The kind of obsessive, delusional transphobia that is most prominent in the UK has made gains in Australia, after last night’s episode of Media Watch aired a breathless segment parroting TERF talking points about trans’ rights issues. The segment centered on a baseless conspiracy theory about the relationship between AIDS Council of NSW (ACON) and the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC).

The program, supposedly based on critiquing bad journalistic practices, heavily insinuated that ABC’s reporting of LGBTI issues has been affected by its participation in ACON’s “Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI)”, which marks corporations on how “queer-friendly” they are. In essence, the more a corporation does to present itself as gay-friendly, like implementing guidelines around pronouns, the more marks it gets. The program produced no proof of this. All it could provide was a single email in which ACON had responded to the ABC with some advice about the definition of the word ‘family’, yet throughout the segment, it insinuated that the ABC’s coverage of trans women in sport or the Tavistock Clinic closure must be affected by this relationship.

The criticism of the ABC’s reportage on these issues was a mindless repetition of TERF talking points, including a tweet that was quoted uncritically and in effect, misgendered trans female athlete Hannah Mouncey. Media Watch also sympathetically covered a University of Melbourne forum on “freedom of speech” that was a thinly-veiled excuse to invite prominent anti-trans speakers from the UK. The forum  discussed a controversy that occurred there, regarding a similar relationship between the BBC and the queer NGO Stonewall. That ended with a victory for the TERFs as the BBC broke their relationship with Stonewall; the TERFs here are seeking the same result. 

It is clear that TERFs are trying to use the freedom of speech and the liberal media as useful idiots for normalising their discourse – mirroring the UK’s “top-down” form of transphobia, which emanates from academics and prominent media figures. After “populist” transphobia crashed and burned with Katherine Deves in the last election, Australian bigots will focus on using bureaucratic means to achieve their goals. 

It is pertinent to note that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had been wedged by trans-baiting questions by the Murdoch Media and others – the questions “what is a woman?” posed in the leaders debate and “can men have babies?” again, mirror exactly the type of culture war against trans people that was fostered by the UK Media in the past few years in election cycles. Anthony Albanese responded emphatically that trans women were not women and trans men were not men. 

Whether Media Watch are being useful idiots here in their fetishising of ‘balanced reporting’ is unclear, or whether there are more ideological motives; we wonder if the difference even has any practical meaning. Screenshots of TERF Facebook groups discussing how prominent TERFs had given senior producers FOI information and been in direct contact with the show definitely raise both eyebrows.

This is not the first time the ABC has been wedged on “balanced coverage” and “journalistic standards”. Its strict codes of conduct leave it more vulnerable on this than commercial broadcasters. During Middle-East reporter Sophie McNeill’s period of employment, it regularly received formal complaints from Zionists pushing against her Arab-sympathetic coverage of Palestinian issues. 

For us, this gives us good reason to discard the nonsense about journalistic standards; we don’t care about balanced reporting. It’s this logic that drives Media Watch into suggesting that a QandA forum on trans women in sport should include a transphobic cisgender woman for balance. We think it would be great if ACON did bully the ABC into being less transphobic; we certainly hope to do as much with our activism.

The Media Watch segment concluded by saying they think the relationship between the ABC and ACON should be reviewed. This could also presage a further war being waged against ABC as the telecasters of the Mardi Gras Parade. The ACON AWEI is a fragile target, and the battle could be easily won by TERFs in the same way they got the BBC to pull out of Stonewall with their similar scheme.

This entire fiasco also demonstrates the limits of schemes like ACON’s. At the end of the day, these schemes are about management trying to maximise their queer friendly image; for instance, ACON gives points to companies whose CEOs attend Mardi Gras. This is something that many queers justifiably see as being against meaningful queer inclusion, instead being an exercise in marketing and pinkwashing. 

These programs don’t have a mass of queer people behind them; they have a small group of managers keen to have good PR in the eyes of queer people. With the lack of muscle behind actually protecting LGBTI rights, it’s an easy target for transphobes – because how much will management really protect it when push comes to shove? The BBC controversy with Stonewall shows us: not much at all.
When elites struggle between each other over these issues in the absence of a strong, grassroots movement, there are really only two outcomes: transphobia or pinkwashing. Neither are supportable and both are enemies of the queer liberation movement. This is why union fights for working-class LGBTI rights, like transition leave being fought for at Sydney Uni for example, and street-based protests like the Trans Day of Resistance Rally on November 20th, are so important. It is only through a mass movement that we can fight against bad actors in the media, the boardroom, and Parliament.