A leap backwards ... (3 - 5 min. read)

Today FINA, an organisation with a HISTORY of discriminatory decisions, banned  TGD swimmers - let’s not beat around the bush here: they’ve chosen a cut off point in puberty before puberty blockers are allowed, so they’ve basically banned TGD swimmers. 

Now, I consider the TGD community has priorities that are more urgent than sports - particularly violence (a trans woman was violently assaulted in Perth last week, for instance), and the harassment of and discrimination against TGD people which continues in many areas of life  despite a (flawed) protective Commonwealth law since 2013, but this is a spectacularly uninformed decision, and comes on a day when airport security checks are YET AGAIN a problem.

I always get extremely concerned when authority and/or security figures show signs of bigotry: it means their deeply flawed “thinking” makes them susceptible to problems such as the rabid Islamophobic focus (and Hussein obsession) after 9/11 that allowed the rise of far right violent extremists (I refuse to give them the satisfaction of using the T word) and stuffed Iraq, allowed gross racist abuses for decades before and after then, and enabled the sort of abuses that have been revealed by the NSW enquiry into strip  searches (MALE officers commenting on the blood running down a menstruating girl’s leg who they’re strip searching???).

Such people are not fit, in my opinion, to have the powers of life and death - including indirect, through causing mental health problems that create serious risks of self harm, nor the powers to search or copy digital devices. 

To what end? To copy and laugh at personal matters - as they have done at TGD people? 

Airport security is not safe for TGD and many other people (particularly survivors of sexual assault). It is pointless to just point out the risks arising from violent extremism unless the counter case - the cost of those measures - is also acknowledged. In this day and age, 9 years after legal protection at a national level, 20 years after the X marker was first used on a passport, decades after Birth Certificates could be corrected - and post-transition gender recorded on passports (albeit initially only after gender alignment surgery), decades after the first legal protection at a state level (by SA), a century after serious medical research first commenced, THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER THIS ISSUE WAS FIRST RAISED BY TGD PEOPLE, and in the midst of yet another round of rabid, unbalanced and utterly misinformed attacks on TGD people (which, IMO, if managers of security forces were not countering in briefings to staff, they were being professionally incompetent), THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR IGNORANCE on TGD issues. 

I fear the resistance to introducing basic respect and decency towards those who suffer at the hands of security checks is more malice (including transphobia) than professional incompetence (which includes ignorance).

PS - the cisgender swimmer who prattled on about TGD children dreaming of competing at an elite level hasn’t got a clue. Transwomen are women; transmen are men; and there are also nonbinary - transgender is an ADJECTIVE, not a noun. The only way a competition could be held for trans people under such circumstances is to hold at least three such competitions, one for each category of trans - otherwise the cisgender hypocrite is saying the binary polars can compete against each without a problem. Of course, given the low numbers it is likely each trans athlete would get to carry home all three medals - and the wooden spoon. What an utter bloody farce of an “idea”. The reality is that that particular cisgender swimmer does not know what they’re talking about.

PPS - it turns out that the hypocrites would allow some men - a specific sub-category of transmen - into women’s competitions. This denial of a transperson's identity is what kills trans people. As far as I am concerned, this is morally, if not legally, attempted murder. At the very least, it is declaring trans people are PARIAHS or OUTCASTS. To claim that is being inclusive is ludicrous. 

And ultimately, it will be the transphobes who suffer most - they are on the wrong side of history, which will judge them as fearful, selfish, small-minded desperadoes who actively resisted progressive and inclusive change, and decency, as decent people will quite rightly see the transphobes as moral pariahs and outcasts.

The cash-in-crew, some members of the LGBTIQA+ communities, who have some internalised phobias that they put worldly ambition ahead of the wellbeing of themselves and those in their communities will also be seen poorly by history - and by those who are paying attention now.