Bias as a power game: what The Australian got wrong in this article about the Australian Human Rights Commission's transgender rights public consultation
Equating trans lived experience to bias, this article is the platonic ideal of an anti-trans hate piece.
This might sound strange to you, but I flatly love this article in The Australian about the Australian Human Right's Commission’s public consultation into transgender rights. I really enjoy reading flagrant propaganda from powerful mainstream media outlets weakly arguing that the people from the marginalised groups they’re targeting are biased somehow - for not wanting to be eliminated.
Almost every line of the article, titled AHRC transgender rights inquiry ‘biased, waste of taxpayer funds’: experts is written to be intentionally misleading, including the fact that the experts mentioned in the headline are all professional transphobes, who are quoted in the piece.
It’s like the platonic ideal of an anti-trans hate piece, pretending to be “reasonable and balanced” while it actively promotes a bigoted agenda. It doesn’t even try that hard to hide it either.
The Australian Human Rights Commission is conducting a national project mapping threats to trans and gender diverse (TGD) human rights in Australia. Considering the rise of anti-trans sentiment undeniably fuelled by right-wing propaganda flooding local news networks from overseas, this feels like a timely and important human rights initiative. Nonetheless, The Australian’s article attempts to cast doubt on both the need for the commission, and the expertise of trans people on the oppression we experience, by claiming that trans people will be “biased” – prioritising the “expertise” of transphobic cis people.
The article starts doing this by immediately problematising he enquiry’s focus on “anti-trans mobilisation” and “disinformation” by putting them in scare quotes. An interesting and telling decision, since the biggest threats to trans rights at the moment are exactly these two things.
It then goes on to do the same thing to statements about the material impact of this propaganda and prejudice on people’s lives: discrimination, vilification, and violence for trans people. Radicalisation and extremism for cis people. The only link to any further information in this section is an inline hyperlink under “trans and gender diverse Australians” pointing to previous (failed) parliamentary inquiry proposed by transphobes casting doubt on the legitimacy of the settled science around gender affirmation care.
Basically, it’s subtly trying to reframe this as a “balance” issue (trans people get their inquiry, transphobic people did not,) in a way that proves the central thesis of the national inquiry for transgender rights in the first place: That anti-trans prejudice is being spread being spread through propaganda by the mainstream media, and that this propaganda is having a material impact on trans people’s lives. That’s why looking at this article is so important.
These aren’t experts
Throughout the article are quotes from a variety of anti-trans campaigners , starting with Jillian Spencer, a child psychiatrist attached to a transphobic think tank, linked to the international anti-trans extremist group Genspect. She has no record of being an expert in endocrinology or transition care , and was stood down as a general practitioner at the Queensland Children’s Hospital after a complaint from a trans patient and now working in a private practice and promoting what she calls the “watchful waiting” model instead.
The watchful waiting model is exactly what it sounds like: a therapist providing endless weak alternatives (such as asking a young trans girl if she’d considered that boys can be feminine too,) to gender non-conforming children as a way to erode their self-confidence and convince them to desist from seeking actual affirming care. If that was actually done humanely, that should mean proscribing these kids puberty blockers too.
But, considering the controversy which has been intentionally inflamed by transphobes around puberty blockers and the fact that activist-transphobes like Spencer are the biggest and most-often quoted proponents of this particular to approach to gender “therapy”, it feels unlikely in practice that these drugs won’t be kept from gender non-conforming children who require them too . Since, especially in Australia, where ordinary conversion therapy is slowly being banned, it would make sense for these people to promote the “watchful waiting” model as a defacto solution to replace it.
What the article got wrong
Predictably, this vital political context is all missing from the article, which chooses instead to ramble inanely on the fictive threat of bias on the enquiry through its (necessary,) focus on the lived experience of transgender people - who as Spencer says: “don’t want to look at the whole rights issue for the whole of the community”.
This is an obviously an absurd take because trans people are a part of every community that exists on the entire planet. It also immediately expects you to overlook the fact that the first source for this article is a known transphobe whose history is unpacked in a single paragraph which noticeably misses the chance to give the reader even so much a simple inline hyperlink to the news stories it mentions to investigate the issue any further.
A cursory investigation of the other people mentioned in the article before the single trans-positive voice towards the end reveals that all of them are openly transphobic and/or are activists for broader right wing causes. None of them are what you would consider to be unbiased sources, and, since they also make up the majority of voices in the article, you couldn’t really call the argument it’s making here balanced, either.
The hidden truth about trans issues is they’re very simple. The rate of people who entirely regret transition is extremely low to the point that we could easily describe it as statistically meaningless. Most people who detransition only do so temporarily because of social factors, like the difficulty and expense of healthcare, or not getting affirmed in their real gender by their family or their community.
On the other hand, the evidence for positive outcomes for transition is overwhelming. The vast majority of trans people are happier living as the genders that they know they are compared to the ones they were assigned at birth. Self-awareness of this fact can start long before puberty, pointing to the fact the state of being trans will start immediately once you’re assigned the wrong gender from the small amount of visual information available to the medical professional present when you’re brought into the world.
Manufacturing controversy
You wouldn’t know of any of this if you only got your news from the majority of the mainstream media in Australia, the UK, or the USA, however. That’s never been an accident, either.
Large, anti-trans hate groups like Genspect are funded and supported by a shadowy and often anonymous collective of evangelical church groups and individual transphobic billionaires, who take advantage of their economic and political capital to make their fringe and ultimately unsupportable ideology appear like a viable alternative to the mainstream scientific and cultural consensus that trans people are normal. That the best way to deal with the psychological effects of having a gender incongruent with the one you were assigned at birth is simply to transition into one which suits you more, and be supported by your culture when you do so. Propaganda articles like this one in The Australian are written to create a “controversy” around this.
This approach of manufacturing alternatives through brute-force propaganda isn’t even new. Around twenty years ago the “teach the controversy” movement, also funded by rich, evangelical churches, used the same tactic to successfully convince the media and many educational providers in the USA that young “earth creationism”, a theory that the Earth is only 6000 years old and was created literally created by a god, was a viable (but controversial and suppressed,) alternative to the more-accepted mainstream scientific theories of cosmology and evolution. Because evolution, after all, is just another theory. Wouldn’t it make sense to talk about the other theories too?
I personally suspect that once the potential utility of this mode of argument dried up, in terms of influencing US politics, that many of the Christian dominionist groups responsible for promoting this anti-scientific ideology, pivoted into spreading political transphobia instead. Indeed, the end goal of both ideologies appears to be the same.
So, maybe instead of worrying about potential bias from trans people, media outlets like the Australian should look into the real-world history of the figureheads and ideologies that they’re promoting first.
While people like us should be more aware of the rhetoric tricks the media uses to obscure their true goals and disincentivise investigation of their sources. Despite what news sources like this like to claim about their approach being designed to foster balance by avoiding “bias,” the truth is, bias is completely unavoidable.
The only question we should learn to ask ourselves about it is, who does our bias help?
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As mentioned, The Australian Human Rights Commission is seeking input from individuals and organisations with expertise in matters relating to TGD people through a submission process. They welcome all submissions, particularly those that include data, information and research relating to:
Mis- and disinformation, extremism and radicalisation, and anti-TGD mobilisation
Anti-TGD abuse, discrimination, harassment, vilification, and violence
TGD issues relating to education, employment, goods and services, health and healthcare, housing, law, and migration
You can view the call for submissions on their website.
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Mx Maddison Stoff (she/her) is a neurodivergent non-binary essayist, independent musician and author from Melbourne, Australia. She writes unapologetically leftist, feminist, & queer fiction set in a continuous universe which blurs the line between experimental literature & pulp sci-fi. Follow her on Twitter, Patreon, & Bluesky
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