Welcome to the Australian Christian Lobby's Voice for Values
This episode contains discussion of themes some may find confronting
Welcome to Voice for Values I'm Martyn Iles
Heteronormativity a word that is applied to beliefs that you and I used to think were completely normal
and didn't even need a word to describe them
the fact that boys are boys, girls are girls
and the boys tend to like girls and girls tend to like boys
and girls and boys become men and women
and men and women get married and men and women have families
these sorts of basic ideas about the very fabric of our society are now labelled heteronormativity
and there is an ideology and a belief system out there that is challenging heteronormativity as we speak in Western culture
last week on Voice for Values I talked to the Australian Christian Lobby's Director of Research Dr. Elisabeth Taylor
about this phenomenon and particularly the philosophical roots of much of the LGBTIQ movement
and where their ideas of sex and sexuality have come from
and how that they are seeking to challenge the Western world's understanding of heteronormativity
this is happening in the education system
this is happening through the law courts and last week we saw a Supreme Court
case coming out of Canada which clearly said that
beliefs about human sexuality as male and female for the purposes of marriage are harmful to LGBTIQ people
Where is this all going to end and how is it being manifested in our own country in Australia
Dr. Taylor joins me once again to talk about this important subject
Welcome to the program Dr. Taylor
Thank you very much
Dr. Taylor I've just described there this word heteronormativity which we went into in some detail in the last episode
and we now have an understanding of it again for the present episode
that is really the target that is being designed by those who are trying to radically
change the law in Australia around things like marriage things like sexuality things like gender
Can I ask what replaces it?
If heteronormativity is no longer a feature of society where are we going?
That's at the heart of the issue so it's an important question heteronormativity
and LGBTQ oppression if you listen to the thought leaders of the LGBT activist
movement they're just different ways of saying the same thing so LGBT oppression
and heteronormativity are the same thing and we won't get rid of LGBT oppression
until we get rid of heteronormativity so Roz Ward is often quoted addressed to
the Marxism 2015 conference in Melbourne where she explained this you know with a
Marxist overlay but I think the Marxist overlay is implicit in the narrative
from this activist movement and she says that LGBT oppression and
heteronormativity are woven into the fabric of capitalism and only Marxism
provides both the theory and the practice for genuine human liberation
it offers both the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where
human sexuality gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom
in extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today
Incredible vision of utopia isn't it it?
Comes out of the idea that we have to do away with all the basic beliefs we have
about boys being boys girls being girls sexualities being heterosexual this kind of thing
Get rid of that assumption all together and you've got utopia
That's right but what's interesting is utopia doesn't even have we can't describe it
All we can do is in fact we can only try to imagine it
We can only imagine what utopia might be like
That's right we haven't got a word for it so I've given it a word which is queer normativity
because if you listen to the thought leaders from the actively LGBT activists
they actually believe that this is liberation not just for LGBT people but liberation for everyone
So in fact if you read further into how Roz Ward thinks about this
She says that actually the whole institution of the family i s a cunning invention of the capitalist overlords
to make us believe poor you know proletariat that we are that we need to live in families
so she says the ruling classes may concede reforms and they have because we fought for them
and they may fund programs like Safe Schools Coalition
but they will never transform capitalism to create real economic or social justice
and it's only the working that shares the interests of all the oppressed groups in society
because we can only meet the demands of everybody in taking collective ownership of everything
So this is a very radical view
but she says that alongside sexism homophobia and transphobia
this oppression that the ruling class has wrought on our bodies
and relationships and sexuality and sexual identities
they all serve to break the spirits of ordinary people and to consume our thoughts
and to make us accept the status quo and for us to keep living or aspiring to live or feel like we should live
in small social units and families where we must reproduce and take responsibility for those people in those units
So this is all the confection of capitalism in order to oppress the working classes
into reproducing themselves for the benefit of capitalism
So everyone is oppressed by the system including you and I
we just don't know that we actually do need liberation from the sexual restrictions
that are included in the structure of society they've been pressed down upon us
And we don't know we're just sheep that have gone along with it that's the way society is ordered
I mean has there ever been a society in all of history where queer normativity has been achieved?
No not to this extent I mean what she's saying correlates very closely with what Kinsey was saying
Which is that this would be a marvellous thing if we just got rid of all of the taboos and restrictions
And there have been of course pockets in different civilisations
Where transgenderism and homosexuality become celebrated by the elites
But you know history doesn't give us a lot of comfort on that school
Because those societies normally deconstruct quite quickly or you know get invaded by barbarians
Who are normally heterosexual
Therefore it would seem that the project is a jolly difficult task
You and I know that it's difficult because heteronormativity just happens to be the way people are naturally inclined
Because that's the world the way the world is created and the way the world is
But to overthrow those natural structures which is so deeply entrenched in all of society
As we said in the last episode all the way down to the way we speak
Gender pronouns and the story books we have on the shelves and the way we live our lives
It must be an enormous task
It's an enormous task I don't think it's an impossible one
And this is what I think is very interesting because I would agree with them
That all of these things probably can be deconstructed
It's just whether I would disagree with them fundamentally about whether or not that is a good idea
Whether or not human happiness lies on the other side of the rainbow
Whether it's utopia
Whether that's really going to be a recipe for health and happiness
And I think that probably these taboos and constraints
Although we might they might think of them as limiting our freedoms
I don't think that this is necessarily fundamentally that their version of liberation
is one that I think is conducive to a strong and flourishing society
Let's come back to the idea then of how this great reform project might be taking place in our culture
Particularly around legislation and education right after the break
Voice for Values at acl.org.au
Welcome back to Voice for Values I'm Martyn Iles
I'm joined today by Dr. Elizabeth Taylor the Director of Research from the Australian Christian Lobby
And we've been having a discussion on today's program about heteronormativity
The word given to all of the things that you and I have always thought are so normal that we haven't had to name them
which is that boys are boys and girls are girls
and boys and girls tend to like each other
and they become men and women and they get married
and sexuality tends to be heterosexual
except there are some who lie on the fringe who are not heterosexual and so on
These beliefs have been labelled and there is a political agenda at work
to undermine all of these traditional understandings of the human person and particularly human sexuality
And we talked about the phrase that Dr. Taylor has coined queer normativity
The end goal of the activists to bring in a world where all of these traditional ideas are completely removed
and that sexuality is liberated gender is anything we say that it is and so on and so forth
but we've just come to a point in the conversation where we want to talk about
How this great reform project might be achieved in Australia today
Now the first obvious one is legislation
What are some examples Dr. Taylor of legislation which aid this reform project towards queer normativity?
One obvious example is anti-discrimination the proliferation of anti-discrimination law
Based on the idea that homosexuality or sexual orientation is a fixed property of identity
That gender identity is an ineffable thing separate from biology
So you can be a man in your head even if you have a woman's body
And that this gender identity is more important in terms of who the real person is than the body that they exist in
And so that that's now enshrined in the Sex Discrimination Act which was recently changed
to replace a man and woman as separate biological categories
Gender identity has now replaced sex as the defining characteristic of whether or not you're a man or a woman
So that's one big change in legislation
And there's been legal rights granted to people who claim to have those attributes
So that they can in a sense use the law to fight back against the heteronormative establishment I suppose
I mean there's that element as well where a certain class of people are given extra legal rights
Almost in order to correct the balance
Yes yeah that's right
So now the law agrees that gender identity is the thing that determines whether you're a man or a woman not your biology
Now one manifestation of that is where men identify as women
and want access to women's toilets and bathrooms and sporting teams
And the other way around so that's just old-fashioned transgenderism
But the idea of gender is now changing in a number of ways as well
So that because according to queer theory you shouldn't necessarily be constrained to binary
Why why be stuck to a male-female binary
So you might get people say well on this spectrum between male and female I'm kind of in the middle
But just slightly one inch off to the to the right
So even the definition of gender is now changing
So it's completely open-ended it's completely sort of build your own adventure
Absolutely in fact it's an essentially individual thing now
And if you look on tumblr then you'll see teenagers being encouraged there's 72 established genders that we've found
And they might be things like glass gender which feels fragile or celestie gender which feels bright and celestial
so what's interesting about this is it's no longer anything to do with gender in the old-fashioned sense
it's much more to do with individual personality and identity who you are
the quintessential thing that makes you unique and special
And what does the law on marriage which has recently changed have to do with the project around queer normativity
Oh well that changes the nature of the family altogether because you've broken that essential triangle
that Roz Ward was talking about
the male, female, child triangle which was the fundamental group unit of society
Well now biology does not define the family anymore because you can have two mothers
that are exactly the same as two fathers that are exactly the same as
one mother and one father
So the biological relationship to the child is obviously changed by that
but also the importance of gender is changed
So you no longer have gender diversity
So there is this idea that with the introduction of same-sex marriage
that two mothers is exactly the same as two fathers and it's not right to distinguish between them
And we don't now linguistically distinguish between them
because they're all encompassed under this one word marriage
It seems to me that actually as a first point of call
to change the marriage law seems to be an excellent thing for those who would like queer normativity
because once you've done away with what marriage teaches us about what gender is for
and particularly the binary nature of it what sexuality is for
and also that heteronormative structure of marriage is the founding basis of the family
If you undo those sort of principles in law then you've got a lot to play with now
There's other lesser issues or other more advanced stages of the debate that you can work through
One of those is of course the whole issue of transgenderism
the T in LGBTQ and the liberation of gender which follows from the liberation of sexuality
And I know you and I have had a discussion for example
about the whole idea of conversion therapies for gender dysphoric people
Can you speak to that and what that means for the reform project
from a legislative point of view on queer normativity
So the conversion therapy or the banning of it depends on a belief system that says
that gender or sexual orientation are fixed properties of identity
that you're born that way that it's hardwired from birth
and therefore that it's discriminatory to change those things or to attempt to change those things
but more than that conversion therapy or even the the idea that someone who has
unwanted same-sex attractions should be able to seek counselling for that well that's a terrible thing
Because that affirms the idea that heterosexual attraction is superior to homosexual attraction
So what they call that then is internalised homophobia
if someone has unwanted same-sex attraction and they would like to get rid of it
Well their belief system is wrong that it needs to be changed and
therefore we're not going to allow people to affirm that wrong belief by allowing conversion therapy
because this is changing what we believe to be something about the fixed settled nature of individual identity
So essentially if you affirm someone in a homosexual lifestyle then that's affirmation of their sexual identity
But if you want to or if you maybe counsel them against it even at their own request
Or they ask for help to change it than that's conversion
And the same goes with gender if somebody feels like a boy and they want to become a girl
then you can make them a girl and that's affirmation
but if you keep them as a boy its conversion and that is now some US states illegal
Yes extraordinary isn't it?
We've opened a Pandora's box I've said the last episode and there's a lot more to be said about this subject
today we covered the issue of law
On the next episode I'd like to turn to the education system and the way in which that is being changed
in order to undermine ideas of heteronormativity in favor of queer normativity
For today Dr. Taylor thank you for joining us once again
My pleasure
Voice for Values from the Australian Christian Lobby at acl.org.au