PM backs doomed trans bill to shore up religious base

What’s scarier than the Chinese Communist Party? More threatening to the national interest than an environmentally conscious tech billionaire? Why, a trans kid, of course.

Nothing energises Scott Morrison’s core constituency more than the deadly challenge to human existence presented by people whose gender is not what the Liberal Party and (almost) all churches insist God assigned to them. At least, that’s what the prime minister seems to think, given the alacrity with which he jumps on the subject.

Except when he’s promising his own backbench, in writing, that he would ensure kids are not discriminated against at school on the basis of sexuality or gender. He did that in December, before acting in February to ensure that trans kids would continue to be discriminated against. It’s hard to keep up with him.

Anyway, yesterday Morrison took a short break from demonstrating trade skills to elevate an obscure backbencher’s private member’s bill to national prominence, describing Liberal Senator Claire Chandler’s attempt to ban trans athletes from women’s sport as “terrific” and pledging his support.

The bill was tabled during the recent, brief parliamentary sittings. Like all other attempted legislation this year, it will not become law before the election, and will sink without trace afterwards. Why, then, the pantomime of prime ministerial emphasis for this urgent social reform?

According to Chandler, her bill addresses an urgent problem: the imminent demise of women’s sport. The reason is the Sex Discrimination Act, which she says needs a specific carve-out to make it clear that “sport and sporting activity can be carried out on the basis of sex and it will not be a breach of the act to do so”. That is, excluding trans athletes from sex-specific competition will be a specifically lawful form of discrimination.

Chandler told Parliament that “the default position under the current interpretation of the act is that it is unlawful to exclude males from women’s sport, with the onus placed on administrators to prove that an exemption applies each and every time a male seeks to compete in their women’s competition. Female players and athletes therefore have no certainty that despite having registered for a women’s competition, they will not be required to compete against males.”

That is, of course, nonsense, but it clarifies what we’re really talking about here. The clue is in the Senator’s use of “male” as a pejorative. The fact is that there is no epidemic of men forcing themselves on women’s sporting competitions. What is happening more and more frequently is the incidence of trans people wanting to play sport. 

High-profile examples, such as AFL player Hannah Mouncey, abound. They’re not “male” unless you insist that every person’s gender is assigned, biologically, at birth; that it is unchangeable by a law of nature; that it is binary; that the person has no agency in the question.

It’s a simple position, exemplified by Morrison’s statement three years ago: “We do not need ‘gender whisperers’ in our schools. Let kids be kids.” 

Kids being, by immutable definition, a boy or a girl.

Chandler’s bill would reinsert definitions of “man” and “woman” in the act (they were taken out in 2013), applying biological determinism to all of us once more. The law would reflect the Liberal Party’s preference: that gender is binary and fixed, not up for discussion.

There are two problems with this: it’s scientifically untrue (gender is not binary), and nobody has come up with a rational justification for insisting that a person’s gender is something in which they have no personal say. Both problems run parallel to the (bizarrely) continuing debate over the right of gay people to exist.

It is a fact that there are extremely challenging issues for sport in dealing with trans competitors, as I’ve discussed previously. At root, those challenges come from the embedded cultural assumption that the world is gender-binary, and our discomfort with moving away from that understanding. Sooner or later, we’ll just have to get over that and deal with the reality.

For most people, it’s an issue of extremely low order. For trans people, it’s about recognising the fact of their existence and the equality of their rights. For Chandler, her leader and a strange collective of people obsessed with what happens in bathrooms, it’s a thing of dread.

The only votes for Morrison in this issue are votes he already has. That’s what lets us know that it’s one he actually cares about.