Aircraft disasters caused by DEI

Few are now left who can remember the Scared Weird Little Guys celebrating the effect of Jeff Kennett on Victorian politics. What a great chorus: 

“The Hindenburg burned, the Titanic sank, bloody Jeff.”  

In similar vein, The Donald immediately knew who to blame for the loss of near 70 souls in a plane crash at Ronald Reagan airport: DEI.  

The pernicious impact of Diversity, Equity and Inclusionary culture cannot be underestimated. Forced on an unwilling country by the likes of Obama and Biden, it now knocks planes from the sky like King Kong picnicking atop the Empire State.

Executive Orders are now de rigeur. English as a language will need to keep up. Others have pronunciamentos and ukases. In the Anglo-Australian scheme of things Orders in Council sound pretty vapid. 

Stamping his Executive foot, Trump expunged DEI from the Federal Administration, but it was, tragically, all too late for the passengers from Wichita. 

How will all this fly in The Wide Brown Land? The socially attached portion of the Coalition, the Nationals, eyes firmly fixed on 1954, their favourite year, are frothing to follow the Trumpian lead on binary sexuality as an official stance: there are boys and there are girls and that’s that. 

Senator Matt Canavan was first out of the gate, urging that a strict binary policy be mandated in Oz “to protect young women in sports”. 

Yes, a person with years of testosterone on board will have an athletic advantage over those not so endowed, but presumably sports administrators can deal with that without having to tell the 182,000, whom the ABS advises are transgender or gender diverse, to get lost.

Little-To-Be-Proud-Of MP

Gun dog Canavan having lifted the pheasant, leader Littleproud moved to the kill: 

“I think there’s elements of this that come to the core principle of protecting women … It comes back to that biological basis that we can’t get away from when we’re born. We can do that in a sensible way without vitriol, without upsetting anyone [except the 182,000 trans or diverse gendered], but just respecting the fact that there are some changes that I think in our society that we probably need to lean into.” 

Sweet. He’s respecting the policy that he’s fumbling to enunciate, of telling those who don’t fit the binary gender template to sod off.  

Barnaby Joyce dog whistled his way into the debate with “… people have strong views, probably not dissimilar to President Trump”.  

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has remained mute on the subject, aware of the fate that befell the anti-gender diversity candidate, Katherine Deves, parachuted into the contest for Warringah before the 2022 election.

The debate ceases to be hypothetical at the point that an Australian passport is presented at a US immigration counter, marked with an X, indicating non-binary or intersex, rather than the previously standard and exclusive M or F.  

What will an American official, armed with the Trumpian Executive Order on binary gender being exclusive, make of the errant Ozzie?  

But, how did we get to passports, and other government documents, departing from the binary pattern?

The High Court has had two goes at this and related fields in recent years, the first (AB v WA (2014) 244 CLR 390) on appeal from the WA CA (WAR 431), which determined 2-1 that AB and AH, born female but having adopted male appearance and identities, must be refused their application for recognition certificates under the Gender Reassignment Act 2000 (WA).  

Buss with artist Desiree Crossing

Wayne Martin CJ and Chris Pullin JA (Michael Buss JA dissenting) viewed the respondents’ lack of surgical alteration as the red line, despite the fact that the WA Act did not make surgical intervention a criteria for a recognition certificate for a change of sexual identity.

The High Court overturned this reasoning in a unanimous judgment, by simple statutory interpretation. 

The WA legislation did not make surgical intervention a sine qua non. Rather, the Act referred to such intervention or other “medical procedures” as a necessary indicator of intention to alter gender.  

AB and AH had both had hormone therapy treatment, thus satisfying the requirement of medical procedure. They both retained their uteruses, having declined surgical intervention, but the High was not concerned as to the existence of non-visible sexual organs in the face of community acceptance. 

The case law traversed by the CA and the High in these decisions leaves no doubt as to the urgency of these matters to those affected, and that the issues (arising most often in family and social security law) are not the product of modern fad (the WA Act is already a quarter of a century old). As the High said in opening AB:

“For many years the common law struggled with the question of the attribution of gender to persons who believe that they belong to the opposite sex. Many such persons undertake surgical and other procedures to alter their bodies and their physical appearance in order to acquire gender characteristics of the sex which conforms with their perception of their gender. Self-perception is not the only difficulty with which transsexual persons must contend. They encounter legal and social difficulties, due in part to the official record of their gender at birth being at variance with the gender identity which they have assumed.”

Norrie: recognised as sexually non-specific

The second High Court decision in the field resulted in the acceptance that official forms could be marked indicating neither M nor F: NSW Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages v Norrie (2014) 250 CLR 490, another unanimous judgment. 

Norrie had been born with male reproductive organs, but subsequently underwent surgical intervention to alter gender. Now referring to herself in the feminine, she decided that the surgery had not determined her sexual ambiguity, and she wanted to be entered in the NSW Registry as neither male nor female.  

As the High noted, the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1995 (NSW) referred to the concept of “sexual ambiguity”, so there did not need to be a song and dance over registering someone as other than male or female.  

There’s been a flow on to official forms in Australia generally, hence the looming question of an Australian passport presented in the US.

These decisions are now over a decade old. Australia has not fallen off its axis. The percentage of the population directly affected by these issues is very small, but for them, the stakes are very high.  

The Trumpian appeal to “common sense” lacks an appreciation of the roots of this issue in the Western canon. Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, suffered his disability because he offended Hera, Zeus’ wife.  

Tiresias had been turned into a woman (on killing a copulating female snake: it’s a Greek myth, go with the flow). When he returned seven years later as a man (after killing a copulating male snake, obviously) the lads dragged him down to the tavern to ask him what sex was like for a woman.  

Tiresias, with a few drinks on board, pronounced: seven times better for a woman. Hera promptly struck him blind for revealing a woman’s most closely held secret.

All jokes and Greek myths aside, the judgments in AB and Norrie carry a pathos unusual in a forum devoted to money and power.  

Zeus with his wife and sister Hera

Politicians who start warbling about “that biological basis that we can’t get away from when we’re born” should be made to read these cases and the many they rest on to confront the importance of sexual reassignment and gender diversity to those affected.

But perhaps not. The Full Fed decision in WRMF (2020) 276 FCR 415 discussed the importance of access to sexual activity as part of being a human in society, in the context of NDIA funding for a handicapped woman. 

Needless to say, the amendments to the NDIA Act last year carried a specific exclusion from any funding for sexual activity. A pod of populist politicians can be assumed to take the least enlightened view of anything to do with sex.