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The power of Australia’s most successful trans lobby group was on glittering display earlier this year as hundreds of brightly clad executives gathered in the Grand Ballroom of Sydney’s International Convention Centre.
Among the partygoers vying for honours at the annual LGBTQ+ Inclusion awards were representatives from almost every major bank, law firm and university in the country, alongside officials from government departments up to and including Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Even Australia’s top spy and law-enforcement agencies were there – ASIO, ASIS, and the Australian Federal Police – all in the running for awards ranging from Bronze through to Platinum.
Many Australians would never have heard of the low-key awards organiser, the one-time AIDS Council of NSW, now rebranded as ACON, but they would likely have felt its influence.
As the nation’s self-appointed arbiter of “workplace inclusion” for trans employees, ACON boasts that more than 500 member employers – covering 25 per cent of the national workforce – have signed up to its trans rights agenda.
“The entanglement with ACON is everywhere,” says the Lesbian Action Group’s Nicole Mowbray.
“It’s spreading through schools, it’s going through the public service, through all facets of society, basically based on a belief that humans can change sex. It’s like a new religion and if you don’t believe that humans can change sex, you are well and truly on the outer.”
Hundreds of businesses and government agencies now compete in ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI), with points on offer for everything from cupcake days and gender-neutral bathrooms to paid leave for staff to “manage their gender-affirmation”.
Encompassing up to three million workers, the AWEI ranks each organisation out of a score of 200 on how they implement ACON’s policies.
ACON’s workplace index is also the springboard for a wider and increasingly successful mission: to change not just the way trans people are treated by society but the way society defines sex and gender itself.
A growing chorus of voices, particularly from within the gay and lesbian communities, accuse ACON of hijacking the “Pride” emblem for an agenda they claim is narrow and exclusionary – the very opposite.
ACON was pivoting to expand into transgender healthcare advocacy, including the TransHub initiative, which promotes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery as part of gender-affirming care.
Many of the ideas were copied from UK charity Stonewall, another gay rights group shifting its focus to trans activism.
Pride in Diversity had been running since 2010, but now it adopted Stonewall’s Diversity Champions program, transforming workplace inclusion into a competitive sport and pushing organisations to embed ACON’s agenda into their policies and culture.
Researcher Stassja Frei, who produces the Desexing Society podcast, argues the AWEI program was designed from the start as a form of social engineering.
“They were particularly successful in certain industries, like banking and finance, higher education and law,” says Frei, “or perhaps they had strategically targeted those industries due to their power and influence in society.”
Rather than an organic cultural evolution, AWEI is a top-down, manufactured social change, says Frei, whose podcast is the first to critically examine the transgender industry in Australia.
Women’s rights advocate Kit Kowalski became intrigued by ACON’s strategy for infiltrating a wide range of institutions through its AWEI program.
Its brilliance has been in marketing its workplace agenda, she says, through the use of “gamification”: that is, having member groups compete against each other to win points and awards by jumping through ever more difficult hoops.
Kowalski started sending FOI requests to government departments about their attempts to score points in the program, a project documented on the ACON Exposed website.
What she found was an almost universal uptake of ACON’s demands.
Re-naming maternity leave as “new parent leave” (3 points) might seem innocuous, Kowalski says, but “it hurts women by erasing the recognition of biological motherhood”.
Likewise, all-gender toilets are not everyone’s idea of equality.
Some requirements are not optional at all. Most federal and state employees have to complete mandatory online induction courses straight out of ACON’s training manuals.
“So I’m literally forced by the NSW public sector to say that a man can come into our bathrooms, or I can’t get the tick I need to keep my job.”
ACON is now deeply embedded in the NSW health system, in some cases directly delivering the gender-affirming medical programs it promotes.
The astonishing scale of the marriage between NSW Health staff and ACON became apparent when The Australian applied under FOI for emails between the two organisations. The request was refused on the grounds it would require “an unreasonable diversion of resources”. A preliminary search had turned up 14,000 emails.
Over the past two years, the Department of Health – a Platinum supporter of ACON’s Pride in Health + Wellbeing Awards – has handed ACON an extraordinary $7m for a “national cervical self-collection education and awareness campaign”.
That was 10 times more than other applicants received, dwarfing the $1m granted to the Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer, the leading expert body in the field for more than five decades.
ACON argues that all trans people in Australia should have full and free access to medical gender affirmation, including surgical interventions.
TransHub provides no hint that the “affirmative care” model is increasingly disputed by medical and legal authorities around the world, especially in relation to the efficacy of puberty blockers.
ACON extends its influence through an alliance with the politically powerful Equality Australia, led by former Labor staffer Anna Brown, and the markedly interventionist Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody, who acts under the auspices of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).
Both Equality Australia and the Sex Discrimination Commissioner successfully applied to intervene in Tickle’s case against Grover as “friends of the court”, claiming only a desire to assist the judges in interpreting the Sex Discrimination Act.
That led to an extraordinary submission by Equality Australia – unchallenged by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner – that sex is simply “a way of classifying people along a scale between a man at one end and a woman at the other”.
One of the many common links in these cases is then-ACON director Cook, a long-time friend of Tickle, with the pair pictured together just days before Tickle initiated the complaint against Grover at the AHRC.
The highly networked Cook was one step away from being appointed to the World Health Organisation’s trans health advisory committee.
The venture came unstuck when questions were raised about Cook’s suitability to advise on such a critical and contentious area, after media reports highlighted his use of private social media accounts to post material relating to bestiality, public nudity, bondage parties and transgender orgies.
Cook resigned from ACON, but in the cloistered world of trans activism immediately re-emerged as Equality Australia’s chair of transequality.
Source: Trans Masterplan: how activists captured nation’s institutions and corporations