Season 2 Episode 3

Stassja Frei: One night in 2021, I decided to jump online and have a look at Australia’s largest LGBTQIA+ charity, ACON – the AIDS Council of New South Wales. 

News from the UK had broken about their largest LGBT charity, Stonewall. Stonewall had been misrepresenting equality law to employers for the benefit of transgender people and to the detriment of women. Liz Truss, then the UK Minister for Women and Equalities urged all government departments to immediately withdraw from Stonewall’s workplace Diversity Champions Scheme. The scheme saw employers pay a fee to Stonewall for training and advice on how to make their workplace more inclusive of LGBT people. Those employers were then ranked according to how well they had met Stonewall’s instructions.

I wondered whether the AIDS Council of NSW was doing anything similarly nefarious here in Australia. Very quickly, my investigations led me to a not very memorable web address: pid-awei.com.au. This arrangement of letters stands for Pride in Diversity, Australian Workplace Equality Index. The very first thing proudly stated on the homepage is, quote “The Australian Workplace Equality Index originally drew from the rich experience, expertise and methodology of the Diversity Champions Workplace Equality Index published by Stonewall in the UK.” End quote.

The scheme by which Stonewall had managed to infiltrate UK workplaces, government departments and even the BBC was operating unexamined here in Australia.

I published a series of info graphics on social media explaining how ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index operated. This generated some interest amongst gender critical women and soon after, a working group was formed. We began submitting Freedom of Information requests to the 60+ government bodies listed as members of ACON’s Pride in Diversity. When we started receiving hundreds of pages in response to our FOIs, a lot of us felt overwhelmed and kind of gave up on the project. One woman, however, persevered. We first met her in the last episode.

Kit Kowalski: My name’s Kit Kowalski. I usually describe myself as someone who writes a blog, but of course I do a little bit more than just write a blog. I also conducted some extensive research into an industry benchmarking index program called the Australian Workplace Equality Index which is run by an LGBTQ charity here in NSW called ACON and the results of that were published on a website called ACON Exposed.

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Stassja Frei: Welcome back to Desexing Society. I’m your host Stassja Frei. Episode 3: A Con

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Back in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic, each Australian state and territory formed an AIDS Council. And that’s where ACON began. 

Kit Kowalski: So in the beginning ACON and all of the other AIDS councils were really about getting the rates of HIV infection down and so that was about awareness and it was about getting people out of the closet so you could have a conversation with them about, look, you can have that kind of sex if you want to, but here’s how you do it safely, here’s how you use a condom, you know make sure that you, you’re protecting yourself and protecting those around you, make sure you’re testing regularly and kind of like promoting that pride, and that’s where they get involved with Pride and Mardi Gras and everything because pride in the community is almost a prophylactic against you know secret shameful practices that we can’t talk about and therefore we can’t make them safer. And one of the things to note is that a lot of those men who died of AIDS actually bequeathed their money, their inheritance to ACON and similar organisations because they were carrying on this fight against a disease that was just devastating to gay men.

Stassja Frei: Because of these origins, ACON has always had ties to the pharmaceutical industry. In 2018 a new HIV prevention drug called PrEP was added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme making it cheap and widely accessible.

Kit Kowalski: Essentially a drug came on the scene called PrEP which is pre-exposure prophylaxis so now instead of promoting condom use, like exclusive condom use, ACON promote this drug PrEP and the idea is that if you’re a man and you are going out and you think you might be having sex, you take this drug two hours before you think you might have sex and then you take it the next day I think, and you basically, your risk of getting HIV is very very low and they also promote testing, so this is knowing if you’re positive and then telling people and acting accordingly. So this has caused a huge mindset shift for ACON for two reasons, and one is they’re no longer promoting condom use and just forget about gonorrhoea or herpes or all of the other diseases you can still get – or chlamydia – from having unprotected sex, now they have a really close relationship with pathology companies, so HIV testing and with pharmaceutical companies with PrEP, right? So they’re actually promoting a drug to their community. Between condom use and awareness and testing and PrEP, rates of HIV infection are very low in Australia at the moment. They’re not nothing and I really don’t want to downplay the significance of HIV but it’s not an epidemic, there are people who are living very long lives with HIV because they’re being adequately treated and so I think ACON has undergone a bit of an identity shift and they’ve moved on to the next marginalised group which is the transgender individuals.

Stassja Frei: ACON needed a new market to remain viable. They’d pretty much won the war on HIV and their hard work around same sex marriage had paid off. In 2017 Australia voted in favour of marriage equality. Coinciding with this major success, ACON turned their attention to transgender people. I’ll let their then Director of Community Health, Teddy Cook explain this shift. She’s a trans identified female and in the following clip she’s delivering the keynote address at the 2021 PATHA Symposium. That’s the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa – New Zealand’s peak body for transgender medicine.

Teddy Cook :In our midterm review of the strategic plan in 2017, it was finally understood that trans people needed urgent intervention. We mobilised everyone, we brought people in, we consulted across the entire state and indeed across the country over a two year period. It cost a lot of money. It cost a lot of time. It required a tonne of honesty and openness. Essential that it was intersectional and it continues to be. It is positive and focus forward. And this ended with a mandate from the trans community that we called The Blueprint – A Blueprint for Improving the Health and Wellbeing of the Trans and Gender Diverse Community in NSW. And it identified 6 main priorities that continue to oversee our work.

Stassja Frei: The six priorities that ACON set about implementing included things like easy access to so called gender affirming care; simple processes for changing your name and sex on government documents and ID; and some fluffy words about a vibrant, well resourced trans and gender diverse community.

But the focus for this episode is their fifth priority which reads, quote: “That workplaces, educational settings and custodial settings are inclusive and respectful of the needs of trans people.” End quote. What does that mean in practice?

In the last episode we learned about ACON’s highly influential Pride in Sport membership program. But long before Pride in Sport, ACON was operating Pride in Diversity. This started out as a program to encourage workplaces to be more accommodating of gay people.

Kit Kowalski: They’ve been running Pride in Diversity since 2010. But in 2015 is where that Pride in Diversity scheme made a conscious effort to switch from promoting gay rights, to promoting trans and gender diverse rights.

Stassja Frei: By 2021 when I first looked at the Pride in Diversity website, ACON had signed up more than two hundred employers to the program. They were particularly successful in certain industries, like banking and finance, higher education and law. Or perhaps they had strategically targeted those industries due to their power and influence in society.

Another highly influential sector where ACON had a lot of success was government. In 2021, more than 60 government bodies were paying ACON for advice on how to make their workplaces more inclusive – powerful government bodies like the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the entire government of the Australian Capital Territory and the Australian Federal Police, just to name a few. 

As members of Pride in Diversity, employers get access to things like a dedicated relationship manager, year round telephone and email support and access to online training modules for employees. All of this is geared toward participation in ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index. From here on I’m going to call it the AWEI. Despite its name, this equality index does not measure equality for all marginalised groups, like women or people with disabilities. It only measures equality for LGBTQIA+ people.

Here’s how it works. Employers are assessed on a variety of things and score points out of a possible total of 200. Are their HR policies inclusive of LGBT+ people? Did the CEO speak at an LGBT+ event that year? Did the organisation celebrate one of the 14 annual LGBT+ days of significance? These are just some of the criteria.

The organisation then collates loads of evidence to demonstrate how they’ve fulfilled the various criteria and, a bit like a school assignment, submits it to ACON for assessment. These submissions are generally more than a hundred pages long. 

ACON does its assessment and assigns the organisation a score out of 200. This determines whether they’ll be ranked as a platinum, gold, silver or bronze employer on ACON’s Inclusive Employers website. Here, employees can search to see whether their employer or potential employer is LGBT+ inclusive. 

And finally, there’s the AWEI awards night where Pride in Diversity members can pay a little bit more money to ACON for recognition of all the hoops they’ve jumped through to complete their homework assignment.

So what’s the big deal? What’s so bad about Pride in Diversity and AWEI? After all, don’t we want LGBT+ people to feel welcome and included at work?

Kit Kowalski: I think there’s definitely some good and there are things that I find frustrating from a point of view of, I think that they’re just wasting resources…but other people might disagree with me there. I think that hiring a programmer to update all of your computer systems so you can put in MX for non binary people as a salutation, I don’t know necessarily if that’s a really great use of time and resources for an already cash strapped government department, other people might disagree with me.

Stassja Frei: How do you pronounce that?

Kit Kowalski: Mx

Stassja Frei: As we learnt in season 1 of Desexing Society, non binary people are mostly teenage girls and young women who don’t identify with stereotypical femininity. Which is fair enough. Most women don’t. But women who adopt the non binary label have become convinced that this means they’re not actually women. They’re beyond the binary of male and female. And to make it very clear to everyone else that they’re definitely not like other girls, they refuse the female pronouns she/her and instead go by they/them. Often they also reject the titles Ms, Miss or Mrs and instead go by Mx. 

For a total of 2 points from ACON, databases around Australia have been updated to include this new fictional title.

Kit Kowalski: One of the things I do think is a little bit ridiculous is, I have read a number of the submissions that these government departments make to ACON, so ACON puts this very neutral sounding form out there and people have to fill it in and sometimes just the tone that they answer these questions in, it’s very solicitous and a lot of agencies will go over and above. So ACON will demand that you celebrate one of the days of significance and some agencies will celebrate five and they’ll put all of that evidence in and they’ll have all of these photographs of these beautiful cup cakes because they don’t want to accidentally not get that one point of celebrating days of significance. And when it comes to like gender transition leave, ACON leave it fairly open and they say you should have a separate type of leave for people who are transitioning gender. And some companies have gone to the extreme of giving a $1000 wardrobe grant for someone to go out and buy a new wardrobe and this applies even if they are transitioning from a female to a trans feminine non binary person with she/they pronouns. They’re entitled to ten days leave on top of their original, their leave that they already have, and $1000 wardrobe bonus. So it’s not so much what ACON says to people in this document, but it’s how people respond to it that I find a little funny at times.

Stassja Frei: One organisation that’s performed remarkably well in the AWEI is Australia’s public broadcaster the ABC. In early 2020 a new enterprise agreement came into force, outlining new terms and conditions for ABC employees. It included 10 days of gender transition leave on top of the regular types of leave available to employees. 

In a Senate Committee meeting, Liberal Senator Alex Antic asked the ABC’s then Managing Director, David Anderson, about this novel type of leave. Senator Antic gave the example of an employee who injured their knee playing football on the weekend. Would they be able to access any type of special leave over and above what their colleagues were entitled to?

Senator Antic: But there is no specific- they would have to dip into their sick leave rather than access a special category? If you injured your knee is what I’m saying.

David Anderson: Senator I I I I’m not going to be defensive about having gender transition leave in there.

Senator Antic: No. Sure. But you are essentially- that means you are essentially picking favourites though, right?

David Anderson: No, we are recognising that, um, we are recognising by, ah, that what we need to do as an employer, that is an inclusive employer that is recognising diversity that we have in our community and benchmarking ourselves against other organisations and agencies.

Senator Antic: I would’ve thought 80% of people…

Stassja Frei: When David Anderson describes the ABC as ‘benchmarking ourselves against other organisations’ he’s referring of course to ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index. By participating in the AWEI, the ABC has voluntarily entered into a competition with other employers to win what I think is the equivalent of a gold star on one’s homework assignment. 

The problem with ACON’s AWEI is that it’s a form of social engineering. Think back to season 1 and what we learned about the Safe Schools program. By inserting queer theory and transgender ideology into children’s education, the trans lobby, with the help of government, is reshaping the values and beliefs of a whole generation of children. Rather than being an organic cultural evolution, Safe Schools is an attempt at top-down, manufactured social change.

ACON’s AWEI is the adult version of Safe Schools. It forces the queer theory belief system onto Australian workers. And there are similarities between the two programs. Just like how Safe Schools encourages lunchtime Pride Clubs, the AWEI does the same thing but by a different name.

Kit Kowalski: In large organisations over recent years, there’s arisen this concept of an employee resource group or a community of interest, a network. So for example, employees who all enjoy photography might form a photography club and then they’ll meet, they’ll talk about photography, or it could be wine or it could be something more professional, like for example, the community of project managers, all talk about you know, how we do projects and what are best practices. These are often grassroots. So if there aren’t very many project managers, then we wouldn’t have one of these clubs for a project manager. However, when you participate in the Australian Workplace Equality Index it actually dedicates a large number of points to the creation and to the function of an internal Pride Network and it stipulates that the function of Pride Network is to carry out the activities listed in the AWEI index which is a, it’s a very long and involved document setting out what you need to do to win points. So whereas in my workplace we have a women in leadership group and if women were to stop being interested we would stop having the group. We also have a Pride Network but ACON stipulates that we must have a senior executive, we must have a senior HR person involved, we must get our Pride Network in front of whole staff meetings on a regular basis and we get points for that and we must have a program of work, we’re held accountable for the program of work and we must have a succession plan so that if all of those people who were involved get fired or quit or move to other jobs or become really busy, then we’ve got others who are waiting in the wings ready to go. So it’s using this idea of an employee resource group which is a really benign concept and it’s meant to help people feel more at home in their workplaces, and it’s really hijacking that concept to create a little mini arm of ACON inside the workplace.

Stassja Frei: Unions should really be up in arms about Pride Networks. There’s no requirement from ACON for an employee representative such as a union rep to be part of the Pride Network. Only managers. So what happens if you disagree with the policies or activities that they’re pushing? You’ll find yourself a lone individual trying to negotiate with management. 

Kit Kowalski: And the idea of having you know senior HR executives in what is supposed to be a group that’s expressing and advocating for the needs of a specific cohort, it really just means that you wouldn’t necessarily be free to actually express your dissatisfaction with the workplace because you’ve got someone from HR, you’ve got a senior manager in HR looking over your shoulder while you do that. 

Stassja Frei: Kit hasn’t just investigated ACON and its AWEI program. She’s also worked in several different government agencies that are signed up to Pride in Diversity.

Kit Kowalski: My workplace at the moment, we do have a Pride Network and what I notice about it is that they tend to operate a fair bit in isolation. So it seems to be just run by kind of one or two individuals and there’s no real community around it. I’ve never met anyone else in the Pride Network. And they do address the all staff meetings so the leaders of the Pride Network have a very high profile in the organisation. And when it comes to say consultation on policies that might affect the LGBTQ community, the consultation is only advertised to that community, to that group of people. And so when it came time to consult on the trans and gender diverse policy, you know the gender recognition policy, it was only advertised to that small community, even though it’s a policy change that would affect all women who – all women and all men actually, who would now have individuals of the opposite sex in their toilets and changing rooms at work.

Stassja Frei: In season 1 we heard how boys using the girls’ facilities is causing huge problems for school girls. But it’s also happening in workplaces. I was told of a case in the Melbourne suburbs where a warehouse hired a trans identified male. He would monitor a particular female colleague’s movements and made a habit of following her into the toilets. Eventually she complained to management and he was told to stop doing it and use a different toilet. Over time, he was managed out of the company. Workplaces that follow ACON’s advice are putting their female employees at risk and they’re opening themselves up to sexual harassment complaints.

Kit Kowalski: The women’s toilet is somewhere that women go to talk to other women, to have some time away from whatever is happening at their desks and sometimes it’s a place women go to cry and it’s a place of vulnerability, it’s literally a sanctuary in there. And it sounds corny, but there is a sisterhood, like it’s the place where you’ll say ‘hey are you ok?’ to someone and it’s the place where you’ll tell someone that they look lovely and you have those moments that you can’t really get away with outside those doors. So I think introducing a man into that space, it’s not something I’m very interested in. And then there’s the question of the change rooms so, I think that’s a, that’s more of a safety issue if we let any man just on his say so, go into women’s change rooms, I think there’s a real issue with that.

Stassja Frei: In the UK, the National Health Service forced this same policy upon its employees. Workers could use the change rooms that matched their gender identity rather than their sex. Several nurses complained when a man started using the women’s change rooms, but they were told by senior management to be more inclusive and to broaden their mind set. Eventually the women took their complaint all the way to an employment tribunal. They argued their employer was subjecting them to sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. Nurse Bethany Hutchinson explained on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, the impact that just one man had on the mental health of female nursing staff. 

Bethany Hutchinson: Yeah so this kind of kicked off in July 2023. So without any sort of warning or consultation from senior management, we became aware of a male changing in the female changing room. And this has led to nurses having panic attacks before their shifts. It’s led to international nurses wearing clothing underneath their uniform because obviously culturally they can’t be exposed or in a state of undress in front of any other male other than their husband. And generally, just a feeling of anxiety amongst many female members of staff, you know looking over their shoulder, worried that this person’s going to walk in and see them in a state of undress.

Stassja Frei: At the time of this recording, the case is ongoing. 

It demonstrates at a minimum, that policies like those imposed by ACON are harming the mental health of women in the workforce. For women who’ve experienced rape or sexual assault, encountering men in toilets and change rooms can trigger symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

Adding to that harm is the fact that women are being erased from HR policies that are meant for the protection of women in the workforce. For example, ACON has renamed maternity leave to ‘new parent leave.’ Kit Kowalski explains.

Kit Kowalski: ACON have the AWEI but they also run workplace trainings and this is an avenue that they use to influence gendered policies, specifically domestic and family violence and maternity and breastfeeding. So, while their AWEI document and all of their public facing documents are very, very vague and very neutral and they don’t really mention maternity, in their training, and I have recordings of ACON trainers saying to HR professionals, ‘you shouldn’t say the word mother, you shouldn’t say the word father, it’s discriminatory to talk about mothers and fathers and you should just say parent one and parent two.’ So there’s this very direct message that these HR professionals are getting from ACON which is that sexed language is wrong and it’s discriminatory and it hurts people. 

Stassja Frei: I’m reminded yet again of season 1 and the story about the primary school teacher who would give herself strikes on the board every time she accidentally referred to her Grade 1 students as ‘boys and girls.’

Kit Kowalski: Plus they have a more general message which is that we need to break down the binary and that we need to- in the interests of equality, we need to remove any binary language, so, on the one hand I do welcome it that fathers are able to access parental leave, that’s fantastic. But on the other hand, I think that we are losing the recognition that a woman who carries a child, gestates a child, gives birth to a child, and then breastfeeds a child, is actually doing something with her body that we value as a society and that we should compensate her for. We should actually support her in those activities and that women get maternity leave because of their bodies. Men, while they should be parents and they should be there for their kids, they simply do not need that leave for their bodies. And I think we lose that distinction when we go to a sex neutral policy and ACON absolutely influence workplaces and when those workplaces are government departments that are responsible for setting the policies and setting an example across Australia, for example they have influenced the Australian Public Service Commission who are responsible for setting the standards for Australian Public Service across Australia. That means that when the Australian Public Service wanted to review the maternity leave act that affects all APS public servants, what they tried to do was remove mother. They tried to remove sexed language which I think it does hurt women.

Stassja Frei: Desexing your maternity leave policy will gain you 3 points in the AWEI. But, who really benefits? Of all the letters in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, the letter most likely to take maternity leave is the L – lesbians. Do lesbians want to be erased from maternity leave? Have we asked them? As Kit points out, the Pride Network is probably too busy jumping through those hoops to even consider asking.

Kit Kowalski: They really get on a treadmill, so as soon as the year starts, they’ve got to start again getting everything ready and doing all of the events and getting everything- and ticking off all of these numerous activities that they need to organise and to make happen to get those one or two points, so there’s really no opportunity for them to go out and to consult with their constituents or to take stock of their workplace, to ask themselves what do lesbians in my workplace actually want or need today, you know, do we have any transgender people in our workplace? Do we have any intersex people in our workplace and if we do, what are their needs? We could just ask them but instead we have an intermediary coming from outside and telling us that we have to celebrate Intersex Day of Visibility and we’re busy baking cupcakes but we have an intersex person over there in the corner who is feeling very frustrated that that’s not what they need.

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Stephen Nolan: We investigate how controversial policy such as whether there is even the existence of many different genders was being promoted as fact by the BBC education department.

BBC presenter: Do you know there are so many gender identities. So we know we’ve got male and female, but there are over a hundred if not more gender identities now.

Stephan Nolan: Why is the media not asking more questions about how public bodies are influenced by Stonewall? We will explain it all in Nolan Investigates Stonewall.

Stassja Frei: In October 2021 the BBC published a 10 part investigative podcast series exploring how the LGBT+ charity Stonewall was influencing public institutions across the UK.

Kit Kowalski: Steven Nolan is a Northern Irish journalist and he has a show, he has a team, he’s known as a hard hitting journalist, he asks the questions nobody wants to ask etcetera. He works for the BBC, he did some Freedom of Information requests and investigated the relationship that his employer, the BBC had with Stonewall, specifically the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme which is exactly the same scheme that we have here that’s running under ACON. So they took, the entire team took a year to investigate and they produced, I think it was an 8 part podcast and they really canvassed the issues, they talked about impartiality in reporting, they talked about how the Diversity Champion Scheme was taking money, albeit a small amount, like 2000 pounds membership fee, but a small amount of money away from the public broadcaster and putting it into the coffers of a private lobby group essentially, and how the Stonewall Diversity Champion scheme actually had an impact on broadcasting. So when all was said and done, the actual podcast was not as hard hitting as you might’ve expected from a really hard hitting Northern Irish journalist. But what he ended up with was a really clear picture that if the BBC wasn’t influenced, then it looks like it could’ve been. It was very subtle, but as a result, Ofcom which is the body that oversees the BBC and a number of other government agencies actually withdrew from the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme. So that was enough of a suspicion of wrong doing for them to actually withdraw their presence from that scheme.

Stassja Frei: Is the same happening here in Australia? Has editorial impartiality at the ABC and SBS been corrupted by their involvement with ACON?

Kit Kowalski: Well firstly, I’ll just say that SBS which is our other public broadcaster, so they’re under a different relationship financially and legally to the ABC, but they’ve been a member of Pride in Diversity over a much longer period to ABC. But together, the ABC and SBS are where we get our supposedly unbiased, untainted by commercial prospects, news, views, opinions and entertainment. So to have both of them enthralled to a lobby group is, is unfortunate to say the least.

Stassja Frei: We’re going to focus on the ABC’s relationship with ACON. But it’s important to note that SBS is ranked as a gold employer in ACON’s AWEI and they’ve been sponsoring the Pride in Sport Awards since 2020. 

The ABC has a statutory duty to present the news in an impartial manner. That means there’s legislation governing the ABC which says it has to be impartial. Its editorial policies go into greater detail, stating that the ABC will present a diversity of perspectives so that, quote “no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented.” End quote.

But when it comes to the clash of rights between women and men who say they’re women, the ABC has completely thrown impartiality out the window. And it’s their involvement with ACON’s Pride in Diversity and their Australian Workplace Equality Index which seems to have caused this drop in editorial standards.

Kit Kowalski: The ABC have made a very strong and strident commitment to achievement in the Australian Workplace Equality Index. Part of the reason that they’ve done this is, and I don’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg, but they recruited a Chief Operations Officer from Channel 10 called Manda Hatter, and she joined the ABC and straight away she became the Chair of their ABC Pride Network. And the ABC Pride Network’s responsibility is to move forward their score in the AWEI and they use that score as a measure of their success for LGBTQ inclusion in the ABC. And so they’re really committed to moving that score up the board. And they have a very very dedicated senior executive, Manda Hatter, who’s actually driving it forward. And they have a very strong Pride Network. One of the things that they’ve done is they have created a content stream on Instagram called ABC Queer. I’m really sorry, I know that that’s a slur, but that is the name of the channel, and that is headed up by someone whose position is the Queer Content Lead for ABC, so they actually created a role for somebody to manage this entire stream and to manage the LGBTQ content. And this is really all geared towards winning ACON points.

Stassja Frei: Manda Hatter joined the ABC in 2017. By 2020 they had entered the AWEI competition and had launched ABC Queer on Instagram. What’s disturbing about ABC Queer isn’t just that it uncritically promotes transgender ideology, it’s that its target audience is young people. In an article from 2022, ABC Queer is described as, quote “a project aimed to reach and engage younger audiences through social media focused content.” End quote. 

It’s really not a stretch to describe ABC Queer as the propaganda arm of ACON. For example, they’ve posted LGBTQIA+ facts such as, “some women have penises” and “some men have periods.” One story they ran celebrated a woman discovering that she’s non binary and so had her breasts amputated in an act of self love. Yes, the words ‘my greatest act of self love’ were plastered across a photo of the topless woman, showing off her mastectomy scars. Many gender critical feminists would argue that rejecting one’s female sex and cutting one’s breasts off is more likely a sign of self hatred rather than self love.

And for International Non Binary People’s Day, ABC Queer reported on how ACON’s Pride in Sport had hosted a panel discussion about non binary people’s inclusion in sport.

If all that wasn’t enough to have you complaining about where your tax dollars are going, here’s ABC Queer’s Content Lead, non binary woman Mon Schafter giving instructions on pronouns.

Mon Schafter: You can’t always tell what a person’s pronouns are without them telling you. And one way to start the conversation is by offering your own. So “I’m Mon, my pronouns are they/them and the occasional she/her, that’s alright. How about you?” Or you might want to add your pronouns to your social media profiles or even add them to your email signature. And remember, if you get someone’s pronouns wrong, simply apologise and move on.

Stassja Frei: In 2021 ABC Queer won Best External Media Campaign at ACON’s AWEI awards night. 

By late 2022, Media Watch caught wind of the ABC’s entanglement with ACON. Media Watch is a weekly, 15 minute ABC program that investigates and exposes bad journalism. They posed the question, ‘Can the ABC remain impartial when it partners with a lobby group and gets ranked in a competitive index?’

Paul Barry: The problem here is a media group partnering with and being rewarded by a lobby group – any lobby group – and how that can lead to perceptions of bias in coverage or to bias itself. We think the ABC should review the arrangement.

Stassja Frei: Host Paul Barry outlined how the BBC and the UK’s Channel 4 had withdrawn from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Scheme due to questions around editorial impartiality. He also talked about Stephen Nolan’s investigative podcast series and the role that played in prompting the BBC to withdraw from the scheme.

Paul Barry: And why is all this relevant to Australia? Because the ABC and SBS belong to a near identical workplace diversity scheme run by the AIDS Council of NSW or ACON. And like the BBC they pay thousands of dollars a year to do so. In fact, the ABC is a star employer, winning gold in this year’s Australian Workplace Equality Index Awards where CEO David Anderson, who is also the ABC’s Editor in Chief also won gold.

Stassja Frei: We heard from David Anderson earlier in this episode. You’ll remember he was defending the ABC’s special 10 day leave policy for people transitioning their gender. For that particular exchange with Senator Alex Antic, the ABC was awarded two points in ACON’s AWEI. It was counted as advocacy by an ABC executive. David Anderson went on to win ACON’s award for CEO of the Year in 2022.

The ABC won a further 2 points because they had consulted external LGBT+ expertise. And who provided that external expertise? Well, it was Chris Nelson, the ABC’s dedicated relationship manager from ACON’s Pride in Diversity.

Media Watch also outlined how the ABC won yet another 2 points out of a possible 200 for lending out their news presenter, Jeremy Fernandez for pro bono work in support of an LGBT+ charity. And which LGBT+ charity did Fernandez support? You guessed it, it was ACON. Although it’s redacted in the documents that the ABC released under FOI, Kit Kowalski was able to determine that for two years in a row, Jeremy Fernandez hosted the CEO panel discussion at ACON’s Pride in Practice conference. This conference is yet another of ACON’s initiatives to influence Australian workplaces. And just for attending ACON’s Pride in Practice conference, the ABC also won another 2 points

And finally, regarding the ABC’s pro bono work, Media Watch pointed out that Jeremey Fernandez also MC’d ACON’s 2022 AWEI awards night. 

Kit Kowalski: I think they got a lot of the material for the show from the website ACON Exposed and that, that actually contained a blow by blow breakdown of the ABC’s AWEI submission for 2021 and 2022 and that really formed the basis of the Media Watch episode.

Stassja Frei: Paul Barry described how ACON had rewarded the ABC for broadcasting LGBT+ programs. They won 3 AWEI points for their children’s series First Day which is a drama about boy who thinks he’s a girl starting high school. And they won Best External Media Campaign for a second year in a row, this time for a podcast series called Innies and Outies. Produced by ABC Queer, it tells the stories of LGBTQIA+ people who choose to either come out or not.

Paul Barry:And this is surely where the problems start. Because regardless of how good or worthy these programs are, and First Day won prizes around the world, having them scored by a lobby group raises questions about ABC impartiality. Imagine for example the ABC paying thousands of dollars to Greenpeace and winning prizes for stories attacking the fossil fuel industry. Or paying money to the Republican movement and being rewarded for a series criticising the monarchy. How would that be defensible or impartial? And what if the ABC also steered clear of debate on contentious matters, as it arguably does on transgender issues.

Stassja Frei: The ABC failed to cover the closure of the UK’s youth gender clinic, the Tavistock. They’ve promoted puberty blockers as suicide prevention on their Four Corners program. There is in fact a whole website devoted to how the ABC has failed women and children in their reporting on trans issues. Womenscooee.org analyses the ABC’s bias on things like men in women’s sport and men in women’s prisons. They’ve critiqued the ABC’s uncritical promotion of breast binders and how they platformed a man who says he’s a woman as an example of a lesbian in their series You Can’t Ask That. And the ABC refers to women like me as anti-trans. When former Hobart City Councillor Jeff Briscoe complained about this label, the ABC’s editorial policies manager, Mark Maley, decided that yes, this wasn’t accurate. It would be more accurate to refer to women like me as ‘anti trans rights campaigners.’ Even in Media Watch’s ACON episode, they said the following:

Paul Barry: What’s more, emails obtained under FOI by women’s anti-trans group called ACON Exposed also show ACON’s ABC [fade]

Kit Kowalski: I knew that whoever picked it up was going to want to distance themselves from the people who gathered that evidence. So I kind of expected it. When they said it, it was a bit like a kick in the guts. Because they asked me beforehand, how would you describe the group, and I said, you know we’re women’s rights activists. I did contact them afterwards and we had a chat about it and apparently it was hotly debated in the newsroom and the people who were in you know in favour of saying something nicer, were just outnumbered. So again that’s kind of the, the power of the Pride Network really, that we can see, we can actually go to a website that has evidence of us doing something wrong, and we have to call them anti-trans because collecting that evidence is somehow against trans people, even though really, the website does make a real effort to talk in a balanced way about trans people and it really makes much more of the use of public resources which personally I think is a much bigger issue in terms of ACON’s influence in Australia just the way that they’re directing public resources, I think that that’s a scandal in and of itself. But no, I expected it but still it was a little bit of a sting in the moment. 

and at the end of the day, look, if that’s what Paul Barry had to say, if he had to say ‘ACON Exposed is anti-trans’ and that was sort of the price of getting that information out there, ok fine.

Stassja Frei: After the episode aired, I naively expected more media coverage to follow. I thought more journalists would start investigating ACON and their influence on government bodies. But it didn’t happen.

Kit Kowalski: This is the interesting parallel between the UK and Australia, and where it really, like the parallel breaks down here, so in the UK they had the Nolan report, they had Stephen Nolan and his crack team of investigative journalists spending a year compiling an 8 part podcast, in Australia we had ACON Exposed, which is one tired individual up til 2 am every night analysing these documents and 15 minutes on Media Watch. Like it’s a flash in the pan. And in terms of the other media getting involved, well, ABC did take a bit of a risk, that’s lovely, but SBS have a very long standing relationship with ACON, Channel 10 have a relationship with ACON and they’re gunning for AWEI points. So you know, like having those three huge players, that’s more than enough to set the tone for the Australian media, it’s more than enough to say these major players are you know leading the way and this is what everyone else should do to follow suit, and they do.

Stassja Frei: In the days following the Media Watch episode, The Australian newspaper reported that, quote, “in the wake of the segment, there were big dramas within the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters in Sydney. We’re told ABC Pride, Aunty’s staff-led group for those who identify as LGBTQIA+, held an extraordinary meeting the morning after the segment ran to air their grievances.” End quote. 

Kit Kowalski: I’d love to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting. And you know I think that, as much as we can all sit here on the couch and kind of be slightly frustrated with Paul Barry and his pontification and the way that he you know said that ACON Exposed is an anti trans group, he did actually put his neck on the line for that and he’s a very senior journalist and yet, him reporting on something like that caused all of the Pride Network to stop work and to have – and this is at the ABC, there is still news to be reported, there is still, you know, there are still plants on Gardening Australia that need to be snipped up and repotted, there’s still work to be done and yet, that story, that 15 minute story, caused all those people to stop work and, apparently it was very frosty around the water cooler for a little while for Paul Barry and the team that worked on that story. 

Stassja Frei: An ABC spokesperson defended their participation in the AWEI scheme, denying that it had any influence on editorial decisions. But as Paul Barry pointed out on Media Watch:

Paul Barry: Even if there is no editorial interference, changing the language and internal culture of a media organisation may still influence editorial values and program story selection

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Stassja Frei: From 2019 through to 2022, the ABC paid a total of $38,879 to ACON. This includes their yearly membership fee of $6000 to Pride in Diversity; $4,500 for a premium table at the AWEI awards night. And, remember how the ABC won two AWEI points for attending ACON’s Pride in Practice conference? Well in 2020, the ABC paid $3,278 to attend that conference. 

It’s quite breathtaking when you stop to think about it. The ABC is paying money to a lobby group for the privilege of being lobbied by that lobby group. Meanwhile their charter legally binds them to impartiality. And if we take the case of the Pride in Practice conference, the ABC paid money to ACON for the reward of two points in the AWEI scheme. Some might call it a racket.

But beyond the money that the ABC and organisations like it are paying to ACON, there’s the hours and hours of staff time that it takes to jump through all their hoops.

Kit Kowalski: If we just take one example which is, I think it’s two points if you get the CEO or equivalent to speak at an LGBTQ event in public. So thinking about what that’s involved, that might be an hour of the CEO’s time, how much does a CEO get paid? I don’t know, $400,000 maybe, $1,000,000 maybe, an hour of their time to actually speak, an hour of their time to get there and back, how many hours, maybe three hours to write a talk if they write it themselves or maybe they get somebody else to write it for them and then they’re reviewing the talk, so that’s another hour, and then there is the CEO’s assistant making the arrangements and in certain organisations, and I have been, I have worked in these organisations, in certain organisations, you will have several meetings where five to ten people will sit in a room and talk about who are the audience, what are the messages we want to touch on, what are the messages we want to avoid, how are we going to craft this message. Like, it’s not simply the CEO rocking up and saying a few words, there’s a lot of work that actually goes into convincing a CEO of an organisation and equipping them to give the right message at a public event on a kind of a fringe edgy topic, cos we don’t want to say the wrong thing on LGBTQ inclusion, not in this climate. So yeah, it’s a very expensive endeavour and for that you’ll get two points out of two hundred. And you’re expected to do that every single year. 

Stassja Frei: This is happening not just at the ABC but in hundreds of corporates and government bodies around Australia. From the Attorney General’s Department to the Department of Education and Training and even the Department of Defence, ACON has been welcomed with open arms to tell public servants what to think on transgender issues. And to make sure that men who say they’re women are allowed in the women’s toilets.

ACON might as well be a government agency because they receive upwards of $17 million in government funding every year.

Kit Kowalski: It’s primarily funded by the New South Wales Health which is the New South Wales government. It gets roughly $13-$14 million for promotion of health and minimising HIV, prevention. A lot of that money goes on writing submissions, participating in research, doing campaigns, media, that sort of thing. It also gets a further $4-ish million from the federal government for grants and it receives around $4 million in services and I believe that this is mostly the revenue from the Pride in Diversity membership and training so an employer or an organisation pays $6000 a year to be a member of the Pride in Diversity franchise. 

Stassja Frei: As Paul Barry said on Media Watch:

Paul Barry: We think the ABC should review the arrangement.

Stassja Frei: I think we should take that one step further. I think the NSW government should review its arrangement with ACON. Do we still need an AIDS Council? Or is HIV prevention and treatment something that NSW Health could perhaps undertake itself? And could they do it for less than $14,000,000 a year?

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Coming up in the next episode of Desexing Society, we’ll learn about how the transgender war on women started out as a war on lesbians.

Sand Hall: The laws changed in terms of notions of discrimination against transgender people, to the point where lesbians were being side lined more and more and we did, we had to go underground.

Carole Ann: We’d advertised as we had done up until then in, you know, lesbian magazines and what have you, saying it was for lesbians born female. And a trans person, Sally Goldner, put in a complaint against us.

Sand Hall: In terms of what was happening with lesbian space, with the trans agenda, one human right is freedom of association and it’s like, we lost it.

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Stassja Frei: 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 Kit Kowalski for appearing in this episode. For more information, or to donate towards this project – which I paid for myself – please visit desexingsociety.com