For a quarter of a century, on and off, Melbourne’s “quality” daily newspaper The Age not only published my words — it was my intellectual home.
About two years ago, my harmonious relationship with the paper began to deteriorate. The tension reached its climax last week when the editor, Patrick Elligett, sacked me as a columnist. The breakdown in trust was down to one issue: gender-identity politics, the trans debate — or severe lack thereof.
While the controversy attracts regular coverage in Australia’s Murdoch-owned press, it remains taboo in the progressive media, where the “no-debate”, “the science is settled” mantras are consistently reinforced by stories of young people blossoming post-transition. The worst offender is the ABC, Australia’s equivalent of the BBC. The public broadcaster has even been rebuked by its own Media Watch programme for failing to report on the closure of the NHS’s scandal-hit gender clinic for children in England and Wales, the Tavistock; and for its partnership with Australia’s Stonewall equivalent, Acon, on the grounds it could lead to “perceptions of bias in coverage, or bias itself”.
In August, I learned that a detransitioner in Sydney — who had had testosterone treatment, as well as a mastectomy and hysterectomy before re-identifying with her birth sex — was suing her psychiatrist for negligence. The Age and stablemate The Sydney Morning Herald were keen on the story. Once again, the editing process was hell.
The following day, the mood in the newsroom was described to me as “edgy”. The day after that, the paper published a letter to the editor accusing me of “transphobic rhetoric.”
The editors were, in part, trying to save me from myself. I was told they didn’t want me to end up “a Suzanne Moore” — a reference to The Guardian columnist martyred after her colleagues waged a campaign against “transphobic” content. And yet, just as The Guardian had done, The Age invited an LGBTQI+ organisation to address the newsroom about avoiding “harm” in their reporting on trans issues.
I went on sulk leave.
On my return, by which time Elligett had taken over as editor, I found the de facto gag order still in force. The state of Queensland was ushering through Parliament a gender self-ID bill similar to Scotland’s Gender Recognition Act, at roughly the same time that a doomed Nicola Sturgeon was tying herself in knots over whether a two-time trans-identified rapist — initially housed in the female prison estate, post-conviction — was “a woman”. (The bill was passed last week to the usual triumphal reporting.)
Similar legislation. Identical propaganda lines. And here, also, violent sex offenders were being sent to female prisons. I was told no. There was no “news trigger”.
Source: I was sacked for writing about trans censorship – UnHerd
I can only assume all this is about money- buckets of it once a person is on the life long drugs necessary to support a persons so called transition from male to female- a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry. The idea that xx and xy chromosomes are irrelevant defies science.
I’m aware that this denigration of biological women ( apparently we can’t have “ hurt feelings “ or opinions about ourselves as biological women) plays beautifully into mysogynist culture- how easily we biological women have been and continue to be oppressed.
This isn’t about compassion for trans gender people- it’s about harassing and persecuting feminists and biological women.( in my opinion, if I’m still allowed to have one!)
The start of this ideology, ie. “gender ideology” was in the early 1980s academias as a result of the feminism defeat from ‘sex’ to ‘sexuality’ (itself a result based on the power of the masculine as norm in phallogical culture). This move towards gay sexuality as a normal form
in itself, and not based on its positive comparison to the female “lack” of a penis enhanced its male native norm vav. the female sex. Whereas hetsex male identity as the general norm of sexuality is based on the fact of the lack of the penis (phallus) in the body of women (which according Freud was the reason why some men are actually afraid of the fact that there are humans who lack a penis, thus regarded as a lack in the female sex self-defined body, and as such the Other to Man. Gay Liberation enlarged masculine sexuality to that of a male sexual identity mirroring itself independent of its Other, ie. gay sexuality is normative in itself by simply be phallocentric.