OPINION
As Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty famously said, “When, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”. The whole point, he elaborated, is “which is to be master”.
As history has regularly shown, authoritarian ideologies regularly twist the plain meanings of words in order to assert their mastery. Not just twist: invert. As Tolkien wrote, the wizards of totalitarianism stand words on their heads. “In the language of Orthanc, saving means slaying.”
Similarly, the dark wizards of rainbow ideology stand words on their heads: “women” have penises, “men” breastfeed… and mutilating children to “change” their gender isn’t “conversion”.
At least one Australian politician is having none of it — and is taking on the rainbow inquisitors at their own game.
All forms of gender reassignment treatment and surgery would be banned for those aged under 18 – including the controversial and increasing use of puberty blockers – under a bill proposed by conservative Liberal senator Alex Antic.
The private members bill would allow teenagers to change gender only in the most exceptional circumstances when diagnosed with long-recognised sexual development disorders.
Senator Antic said he had been motivated by growing community disquiet over the explosion in the number of young people “transitioning” and believed that in many cases youths were making the decision not on the basis of genuine medical issues but pressure from peers and health professionals.
He cited the increase in numbers over the past decade in Australia, pointing to a 2023 Freedom of Information request showing the number of under-18s being prescribed puberty suppressing drugs had skyrocketed from just five in 2014 to 624 in 2019.
The same FOI request showed that as of 2021 there were 2067 young people attending public gender clinics, almost 10 times the number in 2014 when there were just 211.
If that has all the hallmarks of a fad to you, then you’re right. If only it were a fad as harmless as Cabbage Patch Dolls or Rubik’s Cube.
But then, Cabbage Patch Dolls never told girls to hack off their breasts. Solving a Rubik’s Cube didn’t result in cutting anyone’s cock off.
Senator Antic said there was growing evidence from overseas showing many young people who made the decision to change gender came to regret it, and that the state should neither encourage nor enable the young to make such a life-altering decision.
“There is a growing number of young people who, having sought ‘gender-affirming care’, including hormone therapies and surgery, now believe that pursuing this course of action was a mistake and are seeking to undo the damage done to their bodies,” Senator Antic told The Australian […]
“Why are children as young as three or four years old being diagnosed with gender dysphoria? The notion that some ‘expert’ is qualified to tell a child that they are, in fact, the opposite gender to their biological sex is absurd.”
Of course, the modern Liberal party is no place for the dangerously conservative idea that surgically and chemically neutering children is a bad idea.
Senator Antic stressed that his bill was being put forward in a private capacity and was not Liberal Party policy, but he said that he had already spoken to colleagues who were strongly supportive of his proposal.
The conservative senator has become a polarising figure in South Australia and was outspoken against the one-term, moderate-dominated state government of Steven Marshall that was defeated by Labor last year […]
One SA moderate labelled Senator Antic’s transgender bill a “headline-grabber” and warned the Liberal Party both in SA and nationally against “getting tied up and obsessed with fringe culture war crusades”.
Good Lord, no. People might start voting for them. That’s the last thing a Liberal “moderate” (which, language being twisted yet again, really means a “dripping wet, woke, Greens wannabe in an expensive suit”) would want.
Senator Antic has been linked since to a surge in new Liberal Party members, many of them from suburban churches who were angered by senior moderates within the Marshall government over their support for late-term abortion and euthanasia laws.
“We all saw how that’s played out in Victoria,” the figure said in reference to the split within Victorian Liberals over the expulsion of Upper House MP Moira Deeming for attending an anti-trans rally which was crashed by Nazi sympathisers.
The Australian
How it’s played out is that Deeming, like Antic, is drawing in the sort of crowds that the pathetic Liberal leadership of John Pesutto in Victoria could only dream about.
Heaven forbid. Keep that up and the party might even win an election for once.