How trans lobby group ACON co-opted Australia's biggest institutions

Gay and lesbian groups are also finding that the ongoing erasure of biological sex in law is having a damaging effect on many in the gay community.

The power of Australia’s most effective trans lobby, ACON, formerly the NSW AIDS Council, in overturning the view that human beings come in two genders – male and female – is a masterclass in manipulation of institutions and public opinion. It permeates big business, workplaces, universities, sport, the security services, police, professional services firms, sections of the media and, most alarmingly, government departments, exerting serious influence on the health system and education. The latter are crucial in children being taught a faux orthodoxy – that humans can change sex – and making puberty blockers available on request, a policy that increasingly is challenged around the world, including in Australia.

The insidious mission creep is deliberate. In a startling expose, NSW editor Stephen Rice recounts how ACON, founded during the height of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, set about developing “a new strategic plan” about eight years ago. With same-sex marriage achieved, ACON’s focus shifted from gay rights to trans rights.

It has worked. More than 500 member employers – covering 25 per cent of the national workforce, about three million people – have signed up to its agenda. With a mere $20m in taxpayer funding, Rice notes, ACON has effectively co-opted every arm of the state, from classrooms to courtrooms, to enforce its dogma that self-determined gender trumps biological sex. Its Pride In Health + Wellbeing brand reaches deep into health departments around the nation, pushing an agenda for “gender-affirming” medical treatment, including puberty blockers for children.

ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index ranks member organisations out of 200, on everything from cupcake days and gender-neutral bathrooms (which many people find distasteful) to paid leave for staff to “manage their gender affirmation”. Outlandish language, regarded as insulting by many women, such as rebranding maternity leave as “new parent” leave and describing women as “people with a cervix”, is encouraged.

Government agencies now spend thousands of taxpayer dollars updating computer systems to include “Mx” as a non-binary title, all of which win more points. Staff in many NSW government departments are encouraged to add their pronouns to their email signatures and Teams profiles. Most federal and state employees complete mandatory online induction courses straight out of ACON’s training manuals.

The Australian recognises that gender dysphoria is a real problem and that those with the condition, at work, in education and in the community, deserve to be treated with respect. They must not be bullied. But trans ideology must not be imposed, including on children, whose use of puberty blockers has been found to produce adverse side-effects and create problems if users later want to reverse the process. Allowing children to access such treatment, without parental consent, which is the case in Victoria, is a travesty, as we have reported. And as Janet Albrechtsen has argued, much of corporate Australia has become obsessed with fringe issues that excite and drive a small group of social activists, with “the other side cowered into obedient silence by social pressures”.

The nonsense has gone too far. As Rice reports, gay and lesbian groups, rightly, are objecting, finding that the ongoing erasure of biological sex in law is having a damaging effect on many in the gay community. Governments and companies should also take a firm stand against such ideology.