Shame, shame, shame.
How we debate LGBTQI rights in Australia.
It’s rare to hear a voice in the chambers of Australian Governments that speaks so directly and correctly about my life — so rare and powerful was Labour MP Harriet Shing’s speech in the Victorian Upper House that I wept along with her, listening whilst pacing the streets of Fitzroy on this very Melbourne morning.
Harriet was profound. She articulated the complex frustration that our community feels due to systematic and powerful forces of discrimination that affect our lives. She also continuously pointed out the deeply personal nature of political and media debates for LGBTQI people when we are the topic. For us, this is not an abstract conversation about what is right or wrong or ‘moral’ — this is a discussion about our very beings, our physical bodies, and our love. It’s very personal, and it’s a debate in which we’re forced to justify our existence over and over and over.
The Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill passed with a vast majority and will become law, here we are finally seeing Governments placing restrictions on fundamentalist quackery. And let’s be clear that only a Labour or Greens Government would push for such change to occur. Malcolm Turnbull might fiercely claim that his Government led Australia through the Marriage Equality debate — but that change only happened despite the Coalition. It happened because we have a democratic system that gives LGBTQI people the right to have a voice and a right to protest, and we were protesting for many many years before Turnbull became Prime Minister. This protest started in the 70’s.
The thing that has been plaguing me for so long in debates like these is the utter frustration with the continued acceptance of violence against our community and institutions that commit it. I hear the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) being quoted on our national broadcaster and I am enraged. These are not qualified opinions; these are not the voices of people who have research and evidence that relates to the well-being of our citizens — these are the views of zealots who seek to control, homogenize, and would undoubtedly do so brutally and punitively if they had the power. We know what the world looks like when religious institutions have ultimate power, it’s not good for anyone, not just LGBTQI folk. The democratic system of government was invented in part to mitigate this ever happening again.
This like any other topic is not a simple matter with a binary answer to it either — it’s not religious institutions versus LGBTQI people. But public debate likes a binary narrative — it’s digestible and entertaining. It’s also lazy journalism. But if we continue to talk about the church being the villain in this narrative, and gay people the victim, we deny so many of their faith and an important part of their families’ culture. This is the hard work that needs to be done still, we don’t need to just implement laws to protect LGBTQI people from dangerous practices like ‘conversion therapy’, or indeed abolish laws like the ‘gay panic defence’ which excused the literal murder of a homosexual should a person feel intimidated by them — a law that existed in the state of South Australia until December 2020! What we need is for the church, along with other institutions, to change and join the 21st century — they need to fully accept homosexuals, non-binary, intersex, and transgender people, and our bodies. Only then will we start to create a society where we are not ‘othered’, excluded, and rejected by our families or our own cultures.
Religion is an important part of society — it’s our faith and the historical basis for morality and law. Our religions are part of what makes up our cultural diversity in Australia and they do some great charity and community work. But religion is not science and it’s not above the law. Right now, all over the world, religion is the elephant in the democratic room, and the church should not be exempt from accountability. ‘Freedom of speech’ isn’t a truism that excuses violence. And make no mistake, this is a violent experience for us.
This debate, like the marriage equality debate, is emotionally exhausting and a dangerous experience for our community. These debates will continue so long as fundamentalist organisations like the ACL and The Menzies Research Centre continued to enjoy the privilege of charity status, political influence, and media attention. These small think-tanks are pitted against significant proportions of the population like they have the same weight and are deserving of credibility. The LGBTQI community is not a ‘small fringe minority’ — we are a large proportion of the population, not just of Australia but of the world. We exist across every culture, every nationality, and every religion. We are not a problem that needs to be solved, and we are the only people who should dictate what happens to our own bodies.
An important aspect of these debates is that they often exclude the voices of the very people that they are discussing, exemplified by Menzies Research Centre Executive Director, Nick Cater’s article in The Australian in which he simultaneously proposes that lesbians, gays, and bisexual people (specifically) are ignorant of The Change or Suppression Practices Prohibition Bill’s purpose (apparently we can’t read) and that if we did understand it, we wouldn’t support it. Man-splaining, patronising and talking on behalf of a community that you are not a member of, all at the same time, is quite the achievement. This might just look like another pseudointellectual argument to some, but it has a visceral effect on me. Further, it’s a thinly veiled attempt to ‘divide and concur’ our communities by suggesting that we don’t support our trans and non-binary members.
We are continuously spoken over, spoken for, spoken down to and lectured about our own experiences by people who don’t even bother to try and understand us.
There is a great saying that I learnt from some Aboriginal colleagues about how to have discussions or approach topics related to First Nations peoples: ‘nothing about us without us’ — I think this sums up how many marginalised and subjugated communities wish to be treated. Our media producers have choices, editors make choices consciously. The choice to exclude the voices of LGBTQI people in matters that are directly about us is a choice to discriminate and cause harm. There are expert organisations on these topics that have community support and endorsement, there are plenty of LGBTQI folk for journalists to engage with, and ample information available for free online. We have done the labour of producing accessible resources that explain to heterosexual and cisgender people how to afford us dignity.
Menzies, which seems to be a sister organisation to the ACL judging by content cross-over, is hell-bent on attacking transgender and non-binary people. With zero representation, interaction or agency regarding my community exhibited in either organisation, they somehow have a huge proportion of airtime on the topic of our bodies and sex lives. Their statements are simply sensationalist. I don’t for a second believe that anybody thinks the ACL or Menzies represent the views of the general Australian parishioner. But what is of concern is the fact that these two organisations are deeply involved with the Coalition government. Menzies is the think tank of the Liberal Party of Australia and they receive tax-payer money to do their work.
The ACL is even more extreme — their Facebook feed looks like a one-man crusade obsessed with controlling what people do with their own bodies. The organisation, which is led by shock-jock styled preacher Martyn Iles, is rather opaque in its operations. No staff other than Martyn are listed as employees on their website and it has been given special rights to not disclose several of its Board Members by the Federal Government. The ACL received a little under a quarter of a million dollars in taxpayer funder government grants last year, however, the majority of their money comes from donations — how many donations and from whom is not disclosed.
Martyn is charismatic but his views are unsurprisingly dogmatic — his arguments about the LGBTQI community really come down to ‘because the bible said so’. These opinions also seem to come from a place of deeply ingrained fear which is the concerning part, and it is precisely why we call this behaviour a ‘phobia’. Arguments like these, the ones the ACL give a platform to, promote fear and discrimination of LGBTQI people — this fear manifests in words like ‘disgusting’, ‘abhorrent’, and ‘abnormal’ in the verbal, but its physical and institutional manifestations are far more serious.
Please just take a moment now to reflect on the concept of there being a significant government funded lobbyist group in Australia that is dedicated to promoting fear of you and the community you belong to. It’s bloody scary.
The irony of the ACL is that they state to be speaking for the majority of Australians, yet their following and communications reach is rather small. I suspect in reality the ACL, like the Institute of Public Affairs, is majority funded by a handful of very wealthy major donors with a specialist agenda. It is just what it says on the label — a lobbyist group. And they sure do know how to spin.
The ACL and Menzies are both great examples of how wealth and privilege manifest into political power — for no other virtue than their wealth and privilege. Their strategy is simple: make people fear queers, and make people think that queers are coming for your children. From listening to their views, you’d be forgiven for thinking that queer folk are trying to deconstruct the very fabric of society. The sad thing about this strategy and argument is that it takes gender identity and sexuality away from young people. There has been a reluctance in the politics of this debate to confront this argument head-on until now, in the media and in legislation at least. Legislators have been forced to engage with the reality that children can be trans and non-binary, and that young queer folk start to discover their sexual attraction at the same time that heterosexual people do — when we hit puberty.
This legislation subsequently confronts the idea that you can ‘convert’ someone to not be what they naturally are. Not only is this idea preposterous, as this legislation recognises clearly and profoundly, it is deadly.
I’ve spent too much of my adult life dealing with the trauma of the severe homophobic violence I had to endure as a child. I was clearly a queer kid, as I’m clearly and proudly queer now at 34. I have been waiting for the day where we start to see LGBTQI kids being protected from that violence. Other than the fact that this is a basic human right, people need to understand that children need support, love and acceptance — it’s really not that complicated. When our identity isn’t accepted, that’s detrimental. The practices made illegal under this new law had severely negative impacts on children, some of whom did not survive. And that’s not some ‘Marxist-feminist-lefty-theory’ either — it’s a fact, and its a fact now recognised in law.
Our bodies are not political or social ideologies. I’m not making a voting choice by falling in love with another man. Being born intersex doesn’t involve economic theory. Lesbians don’t walk around with a little guide to socialism in their pockets.
Perhaps the worst thing about the ACL, Menzies and the like is that they continue to create a culture of shame for our community. Harriet spoke to this at length and stated that “Shame is at the heart of the need for this legislation.” It’s hard to explain the impact of this shame to people who aren’t members of our community — it’s so complex that I think you need to have lived experience of it to even grasp it, and so many of us don’t understand it ourselves. It’s something that we need to work through as adults sometimes on therapist’s sofa, but too often at the pub. This shame causes prolific mental and body health issues, addiction, relational problems, and many other complexities in my community. It is the reason why 41% of LGBTQI Australians have considered suicide in the past year and why so many actually do it. It’s also the reason why we march at Mardi Gras every year.
But we’re not the cause of this shame — it’s being done to us. And that’s just not fair, and to quote Harriet again, “We deserve better”.
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