ABC takes up transgender cause
ACON, the former NSW AIDS Council now run as an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, drives its radical agenda through a workplace benchmarking scheme. The ABC is a keen participant, wasting funds on ACON’s ridiculous demands. These include changing computer systems to allow non-binary titles such as Mx, building all-gender bathrooms and offering “gender affirmation leave”, as Stephen Rice reported on Monday. That’s for 26 of 4000 ABC employees who identify as gender diverse, only one of whom has applied for affirmation leave in three years.
As we said on Saturday, ACON’s extremist, radical agenda has exerted serious sway over health and education via its influence on the public service. As a result, children in some states, especially Victoria, are being taught a faux orthodoxy – that humans can change sex – and puberty blockers to minors are available on request, a practice increasingly challenged around the world. The effect on the national broadcaster is no less insidious.
ACON’s agenda is seeping into newsrooms and programming. The ABC has created a Queer Content Lead role for a manager of the agenda. Its Instagram channel, ABCQueer, targeted at young people, promotes transgender ideology uncritically, including LGBTQIA+ “facts” such as “some women have penises” and “some men have periods”. One story championed a young woman who “discovered” she was non-binary and had a double mastectomy. The picture of her scars was captioned “My greatest act of self- love”.
Celebrating that agonising act of self-loathing should be sufficient reason for ABC management, and other companies, to shun ACON and for governments to ensure it does not receive a cent more funding.
Far more serious is the failure of ABC news and current affairs to report the growing scientific and medical challenges to “gender-affirming care” for young people, including puberty blockers. Its coverage of the Cass review in Britain, which led to the closure of the gender-affirming Tavistock Clinic and a ban on prescribing puberty blockers for children, was minuscule, and came with the caveat that “applying these findings to Australia misses important context”. Likewise, its largely ignoring a shock ruling in the Family Court that found one of Australia’s foremost child gender medicine experts – later revealed to be Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne chief of medicine Michelle Telfer – was ruled to have misled the court while giving evidence to support a mother who wished her child to be prescribed puberty blockers. Dr Telfer’s gender-affirming treatment was uncritically covered by the broadcaster for a decade.
ABC staffers told Rice so-called “inclusivity” is baked into ABC culture. ABC managing director Hugh Marks is clearly unaware of the extent of the conflict of interest between the ABC supporting ACON and maintaining objectivity. Now it is exposed, he, and the heads of news and current affairs, must restore balance.
If the national broadcaster were serious about providing its owners, Australian taxpayers, with high-quality, independent and impartial news coverage, it would put the blowtorch to organisations such as ACON.