‘Burn the witch’: Gympie flying club’s trans row spirals out of control
Pilot Jennifer Beck’s gender transition was accepted at first in her small regional Queensland community. But then the drama really took off.
Jennifer Beck was “settled into her dream life” six years ago, according to her friends.
As a senior flying instructor, Beck, then 65, had trained scores of pilots since 2004 at Gympie’s small regional airport about two hours’ drive north of Brisbane. She’d been a member of the airport’s Gympie Aero Club since 1993.
Flying was Beck’s passion. Weather permitting, her morning routine was to walk her dog and then take her single-seater aircraft for a spin.
While earning a small income from teaching pilots, Beck held several unpaid positions at the airport as well. She was regional safety officer, in charge of identifying hazards, and served as the airport’s liaison officer with Gympie Regional Council.
If there was a quid pro quo for her voluntary duties, it was living rent-free in a modest caravan Beck owned that was parked near the main hangar. All up, it was a quiet, spartan existence, but fulfilling.
In 2004, the same year she qualified as a senior flying instructor, Beck transitioned from male to female gender.
Years later it would be accepted during legal proceedings that her gender transition, while remaining in her community, had “taken considerable strength and confidence and required support from family and friends”. There was an “abundance of evidence” to support the idea Beck was “happy” after her transition and “could withstand most of the reactions she encountered”.
But that was before attacks on her turned extreme. By late 2014 the aero club’s members had split into rival factions that were broadly for, or against, Beck. Antagonism was focused mainly on Beck’s gender but blurred into her roles at the airport.
As tensions worsened, Beck lost confidence and was sometimes seen in tears.
A statement of principle approved by the aero club’s management and posted on the club whiteboard did not name Beck but was clearly intended to curb growing hostility directed her way. It warned all members against discrimination, bullying or harassment based on race, religion or preferred gender. It was later appended with a signed note by Beck’s main critic, Blair Rowan, who proclaimed his “freedom of speech”. Rowan later attached a golliwog doll to the whiteboard.
The low point for Beck was a series of emails sent by Rowan to some of the club’s male members and later shown to her. These emails, which started in February 2015, condemned Beck’s use of the female members’ toilets, called her a man “with man parts” and asked why she could not be called “he” by everyone at the airport.
Rowan, then 49, said he intended “broadsiding” Beck at the next club members’ meeting about “why we should clean his shit from the side of the toilet bowl that he can’t, and also why he uses the female toilet”.
One of Rowan’s emails objected to Beck’s mere presence at the airport: “My religion and personal values are highly offended by Beck being thrust upon me (that was a pun Gaz). Every time I go to the drome, he is lurking and watching, it’s creepy. How does a woman feel sharing a toilet or change room with a man?” Another went further: “But let’s leave emotion out of this and burn the witch.”
Shortly after seeing these emails in July 2015, Beck was sacked as regional safety officer following a separate complaint Rowan made to Recreational Aviation Australia, the governing body for ultralights.
Now overwhelmed by anxiety and insecurity, Beck resorted to sleeping during the day in her caravan to “avoid reality”. With her world collapsing around her, she feared the next moves to ostracise her could be the loss of her instructor’s job, ejection from the aero club and eviction from her airport home.
All were bleak prospects when Beck was headed for 70 and her only assets were a caravan and single-seater plane. On legal advice, she lodged a complaint against Rowan under Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Act in January 2016, attempting to end what she alleged was a “concerted campaign” of sexual harassment, vilification and victimisation waged against her. She also launched defamation proceedings against Rowan.
Beck’s story could highlight the difficulties that confront transgender people trying to live independent lives with dignity anywhere. But her experience suggests how especially challenging survival – let alone acceptance – can be in a small regional community when some have fixed views. She belonged to a 73-member club near inland Gympie, population 50,000.
In this small pool, she found personal animosities could be magnified and there was more scope for playing out prejudices against someone considered not to fit in. Beck had done nothing wrong, it appeared; she was just different.
For almost a decade – from the time of her gender transition until tensions surfaced – it seems Beck was able to work and live at the airport in relative harmony. Her conflict with Rowan changed all that.
Rowan, a wealthy local Gympie property investor and owner of four or five planes at the airport, had been taught to fly by Beck in 2009.
He did not appear to have problems with Beck then – but he started raising questions in late 2014 about whether she should pay a share of electricity or rent for her caravan home. He also said she should be required to join the airport’s toilet-cleaning roster.
Beck thought the main reason behind Rowan’s objections to her at the time related to the positioning of airport security cameras: Rowan was allegedly displeased after finding out Beck had complained to the club president that one camera, meant to face west, was instead turned north to face two aircraft owned by Rowan.
Rowan’s emails criticising Beck from February 2015 onwards were shown to her in July that year. By this stage, Rowan was an elected member of the club’s management committee.
The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal later said: “Mr Rowan was using strong, offensive and highly critical words about her to other members of the club – committee – seemingly in an attempt to influence them against her.”
Rowan issued a public apology in October 2016 following mediation in the Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland to try to resolve the conflict informally.
Declaring he now had “more insight and greater empathy” for Beck’s position, Rowan said he had apologised. He said he regretted his comments and had withdrawn them: “I’m sure it will be beneficial this … unpleasant experience be laid to rest.”
The peace was short-lived because Rowan chose a different course behind the scenes: just days before his apology, he had fought back by filing his own ADCQ complaint alleging Beck had sexually harassed him in the past.
Rowan alleged one incident occurred in January 2009 when Beck was a flight instructor and he was her student. He claimed that when Beck alerted him a plane was behind them midair, he said: “I don’t need to worry about him, he is behind me?” He claimed Beck switched to an “altered sultry tone” in response: “So you don’t mind a man coming up behind you then.”
According to Rowan, this comment distracted and confused him. He claimed he thought “Beck was born a woman” at the time. Only months later, Rowan said, was he allegedly told that “Beck was born a man”. Rowan said in his ADCQ complaint: “I was offended, humiliated and felt intimidated when I remember the comment and the penny dropped.”
On another occasion during his pilot training, Rowan alleged, Beck asked him to check a cupboard in her caravan home: “I was stretching up to inspect the operation of the door when I felt Beck rub against me. This was a sexual act. Beck made body contact when facing my rear. I felt uncomfortable. Later when I was told she was born a man, I was offended, humiliated and felt intimidated by the act.”
Rowan also alleged that between September 2008 and July 2009, during flying lessons, Beck “on multiple occasions made a circle with her thumb and first finger, and slid it up and down the control stick, simultaneously bulging her left cheek with her tongue”.
According to Rowan: “This would always make me uneasy. Later when I was told she was born a man, I was offended, humiliated and felt intimidated by the act. Right now, having to write this, the memory repulses me.”
At the conclusion of his complaint, Rowan added: “The vilification continues to this day as a result of my rejection and the demonstrated disgust in the unwanted advances of Beck.”
When Beck learned of Rowan’s counter-complaint, the ADCQ’s mediation stopped and Beck’s original complaint was referred to QCAT for a formal hearing and decision. Beck amended her complaint, adding a new allegation that Rowan’s historical claims of sexual harassment were not only false but “victimisation”.
Following a two-day hearing in February 2018, QCAT member Jeremy Gordon ruled in Beck’s favour on three of her allegations and dismissed seven others. Gordon said two of Rowan’s emails sent to club members on February 19 and 25, which contained derogatory references to Beck using the female toilets and questioned whether she should be called “he”, did amount to “sexual harassment” because a reasonable person would anticipate the possibility that Beck would be “offended, humiliated or intimidated by the conduct”.
“It doesn’t matter that she saw these after the event, as is suggested by (Rowan),” Gordon said. “The act of harassment occurred when she received them.”
Gordon also ruled that Rowan had “victimised” Beck with his sexual harassment complaint filed 10 months after Beck’s own. He concluded Rowan’s allegations were “made up”. He said Rowan’s complaint was lodged well outside the time limit, the dates of alleged incidents were sketchy, details of conversations lacked credibility and chunks of Rowan’s allegations were straight out of the Anti-Discrimination Act. It looked like Rowan had “sat down with the act and thought to himself, ‘what can I allege will get me into the ADQC with my sex harassment claim, and then see what happens’.”
It made no sense, Gordon said, that Rowan had been willing to “continue his flying lessons” with Beck (a further 31 flights according to her official log) and “go into close confines with her in her caravan” in 2009 if what he claimed about Beck occurred. As recently as 2014, Rowan had even “voted for her to continue to live on site”.
Gordon said: “The whole of these allegations (by Rowan) in fact I find inherently unbelievable … I think that these allegations of sexual harassment were simply invented by the respondent (Rowan) in order to test the boundaries of the ADCQ.”
Of Beck’s allegations that were dismissed, Gordon said the note Rowan attached to the club whiteboard could not be considered vilification because it was not an act of incitement. Rowan’s other emails, while offensive, did not amount to sexual harassment, vilification or victimisation because they were not “public acts” as such: Gordon took the view they were “published” to a small number of aero club committee members and were really “communications” about upcoming discussions at a scheduled meeting.
Rowan’s “burn the witch” comment was also not ruled victimisation or vilification. It was “extraordinarily” offensive and improper but would not have incited email recipients to act on it. They would have realised Rowan “didn’t intend for what was suggested in the email to actually happen”.
Rowan was ordered to pay Beck the maximum compensation under the act for the three allegations upheld, a total of $19,000. The act in Queensland was not established to provide large financial rewards, and Beck was aware of this when she launched her action. She relied on borrowed funds far exceeding her compensation to cover her legal costs in the hope of restitution that, according to her, was not based on money value. She wanted her life back.
Unhappy with the outcome, Rowan appealed, this time hiring Brisbane silk Dan O’Gorman SC instead of representing himself. He lost again. In February this year, a two-member appeal tribunal, Michelle Howard and Ann Fitzpatrick, upheld Gordon’s decision and spent some time explaining why Rowan’s counter-complaint of sexual harassment “was not believed”.
A major problem was that Rowan had given earlier evidence “on oath” that he’d told “no one” about Beck’s alleged sexual harassment when she trained him as a pilot, or for years afterwards. Yet during his appeal he claimed he told nine people and offered witness accounts to support his revised recall. “Mr Rowan is hoisted on his own petard,” the tribunal said.
Rowan says he intends to appeal against the QCAT’s rulings in the Queensland Court of Appeal with a hearing scheduled in August. He says he does not want to make any further comment until afterwards.
Beck says life has almost returned to normal, but she remains apprehensive about the prospect of fighting another appeal. For the court appeal, she will receive free advice from the Caxton Legal Centre. Friends have started crowd-funding to help cover legal costs.
Now 72, Beck still flies her airplane most days, serves as airport liaison officer and lives in her onsite caravan. She gave up her instructor’s certificate in late 2015 when her health deteriorated in the midst of battling Rowan, and now exists on the age pension.
“I definitely want to get back to life as it was,” she says. “I was happy in my own self, and I felt people were very accepting of me. I think of the number of people I taught how to fly. It’s occurred to me occasionally, well, they might think ‘I had a transgender person teach me how to fly, and that was fine’.”