Episode 4

Warning: this episode contains sexually explicit content, including descriptions of sexual assault and child sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

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So far in this series we’ve focused on the gender affirmation model, it’s impact on families, the health consequences, and how it was mainstreamed in Australia. Now let’s turn our attention to one of the major drivers behind the massive increase in children identifying as trans: schools.

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Welcome back to Desexing Society. I’m your host, Stassja Frei. Episode 5: Safe Schools

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In 2016 a program called Safe Schools was set to be rolled out across Australia. It was an anti-bullying program, aimed at making schools safer for gay and lesbian kids. Safe Schools was developed by academics at Melbourne’s La Trobe University. Specifically, their Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society – ARCSHS for short.

At the time, Moira Deeming was not an elected member of the Victorian upper house as she is now. If you live in Victoria, you probably know that Moira is in the process of suing the leader of the Victorian Liberal Party, John Pesutto, for defamation. She was expelled from the Liberal Party after attending a Let Women Speak rally that was gatecrashed by neo-nazis. In the ensuing media storm following the rally, her then boss, John Pesutto, smeared her in a press release as having associated with people who “themselves have been publicly associated with far right-wing extremist groups including neo-Nazi activists.” But all that, is a story for season 2 of Desexing Society. 

Back in 2016, when Safe Schools hit the news, Moira Deeming was a registered teacher who’d taken time off to homeschool one of her children who, coincidentally, had been bullied at school.

Moira Deeming

The other reason why when I was a teacher I didn’t pay attention to this program, it was called the Safe Schools program, that sounds good to me, I’m all on board, it’s to stop bullying against gay kids, good, I already don’t agree with that, nice, I’ll just go along with my daily life cos I don’t let gay kids get bullied just like I don’t let any kid get bullied.

Surely only a homophobe would object to such a program.

Moira Deeming

It was only when I looked at the curriculum that I thought, where is the anti-bullying material in here? This is a sex ed curriculum and it is full of transgender ideology. I actually can’t see a single thing here about anti bullying. 

Safe Schools had blown up in the media and anyone even loosely paying attention to the news, would’ve seen the headlines.

Moira Deeming

There was an article somewhere about how kids were being asked inappropriate sexual questions by teachers and there was this sexually inappropriate content and I thought, no, that’s impossible, that’s against the rules, that can’t actually be in an actual official curriculum. Impossible. Anyway but I had time to look into it so I did, because I think it was actually in the Herald Sun or The Age, it was in a proper newspaper, that was the first time I had decided to give this whole-what I had considered to be conspiracy theory garbage some attention. And I did have a look at it and I was actually furious.

Moira went to the Department of Education website and found a teaching resource called Transmission, an intergenerational journey. Technically, it wasn’t part of the Safe Schools program. It was a sex ed teaching resource. Like Safe Schools, it was created by La Trobe University’s ARCSHS.

Moira Deeming

This one was just literally about sexual practices and it was so erotic, it talked about analingus, cunnulingus and it gave these graphic descriptions and I was thinking, I’m not a brothel – you know a madam in a brothel, I am not here to train them in the techniques of sexual pleasure, it’s inappropriate for me to cross that line, there is a professional boundary here that is not being respected. And then, if I was to cross that line, being a trustworthy teacher, then when an untrustworthy teacher comes along and crosses that line, these kids are going to have no idea that there is a predator after them because all of their boundaries have been erased. And I just will not take part in that, I think it’s just dangerous. You’re eroding all those good healthy instincts in children that it’s not appropriate for people who have no special relationship with you or proper context to be asking you about your sexual preferences or your sexuality. That’s abnormal. It’s not what teachers do.

Moira sent me a copy of the material. One of the activities asks students to decide which sexual activities they would be ok with, which ones they would never try, and which ones they’re unsure about. Here’s the list of sex acts: anal sex, analingus, cuddling, cunnilingus, dry humping, body and/or genital rubbing, fantasy, fellatio, foreplay, holding hands, manual sex, massage, masturbation, love bite/hicky, kissing, oral, penetrative sex, phone sex/cyber sex, scissoring/tribbing and lastly, vaginal sex. If you didn’t notice, anal and analingus were on the list but not a single mention of breasts or nipples. I think back to when I was teenager and I imagine this would’ve been a bit humiliating to be asked these things in a classroom.

Moira Deeming

And I just looked it and I thought, if my employer gave me this survey, I would sue them. What good reason is there to get a child to write down that information? I ended up complaining, writing an article and channel 10 came out and interviewed me and I said to him I’ll give you ½ an hour cos I thought he was going to try and make me look like a homophobe of course, but I have to give this interview just in case I can get some of the truth out there and he did try and do that I think. But I kept asking him questions, I said well you tell me what good reason there is, you tell me, I can’t see a good reason you would ask children these questions, I said what am I going to do, am I going to grade it? Am I going to put it in my filing cabinet? Are they going to swap to grade their answers? This is absurd! Why is this here, it shouldn’t have got past the government and I couldn’t believe it but it was from a government approved website, I clicked from the government website to Ansell, it was Ansell the condom company website, so from the Department of Education teacher resource to Ansell to that resource. Unbelievable! Outrageous. People should’ve been fired. So many people should have been fired by now, it is just incredible.

The other teaching resource Moira found disturbing was produced by the Victorian Department of Education and Training. It contained some role playing activities.

Moira Deeming

One of them asked them to do a role play as if they were a boy who had been forced to give his uncle oral sex the night before. 

Moira sent me this document as well. It’s called, Building Respectful Relationships, Stepping out against gender-based violence. Some of the role plays involve girls having been sexually assaulted and violent fathers bashing mothers. I wonder if anyone stopped to think how this might affect students who have actually experienced those things.

More alarming still were the policies that Safe Schools encouraged all schools to adopt. Students could use the toilets and changerooms that matched their gender identity, rather than their sex. And if a boy had a girl gender identity, he should be included in girls’ sports competitions. 

Moira Deeming

Basically female students don’t have any rights to female only toilets and change rooms, they don’t even have the right to demand a female teacher to supervise them when they’re trying to shower after a swim at the pool or something, which makes me furious. Because I know and all teachers would know that if a male tried to walk in, whether he’s wearing a dress or not, I don’t care, whether he passes as female or not, if they know that that person is a male, those girls, I mean I can just picture it, they would just be imploring me not to let that man in. And I don’t know about anyone else but I wouldn’t let him in and I would be the one to lose my job. And I just couldn’t believe that that was the situation I was in. I just couldn’t believe-I can’t believe that that is the law right now, that me, trying to protect my female students and their privacy based on a very ordinary – I mean I don’t know a time in history where it’s not been the case that women have wanted their own bodily privacy and it’s never been looked at as hateful before, it’s never been looked at as discrimination before. Why is it suddenly not allowed?

The scenario Moira described, of a male teacher supervising the girls’ change rooms, isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. At a Pennsylvania high school in the US, a male tennis coach, Sasha Yates, formerly David, went into the girls’ changerooms, and stripped down to his bra and panties in front of the girls’ soccer team. In another complaint against him, he’s accused of going into the same changeroom and asking girls about their menstrual cycles and what type of panties they like to wear. 

It’s not hard to understand why Moira is so scathing of the Safe Schools policies.

Moira Deeming

What it did was, actually, give teachers the legal right and the legal cover to sexually harass students. 

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Part of the Safe Schools program was an 8 lesson curriculum plan called All of Us. It was designed for year 7 and 8 students – roughly 12 and 13 year olds. The lessons include same sex attraction, bisexuality, transgender and intersex experiences.

When I first looked at the curriculum, I went straight to Lesson 4, transgender experiences. The activity asks students to imagine that genderless aliens have arrived in the classroom. How do you explain male and female to them without referring to genitals. “Students will need to make a list of characteristics, hobbies, clothing and traits that we associate with being either male or female.” It then lists some examples that students might give, and this where it gets a bit 1950s. Under female it lists: like cooking, enjoy dancing, have long hair, enjoy shopping, wear make-up, gossip with friends. It goes on, “students have the opportunity to explore how these expectations have developed in today’s society and think about how they could be different.” Few would see any problem with an exercise exploring sex-based stereotypes. But it’s the next bit that’s, problematic. Teachers are instructed to play a video – Nevo’s Story, produced by LGBT charity, Minus18. Nevo is a girl who thinks she’s a boy.

Nevo Zisin

Discovering you’re transgender, it’s a lot more complicated than anything else. It’s a lot more complicated than your sexual identity. With your gender it’s like a whole different thing because no one teaches you can be anything except for what you’re already told, I mean that little pink ribbon that’s wrapped around your foot when you’re in the hospital, like that’s, that’s it you know, you can’t argue with that. My gender is male and I feel male.

I thought that for the last 50 years, since second wave feminism, we’d been teaching girls that they can pursue whatever they like. That they can play with cars and climb trees and kick a footy if they want. Am a I wrong? Has society regressed since I was I kid in the 80s? How is it that Nevo has come to believe that sex-based stereotypes can’t be challenged? More importantly, what is Nevo’s story saying to girls? The girls who don’t identify with cooking and dancing and gossiping with friends? 

Moira Deeming

I knew just immediately it would make all of my students who are not super feminine or super masculine think “oh, I’m not a good enough female, I’m not even a legitimate female maybe I’m a boy, maybe I’m not even a female if I don’t look like that super feminine image maybe, ya know if I’m not into all those feminine things.” Having grown up in a pretty feminist household, I was looking at the language, they’d have all these little stories in the curriculum and they were all using sexist stereotypes to describe what it feels like to be transgender. “I liked girly things. I liked girly colours. I liked doing all the girl things” and I was like, what’s a girly colour? When did we bring that language back in.

I wasn’t able to find any use of the word “girly” but Moira’s sentiment is spot on. All of Us teaches girls that if they’re not girly enough, then maybe they’re really boys. And, it encourages social contagion.

Nevo Zisin

I realised there were certain things I was feeling really uncomfortable about in my life and then I had a big chat to my girlfriend about it on a long road trip. We had a really open conversation and she said look maybe you’re transgender, I’m like no no no no no no no that’s not me, I’m a proud woman and I’m a feminist and you know I love women and blah blah blah. And then I went home and I looked up things and I searched for my specific things and everyone was saying everything I was saying and everyone was saying oh when I was little I would play role playing games and I would pick the male characters and I thought ooh, I did that, I still do that, my favourite sims are all male and that was really like confronting for me. And then I spoke to other people and a lot of people said that as a child they would kind of pick male clothing and for 5 years of my life as a kid I dressed male and told everyone I was a boy so I thought maybe that’s a bit of a warning sign

So girls, if you’re uncomfortable with girly things, if your friends are telling you that maybe you’re trans, go online and find confirmation and encouragement to get testosterone. And if you’re a lesbian…

Nevo Zisin

I identified as a lesbian for a while. As soon as I sort of discovered my gender identity I realised it didn’t really fit that well. I now identify, I guess, as straight. I’m attracted to women. That’s about it [fade]

All of Us seems to want lesbians to pretend that they’re heterosexuals, like Nevo. Sadly, Nevo’s association with Minus18 made her a poster child for the trans lobby. Now in her late 20s, Nevo’s entire adult life has been about queer activism. She’s written three books on queerness. She runs school workshops and workplace training focused on gender identity. Interestingly, she no longer identifies as male. She’s non binary and uses they/them pronouns. Even though she only wore boys’ clothes when she was a child, now she wears skirts and make up with her bushy beard. And she definitely doesn’t regret having a double mastectomy. She loves her scars. 

Nevo came under intense criticism for her part in Safe Schools. According to a Sydney Morning Herald article from 2017, conservative Christians said “her story encouraged impressionable minors to undergo sex-change surgery without parental consent.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration if it was ever said. What Nevo’s Story did do, and continues to do, is encourage young girls and lesbians to think that there’s something wrong with them, that they’re not really girls. And if your daughter or son starts identifying as the opposite sex, Safe Schools tells teachers to socially transition your child without your knowledge.

Moira Deeming

The other thing that I really hated that it did was it expected me as a teacher to lie to the parents. So the school gets to decide whether the family is an ally or is going to be supportive and whether we’re going to tell them that their child has been living as a different gender at school. Now I did not sign up to lie to parents, and I am a parent and, just over my dead body would I lie to a parent especially about -I mean at all but, I mean, about something so significant in their child’s psychological development. It should be panic stations everywhere.

Knowing what we know about social transition, that it’s a major psychological intervention that reinforces gender dysphoria, are school teachers really equipped to make this decision?

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How did we get here? How did La Trobe university’s Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society come to play such a large role in children’s education?

ARCSHS was founded in 1993 with the purpose of studying AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. Because of these origins, it’s always been focused on sexual minorities. In ‘95 they received federal funding to undertake a survey of same sex attracted youth aged between 14 and 21. In ‘98 they released their results, Writing Themselves In, A National Report on the Sexuality, Health and Well-Being of Same-Sex Attracted Young People. The results painted a stark picture for gay and lesbian youth. They were being bullied at school because of their sexual orientation and it was leading to poor health outcomes. 46% had been verbally abused, 13% physically abused and 70% of that abuse happened in schools. Based on these findings, the Victorian government set up the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Gay and Lesbian Health. This created a direct conduit for ARCSHS to feed their research straight into public policy.

Dr Elisabeth Taylor has spent some time researching Safe Schools, ARCSHS and Writing Themselves In. She has a PhD in Medieval Women’s History from Cambridge University. She was hired by the Australian Christian Lobby in 2016 as their director of research. The first thing to land on her desk was the Safe Schools Program. Which led her to investigate Writing Themselves In. She has a number of criticisms.

Elisabeth Taylor

So they said that they maximised the sample, they had four questions of these teenagers: are you heterosexual, same sex attracted, attracted to both sexes or not sure? So four options, three of them would qualify them for the sample, including not sure. 

The Q in the LGBTQIA+ acronym stands for queer or questioning. So where respondents answered “not sure” that was counted as questioning. Writing Themselves In put the percentage of youth who are same sex attracted at somewhere between 8 and 11 percent. Compared to a 2014 Australian study, that’s quite high. That study found for those aged 15 or over, 1.4% identified as gay or lesbian, and another 1.4% as bisexual. The generally accepted estimate for exclusively gay or lesbian sexual orientation in the adult population, is 2%. With their inflated figures, Writing Themselves In was able to say “look how many kids are at risk of homophobic bullying. We need to act.”

To complicate this even further, there’s also the question of whether the respondents who expressed same sex attraction would go on to be homosexual in adulthood. 

Elisabeth Taylor

And the authors acknowledge and every sexologist knows, that same sex attraction in high school students is not an indication of a settled gay or lesbian identity as an adult. Some of them will identify as gay and lesbians but a lot of them won’t. 

When I first heard this, I thought it sounded, frankly, a bit homophobic. Isn’t it homophobic to tell a teen that it’s just a phase? It turns out that for a lot of kids, same sex attraction is just a phase. A long term study undertaken in the United States tracked a cohort of teenagers into adulthood. For boys who experienced some same sex attraction in adolescence, over 80% of them grew to be exclusively heterosexual as adults. For girls it was 60%.

So why does all this matter? 

Elisabeth Taylor

And when La Trobe then published the media release to publish the results of this research, they published it as “gay kids bullied in schools”.

There’s no doubt in my mind that gender non conforming kids are bullied in schools. But Writing Themselves In inflated the numbers, creating a moral panic about the health and safety of gay kids. And critically, the report didn’t even properly define what was meant by gay kids. Bisexual is not the same as homosexual. Being unsure of one’s sexuality doesn’t indicate homosexuality. And the researchers failed to identify whether it was same sex attraction that made them targets for bullying, or the more likely explanation of gender non conformity. How did the bullies know to target them? And if 46% of respondents had suffered verbal abuse for being gay, why were the other 54% left unscathed?

The fact is, kids bully each other. One Australian study found that 27%, that’s just over a quarter of students from grade 4 to year 8 were being frequently bullied at school. That study defined “frequently” as bullying that occurred one or more times, every two weeks. On the other hand, Writing Themselves In never investigated the frequency of homophobic bullying. So of the 46% that had suffered verbal abuse, there’s no way of knowing whether these were one offs or weekly or daily occurrences.

There have now been four rounds of Writing Themselves In with results published in 98, 2005, 2010 and 2021. By the third round, in 2010, things seemed to have gotten even worse for gay kids. The proportion who’d experienced verbal abuse jumped from 46% in ‘98 to 61% in 2010. How could this be? Well, as we learned in Episode 3, there are big problems with online surveys. As Dr James Athanasou explains in his paper titled, A Critical Analysis of Writing Themselves In 3, “People who do respond are more likely to be interested in the topic. It is not possible to obtain a valid sample through respondent self-selection. Without a valid sample, all data are questionable.”

So really, we have no idea of the true scale of homophobic bullying in schools.

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One person I interviewed for this series told me that Safe Schools was old news. I think he was right. It’s been tricky for me to get my head around what went down because I wasn’t paying attention back in 2016. Lucky for me, journalist and ABC radio host Benjamin Law wrote a lengthy essay in defence of Safe Schools called, Moral Panic 101. I’ll give you the broad strokes.

The idea was hatched by two women from La Trobe’s ARCSHS – Anne Mitchell, a teacher and co-author of Writing Themselves In, and Roz Ward, a philosopher. A third woman, Jen Sainsbury, had won a scholarship to travel overseas and look at how schools tackled homophobia. She found that changing the school environment to make it gay friendly, was key.

It started small, with $100,000 in funding from the Victorian Labor government in 2010. Just eleven schools signed up initially. Then a Coalition government was voted in, and they gave it an extra $416,000. So far so good for Safe Schools. It had bipartisan support. 

In 2013, a week before the federal election, then finance minister Penny Wong announced $8 million in federal funding to rollout Safe Schools nationally. The Liberal Party won the federal election and was forced to make good on Labor’s commitment. A quick point here for international listeners, the Liberal Party are Australia’s conservative party and they’ve had a long running coalition with the National Party who are popular in rural areas. So, the following year, 2014, work began on a national Safe Schools program. This included the All of Us teaching resource, developed in conjunction with LGBT youth charity, Minus18. 

In November 2015, with little fanfare, All of Us was launched. Three months later, in February 2016, the conservative newspaper, The Australian got hold of the curriculum and began raising the alarm. “Activists push taxpayer-funded gay manual in schools” that was the first headline. The article took aim at the sexual orientation aspects of All of Us and how it encouraged students to take on an activist role. One suggestion is using your assignments to start conversations about equal marriage, for example. If teachers won’t let you put up LGBT posters at school, ask them why, and if you don’t get a reasonable answer, you may have to be creative about where you place them. So began the media storm.

Three days later The Australian ran another article: “Safe Schools Coalition: sexual politics in the classroom”. Journalist Natasha Bita flagged some of what I find to be, the objectionable parts of All of Us. It told teachers that “Phrases like ‘ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘boys and girls’ should be avoided.” 

The article included part of a bizarre lesson plan. “Indicate to your students that you are talking about gender and not sex by asking them to consider what makes them female or male. Most students will mention their genitalia. Extend the discussion by asking students what it would mean in terms of their gender if they were to lose that part of themselves.’’

As the kicker, The Australian took aim at La Trobe academic Roz Ward. She was a Marxist. She had given a speech at the Marxism 2015 conference where she said the following: 

Roz Ward

Programs like the Safe Schools Coalition are making some difference but we’re still an extremely long way from liberation. Marxism offers the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today. Alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia both serve to break the spirits of ordinary people, to consume our thoughts, to make us accept the status quo and for us to keep living or aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and families, where we must reproduce and take responsibility for those people in those units.

Marxism was here to liberate queer people. And destroy the family unit. How would the conservative government respond? Education Minister and Liberal Party moderate Simon Birmingham initially defended Safe Schools. Hard right backbenchers weren’t having a bar of it. Cory Bernardi wanted it defunded. He said it was about indoctrinating “children into a Marxist agenda of cultural relativism.” Labor leader Bill Shorten told Bernardi he was a homophobe. On Facebook, then Victorian Premier Dan Andrews also accused the hard right Liberals of homophobia. So, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ordered the Education Minister to launch a review of All of Us. Professor William Loudon was given just two weeks to complete the review. 

And then, National party backbencher George Christensen dropped the following bombshell in Federal Parliament:

George Christensen

Some of the things that the Safe Schools coalition Australia are recommending to school students include pornographic web content, sex shops, adult online communities and sex clubs. The safe schools All of Us teaching resource directs students to the LGBT organisation Twenty10. On the 19th of January this year, Twenty10 hosted a hands-on workshop for youth on sex toys and sadomasochistic practices. All of Us also directs students to the website of the LGBT youth organisation Minus18 which produced most of the Safe Schools resources. Minus18 advises students on chest binding, penis tucking, sex toys and sex advice such as “penis in vagina sex is not the only sex, and certainly not the ultimate sex.” Minus18 links to the Toolshed, an online pornographic sex shop offering a range of sex toys, sadomasochistic items and pornography. Minsus18 recommends Scarlateen, a teen sex advice site that promotes group sex, sex toys and sadomasochism. 

All of this was true. Kids would’ve had to follow a specific pathway of clicks from Minus18 to reach those websites, but nonetheless, it was true. 

When the Loudon Review came out, he found that All of Us was “suitable, robust, age-appropriate, educationally sound and aligned with the Australian curriculum.” He also found, regarding the problem of Minus18 linking to outside websites that “there may however be material on some of these websites that would not be suitable for younger students.” 

Christensen was not happy. He and another 42 conservatives signed a petition demanding a parliamentary inquiry. And, he dropped another bombshell in parliament. Professor Gary Dowsett, deputy director of La Trobe’s ARSCHS, the research centre that created Safe Schools, was pro paedophilia. In 1982, Dowsett had written a piece for the Gay Information quarterly journal, called Boiled Lollies and Bandaids: gay men and kids. It was essentially a call for gay men to support their paedophile brothers. He wrote: “First, we have three legal social questions to win: custody rights for gay men and lesbians; the legal right of paedophiles and their young loves; and finally, the sexual rights of children as a whole.” It gets worse. “How different then is that gentle, tentative sexuality between parent and child from the love of a paedophile and his/her lover? From all their accounts and from many academic studies that kind of love, warmth, support and nurture is an important part of the paedophilic relationship. I am not saying that mothering/fathering is paedophilic; but I am saying they are not mutually exclusive…”

Technically, Gary Dowsett wasn’t involved in developing Safe Schools. But given La Trobe’s ARSCHS was the source of the research, the program, the teaching material and Dowsett was the deputy director, it cast a very dark shadow over Safe Schools. Shockingly, La Trobe University, played the victim. A spokesman said: “We are appalled that a respected academic has been attacked using parliamentary privilege. This is a blatant attempt to distract attention from the independent endorsement of the highly effective Safe Schools program. We stand by the important work of Professor Dowsett and his team.” 

After all that, the federal education minister had no choice. He held a press conference announcing sweeping changes to Safe Schools. The All of Us lessons that Loudon had suggested “might not be suitable” were removed. Content on intersex conditions would be altered. Schools would have to consult parents as to whether the school signed on to the program. And if they did sign on, parents could opt out of the actual lessons. Finally, he announced that federal funding would not continue after 2017. The conservatives had won, or had they?

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Elisabeth Taylor

The main thing about Safe Schools was the policies and the programs that change the whole of school environment, and that’s what’s so important about Safe Schools is that it was the whole of school approach so we have to be giving messages about sexual and gender diversity in every subject, we can be giving stickers to the teachers that are most inclusive and we need to be celebrating all the LGBTIQ+ days of festivities, we have to have Stand Out groups, we have to have drag queens come and present to the school assembly, we need to have to have rainbow inclusive messaging on our website, you know, all of this. The whole of school needs to be celebrating the rainbow agenda which is a political Marxist agenda. So William Loudoun didn’t look at all of those policies, he looked at the All of Us curriculum and made some suggestions, he spoke to one school, as far as I know, and one of his suggestions was they drop the Minus18 branding, so they did that at the federal level but Dan Andrews and the ACT both said no, well if federal funding for this program is dependent on our changing our curriculum, changing the program in accordance with Loudoun’s recommendations, then we’ll fund it ourselves because, as Dan Andrews said, “I take my advice from experts, not bigots.”

Elisabeth’s view, that the queering of education is a Marxist agenda, is shared by many. But it’s also disputed by many others. And it’s not something I want to go into here. What is indisputable is that most modern Marxists have 100% bought into the transgender belief system. And that includes Roz Ward, one of the brains behind Safe Schools. At a 2014 National Symposium, she was recorded saying “Safe Schools Coalition is about supporting gender and sexual diversity … not about stopping bullying. It’s about gender and sexual diversity.” This is baffling, because Safe Schools was pitched as an anti-bullying program. If that’s not what it’s about, then what is it about?

Elisabeth Taylor

People that understand queer theory would not go along with this, most people. But nobody wants to have the queer theory conversation.

Elisbeth’s research for the Australian Christian Lobby led her down a rabbit hole from which she’s yet to emerge. For the last 8 years she’s been looking in depth at an exotic branch of academia known as queer theory. 

Elisabeth Taylor

So the political claim of queer theory, and this is the thing that people generally don’t understand, is that they want to eradicate the moral distinctions between good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, acceptable/unacceptable sexual behaviours and interests, so that everything is normal and good, and that’s the claim of diversity – that’s what they mean by sexual diversity, equality means that every sexual interest is equal and inclusion means that they object to the mechanisms that distance them from the centre of respectable society.

In 1984, American cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin published an essay called Thinking Sex. It’s considered one of the foundational texts of queer theory. In it, she describes a sexual hierarchy where heterosexual sex within marriage is given the highest cultural value, leading to marginalisation, poverty and state violence against sexual identities lower down the pyramid. 

A lot of Rubin’s essay is devoted to the marginalisation of homosexuals. Remember, it was the 80s, the start of the AIDS epidemic and it was still early days for lesbian and gay liberation. So there was good reason to advocate for homosexuals. But Rubin isn’t just advocating for gays and lesbians. She’s concerned about all sexual dissidents, as she calls them. She writes: “The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.” Yes, that last one is paedophiles. She considers laws criminalising child pornography to be nothing more than a moral panic.

How is it that academics like Rubin, and La Trobe university’s Gary Dowcett are advocating for paedophiles? Have they lost their minds? Well, it’s because queer theory borrows heavily from two branches of philosophy – postmodernism and poststructuralism. And one of the most influential of these philosophers was Michel Foucault. Elisabeth explains:

Elisabeth Taylor

Basically the claim there is that truth doesn’t exist. Truth is the product of power and whoever is in power gets to create the truth and then use that truth – that truth will benefit some and marginalise others, right? So the idea there is that, because we have these belief systems, either from religion or tradition, or psychology and science, that says that there are some sexual interests which are just too hideous to contemplate and they are rightly condemned as abnormal or unhealthy, the fact that we have those rationalisations, that system of rationalisations is based on truth claims which are not true, they’re just the product of power because there are people in power who believe those things and so they’ve taught everybody to believe those things, but if they can create new truth claims and have them accepted by people, well then you’ve upset the discourse, you’ve changed the discourse. 

So essentially, nothing is real and everything is permitted. There’s nothing inherently wrong with paedophilia it’s just that society has taught everyone to think that it’s wrong. Michel Foucault certainly believed this, putting his name to a 1977 petition calling on the French parliament to lower the age of consent to 13. Since his death in 1984, Foucault has been accused of sexually abusing children during his time in Tunisia.

But I want to come back to this word, discourse. It’s one of those buzzwords you see a lot on social media, and when queer theorists use it, they mean something more akin to a paradigm than a debate.

Elisabeth Taylor

Discourse is how we frame our understanding of something, so for example, if you’re talking to a regular doctor about health, they will think about surgery and pharmaceuticals and diagnosis and a certain tradition of health. If you’re talking to a herbalist about health, well then they’ll have something completely different to say about it or an alternative – so you’ve got the powerful discourse about health, health is dominated by the regular medical professions and then you’ve got these fringe discourses around the outside. So what queer theory is saying is well, we’re a fringe discourse at the moment, but all we need to do is get power and then we can become the central discourse and we can marginalise these other discourses that disagree with us about the truth claims about human sexuality.

Queer theorists have done a pretty good job of seizing power and espousing their version of truth. Gayle Rubin’s ideas have proliferated throughout the western world, including Australia. Prostitution has been decriminalised to varying degrees across most of the country. We have male transvestites and transsexuals, as Rubin called them, playing women’s sports and using women’s change rooms. We see BDSM fetishists marching with gays and lesbians at family friendly pride events. And we have drag queens performing for children in schools and public libraries. The only sexual dissident on Rubin’s list who is still “unjustly” persecuted is the paedophile. So how did queer theory make such stealthy and significant gains in society and in law? 

Elisabeth Taylor

If you can get your discourse to come from a respectable institution like a university well then more people will believe it, and more people will believe that it’s true. 

In Australia, that respectable institution seems to be La Trobe University’s ARCSHS. As we’ve heard, they are the architects of the Safe Schools Program. The idea that you can’t tell a person’s gender or sex just by looking at them, is embedded in the Safe Schools material. The idea that woman and man are gender identities that have no relation to biological sex comes from queer theory. Specifically, these ideas are the brainchild of Judith Butler, American philosopher and author of the 1990 book, Gender Trouble.

Elisabeth Taylor

She is coming from this queer theory background. She’s interesting because she suggests a different mechanism for decentering heterosexuality, heteronormativity, that’s the objective of queer theory, and she says well what if we just get rid of male female distinctions and then you can’t tell who’s a man and who’s a woman, so you can’t tell who’s gay and who isn’t and suddenly you have queered all sexuality which was the aim of the radical end of the gay rights movement, is to queer all sexuality.

I want to clarify something here. The lesbian and gay rights movement was about civil rights. They wanted inclusion in society, to not have to hide their relationships, and to not face discrimination for their sexual orientation. When Elisabeth says the radical end of the gay rights movement, she’s talking about queer theorists. And there are plenty of gays and lesbians who oppose queer theory.

But back to Judith Butler’s ideas about erasing male female distinctions. One tactic used by queer theorists is to claim that sex is a social construct invented by humans. It’s not binary as in male and female, it’s a spectrum. They point to intersex conditions, also called differences of sexual development, as proof that sex is a spectrum. This is why one of the lesson plans in All of Us is called Intersex Experiences. Here they use a diagram showing a line with male at one end and female at the other end to demonstrate the male female spectrum. But if we take this diagram to its logical conclusion, it implies that women with large breasts are more female than those with small breasts. Or men with large penises are more male than those with small penises. It’s pseudoscience being taught to children as fact.

The other common tactic used by queer theorists to confuse the categories of male and female is to corrupt language. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, All of Us instructs teachers that “Phrases like ‘ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘boys and girls’ should be avoided.” On the surface, the idea is that you’re being more inclusive of non binary people. But it’s more insidious than that. As Elisabeth explains

Elisabeth Taylor

We have gendered words, we have man, woman, boy, girl, mother, father uncle, aunt, you know all of these words are gendered words because we recognise that male female difference is a significant thing, but if we took away the words, and linguists understand this quite well that words structure your thoughts, so if you don’t have the words to communicate concepts, that’s because they’re not important concepts and very quickly you don’t have the capacity to think about those concepts because you can’t talk about them with people, so you erase the cultural significance of male female difference then you can’t tell who’s a man and who’s a woman, you can’t tell who’s queer and who’s not –  ‘cause this is the problem with the gay rights movement is that whenever you’re talking about homosexuals you are implicitly reaffirming the norm of heterosexuality because you’re saying here’s a different group and they’re heterosexuals, well we don’t wanna do that, we wanna blur all the boundaries, and we wanna queer all sexuality so that everyone is queer. And that’s the mechanism for doing it, it’s very clever.

It seems to me that the queer theorist’s vision of utopia is something akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Huxley’s dystopia, monogamy is forbidden, children are taught from early childhood how to give and receive sexual pleasure, and the elites have weekly drug fuelled orgies. In the TV series of the same name, everyone is bisexual. 

Elisabeth Taylor

One of the things I thought was quite funny was that when Judith Butler’s theories were first published, one of her colleagues at Columbia University described them as “silly but non catastrophic” and I think that’s exactly where they should stay, and you know, I’ve hung out with philosophers at university I know how they like to sort of throw ideas around and I don’t deny them their sport, that’s good fun, but the idea that these should become the basis for public policy or education programs, well that’s, then they’re not non catastrophic anymore, I think they become potentially catastrophic for kids who are unnecessarily confused.

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Ultimately, Safe Schools did come under attack by homophobes. This made it very easy for legitimate criticism of the program to be shouted down as simply homophobic bigotry. Despite the defunding at the federal level, the policies set out in Safe Schools have been adopted by education departments across Australia. Kids are being socially transitioned at school without their parents’ knowledge. Boys are using the girls’ toilets and changerooms. Girls are losing on sports day to boys who’ve been welcomed into their competition. And gender identity is being taught from grade one through to year 12. It’s in every public school.

Ironically, what started as an anti-bullying program to protect gay kids, is probably confusing a generation of gays and lesbians, into thinking that they’re trans.

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Coming up in the next episode of Desexing Society, we’ll hear from teachers about the impact of this ideology on children.

“Jane”

I don’t see the young lesbians anymore. No body identifies as a lesbian. They identify as non binary. 

“Victoria”

And I stood there and I watched this kid win all of the under 19 girls swimming races and then the second and third girls jumped out of the pool and give him these huge hugs. 

And we’ll learn about how schools are driving a wedge between parents and their children.

“Julie”

Doesn’t matter what you say, we’ll be using the male pronouns and your child will be called by this name and all of her school reports and her student card and her, all of her online presence, it’s all with that name and those pronouns and yeah, it doesn’t matter if I’m happy about that or not.

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Thanks for listening to Desexing Society. Written and produced by me, Stassja Frei. Thank you to my script editor, Ms Edie Wyatt, my sound technician Matthew Friend, and to everyone who made this podcast possible. For more information, or to donate towards this project – which I paid for myself – please visit desexingsociety.com