In October last year, over 28,000 concerned Australians
signed a Federal Parliament petition calling on the government to conduct an inquiry
into affirmation practices for children who identify as transgender.
As the principal petitioner, I should have received a response within 90 days.
But despite following up a number of times, the government has still not responded.
Now, I'm not going to give up. This is just too important to let go.
It affects every single one of us.
I'll explain why. Gender fluid ideology used to be a fringe postmodern concept.
But today it causes untold harm to children, teenagers and women.
How long is it going to take
for politicians to wake up to the fact that laws allowing children to be subjects in a medical and social experiment,
and women to be discriminated against, are, to say the very least, profoundly unethical.
In fact, blocking a child from going through normal puberty whilst promising affirmation of a gender identity that rejects biology
is a cruel lie. Children are being sterilised and critics of the treatments are being shutdown.
Proponents would have us believe freedom is found in the idea that ‘gender is fluid’ and ‘everyone is on a spectrum’.
But it's the antithesis of freedom. Politically and culturally,
this ideology is creating a prison for desperate children, consigning them to lifelong medical interventions,
plastic surgery and hormone dependence.
All in an attempt to maintain a facade that denies scientific reality and leaves a trail of regret and devastation.
Young people rarely leaving their rooms because they hate what they have become.
It's a modern day tragedy. Despite this, under a guise of compassion, medical practitioners,
activists and ideologues paint gender fluidity as an aspirational goal to be celebrated.
Consider the phenomenon of drag queen story time.
Western Australian drag queen, Cougar Morrison, specialises in adult entertainment.
His social media bears witness to this with images that are too rude to share.
He states that “Drag is rebellion” and “Drag is safer than any institution”.
Despite his R rated alter ego, he loves to gather children between the ages of two and eight
to read to them in drag, imitating and exaggerating, some would say mocking, female characteristics.
Drag queen story time exists to normalise radical gender ideology to kids.
But school curriculums, TV programs, the media,
all contribute to what amounts to brainwashing children into thinking they can choose whether they are a boy or a girl.
They are marinating in a lie.
So it's not surprising then, that there is a huge rise in the number of Australian children
visiting gender clinics, following hard after something they can never achieve.
It's an act of self-deception, and it's been facilitated by our political system and our nation's largest hospitals.
Given the fact that children don't yet have the cognitive,
psychosocial, or emotional capacity to understand the full impact of the decisions they make,
it is incomprehensible that adults would ignore the lifelong effects that puberty blockers and hormone therapy interventions carry,
including a high likelihood of irreversible harm to cardiovascular health, stature, bone density and fertility, to name a few.
Do we for a moment imagine that children can appreciate the implications of a choice to forego fertility and parenthood?
Gender experts may assert compassionate motives but they can't produce
a single jot of conclusive scientific evidence to support their radical approach.
Neither do they entertain open debate to hear rational counterarguments,
despite the tremendous burden of suffering faced by these desperate young people and their families.
If the welfare of Children is paramount, and it must be, then no-one should fear scrutiny,
especially when the latest research debunks the ideology,
revealing that over 88 per cent of gender dysphoric children from 8 to 15 years old
who present at Australian gender clinics are also diagnosed with mental health issues and indicators
of psychological distress including anxiety, depression, behavioural disorders and autism.
It is an appalling indictment on our society that clinicians working in gender services are putting aside a holistic model of care
and instead concentrating on affirming and treating just the dysphoria.
Australian children are even being transitioned in schools without parental knowledge or consent.
Queensland's major newspaper, the Courier Mail, wrote a report this week on school guidance officers
who are advising students as young as 12 on how to change their names,
pronouns and gender, without including parents. Parents say they were cut out of the process
and that their child was encouraged to lie, to support a potential case to cut ties with them.
This is devastating for children and families but there are other victims in this ideological nightmare.
Women and girls. We are rapidly undoing years of advocacy.
The right for women to vote, to enter parliament, sit on boards, even to study in university -
these were hard fought, and won, by brave women and men over decades.
Christian women and organisations, together with feminist groups -
they marched, they protested, they lobbied, they wrote plays and poems and they organised petitions.
Known as suffragettes, they wore sashes with these colours
clearly identifying themselves, despite eliciting scorn and often vile opposition, even arrest and jail time.
Finally, in 1894 South Australia was the first Australian state to give most women the right to vote.
And I say most because Indigenous Australian women were not granted that right until 1962 – 68 years later.
That's important to note, and impossible to fathom. But I'll cover it in a future segment.
But fast forward to today and the picture is very different.
The federal Labor government is comprised of 53% women,
and across all parties there are nine aboriginal women parliamentarians.
Amongst current MPs there are some, such as Senator Claire Chandler,
who are speaking out against the trashing of women's rights through the gender fluid movement, but not many.
Because when they do, they are quickly shut down, such as what happened in Victoria to now ex-liberal MP, Moira Deeming.
Even the Greens Party has been embroiled in an internal dispute over the freedom to discuss this issue.
We've come a long way in breaking through the ‘glass ceiling’,
so-called as it represents an invisible barrier, preventing women from rising beyond a certain level.
But we've created new ceilings that are effectively stopping women from achieving their goals.
Sport is an example. Female competitors are being denied the ability to win in their own races.
Records are being set in women's sporting competitions by men that women can't compete against.
Men identifying as women are establishing new benchmarks, creating physical ceilings that keep women down in their place,
and that's not first place.
The natural physical advantage of men means that top sports- women are unable to achieve the success they are due.
There's no mystery. From conception, boys are bathed in testosterone, and puberty accelerates it.
Men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands, longer torsos, denser muscles, greater lung and heart capacity.
Look no further than Hubbard, the first biological male to win a women's international weightlifting title,
or Thomas who ranked 65th in the men's 500 yard freestyle, but won the title swimming as a female.
There are many more examples. Female prisoners incarcerated with violent males who claim to be women.
Domestic violence shelters unable to refuse men.
Yet women, whilst frustrated and angry, are reluctant to talk,
for fear of being attacked by media and labelled as transphobes and bigots.
Please understand.
I am not trying to offend anybody. Quite the opposite.
But at the same time, if standing up for what's right necessitates burning a bridge,
then I'm prepared to use metaphorical matches.
But I'd far rather build bridges, and work together for the good of all.
Every human being is equal and precious in the sight of God – made in his image, male and female.
Now some might dismiss this as a religious statement but an awful lot of Australians
who are not particularly religious support this view.
And because of this, they don't want to share a dormitory, a change room, a toilet block with someone of the opposite sex.
In the discussion around the Federal Government's proposed religious discrimination legislation,
the Australian Law Reform Commission supports segregating boys and girls for prayers.
But what the vast majority of parents across the country want to know is –
will their children's physical privacy be similarly respected?
It's untenable for the law to allow segregation of males and females for the purpose of prayer
whilst removing the right of adolescent girls not to have to undress in front of adolescent males and vice versa.
This is a vital moment in Australia's history and every one of us can play a part.
I'll keep you posted on the response from government with the call for the inquiry.
But in the meantime, if you happen to run into your federal member of parliament,
why not ask them what they think about clinics sterilising Australian Children,
and whether they will support an inquiry into the practice!
God bless you.