Pride bureaucracy is Safe Schools for sport
Budding cricketers as young as five are being asked if they’re ‘gender fluid’. But Cricket Australia should stick to wickets, not wokeness, argues James Morrow.
Opinion
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News reported in The Daily Telegraph that would-be cricketers as young as five years of age are being asked if they are “gender fluid” or “non-binary” is just the tip of a politically correct iceberg that is threatening to sink community sport.
The problem goes beyond merely quizzing kids about their genders – behaviour that in an earlier age would have been looked at as downright creepy – to ensuring cricket and other community sporting clubs tick more wokeness boxes than an ASX100 company’s HR department.
Because once you dig deeper, it becomes clear that there is an entire hard left bureaucracy that has infiltrated sport in Australia, turning it from a community-minded activity to yet another avenue of indoctrination.
Cricket Australia has told The Daily Telegraph that they are following the Pride in Sport benchmarking tool, which requires community sports clubs to fill out and submit a 16-page questionnaire to prove their commitment to diversity.
As if the volunteers who run our clubs didn’t have enough to do, they have to document that their team has “a documented LGBTQ inclusion strategy”, that they have “have celebrated and promoted LGBTQ Days of Significance”, and that they have “provided Public Facing Training (e.g. Spectators, Supporters, Parents/Guardians) with a form of face-to-face and/or online LGBTQ Training (e.g. Awareness / 101 / Inclusion / Ally etc) throughout the assessed calendar year”.
Clubs are even being asked to pick up the cudgels on Pride’s behalf.
One requirement of the index includes showing “evidence of push communication to an external organisation of any kind that encourages them to undertake work within the LGBTQ inclusion space, in their own right”.
This can include lobbying “an International Sports Federation, encouraging them to update their trans inclusion policies.”
Come again?
Look, no one wants to see people abused for their sexuality or their race or anything else.
But these sorts of frameworks not only make the assumption that sporting clubs can’t deal with these issues on their own, but also require them to become active participants in pushing a highly political ideology of gender and sexuality.
We’ve seen the debacles that can occur when sporting codes stray from their core business of play and sportsmanship: Rugby Australia, I’m looking in your direction.
Cricket Australia should stick to wickets, not wokeness.