Transsexual Activists, the Real Conservatives

Ah, spring! A time to be born; a time to plant; a time to heal and build up; most of all, a time to laugh. Forget about the dying, the “plucking up”, the killing, weeping and mourning. Spring is a time to dance and embrace, the season for love. Never mind that April is autumn here in Australia. We celebrate Christmas in December, Independence Day on July 4, and Easter in April (when it doesn’t fall in March). Whatever the weather may say, the Cadbury bunnies arrive in the shops in March and are eaten (or thrown away) by April. Or as the University of Sydney motto has it, sidere mens eadem mutato: though the stars may change, students still have just one thing on their minds—and it isn’t differential equations. Spring it is.

Here in Sydney, love has been in the air since February 17, and the city couldn’t be prouder. The city is, in fact, WorldProud. Or at least, it has been hosting WorldPride 2023, the eighth edition of the global festival sponsored by the International Association of Pride Coordinators (“InterPride” to friends). Well, the festival wasn’t exactly held in Sydney. To be more precise, WorldPride took place (in the words of the organisers) “on the lands of the Gadigal, Cammeraygal, Bidjigal, Darug, Dharawal people who are the Traditional Custodians of the Sydney Basin”. According to the WorldPride 2023 website, “Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people … will come together as one, to celebrate with our global LGBTQIA+ community”.

Salvatore Babones appears in every Quadrant.
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Strangely, there seems to be no record of actual Gadigal, Cammeraygal, Bidjigal, Darug, Tharawal, or other Aboriginal peoples celebrating WorldPride’s arrival on their lands. The first three peoples seem not to maintain official websites. The Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation devotes most of its website to the preservation and promotion of the Darug language. The Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation, notwithstanding the fact that their name has been misspelled by WorldPride, is similarly silent on LGBTQIA+ issues. Their website focuses instead on Aboriginal health. In fact it is difficult to find any evidence that any official Aboriginal representative organisation took any cognisance of WorldPride 2023 whatsoever. Cultural appropriation indeed.

The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has, however, filed its first-ever indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan, though only at the “Innovate” (that is, “inexpensive”) level; see the March 2022 Philistine for further details. In this document (though not on its main website) the Mardi Gras describes itself as an LGBTQIA+SB rights organisation. For the uninitiated, SB here stands for “Sistergirl and Brotherboy”, not “Salvatore Babones”. Moreover, the official rainbow of WorldPride is now the “solidarity rainbow”, which consists of the conventional prismatic rainbow, with brown and black appended underneath (to represent indigenous peoples and African-Americans, whether they like it or not), all undergirded by the pink, baby blue and white of the transsexual flag.

The inclusion of the transsexual flag in the WorldPride rainbow is even more … problematic. Obviously (unlike “SB”) “T” sits squarely in the middle of LGBTQIA+. But like Stalin at Yalta, it doesn’t sit so easily in the middle of the pride alliance. Transsexuals may not be “straight” in any conventional sense of the word, but they often go to great lengths to emphasise that they are not gay, either. Gay may not be straight, but it is now straightforwardly “cis”: homosexual men and women are firmly accepted as ordinary men and women throughout the Western world. People of the same sex can marry each other, adopt children, and even rise to become US Secretary of Transportation. It’s just not a big deal. Lesbian women are cis-women; gay men are cis-men. There is no longer anything poofy about being gay. If anything, it’s a bit old-fashioned.

Moving down the alphabet, bisexual people of either sex are similarly cisgender, just with more fun. Bisexual women are particularly in demand. If you don’t believe me, check Tinder. Skipping the T, queer is also mostly cis: it is a highly contentious term (in certain circles) that has no fixed meaning other than an implied opposition to straightness. When you need something a bit shorter and less specific than LGBTQIA+, “queer” will do.

Intersex people are what they sound like: people whose genital and chromosomal biologies are unambiguously ambiguous. That may be a distressing medical condition for those who experience it, but it is rare, and generally evokes sympathy. Like being born with an extra finger, it’s just an unfortunate fact of life. Medicare will cover the surgery without much controversy. And no one questions the cis-genderedness of asexual people. There are lots of people who don’t desire—or who choose not to engage in—sexual relations of any kind. Not as many people as there used to be, granted, but still a lot.

That leaves the pluses. The “+” in LGBTQIA+ is of course a catch-all for a wide variety of sexual identities, most of them “cis”. For example, it seems reasonable to assume that most Quadrant readers are womasexuals (“a sexual orientation describing exclusive attraction to women”), with a smattering of masexuals (“a sexual orientation describing exclusive attraction to men”) thrown in to spice things up a bit. There doesn’t seem to be a term for cis-men who much prefer to experience the company of two or more (preferably younger) cis-women at the same time, but there is a term for just about everyone else. The point is that the pluses, whether straighties or sissies, are generally cisses.

Not so the T’s. If gay life in twenty-first-century Australia is cis-gender but homo-normative, trans life is (obviously) trans-gender but (not-so-obviously) heteronormative. Trans may be queer, but in many ways it’s the anti-gay. Consider the changing rhetoric: people born with male genitalia who are attracted to other people with male genitalia used to be classified as gay men. Today, they’re more likely to be “affirmed” as trans-women whose sex was “incorrectly assigned” at birth. The current societal (and, it must be added, medical) consensus is that children who engage in “make-believe or fantasy play, toys, games, or activities and playmates that are typical of the experienced gender rather than the assigned sex” are transgender, not gay, or (for that matter) simply open-minded. This, from the World Health Organisation.

The implication is nothing short of a gay and lesbian genocide. In 2019, a transnational organisation called the LGB Alliance was formed in part “to protect children who may grow up to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual … [by working] to protect children from harmful, unscientific ideologies that may lead them to believe either their personality or their body is in need of changing”. In response, transsexual rights organisations have sued to have the LGB Alliance’s charity status revoked, called the group “transphobic” (of course), and labelled the LGB Alliance a “far-right extremist hate group” (the phrase “far-left extremist hate group” apparently constituting a contradiction in terms). As a result, the LGB Alliance—which in Australia has criticised the ABC for classifying people “with penises” and people “who love cock” as lesbians—has been placed among the Proud Boys, the Ku Klux Klan, and Quadrant. Well, at least they’re complaining about the ABC.

Who cares if a child born with male genitalia likes to wear dresses, play with dolls, and put on Mum’s make-up? Twenty years ago, a more progressive Australia came to accept such behaviour as being firmly within the extended range of boyhood. Sure, the boy might turn out to be gay, but what’s wrong with that? Gay men are men, not fags or fairies, and nearly all of society accepts that. It took a little longer for lesbian women to gain the same level of recognition, probably because so many over-ambitious men retained sexual fantasies of lesbian reform. But those debates are over—or at least they were. There’s a rainbow sticker in the window of every cafe, and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is sponsored by Optus, Coles, American Express, Deloitte and Oreo cookies. Homosexuality has gone mainstream.

Yet today, Australia’s not-right-wing establishment is trying to put gays back in the closet—or on the operating table. The same medical community that in a previous generation prohibited gay conversion therapy (talking to patients to help them overcome unwanted same-sex attractions) has now embraced medical transition (operating on patients to remove unwanted sexual organs). Call it “the Iranian solution”. In Iran, homosexuality is banned, but sex-reassignment surgery to turn would-be homosexuals into pro-forma heterosexuals is subsidised by the government. What could be more “right-wing” than that? Boys will be girls and girls will be boys, but is the Australian establishment’s wholehearted embrace of transsexuality really just a return to reactionary conservatism? Only an April fool could say.