Issue 90.9 - Queer Dit

QUEER OFFICER’S

PRESIDENT’S

RIGHT CENTRE

PICKS

& CREATIVE WRITING

THE MAP

NO COPS AT PRIDE!

UNCOVERING THE EPIDEMIC: THE IMPACT OF AIDS IN AUSTRALIA

CONFESSIONS OF A SMUT-LOVING ASEXUAL GIRL

SIDING WITH ISRAEL IS NOT QUEER ALLYSHIP

RADICALLY PRUDE

AUSABE: LGBTQIA+ CELEBRATION RAINBOW

NAVIGATING THROUGH THE GENDER BINARY: AN INTERVIEW

DEFINITION

QUEERING THE HORROR GENRE

THE RISE OF THE MASTER DOC

RACE TO THE BOTTOM: ANTI-TRANS LAWS IN THE USA

A BETTER PLACE

TRANS AND QUEER CONTENT CREATORS TO CHECK OUT

CREDITS

GUEST EDITORS

CAITLIN BATTYE (SHE/HER)

STEPH MADIGAN (SHE/HER) DESIGN

JENNY SURIM JUNG (SHE/HER) COVER ART

CONTRIBUTORS & SUBEDITORS

LILY BAXTER (SHE/HER)

‘THE SPACE BETWEEN’

MICHAEL PETRILLI (HE/HIM)

NGOC LAN TRAN (SHE/HER)

KATHERINE QUEEN (SHE/HER)

DYLAN FULLER (HE/HIM)

MIAH THORPE (SHE/HER)

ZOE RUSSELL VON-BUJDOSS (SHE/ THEY)

ASHLEY JAYASURIA (SHE/THEY/HE)

We acknowledge and pay our respects to the Kaurna people and their elders past, present and future as the traditional custodians of the land on which the University of Adelaide stands. We acknowledge that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.

T ORIAL

D

E

Welcome to issue 90.9 of On Dit–Queer Dit!

This LGBTQ+ focused issue of Queer Dit combines two of our favourite things: being queer and talking about being queer. No doubt some people wish we’d shut up about it sometimes. But queer people often spend a lot of time being ashamed of who we are and live in a society that reinforces that shame, so now it’s making up for lost time, you know?

We learn very quickly that to be queer in this world means needing a very thick skin, especially if you start doing it in front of other people at a young age. You’ve got to be willing to accept that your existence is a paradox to outsiders, and that other people are always going to have something to say about the way you are.

Writing about queer issues comes with many risks and uncertainties, long periods of doubt and bitter battles with anxiety, procrastination, and failure. It calls for a lot of faith and a good therapist (put mental health into Medicare, we beg!). But the most difficult trail to blaze is often the one that’s also the most important, and that means diving into who we are, individually and as a community.

We are incredibly lucky to be doing this work, and the only reason we can is because of the people who came before us. Who kicked down doors only to be greeted by another crowd of angry men shouting that it isn’t time yet. Who fought to gain the freedom to do and express as they pleased with no rule, regulation, restriction, or boundary to its respectability.

Wear it Purple Day’s theme this year was “Still Me, Still Human” - a bittersweet reminder of the rollback of LGBTQ+ rights that’s spreading across the world. The “global closet” is huge, with the vast majority of the world’s LGBTQ+ people - around 83% - forced to keep their orientation hidden. The dehumanising stigmas surrounding queerness must be destroyed.

Queer stories are art, and they have the potential to transform the world with truth. To move people by being moved. Truth is a light at the end of the tunnel for those LGBTQ+ in training, sitting in a small town, wondering what life will be for them. Maybe your truth is so quiet and delicate that only dogs can hear it whistle–nonetheless your writing will be on the wall. You were here.

We’re so thankful for everyone who’s sacrificed their time to contribute to Queer Dit and share their stories. There’s a lot going on in the world, a lot of tragedy to process, but know that you are loved. Not necessarily by us, but by someone.

Caitlin and Steph

src queer officer’s report

src queer officer

mat monti (they/them)

Happy Queer Dit my friends!

It’s been a privilege to serve as SRC Queer Officer this year. This year marked the 50th Anniversary of the Murder of Dr George Duncan, a University Law Lecturer who was drowned in the River Torrens by Police officers for one reason, he was a gay man. His death was the catalyst for significant queer law reform across Australia. It is because of Dr Duncan and the Queer folk of his generation that we live in the world we do. So this Queer Dit I’d like to offer my personal thanks and gratitude to the Elders of our community. The people who first marched the streets of Adelaide as openly proud gays and lesbians, the Trans folk who paved the way for us younger trans folk, and most importantly all the queer folk who have lost their lives in the fight for our rights.

I’d also like to offer one thing to you all that I believe our community needs to focus on now more than ever.

Solidarity.

We are an extremely diverse community. Not only in terms of the many letters of rainbow alphabet, but also the intersectionality of our community with others. Queer folk of colour, Queer folk with disabilities, Queer women, our community is extremely diverse and therefore has a huge diversity when it comes to our needs and priorities.

We often tell our non-queer friends and families to be “Allies”. We ask them to, despite not being queer themselves, fight alongside us and support our causes. Well maybe we should learn to be allies to the other people in our own community. Why shouldn’t a cisgender white gay man be standing alongside a Trans Woman of Colour when she is discriminated against? Why shouldn’t a wealthy Trans person, who can afford private Gender Confirmation surgery, be fighting alongside a poor Trans person to get Trans healthcare covered under Medicare?

We should all be allies to one another.

So I’ll finish by making a promise, even as I now leave the position of Queer Officer I say to my fellow Queer folk, I stand with you. No matter what.

Solidarity Forever.

Yours in abundant Queerness, Mat Monti (They/Them) | SRC Queer Officer

YOUX REPORT

404 ARTICLE NOT FOUND :(

The article you are looking for could not be found due to the lack of queer representation in YouX.

YOUR

2. WHICH GAY ICON DO YOU THINK DOESN’T DESERVE THEIR TITLE?

VOX? VOX?

Cass Cavanagh (she/her)

3rd Year | B. Arts (History)

1. Chelsea Manning; we stan a trans and queer whistleblowing icon. Sentenced to 35 years of prison for leaking documents revealing American war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, we should all be inspired by her bravery in doing the right thing even though she knew she’d face the wrath of the world’s most egregious imperialist offender.

2. There are simply too many to count. Ellen Degeneres (wage thief and workplace bully), Peter Thiel (fascist bankroller and piece of shit), Pete Buttigieg (neoliberal capitalist hack) - take your pick!

3. Could it have been my penchant for stealing my mum’s makeup or my love for wearing dresses? I probably should have realised when somebody scrawled F*GGOT in bold permanent marker on my locker in high school - everybody knew before I did!

4. The Feast Festival is always a fantastic way to spend a day and evening, especially with friends! I’m probably most excited to be attending my first Pride as an out trans woman and getting to revel in that liberating experience; no closet can hold me!

Abigail Sutherland (they/she)

3rd Year | B. Arts (History) / B. Music (Classical performance)

1. My fav icon is Freddy Mercury! Truly the finest queer musician from the past 100 years.

2. RuPaul is someone I think doesn’t really deserve their title. Their views on transgender people continue to disrupt our normal lives since RuPaul is so popular with varying “allies” and pushes negative conceptions onto them.

3. I would say that the memory of me having a little tantrum because I couldn’t dress up as a queen/royalty for a costume party like my elder sister.

4. I am excited to see our baby gays come out and celebrate their identities for the first time! It is so important to feel pride and joy to be yourself.

POP! POP!

WHAT

YOU LOOK BACK ON

YOU SHOULD

Ollie Patterson (they/them) Honours in History

1. Tove Janssen, Joe Carstairs and Tchaikovsky

2. Katy Perry no doubt

3. Looking back at photos of myself playing men in so many musicals always makes me laugh a little

4. The book launch / signing for ‘Queen of the Walk, Gertrude’s Guide to Gay Adelaide History’, and cutting my hair again posthonours! Also my partner’s in a production of Shrek the Musical, so I’ll be seeing that at least 3 times (Hills Musical Company, get around it!).

4. WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED FOR THIS COMING PRIDE

Tiana Reynolds (she/her) 1st Year | B. Arts (English)

1. Lady Gaga. She is iconic, she is the moment, she is a star. Her music and performances are fantastic enough alone, but what makes her my favourite gay icon is her dedication to her art. Her creativity and commitment to her ideas are qualities I hope to emulate in my life.

2. If you’ve ever said Taylor Swift is a gay icon you are not seeing the gates of heaven. Sorry! That woman could have gay sex on stage, and I would still think she was the straightest person alive.

3. I basically had a girlfriend in year 7. We were all over each other, we walked everywhere with an arm around the other, kissed on the cheek incessantly, and were generally annoying to the third person in our friend group. The worst part was probably that she was left handed and I’m right handed, so we would sit together and hold hands under the table while writing. Totally normal straight girl behaviour.

4. The same things I’m excited for every month: being gay, going out, spending time with friends and kissing girls, preferably all at once.

LRC 90.9

1. The Australian Human Rights Commission has criticised Australia for its failure to regulate “normalising” intervention surgeries on Intersex children. As the ACT moves closer to ending these procedures, how does your party believe Australian legislature should proceed, and why?

2. The Manly Warringah Sea Eagles recently donned a historic pride jersey for their NRL game, which sparked a boycott from other players on the team. Queer children in particular experience high rates of violence in community sport.

3. Out of 56 Commonwealth member states, 35 still outlaw homosexuality and variously imprison or execute LGBT people. What are Australia’s responsibilities, if any, in protecting the rights of queer people beyond our borders?

Socialist Alternative | RAMON O’DONNELL & NIX HERRIOT

1. Intersex children are often subjected to non-consensual surgeries so their bodies conform to dominant ideas about what constitutes ‘male’ or ‘female’. In a society of strictly enforced gender and sex norms, so important is the act of assigning sex at birth that surgeons can brutally intervene to ensure that ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ can appear on a birth certificate. Assigning a fixed sex can amount to mutilation of healthy newborns, medically-sanctioned child abuse and a violation of bodily autonomy and rights. Bigots hypocritically concoct moral panics around gender reassignment while urging surgery on intersex children. Socialists reject non-consentual surgery on children and oppose discrimination against intersex people more broadly. Intersexuality should be accepted and embraced as the normal, physical reality it is. Australian legislation should enshrine the rights of any intersex person - not their parents, doctors, or anyone else - to make choices about their own body.

2. Boycotting the pride jersey is nothing but bigotry, plain and simple. There hasn’t been a singly openly gay rugby league player since Ian Roberts came out in 1995 and the Sea Eagles would have it stay that way. Players who oppose the pride rainbow are more than happy to play in jerseys and stadiums emblazoned with alcohol and gambling advertisements that actively harm society. The pride jersey itself, though, is a corporatised gesture that exposes the limits of top-down progressivism. Like most institutions, Australian sport has a problem with bigotry – the backlash towards trans athletes is just the latest example. Pinkwashing won’t stop this wider wave of queerphobia spearheaded by the Labor and Liberal parties. The public backlash to Manly’s decision is positive and demonstrates that bigots remain a minority in society and even within the NRL.

3. The Australian government couldn’t care less about queer rights. This is the same government that earlier this year attempted to pass a Religious Discrimination Bill allowing bigots to discriminate at will. Homophobia in the Commonwealth is a toxic legacy of British colonialism and won’t be solved by further interventions by a foreign state motivated squarely by its own imperialist interests. All of the rights that LGBT people enjoy in Australia and elsewhere have come about because people fought for them, from the international gay liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s to the Australian equal marriage campaign in 2017. These struggles opened the closet for the oppressed to come out and make their demands. As socialists we support those struggles in other Commonwealth countries as a path to winning queer rights. If the Australian government truly wanted to help people facing discrimination it would open its borders and guarantee citizenship to refugees fleeing persecution, including those Labor currently imprisons in detention centres.

Greens Club | CASS CAVANAGH, CAMERCON COOK & LAZARAS PANAYIOTOU

1. The Greens take a very common-sense approach to LGBTQIA+ rights with the belief that all people under the rainbow deserve to live their lives free of discrimination and that their rights should be actively upheld by any government worth its salt. The Greens explicitly state their view is that all people - including intersex and gender diverse people - have a right to their bodily autonomy, something that pre-emptive intervention surgeries rob intersex people of.

It is the aim of The Greens to restrict irreversible medical interventions on intersex children except when it is the case that these surgeries are necessary for the preservation of life. Otherwise, these invasive intervention surgeries should never be permitted until the intersex individual in question can provide their informed consent for the procedure to go ahead.

Intersex people are beautiful, and their identities should be celebrated - it is not the place of politicians to decide whether these individuals require ‘correction’ or not.

2. We agree that the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles donning their pride jersey was a historic moment, and we see it as a positive step forward within a league that has had seemingly non-stop issues with homophobia. That several players ended up boycotting the game because of this historic win serves as an unfortunate reminder of how far we still need to go for LGBTIQA+ rights in sport, and particularly in the NRL where the need for queer rounds and jerseys is so evidently apparent.

South Australia is not immune. Around this time last year, we saw Josh Cavallo of Adelaide United come out as the first openly gay professional male footballer currently playing worldwide. Ever since, he has received a consistent barrage of homophobic attacks over social media and even from rival fans in the stands.

Pride jerseys and pride rounds are not just a novelty in sport. They are necessary to combat an incessantly unhealthy sub-culture that has so far gone for the most part unchecked in our ongoing and long fight for equality and LGBTIQA+ rights. We must do all that we can to make players and fans alike safe within their own communities and when among peers.

3. Australia does not exist in a vacuum, nor can we morally hide behind the social construct of our artificial borders, especially as a rich, exploitative country. The Commonwealth of Nations, an imperialist creation, is yet another social construct that creates barriers between humanity, and it should not be where we primarily mobilise on fighting for universal human rights, as human rights are rights inherent to all human beings. Nevertheless, if ever politically popular at any time, which would no doubt be highly unlikely when it comes to the Commonwealth considering the declining support for monarchies, our priority should always be to advocate for a higher universal standard of living. The Greens movement organises globally through an international network called the Global Greens. This network is governed by a charter that outlines our principles of ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, nonviolence, sustainability, and respect for diversity before outlining ten indivisible areas of political action. Within our human rights political action commitments, our global movement agrees to call for LGBTIQA+ decriminalisation, legal recognition, protection of the right to bodily autonomy, and equal rights as well as both the implementation of the Yogyakarta principles and LGBTIQA+ mainstreaming at every level of government.

Labor Club | ELLIE VENNING

1. In 2021, the Human Rights Commission issued the following proposals to protect Intersex peoples’ rights to bodily and mental integrity:

- End unnecessary deferrable medical procedures without personal consent

- Establish a human-rights based independent body of Intersex people to oversee decision-making - Fund and provide access to information and peer support

All Australian jurisdictions should engage these reforms. They should go hand-in-hand with moves to make trans gender-affirming healthcare more accessible, emphasising the role of consent in healthcare. Doctors often pressure parents into choosing normalising surgery when their intersex children are too young to consent. They know that intersex people face discrimination, are more likely to leave school early, and experience high rates of poverty. But rather than address society’s dogmatic gender binarism, they impose harmful surgeries as a panacea for anti-intersex hate. The ACT’s proposed law allows individuals and families to develop their own treatment plans with assistance from medical, ethical, and Intersex experts–a welcome reform.

2. Just 32% of LGBTQ+ youth participate in community sport and 18% of these players have heard their coach say negative things about the LGBTQ+ community. This is something society urgently needs to change and something Labor should address as part of being “much more consultative” than the previous Liberal government. I believe that while the jersey was intended to show the club’s support for LGBTQ+ people, as players were not consulted on the jersey, it came as a surprise for them. The fact that seven players boycotted the game got a lot of media attention. But the media did not focus much on the dozens of fans that descended on the game with LGBTQ+ flags and signs, and that the community effectively voted with their wallets; with the pride jersey and other LGBTQ+ merchandise being sold out on the night within just half an hour. Personally, I find it ridiculous that so much outrage was sparked by some rainbow stripes – never mind the predominant gambling company ‘POINTSBET’ advertisement logo on the jersey…

3. The maximum penalty for homosexuality in seven countries is life imprisonment, and in two countries, it’s death. Internationally, 40% of countries still outlaw homosexuality, but 54% of them are Commonwealth countries. Through our bilateral and multilateral relationships, Australia is committed to advancing human rights, working with other countries to advance their human rights protections through humanitarian support and sanction countries accused of violating LGBTQ+ people’s human rights. I firmly believe that Penny Wong will use her position to advocate for LGBTQ+ protections internationally, and this is something we commend her for championing. Domestically, the Albanese Labor Government is committed to providing funding for LGBTQ+ community organisations to directly employ specialist domestic violence workers, to count LGBTQ+ people in the next national census and to amend anti-discrimination laws so that students and teachers cannot be discriminated against for their sexuality – because everyone deserves to feel safe at work and to be accepted at school. These steps are a massive improvement from the Morrison Liberal Government where military personnel were banned from wearing rainbow clothing.

Liberal Club | JAYDEN SQUIRE

1. The Australian legislature should enforce the right of children to NOT be subjected to normalising surgeries until the child is of the age that they can make a decision. I believe in self liberty, young children do not have the ability to make decision around what happens to their bodies.

2. I support pride rounds and pride Jerseys, I think that anyone who doesn’t support this is just immature.

3. Australia and western countries must enforce human rights, I believe that Australia needs to enforce rights for queer people abroad, and if needed create diplomatic sanctions for countries who do not enforce these rights.

LRC

editors’ picks

caitlin’s recommendations

james whale’s filmography

James Whale is not only an incredible director, but was also an openly gay man in Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s, which is pretty badass! A ton of his films (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and even the Old Dark House) have a ton of queer subtext and are simply incredible works. He also directed the 30s Invisible Man film, which is one of my favourite movies ever - Claude Rains in that role is an absolute treasure!

the priory of the orange tree

I’m an enormous fantasy nerd. Sadly, so many fantasy series are SO long (my favourite series is regrettably 15 books long!), and it’s still a very cishet male dominated genre. Priory of the Orange Tree skirts both of those problems by being a (lengthy) standalone book with plenty of women and queers! I absolutely love the worldbuilding in this book, and getting to examine the differences in how the East and West have interpreted different historical events and how that’s shaped the cultures. The core romance in the series is also between two women, both of whom are excellent characters in their own right.

steph’s recommendations the birdcage (1996)

This tearjerking, screwball comedy is a remake of a little-known French film about a gay man whose son wants him to pretend to be straight for a few days. Starring the late, great Robin Williams as Armand Goldman, the owner-operator of a drag bar, and Nathan Lane as Albert, the flamboyant star drag queen, the movie never presents the leads’ 20+ year relationship as the butt of the joke. Rather it’s embracing gay femininity that’s the moral of the story. Coming out in 1996, this film was a radical outlier in Hollywood and contains some problematic elements that turns lots of queer filmgoers off, but it still tries (and succeeds, in my opinion) to take aim at conservatism and masculinity as manifest in the 90s. 10/10 for rewatch value.

outspoken: a decade of transgender activism and trans feminism’(2016)

Probably best known for popularising the term “cis” in “Whipping Girl”, it’s Julia Serano’s discussion of transmisogyny in this, her third book, that’s the most iconic. Her call to rethink attitudes towards femininity comes through clear and incisive arguments that are only possible if the arguer has followed Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. The book is a collection of slam poems, spoken word, memoirs, and essays that chronicle her own personal evolution between transitioning in 2002, to 2016. Readers get a back door into Serano’s bottomless understanding of the social justice community at a tim when it was orders of magnitude smaller than it is today. While it sometimes reads very theoretical, reading this book will repay on dividends of nuance, empath, and awareness.

Q UEERIN G THE M A P

Queering the Map–an online collaborative artwork and mapping program in which users submit comments attached to specific coordinates all over the world. And the comments are all about personal queer experiences! Canadian artist and designer Lucas LaRochelle originally began working on Queering the Map for a class project. There’s an elevated quality to queer relationships which can sometimes feel like forming your own personal spaces, and LaRochelle has stated that their vision for the project was to archive these spaces: the “cartography of queer life–from park benches to the middle of the ocean.” Since its inception in 2017, there’s been over 80,000 submissions in 23 languages. It’s truly humbling to see the ebb and flow of LGBT people all over the world, and it’s a privilege to read their stories.

Words by Steph Madigan (she/her)

No Cops at Pride!

Words by Michael Petrilli (he/him)

TW: violence, DV and SA

Thefeatured picture was on the centrefold of this very student magazine in 1973, and it was for an article on the first ever Pride March in Adelaide that occurred in that same year. Next year will mark 50 years since that first Pride. How then in those fifty years has Pride shaped itself and influenced society and culture, and should we ask ourselves if everyone is welcome at Pride, a time and place focussed on inclusivity?

I think it’s important when considering this to return to the origins of Pride. Where does Pride even come from? As queer people and through our lived experiences we have all at some point in our lives faced discrimination based on our queerness. In a general sense this is where Pride comes fromfighting against that hatred and

standing up for the right to be who we are. This sort of pride and energy was built up throughout queer history, and there are many instances of queer fightback throughout that history, but it perhaps most famously culminated and erupted at the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The riots to some, mark the beginning of an entirely organised and united front in fighting for queer liberation. It is very important I believe to understand the pretext and environment surrounding the Stonewall Riots in answering who Pride is for.

At that time, and for a long time before that, gay and lesbian culture was pushed underground and hidden

At that time, and for a long time before that, gay and lesbian culture was pushed underground and hidden behind closed doors; anti-homosexual laws ensured this was so. The oppression of queer people was an active agenda of the state for most of twentieth century, and particularly in 60’s New York where it was heavily enforced under the mayorship of Robert Wagner fighting against all forms of counterculture. Bar licenses were revoked, and police dressed in plain clothes would actively entrap men at bars and even public spaces. The Stonewall Riot itself was the result of a botched police raid at the Stonewall Inn. Normally gay bars would be tipped off about upcoming raids. This time they were not, and so the bar patrons were not ready for the disturbing happenings of a police raid. Unprepared, patrons became agitated and concerned and eventually after a crowd grew outside the bar and after police started to assault bystanders, a riot broke out. The riot itself had no political subtext, it was rather people reacting to being harassed by cops. There were no chants, no signs, no marching, simply a raw reaction to police brutality. What sparked from it though was perhaps the beginning of the modern gay liberation movement. The following night the riots continued, this time it was political, queers, allies, and anti-police bystanders actively revolted against police brutality and chants of gay power echoed through the streets that night. Within months gay rights magazines were established and within years gay rights groups started organising and agitating all around the world.

The oppressors and instigators of those first riots were cops. While they may have not been the architects of that oppression, they were the enforcers of it. This highlights the role cops play in society; the ruling class designs the rules of oppression, and the police enforce them. One must truly consider if cops are really here to help you. I would argue that cops do not prevent

crime - take for example burglaries, by the time you call 000 your house has already been robbed and the only help you are offered is the bureaucratic process of reporting crime. And cops are notoriously terrible at responding to this, especially when it comes to women reporting cases of sexual assault and violence. Study after study finds that victims reporting sexual assault crimes to police results in secondary victimisation, which is where cops overwhelmingly blame the victims, stigmatise women, and flat out do not believe their claims (Moore and Baker, 2018, 3419-3438), (Murphy-Oikonen and Egan, 2022, 773-795). People often argue in defence of police behaviour, saying that it is simply a few rotten apples in the bunch, and that most of them are good and join the force out of a genuine desire to help people. Unfortunately cops in their private lives are c*nts - after spending their day doing f*ck all to help victims of violence and bashing in the heads of indigenous children, at home they continue that violence and become the perpetrators of domestic violence. Studies show that 40% of families of cops face domestic violence. That means nearly 1 in 2 cops is violent against their family (Pidel, 2022, 36865). Sadly, the cops themselves uphold this system of violence in their ranks. Disgracefully only 1 in 3 cops arrested for domestic violence are actually convicted (Pidel, 2022, 36865).

You would have thought that in the 50+ years since the Stonewall Riots, police would have learnt not to be violent against queer people. Sadly, every year at many Pride Marches across the globe, cops continue to bash queers. On the 52nd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York at a peaceful post-march hang out at Washington Park, the NYPD perpetrated brutal violence against innocent bystanders (Cozzarelli, 2021, 3-3). This violence by police is not limited to the US, it happens right here in Australia. In 2013 at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras,

an 18 year old marcher was videoed being thrown around like a rag doll by police officers and eventually smashing his head into the pavement. It took three years for the police to drop their charges against the marcher, and sadly no police officers were even reprimanded for their brutality. Closer to home here in Adelaide, we have the famous case of George Duncan, a Law Professor at this very University. Three cops brutally assaulted Professor Duncan and tossed him into the River Torrens, leaving him to drown. The proceeding investigation found that this behaviour by SAPOL was common at that time and additionally, it also came out that there was a concerted effort on the part of SAPOL to: one, cover up the crime and two, influence a juror to find the defendants not guilty. To this day SAPOL offers no apology on the case, admits no guilt and at every opportunity affirms their false support for the LGBTQI+ community and shamefully they say the case is still open. The only investigation I see needing to be done is into the complete corruption of SAPOL. Despite all this, we still accept cops’ presence at Pride events across the world, we happily allow them to make floats and march alongside us, some of us even work as cops or within the police system. Cops have a violent history with the LGBTI+ community, and their support is solely dependent on our current legal status. In a post Roe v. Wade overturning world, we know better than ever that hard-fought rights are not a guarantee. We do not need conditional allies who have historically brutalised us and continue to do so, whose surface level allyship is dependent on whether or not we are legally protected. All I hope to achieve in this article is to, at the very least, make you consider cops’ roles in society and their oppressive nature. As queer people we must continue the fight for our own liberation and support the liberation of all people under the oppressive system that we live in.

References

Cozzarelli, T. 2021. Cops Brutalize, Arrest Queer Marchers on Anniversary of Stonewall Uprising. Turning the Tide, 33, p. 3-3.

Moore, B. M. & Baker, T. 2018. An exploratory examination of college students’ likelihood of reporting sexual assault to police and university officials: Results of a self-report survey. Journal of interpersonal violence, 33, p. 3419-3438.

Murphy-Oikonen, J. & Egan, R. 2022. Sexual and gender minorities: reporting sexual assault to the police. Journal of homosexuality, 69, p. 773-795.

Pidel, J. 2022. Protecting Victims Of PolicePerpetrated Domestic Violence. Government Law Review, 15, p. 36865.

What you name a disease is a critical thing because it impacts how people respond to it, how much they judge themselves to be at risk, what kind of research gets done, and how deadly it becomes. That’s why the horrific and drawn out consequences of the 1980s HIV/AIDS crisis were already in motion when experts named the virus affecting gay men in America: “Gay Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID).

GRID was soon renamed “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” (AIDS) but the association between gayness and disease stuck around. Within the same period when many LGBT Australians started enjoying more rights and freedom, the AIDS crisis decimated their communities and upended the intimate lives of gay men in particular.

Reports about a “parasitic pneumonia” first emerged in the Australian gay press in 1981, yet most people only became aware of the severity of the virus when it started to affect their immediate social groups. Cishet people certainly didn’t know about it, or, if they did, arrogantly assumed it wouldn’t affect them. Meanwhile, gay community leaders saw what was happening in America and took it as an immediate and urgent warning that Australia was likely to be next. They established AIDS Councils and Phone-A-Friend helplines in every state and territory. But their impact was limited because the government didn’t feel obligated to respond to the preventable deaths of queer peopele–such was the social mores in the 1980s.

Then, in 1983 in Queensland, three babies died as a result of contracting HIV through infected blood transfusions. The media had a field day, de nouncing people living with the virus as “unclean” and accusing gay men of deliberately donating contaminated blood. Around the country, groups of angry men went into predominantly queer neighbourhoods bashing gay people and kicking in the doors of gay bars.

The babies, and thousands of others like them, were likely victims of the Factor VIII blood contamination scandal. A pharmaceutical industry, greedy for profits, would take samples from paid blood donors around the world and mix them together. Among the donors were prisoners, sex workers, and poor people suffering from HIV. But companies kept selling the contaminated products, even after new heat-treated versions were available, transmitting HIV around the world.

But the “contagious gay disease” narrative already had a death grip on the media. They pathologised whole classes of people–sex workers, drug users, homeless people, and LGBT people–as dirty and diseased, addicted to casual sex and, in doing so, spreading HIV to “innocents”. Terms like “gay cancer” and “the gay plague” were splashed across newspapers. The media ran its infamous “Grim Reaper’’ commercial, personifying HIV (and those with the virus) as the literal harbinger of death–a baffling choice at a time when gay men were being attacked for using public toilets.

uncovering the aidsepidemi ct h e i m p a c t o f a i d s i n a u ailartsgnirevocnueht a i d s e p i d e m i ct h e i m p a c t o f

HIV panic compelled many to conceal their positive status. You could be run out of your school, workplace or neighbourhood if people suspected you were HIV-positive. Doctors, the gay press, and AIDS Councils all attempted to protect people from such prejudice by encouraging a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect, isolating positive people by silencing discussions about HIV, even within their intimate social circles.

While the physical symptoms of AIDS were devastating, the visible symptoms caused another type of lasting psychological wound. Showing rapid weight loss and purple spots not only exposed you to the ostracism surrounding HIV, but signalled that you’d entered the final stage before death. Some people went to great lengths to prolong their life and avoid gaining “the look”. Others chose euthanasia to avoid any physical side-effects, preferring to die looking the way their friends remembered them. This triggered a culture-wide change in how queer people perceive our bodies; becoming conscious that our health might rapidly and irreversibly deteriorate without warning.

One milestone for HIV visibility was the Third National AIDS Conference in 1988. When organisers invited the audience to declare their status by standing together on stage, hundreds of audience members “outed” themselves, sending shockwaves through the community. Prior to this, most accounts of HIV were anonymised, even in the gay press. But as the caseload climbed, men started to challenge stigma by appearing in the media as the “face of AIDS”. This was valuable PR work that needed to be done, but sadly some men were motivated by their guilt at not coming out as HIV-positive earlier.

By the late 1980s, popular support was

mounting for the Hawke Labor government to tackle HIV. However, the government couldn’t be seen to be spending money on telling gay men how to have sex, or drug users how to inject safely. Imagine! So instead, they funnelled money to trusted community groups who could. Once activists were in charge of devising and delivering health policy, they made sure that Australia’s approach was strategic, creative and sex positive–like encourgaing people to wear a safety pin to show that you were into safe sex. By 1986, Australia achieved one of the fastest drop in infections in the world but it would take some time for the number of AIDS deaths to fall.

Early development of a cure suffered as a result of the government being tightfisted, as well as clinging bigotries in the medical field (after all, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until 1973, squarely within many experts’ lifetimes). That’s how the first antiretroviral medication, AZT, ended up costing $10,000 for an annual supply. And the side effects were so severe that many survivors still believe that their friends were killed by AZT, not the virus. But news of a cure reinvigorated the community. Activists urged positive people to volunteer for every new drug to improve their health…or at least work towards a cure.

Meanwhile, AIDS councils started bulkordering medication from overseas and distributing it at illicit “Buyers Clubs”. But there was only so much medication to go around, and activists were often forced to choose between saving their friends or the gravely ill.

Over the following years, gay publications filled with pages upon pages of obituaries. Most people in their twenties and thirties don’t attend a lot of funerals, but LGBT people reported constant funeral burn-

out. Worse were religious families who often refused to mention the deceased’s sexuality, partners, or gay friends. So queer people came up with creative, irreligious ways of commenorating their friends–in “HIV Survivors in Sydney”, Cheryl Ware describes one funeral held in a nightclub where the ashes and bone fragments of someone who had died were cast out over the dancefloor, because that’s what he would have wanted.

For those living with HIV, volunteering was a lifeline that sustained them through crippling grief and isolation. After all, the depleted gay nightlife only served as reminder of the devastating toll the epidemic was taking on the community. Volunteers provided essential palliative care, staffed needle and syringe programmes and telephone helplines, and served on boards of management. Their dedication enabled HIV positive people to circumvent the shame of the virus and make informed choices about their care. Volunteers resolved misinformation and HIV panic (“I was served coffee by a poofter; do I need to get tested??”), and fulfilled the wishes of those who wanted to die at home, rather than in a hospital.

The introduction of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) in 1996 allowed positive people to live with HIV by preventing it from advancing into AIDS; a watershed moment in a long, and agonising fight for effective treatment. But HAART didn’t reverse AIDS-related dementia and nerve damage, and some positive people were turned off treatment altogether after witnessing the effects of AZT. On an emotional level, the development of a cure meant that survivors had to confront the accumulation of grief that had built up over years, and figure out how to rebuild their lives after being certain they were going to die.

Although Australia’s top scientists declared the “end of AIDS” in 2016, 29,000 people are still living with HIV in Australia. In twenty years, the virus progressed from being essentially a death sentence to a chronic condition that affects more straight people than LGBT people. Today, HIV survivors are considered disenfranchised grieves, in a society that rarely acknowledges their relationships and the losses they endured. It is against this backcloth of unimaginable loss that we must unpack and process our history.

scan to visit the AIDS memorial quilt project!

CONFESSIONS OF A SMUT-LOVING ASEXUAL GIRL.

Forgive me allosexuals (non-asexual people), for I have sinned: I, an ace girl, read smut, and I liked it. Moreover, I devoured it like the poor starving, sexdeprived prude I am. Confused? Let me be frank: I love sex (in theory).

In political discourse about sex education, I often hear the argument that all children are asexual; they are clueless about arousal and don’t fantasise about sex. Therefore, they don’t need to be informed about their bodies because it’s developmentally ‘inappropriate,’ but those conservatives are so fucking wrong. Case in point: me.

At age 5, my sexual awakening was Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) (Damn, she was thicc). In the showstopping Poor Unfortunate Souls number, I wanted to be Ariel so bad and have the Sea Witch wrap her black, tantalising tentacles around me and have her wicked way with me in her den of iniquity. However, I soon discovered I wasn’t opposed to the male silhouette either, as I found myself strangely aroused by Jafar in Aladdin (1992). Retrospectively, I realised that both characters are queer-coded. In the book My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), author Jenn Shapland posits that a queer person’s “becoming” is the result of conflating “desiring to have [a queer sexual relationship/experience] with wanting to be [queer].” As evident from childhood, I believe that queer-coded villains being my ‘type’ indicated “a lust for what [I was] or could be.”

My point here is this: I’m attracted to/ turned on by, or the activities of, fictional

characters, but I’ve never felt this way about any person (male, female, or enby) in real-life. As for having sex in the flesh? Meh.

It’s well known that sexuality exists on a spectrum. After all, no two straight, gay, bi, pan, etc. people are the same, being subject to a diverse set of experiences and preferences. The same goes for the ace community, where the micro-label aegosexual (translating to sexuality without the self) lies under the asexual umbrella. Originally coined as autochorissexual (a now outdated, acephobic term) by Dr. Anthony Bogaert in 2012, aegosexuals experience sexual arousal but are emotionally disconnected from the subject of their arousal. Enter my habit of reading smut and fantasising about fictional characters.

For me, smut serves as both a source and model of sexual energy. Reading about fictional characters getting down and dirty is incredibly erotic in ways that the real thing could never live up to. It seems more magical somehow. In my fantasies, I adopt the role of a voyeur, wherein I derive pleasure from the actions they’re doing, rather than getting off to the characters’ physical appearances. On the rare occasion that I’m a participant, I’m a disembodied figure that is partly me, but also isn’t me. There is a disconnection. Capeesh?

“Asexual? Oh yeah, that means they just don’t like sex, right?” a schoolmate once asked me. Survey says … BZZZ! ‘Wait, wait, I got this, uh …’ thought the Year 8s, in charge of disseminating information

about queer identities for Pride Month,

“[it] means being involved in a romantic relationship, but not really wanting to give birth” *Facepalm* (I kid you not, this was circulated to the entire school. Where’s Zuckerberg and his factcheckers when you need them?). Seriously? Why is it so hard for straight and queer people alike to provide a basic, accurate definition of my sexual orientation?

It’s because of these misconceptions, together with my decidedly ‘queer’ childhood fantasies, that I questioned whether I was bi for a long time before coming out to myself as ace. Purely because I was operating under the assumption that ace people don’t have a libido or fantasise about sex and that if they do, then they’re clearly in denial and just haven’t met the right person yet. The erroneous mathematical equation my 14-year-old brain had calculated, read like this:

0 attraction to men + 0 attraction to women = 0, thus I was equally attracted to both sexes (bisexual).

Indeed, this logic was a gross misunderstanding of bisexuality. On that note, I’d like to present another equation for allos to understand asexuality:

sexual attraction =/= sex drive.

siding with israel is not queer allyship

Words by Caitlin Battye (she/her)

Let’s get this out the way to begin with: Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state. It is a colonial project and a military occupation that aims to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their rightful land.

As a gay woman, something I often hear when speaking out against the numerous crimes committed by the illegitimate state of Israel is that my existence would not be tolerated in Palestine, as if that should suddenly change my stance of opposing ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Proponents of Israel have often engaged in ‘pinkwashing’, in which they claim Israel is the arbiter of queer rights in the region and that anyone who cares for the queer community should support Israel.

This ‘pinkwashing’ relies on a variety of racist and Islamophobic tropes, and it uses queer rights as a shield against rightful criticisms of Israel. Any rights Israel affords to queer people are not extended to the queer Palestinians that have been displaced, caged, or killed by Israel. Focusing on some positive queer legislature in Israel does nothing but obfuscate from the countless violations of

rights Israel conducts against all Palestinians of all genders and sexualities, violations conducted along racial, ethnic, and religious lines.

In recent times, we have seen an outpouring of Zionism on campus. We have seen claims that it is somehow anti-Semitic to criticise Israel or to recognise Israel as the violent colonial project it is, despite the fact that Judaism and Zionism are separate and that there are many, many Jewish people who also oppose Zionism. We have seen prominent people on campus, within our queer spaces, leap to defend Israel and condemn Palestine.

To them, I repeat words that have previously been uttered: For Palestine, there can be no ceasefire. As queer people, we must stand in solidarity with all other groups who are facing oppression and whose rights are being violated. Siding with Israel is not furthering queer rights - it is furthering the systematic oppression and violence conducted by the Israeli state, including that violence against queer Palestinians.

We must remain vigilant against all forms of oppression, and we must not divide our struggle and delude ourselves into thinking we can truly stand up for equality without being anti-racist and anti-colonial. Queer liberation does not occur in a vacuum, and Israel’s brand of queer rights is entirely conditional on the racial, ethnic and religious standing of said queer people.

RADICALLY PRUDE

RADICALLY PRUDE

Consider this:

Words by Ngoc Lan Tran (she/her)

First, she’s a woman not having sex. In the hypersexualised capitalist society, this is incomprehensible. It goes against all the provocative advertising and the hookup culture it has desperately wanted to make “mainstream”. So society responds by rationalising: “Oh, she’s a prude,” because “She must be waiting for the right person. Is she waiting for marriage?” Or worse: “Maybe she was traumatised from being a survivor of sexual abuse?” – the same abuse that she would very likely fall victim to because of the hookup rape culture that the hypersexualised society created by insisting on objectifying women.

Second, she’s an Asian woman not having sex. The society that fetishises and hypersexualises women of color thought that this was a true disappointment. “What a shame, what a waste, she’s so cute. She’s adorable.” Because there was no rational reason for her to not have sex, it thinks her background must have something to do with it. “Right, she must be religious or something; it’s part of her culture.”

Last but not least, she’s an asexual Asian woman not having sex. Now the hypersexualised hetero-capitalistpatriarchal society just simply can’t grasp it anymore. “What do you mean this is not her choice!? It’s not celibacy? She’s born that way? Her religion has nothing to do with this?” Nevermind the fact that the aforementioned hypersexualised hetero-capitalistpatriarchal society failed to ask her if she was religious (The answer? The woman in question is quite atheist).

This is the triple-whammy of being an asexual Asian woman.

. . .

It feels awful to be marginalised in very different ways and not having a shared consciousness that fights back on the hypersexualised hetero-capitalistpatriarchal conglomerate in all its form. Indeed, in thinking about asexuality, I rarely think about feminism; when thinking about feminism, I rarely think about asexuality. The problem is that it is very hard to find a space that legitimises the existence of the asexual feminist/ feminist asexual. This has something to do with the fact, for most, that the asexual agenda and the feminist agenda do not always intuitively align.

Feminism is frequently misunderstood and easily conflated into its sexpositive movement, simply because the movement is one of the more dominant feminist projects with a strong critical stance in public consciousness. As a result, this misconception of feminism has created strife within the asexual community. Some proclaim that the ace community is taking the initiation to distance themselves from feminism altogether. The reason? Many members of the ace community find that the sex

positive feminist movement does not provide a safe space for asexuals as they risk being immediately pigeonholed as purely “anti-sex”.

Some do not fall for the trap of conflating feminism into the sex-positive movement. So instead, they turn a blind eye on feminism altogether. It’s oddly convenient doing this, because the two “rarely intersect.” In their view, asexuality strives towards greater awareness and understanding of people about the ace spectrum, not the gender equality. Gender equality is the feminist’s job. Questions like “why should I care?” and “how does that bother me?” arose as a result. Here is one comment on a discussion thread of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network:

There’s no connection between asexuality and feminism. Feminism is way of looking at the world; asexuality is an orientation. There have been a number of discussions on AVEN about feminism, but not on the basis that it has anything to do with asexuality -because it doesn’t. We have all sorts of discussions on AVEN outside of the topic of asexuality.

Of the marked discrepancy between asexuality and feminism, AVEN members seem to agree; feminism and asexuality are not intrinsically linked and therefore it is a connection that people make by themselves. As one explains:

Feminists talking about asexuality and asexuals talking about feminism does not mean that all of asexuality is making an intentional connection between itself and feminism. It is an accidental association brought on by the fact that there is a lot of cross over in membership between the two groups.

Something strikes a chord; reading these comments hurt. Here it is implied there is

“

”

“ ”

nothing inherently related about the two that can be manifested without the presence of the person who identifies as being asexual and being feminist. If there is any chance of reconciling between the two, there needs to be active effort of theorisation and discussion to make this connection happen. Of course, it is indeed important to remember that asexuality is not a primary mode of feminist resistance, and feminism has not directed invested in asexual projects. If we insist on veering on this path, we risk ignoring and dismissing the bodies that are not just asexual but also of different gender, of diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, or disabled bodies who often have been assumed or dismissed as asexual.

This is the antithesis of solidarity.

Just as the feminist asexual feels difficult to find their space of activism within both feminist and asexual communities, asexual disabled people can often feel left out as the disabled community works to distance themselves from the ‘asexual’ stereotype and the asexual community works to not be assumed to be a medical condition. If we choose to ignore the intersectionality of asexuality, we missed out on the battling the toxic stereotypes and assumptions that made intersectional bodies feel left out.

But if we do take that one extra step to actively take effort to think, research, discuss, and theorise on the intersectionality of our bodies, I reckon there is so much to be revealed and to be learnt about each movement as a first step to find commonality, find support, and strengthen solidarity.

As I began to research about the link between asexuality and feminism, the more I found from just one fascinating glimpse of asexuality in the 60s and 70s in the midst of the radical feminist movement. One of the most prominent pieces of asexual feminist writing was The Asexual Manifesto by Lisa Orlando. Writing for the Asexual Caucus of the Council of New York Radical Feminists in 1972, Orlando affirmed that the term “asexual” which she chose for herself effectively avoided the connotations of “celibate” and “anti-sexual” and means “relating sexually to no one.” This understanding of asexuality was the philosophical and political basis on which Orlando urged asexual feminists to both “be honest with ourselves [when] we tried to determine what our real needs are” while critically “examining the basic conditioning which had shaped our sexuality.” Not shying from the conflict between the time and energy spent to the struggle as feminists and the time and energy spent to develop and maintain relationships in which sex is a goal, Orlando contends:

“

Orlando is only one amongst a movement of anarchist feminists who was consciously chose asexuality as a method of resistance. These are the “radical refusals,” according to Professor Breanne Fahs who explains:

Asexuality is shown to disrupt key intersections between sexuality and the state, particularly institutions that control reproduction, pleasure, and women’s bodies. […] By removing themselves from sexuality, women can take a more anarchic stance against the entire institution of sex, thereby working toward more nihilistic, anti-reproduction, antifamily goals that severely disrupt commonly held assumptions about sex, gender, and power.

”

One of such radical refusals was Valerie Solanas, who is known for two things: writing The SCUM Manifesto, and shooting Andy Warhol (in believing that he destroyed her manuscript). Yes, she really attempted murder, and as much as it was an iconic true crime event of feminist history, it was also tragic. During trial, Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a classic patriarchal move that demonises the woman as well as the sex she associates with by stigmatising people with mental health conditions. The SCUM Manifesto is a 1967 satirical essay of “unabashed misandry” in which a dedicated fictional organisation called SCUM plots to overthrow society and get rid of all men. As much as I want to talk about the iconic line of “the male has a negative Midas Touch – everything he touches turns into shit,” for the sake of this article we need to go back to discussing the two things Solanas did incredibly well in her work: (1) she did not and would not give a fuck about what anybody thinks, and (2) she explicitly determined that asexuality was “cool” and “cerebral” but also distinctively a principleagainst “male culture”:

Noting the power of Solanas’ writing, Fahs also mentions the publication of Dana Densmore in 1973 for a journal by the feminist separatism group Cell 16. In Independence from the Sexual Revolution, Densmore unravels the institution of sexual ‘culture’ in which fucking is often conflated and confused with freedom. “People seem to believe that sexual freedom […] is freedom,” she complains, even though “sexual freedom [includes] no freedom to decline sex, to decline to be defined at every turn by sex.” As Densmore succinctly sums up:

It is when we are not free, or do not feel free, to make such a set of minimum demands on a relationship that serious trouble arises. And we are not free when we are in the grip of the false conditioning that decrees that we need sex. We are not free if we believe the culture’s ominous warnings that we will become “horny” (what a callous, offensive word) and frustrated and neurotic and finally shrivel up into prunes and have to abandon hope of being good, creative, effective people.

The more I think about Lisa Orlando, Valerie Solanas, and Dana Densmore, the more I find that being asexual and being feminist have everything to do with each other. They intertwine and complement. They unite the two struggles that seemingly “rarely intersect” and seemingly had nothing to do with each other by denoting their common oppressor which is the global capitalist-patriarchalheteronormative complex. The very same system commodifies sexuality, dictates sex and desire, engineers the unrealistic, unachievable, utterly insane standard of female appearance and femininity; the very same system that sexualises female bodies, fetishises bodies of POC folks, invalidates and punishes asexual bodies for not being sexual enough; all on a systemic and societal level.

Some critics have pointed out that the conversations around asexuality of radical feminists in the 60s and 70s only “skirt around” our modern interpretation of asexuality as an orientation and a spectrum. To this I respond that, it is important to understand that I am not trying to suggest of a historical continuity between the 2nd wave feminism and the modern asexuality movement. But on that note, I would rather propose that there is much about the likes of “radical refusals” that our current ace community could learn from, particularly on the politicisation of asexual matters.

Those who found out about asexuality may have encountered online ace communities formed in the 90s and the early 2000s instead, where AVEN, Yahoo!, Tumblr, and livejournals were the places where awareness of asexuality blossoms and thrives. During this time, when asexuality visibility was non-existent and much was to be worried about the integrity of the definition of asexuality, there was a lot at stake. The online ace community’s biggest purpose then was not to politicise their existence, but more fundamentally making asexuality recognised as an orientation, avoiding misconceptions of

asexuality as sexual repression, a mental disorder, abstinence, or celibacy. Therefore, it made sense that the online ace community naturally wanted to distance themselves from the radical feminist interpretation of asexuality as a political choice. But in 2022, when the asexuality definition is established, thriving, and accommodating towards different types of attraction (sexual, romantic, aesthetic, secondary), non/relationship dynamics; the asexual community’s biggest challenge is to be visible and to fend off exclusionists who deny that asexuals will not be able to take part in the queer or feminist movements.

As one asexual blogger notes, this photo, Lesbian Dynamics (1973), which was dug up thanks to prolific ace Tumblr folks, would likely have not been well received by the ace online community had it resurfaced 10 or 15 years ago given the feminist historical significance of the photo and its mention of asexuality. But it resurfaced in 2018, and ace

folks love it – maybe that says something about how much our understanding of asexuality is undergoing a radicalising shift towards a political movement.

Last year for Queer Dit, I penned an article called Don’t Forget the A in LGBTQIA+: Making Asexuality Visible (sorry for shamelessly promoting my article, but also, not sorry). I argued that the endemic problem for the ace community is with visibility, because it is invisibility that prevents asexuality from being recognised as a part of the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, and it is invisibility that enables discrimination. “The invisibility of asexuality has the implication of making acephobia not seen.” What I failed to include in my article was a discussion of what visibility means and should mean for ace people in the future. We have done incredibly well for ourselves in creating a massive online movement, starting from Zoe O’Reilly’s 1997 blogpost My life as an amoeba on StarNet Dispatches which is commonly regarded as the first ‘out and proud’ asexual, to David Jay’s founding of AVEN forum which now is hosting 135k+ members, to Instagram activist Yasmin Benoit who founded the influential hashtag ‘this is what asexual looks like.’ Yet at the same time, the online space can be an incredible individualised and anonymous space and holds little effect when making the invisible visible. I myself have great friends whom I have known for years before I found out that they were on the asexual spectrum too. If online visibility is the only visibility the ace community is settling for, then friends, we still have a lot of work to do.

Asexuality needs to be a tangible, recognisable, publicly visibly organised movement that deliberately takes up space in everyday life if this community truly wants to be included and represented. What we haven’t done so well is to make asexuality a relevant and important political issue, to flaunt ourselves in parades, organise protests, collectives, book clubs, and petition for recognition and welfare from our government leaders. On this, perhaps we can learn a thing or two the broader queer movement and the feminist

movement instead of distancing ourselves from them for not “getting” the asexual agenda.

When I started writing, I had variously different visions in mind. I firstly wanted to talk about being an asexual Asian woman, but I also wanted to deep dive into the nooks and crannies of feminist and asexual histories. Things have kind of gotten out of hand; I ended up writing about everything. This is because it’s difficult and almost impossible to separate these aspects of my life into distinctive parts. Favlia Dzodan writes, “my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit.” Along her lines, I say: my asexuality will be radical, or it will be nothing.

For most of us, being ourselves is not easy when we have to work to carve up a space that allows for existence. It is the hard work of reflecting, thinking, healing, researching, discussing, theorising, hurting, bonding, fighting, loving. Last year, I wrote an article to speak up about asexuality and visibility. This year, I write this article to struggle, actively and deliberately, so that I can find for others and for myself what an asexual feminist/feminist asexual space would look like. That struggle takes different forms; mine is to accidentally combine three articles into one… But it’s all worth it in the end. Without struggle there is no solidarity.

L GBTQIA+CELE B RATIONRAINBO

AU S A BE Honouring DrGeorge Ian

The Design Team. Left to right: Dylan Fuller, Whitney Fei Yang Huang, Miah Thorpe, Quincy Nguyen, Katherine Queen, and Fleur Liveris;

Not pictured: Bea Maramba, Brendan Nguyen, David William Nott and Kristina Lee.

Words and photos by the Adelaide University Society of Architecture and Built Environment (AUSABE)

Interview by Ngoc Lan Tran (She/Her)

In late October 2021, the Adelaide University Society of Architecture and Built Environment (AUSABE) was engaged by The University of Adelaide Events team to create a rainbow structure honouring Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan. AUSABE’s Design Team was made up of nine Bachelor and Master of Architecture students and one Civil and Architectural Engineering student. They are Dylan Fuller, Whitney Fei Yang Huang, Kristina Lee, Fleur Liveris, Jeriza Beatrice Maramba, Brendan Nguyen, Quincy Nguyen, David William Nott, Katherine Queen, and Miah Thorpe. Over the course of the summer holidays, these passionate students had dedicated over 100 hours of their time to this project which created a statement of pride and celebration on the university campus.

The LGBTQIA+ Celebration Rainbow, a 24m long x 10m high structure, was unveiled in March of 2022 on the University grounds near the Cloisters and facing the Torrens River. Soon after the reveal, a walk in solidarity to the Festival Centre was held to commemorate Dr Duncan, led by Adelaide’s Queen of the Walk Gertrude Glossip who is renowned for her educational rainbow walk of queer history at the Feast Festival. The event concluded with a preview performance of a new oratorio at the Dunstan Playhouse, Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, as part of the Adelaide Festival.

Born in London and lived in Melbourne, Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan was a law lecturer at the University of Adelaide. After earning a doctorate at Cambridge University, in 1972, he returned to Australia to take up a lectureship of law at the University. Six weeks after his arrival, he lost his life after being thrown into the River Torrens by a group of men believed to be police officers. It was a hate crime that shocked the nation. Almost immediately, Dr Duncan’s death triggered the very first attempt in Australia and in any country in the Anglosphere to decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting adults. Local historian Tim Reeves calls this a “watershed” moment.

Every year, University of Adelaide students hold a memorial service to mourn, commemorate, and honour Dr Duncan. The service is a reminder that Dr Duncan never intended to be a martyr, that his only crime was existing. His death indeed was the catalyst for a positive change that impacted countless queer lives, but there is a long way to go to achieve full equality for the LGBTQIA+ community. This year, to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, AUSABE continues the tradition of honouring Dr Duncan and the celebration of queer lives with their project of architecture. As a society they write: “Queer liberation is built on the foundations laid by those who have come before us. As we continue to fight for equality and unity, remembering their struggles, triumphs, and legacies is crucial to building a strong and

meaningful community with a fierce sense of shared history.”

HOW DID THIS PROJECT COME ABOUT?

Katherine Queen (she/her), President: Well, we were approached as a society by one of our university lectures, who in turn was approached by the Events team at the University. From there, we had an initial meeting with the University team before proposing the project to our committee, who were really excited to be on board.

Myself and Fleur Liveris, who was our Vice President at the time, ran the project a little bit like an intensive design studio. We needed to get a lot of this work done by early to midDecember of 2021 as the project had some really tight deadlines. We initially started out with a concept design and from there, we did all of the work ourselves with guidance from tutors and the industry team.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THIS PROJECT AS A STUDENT SOCIETY?

Katherine: AUSABE was in its infancy in 2021, and in some ways still is, so to be given this great opportunity within our first years really means the world. The project is incredibly important for our members and for what we stand for. We felt really honoured and very proud of what the project ended up as, especially as some members involved are either a part of LGBTQIA+ or have important connections to the community. We were able to meet so many integral people within the story of Dr Duncan, as well as those who are still passionate about it and still fighting for justice. We’re looking forward and ahead. This is an important part of university history and really puts, not only our state, but our country in the spotlight of LGBTQIA+ rights movement. It is a progressive change for the future, and we’re happy we’re a part of that change.

I personally feel proud not only as a society but as an individual. I am simply touched. I cried so heavily during the Watershed performance, it really impacted me and I hope that we celebrate the future of the LGBTQIA+ community and move forward to even more amazing things.

LEFT - A VISUAL RENDERING

BELOW - REALITY

WHAT WAS THE DESIGN PROCESS BEHIND THE LGBTQIA+ CELEBRATION RAINBOW?

Dylan Fuller (he/him), Treasurer: The rainbow flag is universally the most recognisable symbol of the LGBTQIA+ community, so from this, the projects’ genesis was derived. The rainbow was the focal aspect in unifying the design, enveloping the primary structure with a tensile helix oriented rainbow. Associating with this idea is a conceptualisation journey conforming to a linear progression of research, extrapolation, experimentation, storytelling, and actualisation.

The extrapolation of a pride symbol is representative of self-identity. The triangle was formalised as dichroic triangle panels; occupants of the negative space in between the truss. The structure produces refractive light rays throughout different times of day, dimensionalising the space as purposeful. This layering of space utilising dichroic triangles characterised as a medium, provides dimension to the storytelling of this project, reflecting both the murder of Dr Duncan and the law reform for homosexuality that followed. The transparency of the dichroic triangle seeks to amplify the experience. Upon the base of the installation, green

carnations punctuate the jarring triangles, symbols of queer pride.

WHEN WE THINK ABOUT QUEER SPACE, WE MAY FIRST BE DRAWN TO THE METAPHORS OF THE CLOSET AND THE WASHROOM - ALWAYS PRIVATE, INTERIOR, AND AT THE EDGE. CAN YOU COMMENT ON THE ARCHITECTURAL IMPORTANCE OF EXPLORING QUEER SPACES AND STORIES, PARTICULARLY DR DUNCAN’S, THAT THIS PROJECT OFFERS?

Mia Thorpe (she/her): To quote Bernard Tschumi, “Architecture [can] only be political in relation to events.” Quite poignantly so, architecture presented at this Memorial for Dr. Duncan actively challenges the dichotomy of queer spaces. At an observable level, it’s sitting on the highly pedestrianised North Terrace and university grounds, thus proudly celebrating the space. But on a deeper level, the fact that the Celebration Rainbow’s location intentionally faces the Torrens bridge where the queer community had formerly met in the last century, at night, discretely, privately, tragically unsafe;

Words by Zoe Russell-von Bujdoss (she/they)

Tik-Tok is normally a haven for humorous entertainment, and sometimes political conversation, however, there are times where the algorithm goes extremely wrong and my ‘for you page’ is bombarded with dozens of ‘gender reveal’ videos. Whilst some may simply view these as cringeworthy and sappy, the ritual exemplifies the deeply entrenched gender roles present within society that are assigned to us before we are even born.

The unconscious power of pink and blue slowly transforms into a regime that polices our bodies, behaviours, and reinforces a binary of two distinct, opposing forms of genders: masculinity and femininity.

So, what does this all mean for non-binary peoples? For individuals who do not exclusively identify as a man/woman or situate themselves in between, maneuvering through the ‘gender dichotomy’ can often compromise personal identity and well-being.

My sibling, Ollie, who possesses an endless supply of wisdom, agreed to share their perspective and personal journey as a nonbinary person…

What do you define as non-binary and what does this concept mean to you?

“Non-binary” encompasses anyone that does not fit into the standard binary gender system. There are several ‘specific’ identities within this: non-binary, gender-fluid, gendernon conforming - I believe they all fall under the definition of non-binary (anything that differs from the boy/girl you were presumed at birth. Being non-binary rebels against the expectations of society and allows you to be able to do the things you’re too comfortable with - without having to fall into a certain box. It’s certainly not easy to throw away society’s judgment, but it can

be an important step in self-acceptance.

Did you always know you were nonbinary?

Short answer - no. But there were signs from childhood that make a lot of sense now. I was taught from a young age that there are expectations of boys and girls - but I didn’t have to follow them if I didn’t want to. I remember having an affinity for some feminine things that I didn’t really understand… I never gave any thought to this being out of the ordinary. I certainly didn’t conform to the same interests and attitudes as other boys throughout school. In grade 9 this made me somewhat of a target of bullying however, by my early teens I became okay with the person I was and as my cohort matured—I became accepted by almost everyone at school and got on quite well with people.

In the years following, I learned about transgender people and non-binary identities (I was actually skeptical at first) and found myself relating more to the experiences of these peoples. Eventually… it just made sense to me that it was how I felt too. While I could accept myself as a guy that didn’t need to conform to hyper-masculinity who could endeavour to be a positive example to other men, like my father had been for me - it just didn’t feel right, I didn’t feel male, something felt missing and wrong -I felt “in-between” so to speak.

What do you feel the biggest misconception of being non-binary is?

That non-binary genders and transgenderism as a whole is an entirely new concept in society – This is not true. Non-binary people have existed in pre-colonial Americas, India, Southeast Asia, Indigenous Australia, Albania and premedieval Europe. Not to mention the

navigatingth rough thege

persistence of queer and transgender people as secretive communities that existed since classical Greece, Rome and even before that.

Do you feel that Imperialism has played a major part in shaping our understanding of gender in society?

European colonialism has been the dominant power in the world. Their philosophy of cultural superiority took precedence, and they obliterated cultures under the guise of bringing ‘civilisation’ which was instead the dissolution of non-binary people and transgender identities. In India, “Hijra” people were “banned” under the British Raj, virtually making them non-existent in public until recent years. Non-binary identities were erased in south-east Asia and across the pacific with the advance of Western religion, and we know what happened with the cultural genocide of Native American people and Aboriginal Australians - this included the erasure of “Two-Spirit” people in the Americas, and non-binary identities in Indigenous Australian culture.

This discourse that being non-binary is some sort of hyper-woke concept, shunning ‘regular’ society - is ignorant. It doesn’t take into account thousands of years of history. We need to reassess why we put so much importance on gender roles in our society. The idea of men and women being what holds society together is but one worldview of many from around the world… but it’s come to be accepted as the only one. This is starting to change in many countries as transgender and non-binary people realise self-empowerment. Still, a long way to go, however.

What would you say to someone struggling to accept their gender and scared of what others will think?

Be true to the person you are inside. If you don’t fit with the gender you were presumed to be - it’s really important you reconcile

that within yourself. Trying to deny those thoughts out of fear of the difficulties you may face in life by being non-binary will eat you from the inside, because you would basically be denying the existence of the person you actually are.

It is really easy to feel discouraged from ‘transitioning’ or coming out -due to pressure from the media, or people in your life. I know how scary it is, even in today’s society, and it’s confronting to have to face the unknown... but I see so many trans and nonbinary people living their life proudly and happy and I know that we can all get through it - we just need to trust in ourselves and have the courage to be authentic… and true to ourselves.

I want to point out the importance of these decisions and identities not being final. A lot of people feel they have to “transition” into one thing from the other, but the reality is that things change. Nothing has to be fixedyou can feel a certain way, and then change your mind. I’ve known a lot of people that have been non-binary, then switched to feeling transgender in a binary sense, and then come back to feeling non-binary. It’s normal to explore yourself - see what works, what doesn’t - we already do it for other parts of our identity.

As long as you are being true to the way you are feeling, and not pushing down part of your identity, that is the most important. The other hurdles will be there - as they are for all of us, but having the confidence in yourself is the best way to overcome those obstacles.

derbinary: a n interview

Words by Ashley Jayasuria (she/they/he)

definitions.

Buzzing buzzing brightly, Light and sound mixing, it’s Insane how many distinctions We make and hold onto dearly. Why why why, do we hold on to All of this? All of it, too much of It, endless possibilities are only As worthwhile as the energy we Spend sifting through them.

We cut up the world into all these little Bits and Pieces and Yet, wonder with no sarcasm why some Care so much for their boxes.

Boxes make us safe, boundaries are healthy, But it hurts so much to exist, It hurts so much to cut up infinity Into these indistinct forms as if it Means anything, really. Meaning, Reasons, Decisions, Free Will, it hurts To kill a thousand lifetimes with each Thought, each step, each breath. Life Is suffering because we are all so apart And yet we seek so much solace being You or I or them or whatever makes us Comfortable.

It’s all just a bandaid. And yet, Why should we judge others for Seeking such? No matter what, that’s All we’re seeking. Penny wise may be Pound foolish, but the starved need to eat.

If we are all just one being, what does it Matter? Someone may cut differently to You, but we are all hurting here. We all Desire freedom from pain. Better to live That we may all be free, meeting in the middle.

QUEERING THE HORROR GENRE

Words by Caitlin Battye (she/her)

When thinking of the horror genre, many people conflate it with a sense of hyper (and often toxic) masculinity and heteronormativity. Images spring to mind of heterosexual teenagers being slain in gratuitous ways - almost as gratuitous as the lingering shots of the female form, often naked and objectified in a way the male characters are not. However, horror is a remarkably diverse genre with a remarkably queer history. In fact, I would go as far as to say that horror is quite possibly the queerest genre for its ability to delve into the anxieties of the queer experience, and the anxieties and biases the patriarchal heteronormative society holds towards our community.

Horror when done right reflects the fears of its author and of society at large. Queer anxieties specifically are deeply embedded within many of the most classic pieces of the genre. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a prime example, with many people remarking on its barely-subtextual eroticism and display of sexual repression and desire in Victorian times. Bram Stoker himself was likely a queer man - indeed, his letters to poet Walt Whitman certainly indicate so. These letters contained passages such as:

“How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eye and a child’s wishes to feel that he can

speak to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul. I don’t think you will laugh, Walt Whitman, nor despise me, but at all events I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.”

And:

“I only hope that we may sometimes meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.”

Stoker was also close friends with known queer Oscar Wilde - a friendship that Stoker seems to have attempted to keep hidden, refusing to mention his friendship with one of the most famous literary figures of the time, even in a 12 page document listing his most famous acquaintances.

Dracula tells the tale of a young heterosexual engaged man who travels away from his fiance for business to stay in the home of an older, strangely seductive man. Dracula “leans over” Jonathan Harker, strokes him until he passes out and awakes with his clothes folded beside him. Jonathan finds salvation in fleeing back to England, to his fiance Mina and teaming up with a group of men to purge Dracula from this earth, signifying a return to the heterosexual norm in a way Bram Stoker seems to have similarly craved.

Queer readings of classic horror media continue on to the big screen with the Universal Monster movies of the 1930s. Frankenstein and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein were both directed by James Whale, a British director who was openly gay throughout his career spanning across the 1920s and 1930s. Whale’s films present the audience with a monster who is undeniably sympathetic, an outsider for no reason other than how he was born. Queer audiences latched onto the Universal Monsters for this sympathetic look at the monster as an outsider shirked by society, as well as their underlying themes of sexual repression. Bride of Frankenstein is especially queer, with the effeminate Pretorius clearly in love with Henry Frankenstein, interrupting the consummation of Victor’s marriage to posit they partner up to create life togetherremoving the need for a woman in creating life, and acting as same-sex parents in a way.

Dracula’s Daughter, released in 1936, was similarly queer. The film is an early adaptation of J Sheridan Le Fanu’s also extremely-queer novella Carmilla, which predated Dracula by a quarter of a century. Countess Marya Zaleska, the titular daughter of Dracula, longs to be freed from her bloodlust and to live a ‘normal’ life. Marya is a character tortured by her desires and unendingly ashamed of herself in her quest to conquer her innate nature. She is coached by a man, Dr Jeffrey Garth, who is the perfect patriarchal heteronormative archetype in her attempts to overcome her urges, and she is seen drawn to women victims in undeniably seductive scenes.

Throughout this period, the Hays Code was in full effect. The Hays Code was a selfimposed set of industry guidelines which set a moral standard for the films that could and could not be made. Films were not allowed to depict “perverse” subjects such as homosexuality, and if they were depicted the homosexual agent must be

punished by the end of the film. As such, the depiction of queerness in these films was subtextual but still apparent. It is why the queerest characters were the monsters who would inevitably meet their end, and it is the sympathetic portrayal of these monsters that has endeared them to queer audiences for nearly a century.

In a post-Hays Hollywood, homosexuality was able to be depicted more explicitly. We saw a surge of explicitly queer content, however most of it still defaulted to depicting its queer characters as villains whose transgressions would inevitably be punished, oftentimes without the sympathy present in earlier films. The Lesbian Vampire subgenre, booming in the 1970s, is a prime example of queerness allowed to exist in the genre on screen, albeit in a manner designed primarily to titilate a heterosexual male audience. In the bulk of these films, the lesbian vampire preys on a woman in a heterosexual relationship, and it is the heterosexual relationship that is fighting to triumph. Out of the films in this subgenre, Daughters of Darkness, The Vampire Lovers, and Blood-Splattered Bride are some of the most well-known, each with varying successes and failures in their depictions of queerness.

As queerness in the horror genre was becoming louder and more noticeable, it began seeping into other subgenres, including the ordinarily heteronormative slasher genre. Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is a sharp deviation away from the original film - which originally led to it being lambasted before being recognised as a cult classic in recent years. In the film, Jesse is possessed by Freddy Krueger. Jesse’s body is being taken over by an evil inside of him that is trying to break free. Jesse’s attempts to sleep with his heterosexual girlfriend are thwarted by the internal presence of Freddy, there are leather-clad men in bars and homoerotic shower scenes with supernatural towel whipping. The film is so incredibly queer

that it flopped at the box office and ended the career of its lead gay actor, but has since been revived as a prime example of camp gay horror that many gay men have found themselves relating to.

In recent years, we have seen queer creators, characters and stories explode within the horror genre. NBC’s Hannibal was created by a gay man, and focused on the homoerotic relationship between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. Jennifer’s Body explored rape culture and the (quite literal) demonisation of female sexuality through the female gaze. Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy explores the long-lasting generational impacts of queerphobia and patriarchy in a heavily religious society. Spiral examines the sinister homophobia still present in everyday suburbia for queer couples, especially queer people of colour. Knife+Heart looks at the discrimination queer people face when it comes to law enforcement taking crimes against our community seriously. Iranian vampire spaghetti western A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night explores feminist and queer subversions of the patriarchy. Netflix series Haunting of Bly Manor explores the overcoming of trauma and the simultaneous power and horror of memory, centered around a queer gothic romance.

The horror genre is a complex one with a history as long as the history of media itself. It also has a strong queer history, one which the queer community has latched onto. It is this history of queerness in the genre and the boldness of previous storytellers that has paved the way for the storytellers of today to use queerness in horror to shed light upon the injustices and anxieties that plague the queer community.

The Lesbian Masterdoc is a common nickname for a document entitled “Am I A Lesbian?” that was written in 2016 by Angeli Luz. The Masterdoc presents a series of thoughts and experiences that Luz concludes are common among lesbians, with sections including ones about “Early interest in women” and “You might be a lesbian if TL;DR.” Page one introduces readers to the concept of compulsory heterosexuality, a term Adrienne Rich coined in 1980 to challenge other feminists on their assumption that attraction to men was a natural feminine predisposition. In the Masterdoc, Luz writes, “Compulsory heterosexuality is the voice in my head that says I must really be het even when I’m in love with a woman.” If you relate, you might be one.

Luz did not set out to write a canonical text, but she did. The Masterdoc peaked in popularity in late 2020, but it’s experienced a renaissance on Tiktok where videos using #lesbianmasterdoc have collected over 14.7 million views. The affirming and revelatory reading experience brought on by the Masterdoc is currently fuelling a viral trend where users gush about its world-rocking clairvoyance, or are too afraid to even look at it.

the rise of the masterdoc

the rise of the masterdoc

Words by Steph Madigan (she/her)

Naturally, there are critiques. Adrienne Rich, for example, was transphobic, and some say that Luz’ writing implies tenets of political lesbianism that are transexclusionary. Also, Luz came out as bisexual last year, raising concerns that the Masterdoc blurred the line between bisexuality and lesbianism. But in this queer’s opinion, Luz’ description of lesbianism focuses more on psychology and sexual intimacy than gender. I’d reccomend Julia Serano’s “Whipping Girl” and Leslie Feinberg’s “Stone Butch Blues” for a more academic, intersectional approach.

But that’s not all! There have been numerous attempts to replicate the success of the Masterdoc for trans and gay male audiences. “Trans depersonalization” by Zinnia Jones is extremely apt. Jones is a marketer, writer, and activist who started a website with a series of essays called “Gender Analysis”, offering an in-depth look at trans issues. Her mostread article, “‘That was dysphoria?’ 8 signs and symptoms of indirect gender dysphoria” was an attempt to describe a sense of pervasive discomfort and unease that subsided once Zinnia started transitioning. With subheadings including “A sense of misalignment, disconnect, or estrangement from your own emotions” and “A notable escalation in the severity of these symptoms during puberty”, Zinnia received an outpouring of support from fellow trans people who resonated with these experiences. Like with Luz’ comphet, Zinnia’s online resource library has helped crack many so-called eggs.

On March 11th, a Texas judge temporarily halted statewide investigations of parents with trans kids. This came after Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state officials to consider gender-affirming healthcare, like puberty blockers and hormone replacement

birth certifications (qualifying in some jurisdictions as coerced surgery), but it’s recently gone further and blocked changes to birth certificates even after surgery. And this list is…non-comprehensive.

How did we get here? Since the mid-twentieth century, Republicans

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

therapy (HRT), as child abuse. In Texas, child abuse is punishable with up to 100 years in prison and losing custody of your kids, which is pretty alarming when you start defining child abuse as “stuff I don’t like”. The judge in question ruled that Abbott’s actions were unconstitutional, but the threat has been made.

The United States is seemingly on an inexorable march towards trans erasure. In the first half of 2022 alone, 300 anti-LGBT bills were proposed by state legislators. That’s an increase from the 130 similar bills proposed last year–a number so large it’s prompted some advocates to label 2021 as “the worst year in revent history for queer rights.”

Over one third of 2022’s anti-LGBT bills target trans people. Trans kids’ access to sports is singled out, with bills in 17 different states restricting high schoolers from participating in sports teams associated with their gender. Tenenssee added that they’ll withhold a portion of state funding if schools fail to confirm trans students’ birth sex (presumably via phsical examination). Arkansas was the first state to ban affirming healthcare for trans youth, promising to revoke the licences of doctors who provide it, followed by Arizona and Tennessee. Five states also passed anti-trans bathroom bills. Bills were passed in Arizona, Indiana, and Oklahoma allowing religiously-motivated discirmnation against LGBT people in adoption and foster care. Finally, Montana legislation stated thatpeople had to medically transition before they could change their

have been fine-tuning their fratty cowboy style of right-wing populism. “Traditional conservatives” were a little reticent to make flagrantly racist, sexist, and violent statements to win over voters, and then Newt Gingrich came along. He pioneered a style of partisan combat so toxic and obstructionist that it put Republicans back in control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. Then, Goldwater, Reagan, and other conservative politicians used abortion to galvanise evangelicals back to the polls, who become the single most important interest group for Republicans moving forward (second only to the NRA).

The idealised rewind back to the 1950s went awry when sodomy laws were overturned and the fight won for same-sex marriage. But the GOP has to keep their base boiling in constant populist fervour, so when one issue fades (as with gay rights) they’ve got to find something else. And trans people were next on the horizon. In the 2010s, the Tea Party (who were offended by Obama’s blackness, not so much his war crimes) and their white nationalist allies made social conservatism trendy for bluecollar Americans. Where once the targets of conspiracy theories were confined to Democratic party officials, fearmongering was suddenly laser-focused on LGBT individuals, and beamed directly into their homes and phone screens.

Trump adopted the idology of the farright base he needed to win, making so many moves against LGBT people that his leadership was branded “The Discrimination Administration”. Meanwhile, cable news (which remains the primary news source for 91% of Americans) popularised conspiracy theories about trans people and egged on far-right street violence, smearing their opponents as “groomers”. This is a transparent attempt to erase trans people by contextualising their very existence as sexually predacious and harmful to children. I mean, the “Don’t say Gay” bill was publicly referred to by Republicans as the “Anti-Grooming Bill”--

seamlessly into a now-common anti-trans playbook: produce bigoted content about trans people, film yourself antagonising and attacking trans-inclusive events, then go on Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets to put the videos in front of an even broader audience. Eventually, the original talking points trickle upwards to conservative lawmakers, who zero in on schools and bathrooms as pressure points for eliciting “what about the children?” reactionary sentiments.

BOTTOM ANTI-TRANS LAWS IN THE USA

they’re not even being subtle about it!

Anti-trans panic has since taken hold and metastasized. There’s a growing cottage industry of Christian mommy bloggers turned right-wing thought leaders–e.g. Abigail Shrier and Maria Keffler–who’ve reskinned old gay conversion therapy manuals into guides for “de-transing” your child. These guides dehumanise trans kids as being brainwashed by the “gender industry”, requiring parents to isolate them from their friends, family, and the internet until they repress. Not only are these people enriching themselves at the expense of trans people, they’re draping bigotry in a gossamer covering of feminism, generating anti-trans laws bearing progressive-seeming names. For instance: the Mississippi “Women’s Bill of Rights’’ is essentially a TERF manifesto that invokes the seperate-but-equal doctrine for women.

Sound culty enough yet? This flows

What-about-the-children-ism is an evergreen trope in the conservative arsenal. It dates back to Jim Crow, when segregationists would argue that white

schoolgirls were under attack physically and psychologically from the integration of Black students. Now we’re seeing the pathologizing of trans kids and teens: saying they’re confused, or they’re enforcing “authoritarian tolerance”, or they’re being experimented on by doctors, and therefore should be barred from accessing transanything…whether they want to or not. Because…what-about-the-children?! These contradictions serve the needs of those in power: that is, the many Republican candidates for the 2024 Presidential elections who are staking their campaigns on culture war bullshit.

Worse still, is Americans aren’t liberalising over time on trans issues the same way they have on same-sex marriage–they’re actually becoming more intolerant. About four-in-ten American adults (38%) say that greater acceptance of trans people is good for society, while 32% say it is bad, including 54% of Republicans and

Republican leaners. The effect has been devastating for the LGBT community. You might remember how, in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, conspiracy theorists built a lie that the 18-year-old cis gunman was a trans woman by falsely conflating him with random trans women of colour. Tens of thousands of people were exposed to these lies, and the story eventually reached Congressman Paul Gosar who claimed that the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”

Manufacturing trans panic comes with a human cost. Fifty seven trans and gender non-conforming Americans were fatally shot or killed by other violent means in 2021, making it the deadliest year on record for trans hate crimes. And judging by recent trends, the far-right’s capacity for street violence will only escalate, of which black, brown, and Indigneous trans people are the most impacted.

Let me be clear–the current legislative push in the U.S aims to permanently confine trans people to their homes. For instance, let’s look at Tennessee’s House Bill 1182 (SB 1224). SB 1224 forces businesses and schools to post “trigger warnings’’ on their doors if they allow trans people to use bathrooms or locker rooms that match their gender. You know, like all buildings in a civilised country should. But under the bathroom measure, cisgender people can sue for “psychological, emotional, and physical harm suffered” if they so much as see a trans person on the premises. This is so ridiculously vague that it appears to litigate everything and nothing, but what it really does is coerce trans people away from existing in public–otherwise suehappy Republicans will plunge businesses and schools into financial ruin through civil suits. Forcing trans people out of the formal labour market has the added effect of making medical transition prohibitively expensive and disenfranchising those who would otherwise fight back.

Legal discrimination, like SB 1224, makes

it so that the social “punishment” for being trans extends and stretches from the original victim and their loved ones, to all trans people, who are forced to relive their past trumaas and cope with the resulting wave of extrajudicial punishment that rains down from all sides. The long-game, then, is to make trans people detransition via lack of healthcare, to make them become lifelong closet cases for fear of being harmed, or–ideally–to make them not exist at all through religious education. If the push succeeds, the U.S. wll have effectively declared itself fully cisgender for the first time.

Sadly anti-trans rhetoric has migrated to Australia, as at the beginning of this year we were inundated with bathroom and sports bills. We must push back hard against the Coalition and News Corps’ willingness to engage in culture war bullshit before it escalates. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt: anti-trans statements are so newsmaking, they only work to the advantage of conservatives who will happily strip away rights from other groups given the opportunity. But if the last century of U.S. history can service any kind of precedent, it’s that the GOP will lose this fight eventually, and you can help out by donating to the Australian trans rights charity linked below. Stay safe out there.

QR code for Transcend Australia: //transcend.org.au/about/

A river flows on and on.

And some way North another too. Shaped by the lands through which They meander.

Picking up and putting down, Some drifting wood held onto Dearly, others gently left

To feed another cycle.

Some day along their ways, Suddenly there’s not two but one.

And though the one is born of two, who can say how it should flow?

No matter how much space they’ve crossed, They’ve never really been here now.

No matter how much space one crosses, Always the source beckons them back.

But if the one would dare to dream, Whether mighty river or gentle stream, One day I know, that one will gleam

Beneath open sky, lone river no more.

Words by Ashley Jayasuria (she/they/he)

a better place.a better place. a better place.

BRILLIANT TRANS AND QUEER CONTENT CREATORS TO CHECK OUT!

YOUTUBERS

Caelan Conrad

CJ The X

James Somerton

Katy Montgomerie

Khadija Mbowe

Ladyknightthebrave

Mia Mulder

Hbomberguy

Kat Blaque

Philosophy Tube

Ro Ramdin

Zoe Baker

Verilybitchie

Jessica Kellgren-Fozard

POETS

Lesbia Harford

Audre Lorde

AUTHORS/BOOKS

Transgender Marxism

Julia Serano

Martha Nussbaum

Arundhati Roy

Jack or Judith Halberstam

Cheryl Ware

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

E T P A I D T O C H E C K

I N

I L L !