South Australian Senator Alex Antic, who has previously warned about cancel culture banning Magnums.(Image: Facebook)

To the deep dismay of the leaders of both parties, trans politics is getting a run in the election. That began with Tasmanian Liberal Senator Claire Chandler, proposing a bill to regulate recognition of women in women’s sport. Having the state tell hundreds of sports authorities how they should run their competitions is an interesting approach to small government, but let that pass.

Scott Morrison ran with it for a while, and then jumped off when North Shore valkyrie Katherine Deves, described gender altering (or ‘affirming’ as it is now described) surgery as mutilation, and compared herself to the French resistance in her struggle against the LGBTQ/the Nazis. 

The stoushette has recirculated a moment that occurred just before the election began.

South Australian boy culture warrior Alex Antic (pronounced Antish, apparently, an anti-vaccine mandate type, presumably in the classic Balkans paranoid manner) did what attention-seeking senators always do in Senate estimates: used as a prop a public servant who can’t hit back.

Antic asked federal health department head Brendan Murphy ‘what the definition of a woman is’. Murphy replied he would have to take that question on notice. With that in the bag, Antic could live up to his name, and stalk off, bundling his things up, telling Murphy that now he had heard everything. US senator Lindsay Graham did in the same in confirmation hearings for the now new Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Alex, can’t you even devise your own stunts?

Murphy, by his position, couldn’t give the retort that would have been justified, a la ‘fuck off you snotty little shit’, but he would have been able to hang Antic out to dry by pointing out that, by the laws of differing states, ‘a woman’ is not merely a member of the female-born sex. That includes Liberal-led states.

In NSW led by happy-clappy Dominic Perrotet, you can change your gender on your birth certificate if you undergo a surgical procedure that reconstructs physical sexual characteristics. That was done under the Libs, and looks like the further-right government of Perrotet have no plans to, er, reverse it. True, it’s not Victoria’s free offer that you can call yourself a sparkle unicorn on your birth certificate.

In Antic’s own state of South Australia, it’s even looser. According to the guidelines:

“A person of or above the age of 18 years whose birth is registered in the State can apply for registration of a change of sex or gender identity if: • the person provides a statement by a medical practitioner or psychologist certifying that the person has undertaken a sufficient amount of appropriate clinical treatment in relation to the person’s sex or gender identity.”

Note, the general term ‘clinical’, not surgical or physico-medical and note also that a psychologist (not even a psychiatrist) can provide the statement. That surely means that you can change your gender on your birth certificate simply through a process of self-definition with some professional involvement. If you’re South Australian and you can’t find a psychologist to make that affirmation, throw a rock in North Terrace, you’ll hit one who will in the head. 

Note also, that such a change, in South Australia, is comprehensive:

“After the record has been changed, your new birth certificate will not be marked in any way to suggest your sex or gender identity has been changed.”

So if you’ve become a transwoman and got a primal scream therapist with an office above a garage, to sign the paper, you’re a woman, and by your paperwork you were never a man. You can have three such changes in a lifetime before you could potentially be refused. Pretty radical really, though also parsimonious – in the 70s in Adelaide, people changed genders more than three times in a night.

This arrangement has persisted through the life of the now-departed Marshall Liberal government. Perhaps Antic could have lobbied his own colleagues to reverse it, during their brief, unusual period in actual power? Perhaps he did, and they told him to piss off, because most people – even if they reject the wilder claims of the self-appointed trans lobby – recognise trans being as real and think institutions should reflect that reality. 

Still, cheap shot got.