Katherine Deves is saying what a lot are thinking about transgender athletes

Katherine Deves arrives for the Politics at the Pub evening at Forestville RSL in Sydney last Friday. Picture: Nikki Short

Liberal candidate for the Sydney seat of Warringah, Katherine Deves, is in the eye of a media storm over her views on transgender athletes in women’s sport – but as with many social issues the media’s biases may just help the government.

The vehemence of the Deves backlash can be best understood if readers realise many people – few of them transphobic – actually agree with Deves about women in sport.

If Deves were simply a nutter – and many of the comments on her now deleted Twitter account are nutty – why would her critics not just ignore her and bank the seat to sitting independent Zali Steggall?

Why give her so much publicity? After all, many such as NSW Treasurer Matt Kean – who demands Scott Morrison disendorse Deves – seem happier with so-called “teal independents” like Steggall than with the Coalition.

Teal is defined as a mix of cyan (blue) and green.

It’s appropriate livery given most of the largely female teal candidates are backed by the Greens, Labor and GetUp. They are left-wing, small-g green women running in blue-ribbon Liberal Party seats often held by progressive Liberal men.

ABC election analyst Antony Green on April 20 said these independents were “tapping into a perception among Liberal voters that the government isn’t doing enough” about climate change or an integrity commission. Yet both Labor and the Coalition are committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 and the Morrison government has tabled legislation for an integrity commission.

Many federal political reporters seem unfamiliar with the record of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. Labor favours it as a model federally. ICAC found nothing much in 10 years under former premier Bob Carr and only recommended charges against former Labor ministers Eddie Obeid and Ian McDonald in 2013 after Carr’s retirement in 2005. Yet ICAC has claimed the scalps of three Liberal premiers against whom no courts found wrongdoing.

Labor is running dead in the teal seats, calculating sitting Coalition MPs who poll less than 45 per cent of the vote can be toppled by preference flows to independents who poll more than 30 per cent thanks to huge campaign budgets from Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200.

For the government, the task is to make voters in seats such as North Sydney, Wentworth in Sydney’s east and Kooyong and Goldstein in Melbourne realise supporting such independents increases the likelihood of a minority government led by Labor, a repeat of the 2010 result to former prime minister Julia Gillard.

Holmes a Court has even claimed on Twitter minority governments are good for the country and argued Gillard’s was a great government because it passed so much legislation, including the carbon tax it had vowed not to introduce.

Suffice to say Labor itself tipped Gillard out of the prime ministership for the return of Kevin Rudd in 2013. Rudd is generally acknowledged to have saved about 20 seats in that year’s election. Tony Abbott won by campaigning against the carbon tax and Labor’s fumbling of asylum seeker policy.

Back to Deves. Why are Morrison, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, and former prime minister John Howard and Abbott all backing her? It might surprise many journalists that many Australians think Deves is right about keeping women’s sport for women.

Deves may well fail in Warringah, but Steggall’s calls for her disendorsement suggest Steggall is concerned about her chances. More widely, what do left-wing journalists imagine communities in the outer suburbs of our capital cities think about Deves’s women’s sports issue? Seats with high numbers of Muslim, Indian, Polynesian, Maronite and Catholic voters are likely to want their daughters playing sport against other biological females.

Such communities are socially and religiously conservative and often living in seats held by the ALP. Think the marginal seats of Macquarie and Dobell in western Sydney.

The ALP already faces a cultural values problem with the Religious Discrimination Bill promised by Morrison at the 2019 election but scuppered by Labor, the Greens, independents and five Coalition MPs in February.

Dennis Shanahan in this paper last Thursday revealed details of Morrison’s correspondence with religious leaders over the Bill, scrapped when proposed amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act to ban schools from making decisions based on the faith of the school were linked to the passing of the religious freedom legislation. Church groups decided the amendments would take more from private schools than the Religious Discrimination Bill was giving.

Morrison wrote at the start of the campaign to church groups: “Until a consensus can be found and the issues that have been created by these amendments can be resolved, we cannot in good conscience put at risk the existing protections that currently exist for people of religious faith. Sadly, Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party prized scoring a political victory against the government as more important than achieving laws that protect Australians of religious faith against discrimination.”

This column noted on February 14 that Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen had said after the party’s 2019 defeat “people of faith no longer feel progressive politics cares about them”. Protecting the rights of gay and trans children and the right to free religious expressions of faith was a tricky balance. “Yet much of the left media has been unable to prioritise religious freedom and seems only able to defend gay and trans students’ rights,” the column argued.

Electorally, there may be more upside for Morrison in religious freedom and defending women’s sport than there is downside in an unpleasant debate about trans rights.

The Sydney Morning Herald was praised on Twitter last week for Wednesday’s editorial demanding Deves be disendorsed. It cited as precedent Howard’s 1996 disendorsement of Pauline Hanson. It was a poor example. Hanson went on to win the Labor seat of Oxley as an independent and to become a national political figure as leader of One Nation. She would most likely have remained in obscurity had she run as a Liberal.

Many journalists last week tried to pretend trans-competitors in women’s sport was not a serious issue. Wrong. It is an issue all over the world.

Former trans cricketer Catherine McGregor, a decorated soldier, political adviser and media commentator, is a close long-time friend. Our fathers died the same day in 1964. We are Queenslanders of the same age.

Catherine said last week: “There is no case for trans competitors at the elite level in women’s sport. The difference in size and strength between biological women and trans women who have had the benefit of testosterone in puberty is too great.”

The core argument for trans inclusion in women’s sport concerns identity. Those who do not support inclusion are accused of not accepting trans athletes as real women. Never discussed is why there is no push from trans men to compete against biological men.

Anyone wanting to understand the biological and philosophical truth in this debate should read an essay in The Conversation by University of New Orleans ethics professor Chris W. Surprenant on May 18 last year. This is a big issue in the US precisely because trans athletes are winning so many events against biological women.