One of the weird side benefits of my job at Southern Cross University is a free subscription to all the Murdoch rags around the country.
It’s ‘know your enemy’ time for me, and it is like watching Fox/Sky news combined with populist anti-intellectual wankerism.
The signature features are an inability to distinguish between news and opinion, and side taking. It seems like there is a chronic incapacity to write a news article without some right-wing agenda seeping through.
Articles about crime gangs have digs about immigration, stories about young people drip with racial undertones. On choosing sides, it’s like there’s some big whiteboard with lists of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ that must be adhered to. ABC bad, Fox good. Brittney Higgins bad, Bruce Lehrmann wronged. Meghan Markle evil hussy, Princess Catherine wondrous and decorative.
The Voice, really bad.
Solar evil, fossil fuels great. Windfarms really really bad, coal-seam gas good. It is so binary.
It is great sport watching what happens when the horse that they are backing gets scratched.
Charlie Teo was really good until he suddenly wasn’t. Then Ben Roberts-Smith was blameless, before he fell firmly from grace.
And then the Murdoch press just pretends they never existed.
But overwhelmingly, over the last year or so, there is bizarre daily attention to transsexuals, who are universally bad in Murdoch-land.
And this got me thinking – why are they so anti-trans? Why all this attention on the threat to women’s sports and change rooms and young bodies and minds?
Frenzy and confected outrage at the thought that trans people might read stories to children in libraries.
Publicising and supporting those international and local zealots who discourage vigilante violence coming from one side of their mouths, while actually encouraging it from the other.
Why all this hurtful, harmful hate speech and vilification when the whole topic could be dealt with sensitively and compassionately like in almost all other mass media?
If you get the chance, watch the National Press Club address from April 2023 by Georgie Stone, actor and trans activist. Wowzers.
Along with Grace Tame in the same venue a year before, it’s one of the great speeches of our time.
How heartening to see that the power of oratory lives on in these young women. I dare you to watch this without crying. When asked what her message was to the anti-trans Murdoch media she answered – ‘just stop trying to kill us’.
Overseas, the Murdoch empire proudly quotes bigots, like Nikki Haley, who is in the running to be US republican presidential candidate:
‘How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year’.
Yep – the key reason girls are suicidal is because there are trans people in their locker rooms.
Now that same-sex marriage is a lost cause after decades of Murdoch opposition, there is no point harping on about lesbians adopting or being forced to bake a cake for a marriage between Bruce and Tom anymore.
We have euthanasia in every state and territory now, so terror stories about killing granny for the inheritance just get a yawn.
Abortion is legal everywhere too, so they can’t very well bang on about sexual promiscuity as a result like they did for years. Even buggery is no longer a crime. Hence the focus on transsexuals their latest go-to topic for stirring up resentment and horror.
A hint of sexual depravity despicably framed within a women’s rights framework.
The truth is that participatory sport has nothing to fear from trans participation, and so much to gain.
There are some terrific examples locally in community and schools where trans sportspeople are welcomed without problems.
Excluding women who are trans reinforces stereotypes about cis women (a cisgender person has the same geneder identity as that presumed for them at birth), and discriminates against a vulnerable group needing team acceptance more than most.
Elite and professional sport – well, that can be sorted calmly, consultatively and without negative judgmental language.
The locker room or bathroom predator scenario is overplayed and exceedingly rare. Besides, a determined pervert could get in there by fancy dress anyway.
This is actually about making it impossible for trans women to safely be in yet another public space or activity. Prejudice disguised as feminist moral protective outrage. Even the Nudgee Highway Service Centre has a gender-neutral change room and bathroom.
Go Queensland!
Finally, let’s all bust the myths that gender is binary, always apparent at birth, identifiable through biological characteristics and can never change over time.
Trans women are real women. People are who they say they are.
I heard the mother of a trans young person interviewed on the radio recently. She was so excited to be part of her child’s journey – questioning, challenged, but learning all the way to her open heart.
Murdoch could learn a thing or two from her. If he had a heart.
♦ David Heilpern is a former magistrate and is now Dean of Law at SCU.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
