traditional lands roughly correspond to the Eastern suburbs and Inner West of Sydney, New South Wales, including the Sydney central business district and Sydney Cove.

Gamilaraay. An Aboriginal Australian people whose traditional lands are roughly delineated to the south and east by Singleton, New South Wales; to the west by the Warrumbungle Mountains; and to the north and west by Nindigully, Queensland.

GetUp!. A progressive political organisation. Functionally similar to the US’ Our Revolution, but with somewhat greater cultural stature. UK equivalent unclear.

Greens. The Australian Greens. Social-democratic. Against animal cruelty, against corruption, environmentalist, pro-choice, pro-decriminalisation-of-drugs, pro-euthanasia, pro-Green New Deal, pro-legalisation-of-marijuana, pro-LGBTIQ+, pro-public education, pro-universal healthcare, Functionally equivalent to the US “Squad” or UK Momentum.

#HomeToBilo. A hashtag campaign calling for the Murugappan family (Nadesalingam “Nades,” Kokilapathmapriya “Priya,” and their daughters Kopika and Tharnicaa), all of whom are Tamil refugees, to be freed from Australian immigration detention and returned to their previous residence in Biloela, Queensland.

IGA. Independent Grocers of Australia, a local division of the US Independent Grocers’ Alliance (IGA, Inc.).

JobKeeper. A limited-duration wage subsidy run by the Federal Government during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analogous to the US’ Paycheck Protection Program.

JobSeeker. The JobSeeker Payment, an income support payment paid by Centrelink to eligible Australians and permanent residents aged 22 to 64. Corresponds to the UK Jobseeker’s Allowance; no direct US equivalent.

Journo. A colloquial Australian English noun meaning “journalist.” Now fairly international thanks to Twitter.

Kevin ’07. A nickname for former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, after his campaign slogan at the 2007 federal election at which he first won that office.

Kulin. An Aboriginal alliance whose collective traditional territory is located in Victoria, extending around Port Phillip and the Western Port, up into the Great Dividing Range and the Loddon and Goulburn River valleys.

Labor Right. A faction within the Australian Labor Party. Functionally equivalent to the US Blue Dogs; similar to the UK’s New Labour but more openly right-wing.

League. When used as a mass noun, indicates rugby league football.

Libs. Short for “Liberals,” and typically specifically for the Liberal Party of Australia, who are conservative. May be used to denote small-l liberalism, but typically only in colloquial words and phrases loaned from other English dialects, such as “own the libs.”

Maccas. Colloquial Australian English short name for McDonald’s restaurants.

MEAA. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. The trade union and professional organisation covering the media, entertainment, sports and arts industries.

MFW. Mad Fucking Witches. @MFWitches on Twitter.

MP. Member of Parliament. Most commonly refers to a legislator sitting in the lower house of a legislature, i.e., a federal Member of Parliament (MP), or a state Member of a Legislative Assembly (MLA) or equivalent.

NDIA. The National Disability Insurance Agency.

New South Wales. Abbreviated NSW. Australia’s most populous state, located along the southern part of the east coast, south of Queensland, north of Victoria. The capital is Sydney.

Newstart. The name, between 1 July 1991 and 20 March 2020, of what is now called JobSeeker Payment.

OAM. Medal of the Order of Australia. The third-highest national civilian honour, approximately equal to a UK MBE.

Officeworks. A chain of office supplies stores owned and operated by Wesfarmers Ltd. Directly equivalent to US FedEx Office (FKA Kinko’s).

One Nation. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, a political party. Semi-openly fascist; Islamophobic, populist, xenophobic, ultranationalist. Equivalent to the US House Freedom Caucus or the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

One Nation also likes to position itself as a shadow to the Greens. This is slightly undermined by the fact that while the Greens regularly act as a check on the right-wing policies of “their” major party, the ALP, One Nation consistently votes with the Coalition.

Opposition. The largest of the parties politically opposed to the Government. During a Coalition government, Labor is typically the Opposition; during a Labor government, the Coalition as a whole is the Opposition.

PNG. Papua New Guinea.

@PRGuy17. A Twitter account created in March 2020. Pro-Labor; anti-Coalition; passive-aggressively anti-Greens (@PRGuy, “Okay so,” 2021; @PRGuy, “I don’t know,” 2021). Supporter of the Andrews Labor government of Victoria specifically (@PRGuy17, “Yep!,” 2021).

As of March 2021, it appeared that the account was being operated by Deakin University academic Dr Muneera Bano, among others (@k_morrissey, 2021).

probbo. Little-used Australian slang literally meaning “problematic,” but always connoting irony.

RAC. Refugee Action Coalition.

🐀 (“rat emoji”). Used in display names, etc., to indicate affiliation with sewer rats.

SAlt. Socialist Alternative. A Trotskyist organisation affiliated with the Reunified Fourth International.

Scotty. When not otherwise qualified, usually a pejorative nickname for Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia. Derived from the “Scotty from x” snowclone; gave rise to the “Scotty the x” snowclone.

Scotty from Marketing. A popular characterisation of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a former marketing executive. Evokes poorly faked bonhomie and the generally poor reputation of marketing personnel in the Australian workplace, and associates those concepts with Morrison, a much-disliked politician generally seen as manipulative and inept.

Scotty from x. A political snowclone in which the subject is Prime Minister Scott Morrison. A generalisation of “Scotty from Marketing.”

Sewer rats. An informal grouping of Twitter users notionally unified by an opposition to misogyny, sexual violence, and the “boys’ club” mentality said to typify the Australian Parliament.

The term originated in the early 2021 media storm surrounding rape allegations against Liberal MP Christian Porter, then Attorney-General of Australia. While promoting an Australian Financial Review article that was sympathetic to Porter, conservative journalist Chris Uhlmann opened a Tweet with:

Top of the morning sewer rats. Why not waste a lazy day in hysterics over this? […]

Uhlmann (2021)

While in practice sewer rat affiliation has retained somewhat more of its original meaning than droplet Twitter affiliation, it similarly tends to be largely a signifier for liberal and centrist political orientation.

Shadow minister (for x). The MP or Senator designated to serve as minister for x portfolio, should their party win government. Typically, only the two major parties have shadow ministers; the other parties have spokespeople, who are exactly the same except for not being in one of the two largest parties.

The Shot. A semi-serious opinion journalism outlet founded by The Chaser’s team (counterintuitively but obviously, The Chaser came first). @shot_au on Twitter.

Sky News Australia. A television channel available Australia-wide on cable and satellite, and on free-to-air TV in regional and non-metropolitan areas. Corresponds to the US’ Fox News Channel or the UK’s GB News.

Small-l liberalism. Liberalism as conventionally understood. The “small l” distinguishes it from the philosophy of the Liberal Party of Australia, who are conservative.

Sports rorts. TBA.

#StrandedAussies. TBA.

Norman Swan. Born 1953 in Scotland. A physician, journalist and broadcaster. His son is Jonathan Swan, a journalist who while working for Axios conducted a fairly blunt and contentious interview with US President Donald Trump.

Sydney Morning Herald. TBA.

Ten. TBA.

TikTok guy. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, web comedian Jon-Bernard Kairouz.

Tory. A colloquial pejorative meaning “conservative,” typically indicating specifically the Liberal Party of Australia. Lifted from the British Tories, the political faction which later became the modern Conservative Party.

Tradie. A tradesperson.

Treasurer. TBA.

Tree Tory. A colloquial pejorative directed at the Australian Greens, typically by supporters of the Australian Labor Party, suggesting they are functionally conservatives whose concern for the environment is a form of unserious virtue signalling.

The underlying thesis has no basis in fact. Taxonomically, the Greens’ unambiguous social-democratic stance places them to Labor’s left by any internationally accepted rubric. Statistically, in contests where the other candidate is a Liberal but their own candidate isn’t likely to be one of the top two, Greens voters are slightly more likely to favour Labor candidates than Labor candidates are to favour Greens candidates, suggesting a stronger opposition to conservatism by the Greens than by Labor.

Nonetheless, due to Labor’s established platform access and its increasingly strong focus on opposing the Greens rather than the Liberals, the term remains in popular use.

Turrbal. An Aboriginal Australian people in southeast Queensland whose traditional land is approximately delimited to the north by the North Pine River, to the south by the Logan River, and inland at the locality of Moggill. The city of Brisbane is on Turrbal land.

Victoria. Australia’s second most populous state, located in the southeastern corner of the mainland. The capital is Melbourne.

Woolies. Colloquialism for Woolworths Supermarkets. A supermarket and grocery store chain. Roughly 33% market share as of 2019 (Roy Morgan, 2020).

Work for the dole. A compulsory workfare program which all JobSeeker Payment recipients are forced onto after a certain duration of unemployment. Equivalent to the UK’s workfare scheme; no direct US equivalent.

Youth Allowance. An income support payment available to unemployed young people aged 16 to 21, or 18 to 24 under certain circumstances.

References

Holmes à Court, S.A. [@simonahac]. (2019, April 21). i’m putting a 💧 before my twitter name […] [Tweet]. Twitter.

@k_morrissey (2021, March 12). OK, yeah, this is fucking deranged. … [thread]. Twitter.

McGowan, M., & Cantor, M. (2020, August 5). Explain it to me quickly: Who is Jonathan Swan, the reporter who grilled Trump? And what do kangaroos have to do with it?. The Guardian.

@PRGuy17 (2021, January 29). Okay so apparently a few are losing their heads … [Tweet]. Twitter.

@PRGuy17 (2021, January 30). I don’t know what would excite me more … [Tweet]. Twitter.

@PRGuy17 (2021, July 27). Yep! Some Labor and Liberal states doing a stellar job in Australia, … [thread]. Twitter.

Roy Morgan (2020, March 24). Looking beyond the panic-buying, Australia’s big supermarket story is Aldi’s growing market share (Finding No. 8336). RoyMorgan.com.

Uhlmann, C. [@CUhlmann]. (2021, March 5). Top of the morning sewer rats […] [Tweet]. Twitter.