AU — . An Australian politician has revealed that “more than 30 federal departments and agencies” are paying a transgender and queer lobby group for “advice and staff training on so-called ‘inclusive’ language.”
Senator Claire Chandler, a Senator for Tasmania for the Liberal Party, said in an Op-Ed published on her website today that the federal Department of Health had last year replaced a pregnancy COVID-19 vaccination guide’s fifty references to ‘women’ with the phrase ‘pregnant person’.
In January, Senator Chandler queried the Department of Health about its “mind-boggling waste of resources during a pandemic.” This month, she learned: The Department’s answer was that it receives ‘a benchmark and suggestions’ on ‘the use of inclusive language’ from the lobby group Pride in Diversity. Services Australia was presented with a “Gold Employer” award by the same lobby group this year, apparently around the same time it was starting to re-label mothers as ‘birthing parents’.
Pride in Diversity is a program by the New South Wales-based ACON, which is described on its website as a “health promotion organisation” campaigning for “sexuality and gender diverse health.” The tax-exempt non-profit offers nationwide “services to assist employers, sporting organisations and service providers” with “inclusion” through its three programs, which aside from Pride in Diversity are Pride in Sport and Pride in Health + Wellbeing.
ACON ranks employers by its “benchmarking instrument for LGBTQ workplace inclusion.” Employers who best conform to ACON’s standards are given incentives in the forms of high rankings on the Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI), which is published by ACON, as well as awards.
This “influence of lobby groups over the public service” has been evident, as “the Office for Women declares that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, … Sport Australia encourages males who identify as women to play women’s sport,” and “Australian Bureau of Statistics claimed that humans can change sex over the course of their lifetime (a claim it was forced to amend after I asked them at Senate Estimates if they’d checked it with biologists).”
Further, the scheme has had “detrimental” effects on women’s human rights in Australia and internationally, with law and policy “increasingly allowing males to self-identify into women’s spaces and facilities, even housing male rapists in women’s prisons,” she said.