Misleading ads about transgender people by Binary target LGBTIQA+ equality bill

Anti-LGBTIQA+ organisation Binary, formerly the anti-marriage-equality lobby group Marriage Alliance, is running misleading ads about transgender people in a campaign against a proposed equality bill for New South Wales. 

The bill, announced in March 2022 by independent member for Sydney Alex Greenwich, would seek to ban conversion therapy, allow people to transition without undergoing gender reassignment surgery, and put in place other protections against discrimination. Draft legislation is expected to be released by the end of the year. Organisations including Equality Australia, ACON, and Amnesty International Australia have come out in support of the proposed bill, calling it an important bill that would protect LGBTIQA+ people.

Binary’s ads, run on Facebook and other Meta platforms, link to a petition on the organisation’s website claiming the proposed bill “threatens to jail parents for daring to protect their children from gender transitioning”. It has gathered over 7000 signatures so far of a 10,000 signature goal. 

The ads greatly exaggerate the extent to which the NSW government would be able to prosecute parents of trans children. In two of its ads, featuring hypothetical conversations between a gender-questioning child and their parent, Binary claims that what the parent says next “could be illegal in NSW”, comparing NSW’s proposed equality bill to Victoria’s Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021, which outlawed conversion therapy with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

The ads claim that the government would “jail parents for protecting their kids from harmful LGBTIQA+ ideology”, and that NSW may even outlaw “praying for someone you know in the hope they abandon their plan to transition”. 

According to Equality Australia legal director Ghassan Kassisieh, “This is predictable fearmongering about a bill that does not yet exist, but which is desperately needed to bring NSW laws into the 21st century.”

“The truth is NSW has been lagging behind other states and territories in legal reforms for LGBTIQ+ people,” he said.

“An equality bill is desperately needed to address the real issues facing LGBTIQ+ people in NSW today, and consultations by the member for Sydney on what this bill should contain are both welcome and overdue.”

Many of Binary’s ads present the idea that children — and people in general, in some cases — should not be allowed to medically transition. The ads feature the stories of people who underwent medical transition as adults and are now prominent detransitioners who have aligned with right-wing anti-trans groups.

Detransitioners are people who decide to stop the process of gender transition or decide to no longer identify as transgender. Their stories are compelling to right-wing groups who use detransition stories to argue that children are being brainwashed into believing they have gender dysphoria and are then pushed into making irreversible changes to their young bodies. 

Those that were included in Binary’s ads include Australians Ollie Davies and Jay Langadinos, who have both claimed that their medical transition occurred after psychiatric evaluations resulted in a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which they both now believe to have been insufficient.

Davies, who once tweeted he was a member of the international anti-trans organisation Genspect, has cited anecdotal evidence when telling The Australian that he believes “a massive population of people” who are not gender dysphoric are being pushed into the “gender affirmative care pathway”.

Davies said he was not aware he had been used in Binary’s advertisements and that he had once tweeted that he was a member of Genspect but that the tweet had been taken out of context.  

“When I said this, I was referring to the fact that I’d filled in a form on their website with my basic contact info and received a few emails from them with some helpful tips,” Davies said in a written statement provided to Crikey.

“This was after I’d exhausted every avenue I could think of in Australia – including organisations associated with the Pride Centre, my former trans health care provider, and support lines – and found nothing.”

Langadinos is currently suing her past psychiatrist for professional negligence, having detransitioned after previously undergoing a six-year medical transition that included hormone therapy, a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy. 

Statistics show detransition is uncommon, with one meta-analysis from March 2021 finding that in nearly 8000 people, regret after gender reassignment surgery was at around 1%. Gender-affirming medical treatment has been proven to save lives, lowering suicidality, and studies have found that post-surgery regret is far rarer compared to other, non-trans-related surgeries.

Furthermore, there is often a misunderstanding about the reasons why people choose to detransition. In a 2015 US transgender survey with responses from more than 27,000 people from all 50 US states, the top reasons for detransition, whether long- or short-term, were external factors such as pressure from parents and discrimination against them as an out transgender person. 

Only 5% of respondents who had detransitioned said gender transition was not for them, representing just 0.4% of the overall sample. Groups like Binary that focus solely on detransitioners who no longer identify as transgender paint a highly misleading picture. 

In a recent report by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism examining Australia’s far-right and extremist groups, Binary was listed as a hate group alongside other anti-trans organisations such as the LGB Alliance. 

Binary did not respond to a request for comment.

The organisation has also been campaigning in Victoria, claiming that Premier Daniel Andrews and others have “set their sights on brainwashing our toddlers and preschoolers”. 

The organisation has most recently placed new ads through Meta platforms calling for a royal commission into Australia’s gender clinics, to “stop gender clinics destroying children’s bodies and lives”.