Honi Soit is produced, published and distributed on the stolen land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded. For over 235 years, First Nations peoples in so-called ‘Australia’ have continued to suffer under the destructive effects of invasion, genocide, and colonisation. As editors of this paper, we acknowledge that we are each living, writing, and working on stolen Gadigal, Wangal and Bidjigal land, and are beneficiaries of ongoing colonial dispossession.
is an inherently colonial institution which is not only physically built on stolen land, but also ideologically upholds a devaluing of Indigenous systems of knowledge and systematically excludes First Nations peoples. We recognise our complicity in such systems. We strive to remain conscious of, and actively resist and unlearn, colonial ideologies and biases, both our own and those perpetuated by the University and other institutions like it.
Jamie Bridge
Claudia Blane
Juneau Choo
Anastasia Dale
Angus McGregor
Hannah Nicholas
Wendy Thompson
Rohan Baker-Wade
Maddy Barry
Claudia Blane
Jamie Bridge
Jesse Carpenter
Juneau Choo
Anastasia Dale
Tim Duff
Kayla Hill
Demyun Newynn
Wendy Thompson
USyd Queer Action Collective Students Against War
Anastasia Dale
Demyun Newynn
Claudia Blane
Jo Staas
Wendy Thompson
Email: editors@honisoit.com
Instagram: @honi_soit Facebook: Honi Soit
Postal Address: Students’ Representative Council, University of Sydney Level 1 Wentworth Building (G01) University of Sydney, NSW 2006
Sign up to write and create: linktr.ee/honisoit
Website: honisoit.com
Last year, Christian fundamentalist bigots found our queer edition of Honi Soit, titled Fagi Soit, so revolting that they stole hundreds of copies from stands and threw them into bins before most readers could get their hands on them. Many people were understandably shocked when this occurred, but while anti-queer censorship is fucked up, it isn’t new.
Just this year, bigots in Cumberland Council, including Labor members, found a children’s book on rainbow families so revolting that they voted to ban the book from council libraries.
Councils in Victoria caved to neo-Nazis and cancelled dozens of drag storytime events last year, citing safety concerns but failing to actually protect the queer performers.
Our ability to openly express ourselves as queer people is far from a guarantee. It’s the result of endless strikes, pickets, and protests by countless queer activists.
Every single time bigots try to censor us and justify it by vilifying us as too revolting to be in public, we have collectively done just that: revolted.
When Cumberland council censored queer books, we revolted, rallying to get the ban overturned (and we succeeded). Queer activists revolted against censorship of our art by bringing and passing motions of support for drag storytimes to local governments in NSW and organising our own events in response. While the fight continues at some local councils, NSW now supports drag storytime on a state-wide basis. When bigots threw Fagi Soit into bins around campus, we revolted by rallying and getting it reprinted.
In celebration of this continuous resistance against bigotry, Fagi Soit 2024’s theme is Revolting. That’s both the way bigots slander us as revolting, perverted, and immoral, and the way we revolt against bigotry, against oppression, and against capitalism. So, dear reader, hold your nose and grab your molotov cocktail, and enjoy the return of the newspaper that was simply too fabulous for the far-right.
Lastly, remember that the struggle carries on. The new Campus Access Policy (CAP) is an existential threat to queer activism at USYD. Activiswm is the most effective way for us to continuously resist anti-queer censorship, so this hateful attack on free-speech must be overturned. Make sure to join us at upcoming rallies for queer-specific issues and other student organising alike to call for an end to the CAP and to revolt for sex workers’ rights, refugee justice, queer liberation, and a free Palestine!
As a student newspaper, we pledge to stand in solidarity with both First Nations movements and all Indigenous struggles toward decolonisation worldwide, endeavouring to platform Indigenous voices. Honi is committed to countering the exclusion, censoring, and silencing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in mainstream media.
Always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
Historic Student General Meeting calls for a Free Palestine
The Equality Bill
Speaking out Against Anti-Sex Work Politics in Women’s Honi TERFs are Fake Feminists Fruit Flies
An oversimplification of science
No USyd orange on our pride flags! Growing Up Queer in Western Sydney Response to the SGM
Queer
Yours,
the USyd Queer Action Collective
Identity Politics
An Apolitical Uni is a Dead Uni Are you talking to me?
The impact of the housing crisis on queer social life and campus culture
An Investigation into the History of Monogamy Pink is the bloodiest colour
Parking Was A Nightmare
Holding the Man Upcoming: Joan Marie OB reports
ISSN: 2207-5593. This edition was published on Wednesday 14 August 2024. Disclaimer: Honi Soit is published by the Students’ Representative Council, University of Sydney, Level 1 Wentworth Building, City Road, University of Sydney NSW 2006. The SRC’s operation costs, space and administrative support are financed by the University of Sydney. Honi Soit is printed under the auspices of the SRC’s Directors of Student Publications (DSP): Dustin Dao, Jasmine Donnelly, Lia Perkins, Tiger Perkins, Victor Zhang, Lucinda Zheng. All expressions are published on the basis that they are not to be regarded as the opinions of the SRC unless specifically stated. The Council accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of any of the opinions or information contained within this newspaper, nor does it endorse any of the advertisements and insertions.
Claudia Blane
Letter regarding the Philosophy’s Department decision to invite transphobic speaker
Dear Dr. Ryan Cox,
We write to you, the organiser of this semester’s philosophy seminar series, to request that you rescind your invitation to well-known anti-trans activist Holly Lawford-Smith, who is currently scheduled to present on the 14th of August, 2024.
We make this request to you in multiple capacities: as alumni of the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney; as women with formal qualifications, teaching experience and
expertise in feminist philosophy; and as women with political experience in feminist organising.
Allow us to state first that we all have fond memories of the USyd Philosophy Department, each of us gaining higherdegrees in feminist philosophy. We remember the department as a space where knowledge and its pursuit were rightly understood as historically situated and, equally, as a space where the dangers of failing to recognise this fact were taken seriously.
It is because of our attachment to the
department, as well as the knowledge we gained during our time studying and teaching there, that we feel we must write to you now.
We believe that alongside irrevocably tarnishing the department’s reputation, hosting Lawford-Smith would be a violation of the philosophy department’s most fundamental function: the provision of ethical education.
Lawford-Smith’s contribution to public discourse – whether on twitter/X, in her book, Gender Critical Feminism (2022), or on her website – demonstrates
her contempt for, and commitment to disrespecting, trans women. It also demonstrates the unseriousness with which she treats her association with the far-right. Here are but a few examples:
1. Lawford-Smith has an entire website – https://www. noconflicttheysaid.org/ – designed to cultivate fear about allowing trans women into women’s spaces
2. Lawford-Smith retweets a post from Avraham Shalom Yemini, an Australian-Israeli far-right political activist
Wendy Thompson ruminates.
LOVE LETTER
Dear Raygunn,
The first time I saw you do the kangaroo on a linoleum floor in front of millions of onlookers, I fell hopelessly in love.
The way that you move - the way you jerk, that is - has me truly bewitched.
I’m in the process of transferring to Macquarie University just so I can attend one of your infamous break dancing seminars.
I just can’t help but imagine us headspinning down the aisle to Tones and I or something.
Yours eternally, Anonymous.
3. Lawford-Smith mocks the fact that legislation designed to protect LGBTIQA+ people fails to pass in Victoria
4. Lawford-Smith implies that trans women only exist due to disorder or trauma
5. Lawford-Smith misgenders trans women as ‘trans-identified men’
6. Lawford-Smith dismisses misgendering as ‘accurately referring to sex’
We have chosen, in this short letter, not to waste time systematically debunking the arguments Lawford-Smith makes in her book; there are decades of feminist scholarship that can be consulted for that purpose. We have also purposefully avoided getting bogged down in a debate in which thin invocations of ‘free speech’ can be made, for we see, as feminist philosophy has taught us to see, that in a situation such as this one, invocations of this type are but rhetorical moves designed to distract from the real stakes, the real politics, of the speech in question. What does LawfordSmith’s speech do? It legitimises hatred against trans people and women: trans women, most acutely. It should not be welcomed at a university.
Lawford-Smith’s anti-trans activism, as we hope you agree, is not something a philosophy department should associate itself with.
It would always be inappropriate for a university philosophy department to host an anti-trans activist like Lawford-Smith. But to do so at this historical juncture, in which even a cursory glance around the globe makes clear that there is a coordinated right-wing, anti-woman and anti-trans attempt to define ‘woman’ reproductively, is to cross a line into complicity.
With genuine hope, we thus ask: will you rescind your invitation to Holly Lawford-Smith to present in the philosophy department’s seminar series on the 14th of August, 2024?
Given the seriousness of the matter, we look forward to a prompt response from you.
Your sincerely, Finola Laughren, Anna Hush, Wendy Xin and Lilia Anderson
Got something you want to get off your chest? A love letter? A limerick? Something you would tweet back when Twitter was good?
Defining moment: Students vote en masse to cut ties with Israel
On August 7, a Student General Meeting was held at University of Sydney to vote upon two motions.
Students were marshalled into Eastern Avenue Auditorium, with any overflow set to fill Chemistry Lecture Theatre 3. The line for registration stretched out past the Chemistry Building and on to the City Rd footbridge.
One student, Alex, told Honi that they are attending the SGM because it is “important that more people understand USyd’s complicity with what’s going on in Gaza”.
The capacity of the Eastern Avenue auditorium was 500, which was filled relatively quickly, with Honi sending one of their editors to Chemistry Lecture Hall 3 to meet the demand.
The meeting began at 5.35pm, half an hour after the projected start time. SRC Secretary to Council, Julia Robins, urged for everyone to follow the proceedings and Harrison Brennan, SRC President, noting the delay incurred by the massive crowds attending, said that “this [meeting] agenda is completely useless now”.
Brennan delivered the Acknowledgement of Country, recognising that we gather on land that was “violently stolen,” and that “colonial violence is not something of the past.”
Brennan began by explaining how the 2024 Student General Meeting would be conducted, whereby the movers of each motion would be given two minutes to explain the motion, while individual speakers for and against the motion were given 90 seconds. Movers of the motion also retained the right of reply before a final vote.
Jasmine Al-Rawi (SRC Welfare Officer, Students for Palestine), the Deputy Chair of the SGM, spoke to the University’s “proud history of SGMs”, and mentioned the first meeting held in 1971, to oppose the Australian tour of an all-white South African rugby team during South African apartheid.
“The bombs that are dropped are made by weapons companies that have names, and these companies do their research right here at Sydney University,” she said.
Al-Rawi also mentioned the turnout for the University of Queensland’s SGM on May 29. UQ’s SGM saw over one thousand students in attendance, voting for the UQ’s divestment from weapons manufacturers and Israel.
MOTION 1 – DEMAND USYD CUT TIES WITH GENOCIDE
The first motion, demanding that USyd cut ties with the genocide in Gaza, was moved by SRC Education Officers Shovan Bhattarai (SAlt) and Grace Street (Grassroots).
Bhattarai began by leading with a chant of “Free, free Palestine”, which
prompted a cluster of campus Liberals to yell “from Hamas” in response.
Bhattarai went on to explain the grave situation in Gaza: “This genocide has killed 186,000 people, 8% of the population of Gaza. Our government has backed up the arming of the F-35 planes. We have come out in our dozens and in our hundreds to make clear that we refuse to be complicit in this genocide any longer.”
Street then noted, “it is not controversial to say that BDS led to the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, and it is not an exaggeration to say it will lead to the dismantling of apartheid Israel.”
Street went on to explain USyd’s complicity and the rationale of the motion: “our University has very strong ties to Israeli academic institutions, all of which plan, implement and justify Israel’s occupation tactics in Gaza.” Street cited the Memorandum of Understanding with Thales, reiterating that Thales “creates the Watchkeeper drones used to surveil and kill Palestinians in Gaza.”
The first speaker for Motion 1, SRC Vice President Deaglan Godwin (SAlt, Students for Palestine), endorsed the motion, asking “why are the supporters of Israel never forced to condemn the atrocities that Israel commits?’
In the Chemistry Building Hall, a speaker from Students Against War (SAW), Midhat Jafri, spoke to the motion: “The University has ties that will not go unless we challenge them. This university is supposed to be a place of innovation, of civil society…. Not where fees are being used to supplement programs where weapons are being used to bomb children in Gaza.”
The second speaker against the motion, Freya Leach, took to the microphone with an Israeli flag draped around her shoulders. Leach stated that “you cannot support human rights and not condemn a radical jihadist terrorist regime” prompting jeers from the crowd.
Rand (Grassroots), SRC Women’s Officer, then spoke in support of Motion 1. Her speech commenced with an Acknowledgement of Country, “always was, always will be Gadigal land”. Rand stated that the SGM was “a demand for land back, for self-determination, for sovereignty. There are no universities left in Gaza, no schools, no hospitals, no mosques, no churches. There are no gleeful screams of toddlers, running for fun. Only running in fear, running from death.”
The final speaker for Motion 1, Yasmine Johnson (SAlt, Students for Palestine) emphasised their connection with the pro-Palestinian movement as a Jewish person and activist. “As a Jewish student I am so proud to stand with all of you and with Palestine”.
In their right of reply, Bhattarai and Street encouraged the audience to attend future actions, namely the Student strike for Palestine on August
28. The motion was then taken to a vote. Votes were represented by holding up a pink ballot. Motion 1 carried with an overwhelming majority. A small cluster (Honi counted 5) voted against the motion in the Eastern Avenue Auditorium, along with one person in the Chemistry Building Lecture Hall.
MOTION 2 – ONE PALESTINIAN STATE, AFFIRM THE RIGHT TO RESIST
Motion 2 was moved by Jacob Starling and another SAW member. Starling spoke to the motion and stated that the “prospect of ceasefire is nowhere in sight”.
Starling emphasised the University and Australia’s complicity: “Mark Scott knows he is complicit and has introduced the Campus Access Policy to silence us…Leaders like Wong and Albanese use the prospect of the so-called “two state solution” to sanitise their support for Israel.”
The second speaker voiced their support for the motion, stating that “It is important to stress that a twostate solution is not a possibility. Israel never has and never will comply with the two-state solution”. Speaking to the teachings of Edward Said, they emphasised that “it is a fight against colonial dominance.”
A procedural was moved to take an immediate vote. Motion 2 was put to a vote and carried again by majority.
A large contingent of students filed out to Eastern Avenue and marched towards the F23 Michael Spence Building, the location of Vice Chancellor Mark Scott’s office, while chanting: “divest, divest your many many billions. Your profits are covered in the blood of Palestinians”.
“Sydney University we know what side you’re on, remember South Africa, remember Vietnam” rang out across Eastern Avenue as the crowd gathered outside F23.
The proceedings concluded with notice of an upcoming protest for USyd to cut ties with Israel, to be held on Wednesday August 21.
SRC President Harrison Brennan told Honi that this SGM “has set the tone and the agenda of the SRC for the rest of 2024, and into 2025,” especially as the SRC continues “the campaign calling for divestment.” He emphasised “it’s crucial that we build on the momentum […] to build a bigger and better campaign for Palestine.”
Jamie Bridge reports.
The NSW Labor government has once again delayed voting on the Equality Bill, with the proposed law now scheduled to be heard in October.
First introduced by independent MP for Sydney and former chair of Equality Australia Alex Greenwich in August 2023, the Equality Bill includes a sweeping list of reforms for queer people and sex workers in New South Wales. This includes gender self-ID on birth certificates, further decriminalisation of sex work, surrogacy reform, anti-discrimination protections for sex workers, and the removal of religious exemptions to anti-discrimination protections.
The government has delayed voting on the bill numerous times, including referring it to a parliamentary inquiry. No findings were made other than that the bill should go to debate - a finding Labor did not accept by once again delaying the bill.
In a statement to Queer Honi, USYD Queer Action Collective member Juneau Choo said that, “Shamefully, Labor has denied our equality not just once or twice, but many, many times. For more than 300 days, Labor has conspired to murder the Equality Bill, and they would have committed the murder during Mardi Gras, ironically, if not for one inconvenient truth: their cops were caught murdering our gays.
“Because of the unfortunate timing, Labor had to postpone the killing of our rights to stop what would have been the death of Rainbow Labor, just so that the bastards could march with the police at our pride.”
A member of Pride in Protest stated, “This is just cowardice, spineless and gross. Labor pretends to have our back, but behind closed doors they cower in fear to even delivering the slightest progress in giving queer people the basic rights we deserve. It’s creepy to think that they feel they can march in Mardi Gras after this. Gutless, spineless photo-op obsessed morons.
“It’s time to cut off this weirdass dynamic. If you can’t even stoop to the basics whilst we ask not to be evicted into the streets and from our workplaces, why even pretend? It shouldn’t be this hard.”
In a now-deleted statement on X (formerly Twitter), Greenwich stated “I’m deeply disappointed that there is a further delay to these straight forward reforms that provide LGBTIQA+ people with dignity, safety, and identity. Debate will now occur in September or October, and while I will continue to work with colleagues to address any concerns, equality delayed is still equality denied.”
Pink is the bloodiest colour
Pinkwashing. This compound word finds its roots in “whitewash.” The adjective “pink” is associated with the pink triangle and the rainbow flag, while the verb “washing” signifies the cover-up of unpleasant or revolting facts about an organisation, brand, or settler-state, sweeping inconvenient truths under the pride flag rug, rainbow lanyards, and carabiners in the hope that they will be forgotten by the queer community.
Pinkwashing is when major corporations “wash” their building surfaces with the kiss marks of “pink” lipstick and lip gloss, glossing over their unfair labour practices and employment discrimination against lesbians, gays, and queers in flannels or denim jackets. Pinkwashing is when colonial settler-states “wash” their stolen land with the hot “pink” of rainbow crossings on Davie Street or Oxford Street, covering up their record of criminal behaviour and transgender genocide against TwoSpirit, Sistergirl, and Brotherboy communities in occupied Coast Salish territories or sovereign Gadigal country.
QUEERS, QUEERS, QUEERS, FOR GAZA, GLOBALISE THE INTIFADA: Origin
Pinkwashing. The term originated in 2010 with Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!), a queer collective on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land in what’s now called San Francisco Bay Area. It was popularised by Palestinian-American journalist and editor of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, who in 2013 gave a lecture titled “Pinkwash, Greenwash, Hogwash: How Israel uses sex and marketing to distract from apartheid.”
Pinkwashing is when the Zionist regime whitewashes its racially segregated road network in the West Bank, blockade of the Gaza Strip, ethnic cleansing of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem, and Al-Aqsa killings in the Old City with a rainbow flag with the cynical words, “In The Name of Love.” Pinkwashing is when the Zionist entity whitewashes the 1948 Lydda Death March, the 1953 Qibya massacre, the 1967 Ras Sedr massacre, the 1976 Tel al-Zaatar massacre, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila genocide, the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, and the 2006 Qana airstrike with the pride flags of WorldPride Jerusalem 2006, and the contemptuous words, “Love Without Border.”
SAY IT LOUD, SAY IT CLEAR, REFUGEES ARE WELCOME HERE: Qantas
A corporate sponsor, Qantas is welcomed by the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras to our pride festival.
In 2017, Qantas displayed its Mardi Gras sponsorship on one of its airliners, painting it in rainbow colours. At the same time, as it was “washing” an aircraft with “pink” stripes, Qantas was and still is deporting asylum seekers on the same aircrafts. Paul Keating’s Labor government may have sold off the national airline in 1992, but Qantas is still the state airline because the Australian government uses its pilots, crew, and airline personnel to do its dirty labour.
Revoltingly, this dirty work supports 76 years of Tamil oppression in Sri Lanka. Allied to Sri Lanka’s state security forces, the Australian government gave drones to Sri Lankan military personnel to perpetuate the Tamil genocide. These aerial surveillance drones were previously used for Operation Sovereign Borders, in which Australia pushes migrant vessels back to Indonesia or tortures refugees in offshore detention centres. Currently, they are used to help prevent Eelam Tamils from fleeing Sri Lanka.
Shamefully, Qantas helps prevent Eelam Tamils from fleeing Sri Lanka, too, collaborating with the Australian government to deport Tamil families from safety, despite their risks of torture. Australia is a regime of anti-refugee torture that helps Sri Lankan forces perpetrate the Tamil genocide, sponsored by Qantas.
Former CEO of Qantas Alan Joyce may be personally gay with sex workers on Grindr, but he is not politically queer because his airline advocates the oppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka. The flag carrier of Australia may carry the rainbow flag, but it also carries the Australian flag because Qantas supports genocide from Gadigal land and Naarm to Mullivaikkal, Sri Lanka.
BOTTOMS AND TOPS, WE ALL HATE COPS: NSW Police Force
To police the Sydney Mardi Gras, the NSW Police forces themselves into our proud protest.
In February, the NSW Police was permitted to march in plainclothes in Mardi Gras, removing their uniform from the parade. At the same time, as they were “washing” the thin blue line with “rainbow” flags, NSW Police officers were and still are committed to brutalising Indigenous communities and perpetuating Aboriginal deaths in custody. The NSW Police is a colonial army because the Australian government uses its firearms, vehicles, and horses to commit the genocide of Indigenous peoples.
An example of this settler genocide is the murder of Aboriginal trans woman Veronica Baxter. In 2009, the NSW Police abducted Veronica from her home in Redfern, detained her in an all-male
maximum security prison, denied her contact with family and access to health care, and let her die. Three days after they had policed our pride, Veronica was forcibly disappeared by the NSW Police, and murdered five days after the pig cops had used sniffer dogs to perpetrate the War on Drugs in Mardi Gras, arresting comparable numbers to the first protest in 1978.
The first pride was a revolt, an intifada in which 78ers rose up, rebelling against police violence and enforcement of anti-homosexuality laws. Continuing police attacks on gays, women and Black people, the NSW Police still bands together with the Australian government to torture and kill Indigenous peoples by incarceration, many years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Partners in crime with the illegitimate occupation, the NSW Police may have a gay officer with a gun aimed at Sydney couple Jesse Baird and Luke Davies, but all cops are queerphobic killers because no bastard will wash their service weapon of the blood of LGBTQ+ and Indigenous communities.
ONE, TWO, THREE, FUCK THE ALP: Australian Labor Party
Party crashing our celebration of queer history, the Australian Labor Party invites itself to Mardi Gras.
The “good cops” to their “bad cops” such as Labor MP Greg Donnelly, Labor marched in plainclothes in Mardi Gras like their police, stupid white bastard Chris Minns opting to wear jeans and a shirt over hot pink shorts. At the same time as they were draining Palestinians of blood, and “washing” their red shirts with “Rainbow” Labor, the Labor Party applied nail polish on one hand and got the other hand dirty delaying the Equality Bill.
It may name itself the Labor Party, but it wages class war against workers because it denies the equality of sex workers and trans people. An injury to one is an injury to all, and Labor hurts the working class because it harms sex workers whose labour is not protected from discrimination in areas of social life such as housing and banking
under the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977. The Labor Party harms trans workers, too, who are forced by law to pay surgery costs out of their own pockets to amend their identity documents, which condemns them to queerphobic prejudice in employment and education.
The Australian Labor Party may have a gay Foreign Minister in a department of homophobic affairs, “Australia’s Worst Lesbian” who voted against same-sex marriage and is killing lesbians in Gaza, but it is a hate crime perpetrator because Labor perpetuates transphobic violence against workers with red umbrellas and transgender flags.
Pink Washing, White Supremacy
Pinkwashing is when the NSW Police GLLOs (Gay and Lesbian or LGBTQ+ Liaison Officers) police our proud protest, having murdered Indigenous women in custody and violently brutalised 78ers in the Darlinghurst Police Station, what’s now called Qtopia. Pinkwashing is when Qantas washes its aircraft in rainbow paint, having forcibly deported asylum seekers back to torture. Pinkwashing is when the Australian Labor Party dampens the fun of our queer celebrations, having held our equal rights hostage and refused to pass our Equality Bill in full.
Pinkwashing. The adjective “pink” ought to be associated with the pink mist from Zionist snipers shooting Palestinians in the 2018–2019 Great March of Return, while the verb “washing” signifies the ethnic cleansing campaigned for by White Australia, which attempts to create a White ethnostate devoid of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Eelam Tamil refugees, and Asian migrant sex workers. Pinkwashing is a homosexual white nationalism, when we are assimilated into the racial capitalism of corporations, and integrated with the imperialism of the settler-state. It is people of colourexclusionary gay radicalism, when we take in the colonisers to appropriate our rainbow flag, and the Nazis to rereclaim our pink triangle.
Juneau Choo airs the dirty laundry.
Speaking Out Against Anti-Sex Work
Politics in Women’s Honi
This article has been written to address the whorephobic and transphobic narratives put forth by the article “Postfeminism is a plague” published in the 2024 Autonomous Women’s edition of Honi Soit.
The marginalisation of sex workers’ politics and queer politics from the feminist movement™ is deeply rooted in transphobia and racism. This is why we believe that this article warrants a published response.
As a grassroots feminist student collective with an autonomous Honi edition,we understand the value of having contributors from outside organising spaces, and that it is the responsibility of the editors to review submissions. This is why we recognise this not to be an individual contributor’s poor critique but an editorial mistake by a collective whose members have organised with us, stood next to us on picket lines, and marched alongside us in support of sex workers’ rights.
We believe that this appalling editorial decision of having the only article written about sex workers in Women’s Honi 2024 to be bigoted and disappointingly shallow. This is because the editors greenlit a piece that focuses on the culture war debate around sex work but not the work or the worker. This is an act of passing the torch from one bigoted SWERF to another, playing into anti-sex work, Catholic, puritanical narratives.
SWERF, a word created after and in the same vein as TERF, stands for Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. There is nothing truly radical about this type of “feminism,” but many people purporting to be feminists, both intentionally or otherwise, leave sex workers and their work out of their discourse and activism.
In the following paragraphs, we will respond to the harmful sentiment that was propagated in the article.
RED LIGHT 1: TERF Talking Points
Upon reading the article, the most apparent and horrific observation is how disturbingly similar the anti-sex work talking points are to TERF talking points. For every single SWERF point brought up, the argument is made in almost the same shape as the nasty transphobic hate we have to endure every day and night.
This is how bigoted separatist feminism works: it introduces purity into womanhood. It pretends to seek nuance, while promoting hate. It seeks to “save” the very demographic that it vilifies.
RED LIGHT 2: Imaginary Sex Workers
An image of a woman in porn can be seen to stand in for ‘all women’, whereas an actual woman performing in porn is understood as essentially other. -
Melissa Gira Grant
One of the biggest problems with the discourse around sex work is the inability and unwillingness to see sex workers as workers. This sentiment is true for the anti-sex work piece in Women’s Honi.
It is revolting to read an article disguised in anti-capitalist rhetoric that
and punch down into the most silenced and sidelined corner, sex workers.
RED LIGHT 3:
Saviourism is Carceralism
The reality that the women’s movement™ and the world do not see sex workers as workers has dangerous consequences.
To us, the relationship between sex workers and their bosses is that between worker and boss. To SWERFs, however, it is seen as the relations between rape victims and rapists, and under this framework is born the Rescue Industry, consisting of SWERF NGOs, the Australian Border Force, the Federal Police, and the NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner. These organisations seek over-policing and deportation as a response to what they see as a moral problem.
“The ‘rescue industry’ seek to use our experiences to campaign against sex work, earning legitimacy by using our stories and competing for funding…” - Asian Migrant Sex Workers’ Advisory Group
by the USYD Queer Action Collective
A comparison: SWERFS vs. TERFS.
is devoid of class analysis. Wilfully or not, this publication ignores the humanity, the conditions, the challenges, and the difficulties that sex workers experience.
Sex work is work, sex workers are workers, and sex workers work because they need to buy groceries and pay rent.
“Unaware young women” are not “duped into starting an OnlyFans” by post-feminists or the girl boss media as this infantilising article suggests. We do so because it is our job, sometimes our OnlyJob.
This is especially relevant to us as queer people, since on this continent and all over the world, trans people often engage in sex work because they are
NGOs like Project Respect and the churches campaign against the existence of women in brothels and massage parlours. These bigots send people into establishments posed as clients and “pray” the worker out once there is a booking or call the police on them.
Anti-sex work legislation like Trump’s [Fosta - Sesta], posed as attempts to rescue sex workers, do significant harm via financial discrimination to sex workers across the world.
In the most recent debate around the Equality Bill, a piece of legislation that would introduce a wide variety of reforms necessary for queer people, including adding provisions for sex work to the Anti-Discrimination Act, the Christian right was seen handing out bigoted flyers encouraging people to call for the bill to be voted down.
As we write this article, the Australian Border Force has detained more than 128 Asian migrants who are suspected of being sex workers, regardless of their actual employment. Most are young
locked out of traditional employment.
Sex work is estrogen and testosterone, it is healthcare and education, and it is food and housing.
This is why we understand there to be an inherent link between the devaluation of sex work and the denial of trans healthcare and housing. The detachment from these economic conditions is why SWERFism and TERFism exist. They are born from people who theorise about - but do not experience and cannot connect to - the struggles they claim to care deeply about.
In an attempt to contribute to a mostly academic debate around postfeminism, the writer was enabled by the editors to pick up their boxing gloves
To this day, the Australian Border Force continues to raid brothels in pursuit of migrant workers to deport. This anti-immigration campaign is all done in the name of saving migrant sex workers from trafficking and modern slavery.
Operation Inglenook is the name of this sadistic campaign. Racist initiatives like this have seen migrant brothel workers jump from windows several stories up in efforts to escape the Border Force. This violence is justified by infantilising, saviourist narratives that refuse to recognise sex workers as workers and ultimately work to undermine women’s autonomy by calling into question their ability to make informed decisions.
Discussions about the precarity of sex workers’ conditions must be centred on the struggles that workers face in the workplace, not the supposed illegitimacy of the work itself.
Paving a Path Forward
Moving forward, we want to push back against the belief that there hasn’t been any nuanced debate about sex work. As organisers in the movement, we engage with this discourse on an extremely regular basis. The assumption that sex workers - who are raided by police, deported, refused entry into the country, evicted, fired, murdered, sexually assaulted at work, and denied employment - do not have ongoing liberatory discussions is paternalistic sexism. This claim delegitimizes the decades of organising led by women, trans people, and migrants across the world, falling in line with the misogynistic tendency to devalue women’s work.
In 2023, the biggest women’s contingent to May Day in Sydney was the Working Girls Contingent, with workers coming out from bedrooms, brothels, strip clubs, massage parlours, hotels, and the streets. Sex worker activists stood in opposition to the devaluation of women’s work and fought for decriminalisation as well as better working conditions - for a union.
The contingent chanted bravely: “Listen up we’re talking to you, we deserve a union too!”
We believe that critiques of body positivity have a place in our movement, but a response to body positivity cannot be body negativity and purity, a political framework that moralises and paternalises us: queers and sex workers.
We oppose ideas of body positivity and body negativity because we refuse to be understood as just bodies. We are not saviours and we are not victims. We are workers fighting for our collective liberation.
Sex workers and trans women are not the feminine divine that exist to recruit people into our class position. At the same time, we are not recruited by some TikTok into doing sex work or transitioning.
We are workers, and that means that the focus of activist discourse should be on our industrial struggles, like nurses, midwives, cleaners, models, early childhood educators, dancers, or hairdressers. It should be on better pay and better working conditions.
TERFs Are Fake Feminists
Esther Whitehead fights back.
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won the Olympic gold medal for her weight category in women’s boxing, rather than being able to celebrate, the cisgender athlete found her gender interrogated by every commentator with a captive audience. The immediate jump to the questioning of Khelif’s gender is disgusting, transphobic rhetoric. The supposed feminists questioning her ability to compete are in fact calling to bar anyone outside of gender norms from participating in sport, or in any form of public life.
TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
A TERF’s feminism is nothing more than a convenient disguise. You will never hear a TERF talk about any actual issues impacting women. TERFs remain silent on matters of reproductive health and domestic violence while tweeting themselves into a frenzy around a trans person existing in public life, like in the case of Imane Khelif. These accusations are predominantly levelled against women of colour.
Transphobia and racism are tied together. Gender is a socially constructed system, where men engage in wage labour and women perform unpaid domestic labour. This system is critical to the maintenance of capitalism. Colonialism violently exported these gendered systems, and colonial relations remain today to enforce capitalism. In addition, categorisation of race was created to justify the atrocity of chattel slavery. The ideas that TERFs perpetuate are reminiscent of phrenology, the pseudoscientific belief that the size and shape of one’s head can predict their intellect and even personal character. It is a resurgence in now defunct, disproven ideas. Ideas about trans people, race, and feminism.
TERFs have no real feminism.
In sport, for example, TERFs will never be seen talking about how men had more Olympic medals to compete for. You will never hear a TERF discuss the crisis of domestic violence, abortion, or even the gender pay gap, which impacts the autonomy of most women every day. They are fixated on culture wars and controversy.
The logic of protecting bodily autonomy that many used to defend abortion should extend to transgender healthcare as well. TERFs want to restrict autonomy, ignoring women’s issues and banning trans healthcare. Every couple of years, TERFs come out of the woodwork to express their concern about women’s spaces and how we must protect them. What are these women’s spaces? Nothing more than binary bathrooms are ever talked about. TERFs also go completely crazy around inclusive language that they perceive as erasing cis women: for example, saying ‘people who breastfeed’ rather than ‘mothers’ in medical settings where patients’ genders are unspecified.
The USyd Queer Action Collective continues the proud tradition of campaigning around sex workers’ rights.
At the moment, we are campaigning on the Equality Bill, a piece of legislation that will put sex work on the AntiDiscrimination Act and end religious discriminations against the Queer Community.
To answer the question posed in the initial article:
How do we ensure young girls are shielded from this? What’s a good counternarrative to put out there? How do we make it palatable and shareable (an unfortunate necessity in the digital age) enough to become widespread and combat the disease of choice feminism?
We say: The things that women need to fight back against is the devaluation of our work and our lives. We organise our workplaces and campaign against housing discrimination, financial discrimination, and racist migration policies.
The counter narrative is that women deserve equal pay, deserve financial independence, and deserve to not be detained, incarcerated, and brutalised for wanting to live. What we need is better material conditions and for an ongoing campaign against the sexist and racist institutions that seek to remove us from womanhood and from our work, such as the rapist--filled USyd Colleges, the Catholic Church, and the police force.
No bad whores, just bad laws!
The prominence of these ideas has been spread by high-profile freaks such as Posie Parker and the now infamous J. K. Rowling. Of course, some are from this settler colony, such as Katherine Deves, who was kicked out of the transphobic Liberal Party for being too transphobic. These TERFs simply hold no interest in feminism or womens’ rights; their whole goal is to attempt to make transphobia more appealing by pretending they are feminists.
Unfortunately, this is a tactic that works.
People in power fall for the TERFs. They are asked to give panels in Parliament or speak at Universities. Court cases debate if discrimination against trans women fits within the ‘legal’ definition of discrimination. The University of Sydney invited Holly Lawford-Smith, a hateful bigot most known for making a website to deadname trans women, to give a speech on feminism this week. Many women fall victim to believing TERFs concerns about women’s rights and give platforms to these hoaxes.
Academia is an important battleground for TERFs because if their research is published then it will act as a justification for enacting transphobic policies. Despite the research being poorly conducted, with methodologies that involved violating patient confidentiality. In addition, the organisers of the report are also known transphobes. Lawford Smith has used the fact that a prominent University, Oxford, published her book to normalise her views.
The Cass review undertaken by the UK government is currently being used as proof
to fearmonger about trans children, including prompting and supporting bans on puberty blockers, despite the fact that gender-affirming care improves patient mental health at a greater rate than any other known treatment. Gender-affirming surgeries have a regret rate similar to that of heart transplants, yet these findings are being exported to other nations and used as a credible source to deny trans people healthcare, deeming it risky on often arbitrary metrics.
TERFs are not feminists — they are anything but. They have nothing on the topic of women’s rights to discuss except for their unfounded hatred of trans people.
They attack cisgender women in their frenzied paranoia, such as Imane Khelif. It is predominantly women of colour that they attack with these baseless claims. It is an insult to feminism to allow TERFs to call themselves feminists when they are fundamentally against women’s rights.
Real feminists stand with women.
Fruit Flies
Juneau Choo finds herself transformed into a maggot.
In a roaring flood from the prison wall of Egypt to the minarets of al-Aqsa, the movement orchestrates the break-out between the river and the sea, from the water to the water, in which a part of the Apartheid Wall was pulled down by Palestinians in the West Bank, and in which the resistance was a mere six miles, depth of the ocean, from bisecting the temporary entity.
And the answer is that the latter becomes the former, breaking down the corpse of Stern and gang.
Larvae of martyrs liquefy the yellow spots of necrotic retinae in the butchers of Beirut, decomposing eyes looking like the olives whose trees the settlers set fire to, and feed on the wormy innards of a gutless, invertebrate BenGurion.
And inside the Watergate Hotel, where the Watergate break-in at the DNC headquarters was orchestrated, and where some of the Zionist delegation stationed themselves outside the gates of Eden, a revolt of anti-genocide activists released the eleventh plague of Egypt: maggots to let the Canaanites go.
In Roman religion, spirits of the departed become Lares, “tutelary gods,” great guardians if they are good, else they become Lemures or Larvae, “wicked spectres.”
And in gay science, souls of the dead become Larvae when they are bad, become insect larvae when the sodomites are sinful, and grubs when buggers bug the bigots.
And maggots of Larvae devour the flyblown entrails of Balfour, feast on the festering viscera of Attlee and Churchill, treat the wounds of Gaza, and stimulate growth.
Shades of the restless dissolve the British colonial penal code, disintegrate homophobic laws from the whited sepulchre, anti-buggery acts from the perfidious Albion, Sykes-Picot country, a crime against nature on the White Cliffs of Dover.
Ghosts of revolting prostitutes transform,mutate,metamorphose into worms when they misbehave, act bad, whore it up, UP THE WHORES!
And phantoms of street transvestites transfigure, become “abnormal,” and transmogrify into maggots when they cross-dress, transgress, ACT UP.
Vengeful ancestors, revenge of the wretched of the earth, set free the trigger sound of homophobes: the laughter of our larval children.
And terrible fury, anger of the convicts of hunger, is let go from tense muscles, turned loose on the usurper’s decaying flesh.
And apparitions of our dead melt sodomy laws from overseas, Metropolitan England covering with golf course sod Gadigal country, unceded occupied territory turned to Moore Park, TERF Island turf of settlers killing in the name of terra nullius, “a land without a people.”
The mouldy body politic of a dying colonialism, the putrid organs of end-stage imperialism, is eaten by the maggots of fruit flies.
And an Emergency of mak nyah, Malay “trans women,” consume the rotten offal of the late British Empire, spoiled carcass of the charter ethno-class.
A peer-reviewed journal article asks the question, “What do two men kissing and a bucket of maggots have in common?”
And the answer is that they rhyme: a bucket of maggots, and a couple of faggots.
And this girlfag asks the question, What else do a bucket of maggots and a revolt of faggots have in common?
Larvae vomit a witch’s brew of digestive enzymes to absorb the misfolded proteins, “prions,” an anagram of “prison,” brain disease of the cannibalistic daemons, giants that assimilate empires, republics from Gallipoli to Southern Africa.
And larvae accelerate the downfall of the Occident, Europe the sick man of the world, White Australia the white scars of trachoma and the burning of phosphorus, and will pupate in the soil of stolen land under siege from Lake Mungo to Ramallah.
And in one limitless flood from the fresh water to the brine, between the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, the lake from which the ichthys returned, like a salmon run, to the place where John the Baptist christened Jesus the Nazarene, the Jordan River flows past Eve and Adam’s, the Garden, to be crossed over by the martyrs entering the Promised Land of a free Palestine.
And in one repeating tide from the saltwater to the rainforest and spinifex, the water cycle between the Red Sea and Port Botany, faggots rise up to the settlers’ dinner on the criminal Zionist’s war table, still warm, walk into the coloniser’s hotel, and set free a revolt, riot, mutiny of Larvae to repulse, repel, rebel, spectres of the Stone Intifada that haunt the dead-end entity, and spectra of our Stonewall that trouble the transient rainbow!
Art: Wendy Thompson
An oversimplification of science:
Why future archaeologists probably won’t misgender my bones
Rohan Baker-Wade takes a shovel to pseudo science.
As trans people we are often told that “when archaeologists dig up your skeleton they will know your biological sex.” It may seem difficult or even impossible to refute this because what could be more unchangeable than our physical skeletons? Some of our closest great ape cousins, such as gorillas, have obvious sex differences in their bones, with males being visibly much larger and stronger than females. Could this be the same in humans?
This projection of preconceived ideals onto past societies has had detrimental effects on how the past is perceived by professionals and ordinary people alike, which has inevitably bled into modern political discourse surrounding gender.
This view fuels opinions fronted by everyone from homophobes claiming that marriage is only between man and a woman to J.K Rowling’s ardent obsession with gamete size that enables gender policing in bathrooms. It seems obvious that sex has a great influence on human bones, and as the main biological material that preserves archaeologically, scientists must have developed foolproof techniques for determining sex of an individual! While there are skeletal and genetic methods used by archaeologists that work in certain situations, the reality of biology is that it never exists in a simple binary as transphobes and the general right wing would like to have us believe. There are a huge amount of complications that make sex estimation difficult or frankly impossible. Archaeologists are well aware of these complications and it dictates so much of what information we feel confident in using to reconstruct the past. In the midst of so much anguish with
Art: Wendy Thompson
increasing hatred towards queer and especially transgender people, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to dismantle the ways in which those who want to eradicate us, misrepresent or ignore the process of science to aid their own political goals.
In any basic archaeology course, students will be taught sex estimation through several bony features on the skull and pelvis that usually have some differences between the sexes. This method is useful and accurate in some contexts, but it also has flaws. While bones can reveal a significant amount of information about the lived experience of an individual, most aspects of their life will show no effect on the skeletal system and will therefore be unknown to us. This is the central doctrine of osteology, the study of human bones, and is drilled into the mind of every archaeologist. In practice, sex estimation can be conducted with relative confidence on individuals where these differences are more pronounced, but in most archaeological cases the situation is more complex, making the estimation less accurate or even impossible.
First, archaeological remains are almost always very fragmentary, and in many cases the areas on the skeleton examined in sex estimation do not survive. Skeletons buried with the pelvis facing up, which most are, often have the pubis bone crushed under the weight of the dirt over them, destroying the features used in sex estimation. In these situations, other less accurate methods may be employed such as analysing occupational markers, which are increased muscle attachments due to habitual actions in certain muscle groups. These can give an indication of the sex of the individual in cases where textual evidence gives us an idea of gender roles in the studied society. Even in these circumstances, experts working on archaeological remains can easily fall into the trap of projecting modern ideas of gender onto ancient societies. This is exemplified by Paleolithic females who were generally much more robust and larger than today, so nonpelvic bones could easily be mistaken for male under traditional methods. This projection of preconceived ideals onto past societies has had detrimental effects on how the past is perceived by professionals and ordinary people alike, which has inevitably bled into modern
political discourse surrounding gender.
While the skeleton is often unable to yield a successful visual sex estimation, the study of DNA from archaeological skeletal remains seems more promising. The most basic understanding of how sex is determined genetically is that an XX chromosome pair develops into female and an XY pair develops into male. While this seems like a simple binary at first glance, one which transphobes love to claim supports their arguments, the reality is of course much more complex. The specific gene that initiates sex determination is controlled by the sex-determination region Y (SRY) found on the Y chromosome which switches on genes involved in testis formation and blocks those that form female reproductive structures. While this is correct under our current understanding of genetics and does work in some situations, nature throws in plenty of complications in the form of mutations.
One type of mutation known as Swyer syndrome knocks out this critical SRY gene, meaning that an individual with XY chromosomes would develop typically female. If an archaeological individual with this mutation had their DNA analysed, they would be sexed as male despite likely living their whole life as a cisgender female.
Another form of mutation that can affect how sex is expressed in the body involves abnormal numbers of chromosomes. A notable type is Klinefelter Syndrome (XXY chromosome configuration), which sees typical male development with some female sexual characteristics developing following puberty. A Mediaeval Portuguese individual, whose skeletal anatomy had caused confusion amongst archaeologists, has recently been identified as having an XXY chromosome configuration after their DNA was analysed.
There is a tendency to imagine these scientific concepts exist in a way that is simple for humans to understand. That seemingly unchanging and obvious ideas throughout history such as sex exist in that way with no nuance or exceptions. For the political aims of transphobes and general right-wing, the natural biological binary works perfectly in their goal of preserving the current cultural system. They can state that man and woman, XX and XY, is biological, and that is perfectly
reflected in the skeleton based on oversimplified and outdated scientific methods. For transphobes, the status quo – the rigid gender roles of man and woman – is intrinsic. To reject the status quo would be to reject one’s own nature.
A Mediaeval Portuguese individual, whose skeletal anatomy had caused confusion amongst archaeologists, has recently been identified as having an XXY chromosome configuration after their DNA was analysed.
But unfortunately, biology is not concerned with making itself as efficient and simple as possible for the benefit of the human mind. Even without humans injecting our notions of cultural gender construction, sex is complex in ways we are only just beginning to understand and apply to many facets of science, including archaeology. As this nuance is understood more and more over the coming years, our reconstructions of the past will also be more complex, for both our understanding of societies in the past and for transgender people living today who are perhaps
No USyd orange on our pride flags!
Tim Duff (they/them) risks black mould poisoning for activist history.
Queer groups at USYD are remarkably small at the moment, and this presents an unusual problem when people start finishing their degrees. Usually, institutional knowledge (meetings and minutes, protest building, multi-year campaigns, cornerstone events, etc.) ends up in the arms of generationally resilient political factions or wellfunded student execs. When their members leave university, the group’s direction remains anchored by the sheer weight of organisation. Queer campus groups, on the other hand, often change hands wildly from faction to faction or remain wholly independent because queer struggle beyond “visibility” remains a fringe fight to take up. All the while, queer student causes are woefully underfunded and are often one of the first on the block for “cost-cutting measures.”
As such, when queer oral tradition fails, strategies often just get lost. Many political directions that were obvious a decade ago have become obtuse and surprising today. Meanwhile, USYD management gets to normalise the erosion of student autonomy over the course of decades. It’s normalised for the USU to own all the O-week (“Welcome Fest”) infrastructure. It’s normalised for a queer society to have corporate sponsors. It’s normalised for campus security to tear down posters each morning. Looking back at student history makes it strikingly clear how much the university micromanages the way queer people group themselves, how we organise, how we make change happen. This pinkwashed bureaucratisation must be interrogated at every turn. Instead of a stifling and sterile corporation, we need a campus culture that nurtures the creativity to resist bureaucratic inertia, to get stuff done on our own terms.
Sydney University’s track record on queer rights is abysmal, and this is a reflection of the fact that it is an institution that has funded and participated in genocide from its founding to the current day, from Gadi to Gaza. It is a colonial machine that swallows up marginalised groups into its bureaucratic folds, as long as it can make money from them. If there is a risk to the university’s brand or profit — most recently seen with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment — then it will spit these groups out with full violence.
Rather than offering exemptions on EPPs, management eagerly mailed this no-graduation threat twice to all enrolling health students, most of whom had no compulsory EPPs in their courses at all. It took a three and a half year legal battle with the SRC at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for Sydney Uni to capitulate.
The reason Sydney Uni did this was, of course, money. The letters were sent to weaken prospective liability claims just to get insurers off their backs. Where there’s potential fines involved, Sydney Uni has thrown entire student faculties under the bus and bought into the racist, queerphobic fear mongering around HIV and hepatitis. To quote the SRC’s campaign, “HIV doesn’t discriminate, the University does”. In short, the university isn’t and never has been on the side of students.
A prime example: from January 1993 to July 1996, the University of Sydney attempted to prevent ALL Health Sciences, Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing students with HIV, Hepatitis B, or Hepatitis C from graduating. They claimed that these students could not legally perform Exposure Prone Procedures — procedures with a risk of cutting the student’s skin — and therefore could not meet their course requirements.
To pretend that Sydney Uni is built on anything other than violence would require a long term project of historical revisionism. In the case of their queer rights record, the Pride Network does that revisionism. Established as the Ally Network in early 2015, it was at the time an index of LGBTQIA+ friendly staff and an advisory group to university management. The Pride Network does two things: It normalises university management being the sole representatives of tertiary education at Pride events, and
It lets the university stay quietly apolitical on queer issues while pinkwashing their brand of ‘diversity and inclusivity.’
position to the Pride Network while delaying any material changes for as long as possible. On marriage equality, former Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence refused to set the university’s position despite on-campus protests, months-long campaigns, and several faculty Yes endorsements. Instead, the Ally Network snuck in their support for marriage equality with a statement on their webpage just days before the postal vote began in September 2017. That year, and for four years after until 2021, Sydney Uni paraded in Mardi Gras while uni staff still could not access any gender affirmation leave, let alone annualised leave. No matter how many rainbow flags they raise at the Quad, Sydney Uni will never act on the struggles that queer people face.
Case in point, Sydney Uni (on request of the Ally Network) entered its first float in the Mardi Gras parade in 2016, less than 12 months after the Ally Network was founded. Before this, university students in the Sydney region used to band together in a crosscampus activist float that echoed the radicalism of the first Mardi Gras. By sticking its corporate foot in the door, Sydney Uni cut in on a space that has always radically belonged to students, and normalised their brand image in the parade.
When the university tries to claim that inclusion is the highest goal for queer students, we must be able to turn back and say that we will not have the purpose of our education decided for us. Campus communities and student unions are where the queer movement first thrived because students decided that police violence was not welcome there. Mardi Gras is not just important because it was a protest planned by USYD students; it’s important because it started a months-long campaign that won the right to protest for everyone in NSW and took away legislation that NSW Police used to attack sex workers, Indigenous people, and queer people.
After three massive Drop The Charges rallies and 125 arrests, the NSW Summary Offences Act 1970 was repealed, and most charges against the 78ers were dropped. The second Mardi Gras had no arrests because queer students and activists won against the NSW government and police.
The start of queer revolutionary creativity starts with the realisation that queerness is a political class whose struggle is bound up with everyone else’s. During the many attempts before 2007 by the Howard Liberal government to introduce voluntary student unionism and crush student union power, queer students joined the fight at USYD — they had some of the most to lose, including the Queer Space. An attack on student activism is an attack on all students, and this stands as equally true today. The new Campus Access Policy exists to let Sydney Uni continue profiteering on the genocide against Palestinians while minimising damage to their brand. The point of Queers for Palestine is that the pinkwashing of genocide is unacceptable whether it is done by the Zionist regime or by Sydney Uni. We must not let our queerness be used as a brand shield in capitalist interests; it must be in our own hands, and we must know what to do with it.
Art: Tim Duff
Growing up queer in Western Sydney
Kayla Hill (she/her) heads out west.
Cumberland Council, which spans from Lidcombe westwards through Merrylands until Pemulwuy, passed a motion in February to ban drag storytime events. A subsequent motion was passed in early May banning books about LGBTQ+ parents from all council libraries. At the following council meeting, hundreds of protestors gathered outside the Cumberland Council chambers, one half opposing the ban and the other supporting it. Wrath surged through the pro-ban protestors, who made evident their vehement disgust at our presence through their chants that declared us satanic paedophiles, proclaimed that we were going to hell, and most alienatingly of all, that told us to “Go back to Newtown”.
I was eleven when I first experienced homophobia. On the school playground at my local school in Cumberland, my best friend and I would walk around together, her arm wrapped around my shoulder. Our classmates would remark, “lesbehonest”. The two of us also shared an Instagram account where we posted vlogs of our weekend outings. One day, a boy in our grade commented on one of these posts, calling us “f*ggots[a]”. At the time, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of me being queer. Nonetheless, my expressions of joy and affection toward my friend were unacceptably queer.
Following the threat of economic sanctions by the state government, worldwide publicity, and community outrage, the book ban was reversed within two weeks. But where did that leave the queer community of Cumberland? Were we to carry on,
as if the majority of our councillors had not just voted to deny our representation in public libraries? As if latent queerphobia within our community had not suddenly been emboldened?
Inner city queer activism functions by fighting homophobia head on. “Pride was a riot, we won’t be quiet!” so screams queer activists into megaphones. Except I have always been quiet.Many queer westies cannot afford to be explicitly and unabashedly queer as is emphasised in inner city queer activism. Such an approach will not save those of us out west. We cannot simply protest our way out of the homophobia that is deeply embedded in our community precisely because of the unique way it has been produced and disseminated. Any sense of relief for the queer people of Western Sydney necessitates our own leadership; a leadership that is informed by cultural, religious, and economic intersectionality.
Audre Lorde stresses the necessity of community for liberation. Two of my best friends are also queer people of colour who live in Western Sydney. We blast Chappell Roan on the drive home from uni (and Mitski on the melancholic days). We go out late to get sugarcane juice whilst lamenting over past loves, how maybe we should’ve just gone to Western Sydney Uni, and the horrors of living at home with your parents in your late teens. There is a uniquely tender joy in our friendship produced from our shared experience of racialised queerness in Western Sydney. We find comfort in the unrelenting community of one another.
This isn’t exactly a manifesto for liberation. But it seems sufficient for now…I think.
Response to the SGM
Students Against War
Last Wednesday’s Student General Meeting (SGM) saw around 600 USyd students in attendance vote overwhelmingly in favour of cutting USyd’s ties with Israel, affirming the right of Palestinians to armed resistance, and calling for one secular, democratic Palestinian state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. The mass meeting was an enormous step forwards for the Palestine movement and proved that the student body stands with Palestine against Israel’s genocide.
A tiny handful of supporters of Israel’s genocide attended the meeting, spearheaded by Conservative Club president and pro-Israel ideologue Freya Leach. In the meeting, Leach launched into a venomous speech laden with Islamophobic fearmongering and anti-Palestinian racism in order to defend apartheid Israel from those who might speak out against the slaughter in Gaza.
It tells us everything we need to know that the University’s response statement to the Student General Meeting all but sided with the politics of Leach’s far-right fringe. The statement attempts to dismiss the two motions passed as simply the whim of a miniscule fringe of the student body (less than one per cent, allegedly), instead of seeing the meeting for what it was - a mass democratic meeting of students demanding that the university have nothing to do with Apartheid and genocide. With this position, Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott refuses to accept what millions around the world know - that Palestinians are right to resist their occupation through whatever means they have available, including arms, and that the only viable solution is a single, secular, democratic state across all of Palestine.
estinian homes has been a mainstay of Israeli propaganda throughout the genocide.
In reality, queer Palestinians would be far better able to fight for their own liberation without the imminent threat of death from Israel’s bombs, recurring displacement from their homes, and repeated imperialist intervention. The real threat to queer people in Gaza is Israel’s genocidal invasion. Leach’s comments serve only to demonise Palestinians and defend Israel from criticism.
Leach also fails to see the bitter irony of accusing pro-Palestine activists of not caring about the rape of Israeli women whilst wrapped proudly in the flag of a state whose Minister for National Security openly defended the gang-rape of a Palestinian detainee by nine Israeli prison guards. The United Nations has condemned Israel for its systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners, which predates Hamas’ October 7 attacks, but have since gotten more extreme.
The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. Leach’s father, Mark Leach, attempts to provoke pro-Palestine protesters by flying the Israeli flag at Palestine rallies, and ludicrously asserts that the chant “from the river to the sea” is a call for genocide of all Jews.
There is a long history of defenders and apologists of genocide, apartheid, and colonialism using the language of liberation in order to justify their atrocities. These arguments serve only as apologia for the brutality of imperialism, and to demonise colonised peoples when they fight back against their oppression.
Leach’s tirade at the SGM leant on the same tired, racist tropes consistently thrown at the Palestine movement, proclaiming that “Hamas… takes a Sharia Islamic view of gay people and suggests that they should be thrown off of buildings.”
This Islamophobic attempt to pinkwash Israel’s genocide is nothing new from the right-wing mouthpieces of the ruling class. IDF soldiers planting pride flags in the rubble of destroyed Pal-
imperialism, and
Wednesday night’s SGM showed that students won’t take it. Only a mass, militant student movement can sever the ties between USyd and the Israeli terror state, and take the fight further to break Albanese’s complicity.
Read the whole Students Against War response to the Vice Chancellor online at @studentsagainstwar_ on Instagram.
Freya Leach, Mark Scott, Prime Minister Albanese, and the right wing press are all standing on the side of racism,
Penny Wong, a first-generation Malaysian-Chinese Migrant, the first butch lesbian in the Australian Parliament, paid $160 an hour, opposed marriage equality for half of her career.
My cousin, a first-generation Vietnamese Immigrant, the first butch lesbian I knew, paid $25 an hour, needs to find a wife or will face deportation
One is supposed to speak for the other, and to the mainstream, they are categorised under the same niche… yet their lives couldn’t be more different.
In this article, we will discuss Identity Politics, its radical origin, and how it was taken away from us.
Identity Politics was designed to be an entry point.
To discuss Identity Politics, we must first acknowledge that the framework is a compelling, charismatic, and observable way of teaching people that social inequality exists. Furthermore, we must understand that when identity politics was being cooked up, it wasn’t just “some liberal bullshit.”
For this reason, in this section, we will talk about the MOTHERS of Identity Politics: The Combahee River Collective (CRC).
The CRC was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organisation in Boston (1974 - 1980). In one of their retreats, the collective wrote one of their biggest hits (my literal favourite text) titled ‘The Combahee River Collective Statement’ (1977). The statement is not hard to find, and I promise, unless you are the most annoying theory bro who has formed your personality around being extremely anti-identity politics, you will find that the statement is just bars, after bars, after bars.
“We realise that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us”
“This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”
They are arguing for simple yet very revolutionary concepts: specific knowledge about oppressions can be formed through being in different marginalised positions. The people who face certain oppression are more interested in resolving it because it is their own.
Their explanations face criticism, most of which often hyper-focuses on the idea that the CRC was arguing for gatekeeping social movements. However, I believe that this argument is shallow and is a mischaracterisation of what CRC’s version of identity politics is meant to be. If you just take a second to scroll down a couple paragraphs, you will realise that the political argument that the CRC puts forward is actually one that is against separatism.
“Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand…We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.”
(As I said, bars after bar after bars)
The MOTHERS of identity politics argued that the theory itself was supposed to be material and coalitional… it was meant to be learning about yourselves then expanding further to others and it was.
Political fronts popped up everywhere! The strategy is mobilising people through community networks, organising on everyday issues that they experience, then campaigning on broader uniting issues.
One example is Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. In 1984, an alliance of lesbians and gay men supported the British National Union of Mineworkers during the year-long strike of 1984–1985.
But now, when people complain about identity politics, the idea has been completely removed from its roots.
Identity Politics Will Now Backfire at You Like a Fucking Bitch.
“I, a sex worker on a student VISA, Subclass 500, sucking men’s dicks to pay off my rent, am asking you, a white man, employed at a union job, if you hear the most fucking vile, disgusting, racist, antisex work, misogynistic bullshit from another migrant sex worker, would you stand up tell them that they are wrong?”
And he responded: “Well...It’s hard because I don’t want to speak over marginalised communities” after sitting through a forum on anti-racism and sex workers’ rights.
Unfortunately, all good things must be co-opted, carved out, and sucked up by the ruling class. Since the late 1970s to now, our lives have been co-opted, our work has been co-opted, and most horribly, our organising has been coopted.
Elites of marginalised communities are co-opted. One notable example of this is Rupaul; the ‘queen of drag,’ transformed from working in the club, identifying as a sex worker who needed to make a living, to now, being The Queen of Fracking.
This co-opting can also be said about our movment’s language. In a rally against domestic violence earlier this year hosted by [redacted], one of the speakers grabbed the mic and discussed the necessity of calling the police on your family members while quoting revolutionary, anti-carceral, abolitionist feminist, top 10 most wanted by the FBI, Angela Davis.
Unfortunately, this is also true for Identity Politics. What was supposed to be coalitional has now turned and become an organiser’s worst fear: Deference and Separatism.
Deference, when a person in a position of power defers the responsibility of making social change to someone else. It is omitting responsibilities.
Separatism: the advocacy for separations of movements not for the sake of strategies but for controlled cohesion. It is preferring the elite of a movement like Penny Wong (gay genocidal Minister for Foreign Affairs) over solidarity (straight Arab refugees).
Both of these tendencies set our movements back and highlight words that were never written in the formation of Identity Politics. It believes that the struggles we all face are separate, which means the way that we relate to each other is by pity rather than as equals.
Setting Ourselves Free.
We must put an end to deference and separatism, and we can not do so by over-corrections and condescension. A real response is one that starts with a desire for transformation and organising on the principles of solidarity. We start with what it is that we want to structurally change about the world and go from there.
Identity Politics will tell you that your struggles are unique and that you should start off by understanding its source but then expand further.
Separatism and deference convince you that these struggles are unique to just you, and that no one will ever understand; that we are the beholder of knowledge, and no one shall speak before you.
Solidarity says that the liberation of yourself is the liberation of all; the liberation of others is your liberation.
We are stuck in the room of separatism and it is up to us to break down the walls and build a new one.
Art: Demyun Newynn
If queerness is an ongoing, active resistance to heteronormativity, then survival exists only when such systems are continuously dismantled and challenged. The Campus Access Policy (2024) attempts to suppress activism under the guise of safety, to improve on-campus
An apolitical uni is a dead uni
Jo Staas (they/them) not-so-quietly mourns.
marketability, and to disrupt the life cycle of student activism to prevent meaningful change. If actualised, it is dangerous because it assumes that the University has the right to define protest and assumes that queerness can only exist if co-opted with management to be sanitised for profitability. “An Apolitical University is a Dead University” is a response artwork emphasising activism as a means to challenge the systems which attempt to undermine queerness, whilst promoting intersectional liberation for all.
Areyoutalkingtome?
Claudia Blane (she/her) inspects the barriers obstructing access to cervical cancer screening for queer people.
Mum didn’t tell me what a Pap smear was until I was in my fourth year of high school.
We were in my childhood bedroom at the time, which is tucked away in the bowels of our old house. My brothers were in the kitchen cooking something garlicky, my dad was picking Grandma’s scripts up from the pharmacist, and our next-door neighbours were taking the bins out. No-one could hear us at all — but still we conversed in hushed voices, as if I was learning about some shameful family secret instead of an important medical procedure.
I use the term ‘learning’ loosely. here. I didn’t actually learn what the Pap smear tested for that night, nor what it was supposed to prevent — and the awkwardness that stunted me and Mum’s conversations tainted my Catholic school’s PDHPE classrooms in the same way. The only information I felt I concretely knew (or could ask about was that I needed to get tested for whatever this malignant ‘thing’ was. From this reply I scrounged together the understanding that the risk of ‘it’ would only emerge once I started engaging in relations that fit my Mum’s definition of sex. I didn’t discount that the screening was important — I just didn’t think
that it would be important for me.
This misconception is one of many factors impeding queer people’s participation in cervical cancer screening (previously known as the Pap test), which is notably lower for lesbians, non-binary people, and transgender men than it is for cisgender women.
La Trobe University’s 2019 ‘Private Lives’ survey found that 58% of eligible LGBTQ+ Australians had accessed a Cervical Screening Test within the previous two years as opposed to 68% of the eligible Australian population in 2022. Asexual respondents were the least likely to be screened (there was not enough data to garner a statistic), and the participation of transgender men in the procedure was as low as 39%. This number resembles the 37% of trans people who avoid accessing any healthcare services because they fear being discriminated against (37%).
It’s not difficult to come up with reasons why these inequities persist. The shame that has traditionally shrouded discussions of non-male bodies has continually debilitated necessary conversations about the medical procedures that affect them and insulates said procedures from important reform. Cervical cancer
screening campaigns, for example, propagate this belief of the test being ‘women’s business’ by being exclusively located in female public toilets and doused in pink and purple. While this messaging does suggest to cisgender women that they are expected to get screened, it inadvertently excludes trans, lesbian, and genderqueer people that diverge from this ‘feminine’ patient prototype from the same encouragement. When compounded by the cryptic name of the screening form used up until 2017 (‘Pap smear’) and the lack of adequate sexual health education in schools and (some) homes, it’s no surprise that misconceptions like “you don’t need to get screened if you’ve only slept with women” are affecting the participation rates of queer people. The lack of these should-be-public resources also disproportionately impacts Indigenous Australians, for whom the mortality rate of cervical cancer was three times higher than non-Indigenous Australians in 2021.
The difficulty of finding a healthcare provider in Sydney that both anticipates LGBTQ+ patients and is knowledgeable about the factors affecting their participation in intimate and relatively invasive procedures exacerbates
this inaccessibility for the trans community. A 2019 study of 537 trans and gender-diverse Australians found that 51 percent of transgender men had never had a cervical test suggested to them before, let alone offered adjustments to the test’s traditional application. This, when combined with the doubt that community-specific issues such as gender dysphoria will be taken seriously by providers (especially those reticent to use transinclusive language), greatly impacts the community’s incentivisation to participate in cervical cancer screening.
If you’re a queer person in Sydney who is eligible for a Cervical Screening Test but hesitant about the screening process itself, you can ask your doctor about self-collection! This alternative method of screening allows you to collect the cell samples yourself in a private area of the doctor’s office.
There is a spectre haunting the youth of Sydney: the spectre of housing prices. Devastatingly, this spectre disproportionately affects young queer people. Neoliberal austerity has led to a great loss of safety nets for young people and queer homelessness is now ubiquitous, but the damage to political organising and the broader social lives of young people is less talked about.
As housing becomes increasingly unaffordable, young people (including students) must live further apart from each other and community hubs such as universities. Hours spent commuting from housing further and further away means campus life and community has become a skeletal version of what it once was. Having to commute hours to see your friends because the only semiaffordable housing is on the outskirts of the city (this is also exacerbated by the privatisation of public transport) squanders chances to socialise and to build community. Who among us has not had to leave a party hours early because otherwise they would not be able to get home safely?
Queer people have no spaces; to organise politically, to meet people,
to host parties. If this continues, will we have any semblance of culture or community at all? Will we even get a youth at all? How are young people supposed to grow if we are forced to live with our parents well into our twenties or dedicate all of our time to monotonous work to be able to afford rent?
Young people deserve to have their independence, to experience their slice of youth, to have something in the shape of freedom and be able to form their own personhood.
Everytime I speak about this topic to friends of mine, a heavy silence fills the room. Truly, the feeling of being robbed of youth or a life at all is among the most universal feelings amongst our generation today. The current state of campus culture clearly shows this: it was only this year that what was once the largest queer organisation on campus, SHADES, (which used to hold massive parties and other social events) died following a lack of interest in new students being on the executive. Young people now lack the social and directional skills to manage such a club, and even worse, they wouldn’t know where to
start; since the COVID lockdown they have only experienced a dead campus (clubs experienced large budget cuts then).
The direness of this situation can not be understated. The entire point of university is to meet new people, to debate and exchange ideas; that is the part of education that you cannot receive simply by reading widely at the local library (although that’s also another victim of neoliberal attacks) .
The link between campus life and rent prices may not be immediately obvious, but they are directly related. Students cannot go to club events or talk at the pub after class because they cannot afford a place close by (or in some places they may still live with parents that do not allow them to, missing out on key independence). Ins they have to spend hours commuting back home or spend all their hours outside of class working to afford their rent. This obviously affects the social web on campus and the experience of queer youth.
Young people are being socially and intellectually stunted due to missing out on key developmental experiences of their twenties. It is no wonder that
An Investigation into the History of Monogamy
A few years ago one of my best friends entered a polyamorous relationship. Earlier last year I found out my parents had a relationship that was open (to what degree, I don’t know - and I don’t want to know). So when my partner broached the topic with me recently, I was intrigued. Naturally, I invited my friend to the park and asked them over a joint about their experience being in an open relationship. I was blown away by how much I resonated with what he said.
Why are we allowed to hold an infinite amount of love, for an infinite amount of friends, yet the amount of people we can love in a romantic or sexual way is automatically finite? What makes our capacity to love hundreds of people automatically void when it
comes to our partners? Having multiple friends doesn’t mean I love my other friends any less, so why shouldn’t it be the same for romantic and sexual partners? Furthermore, where does this line between friend and partner lie? I have had sexual partners with whom I was friends first, and I have had sexual partners with whom I’m still very good friends now. I have never felt that there was a strict difference between the two, a line that must be crossed or not crossed, but rather a free flowing spectrum of different forms of love and intimacy.
I have long believed that rules around sexuality and gender are forces designed to make us conform to the heteronormative nuclear family model. In fact, as a Gender and Cultural studies student, I read and write about these
Maddy Barry (she/her) considers polygamy.
political aims of the society’s dominant class. He defines the “technology of sex” as a set of techniques that have been developed and implemented by those in power, to uphold our hegemonic society, as a way to protect their status.
Wendy Holloway wrote in “Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity” that heterosexual relations are “the primary site where gender difference is re-produced.” Holloway goes on to say that “gender difference is... reproduced in day-to-day interactions in heterosexual couples, through the denial of the non-unitary, non-rational, relational character of subjectivity.” These theories can be applied to sexuality not only in terms of sexual orientation but also the way we view intimate relationships
accompanied the shift from mobile to sedentary communities. The results we obtained suggest that male population sizes increased substantially later than female population sizes. This observation raises the possibility that a polygamous mating system might have been widespread in prehistoric human populations. In the ethnological literature, there is ample consensus that humans evolved in multimale polygynous bands. Sociobiological studies do suggest that the development of extensive farming resulted in a decrease in the levels of polygyny. Especially with the shift to farming in the Neolithic period, sedentary and more structured communities developed. Nuclear families replaced the polygamous, extended-family compounds typical of hunting-gathering populations, and the household, rather than the band, became the main socioeconomic unit. In the traditional Christian wedding ceremony, a man and a woman promise each other before God a lifetime of fidelity (‘Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate’; Matt. 19:4-6). Consequently, the Roman Catholic Church forbids divorce. But why? Why forbid divorce if man was monogamous by nature and there are no alternatives anyway? But the ‘problem’, of course, is that there are alternatives: Homo sapiens are not a strictly monogamous species. And even religion cannot enforce monogamy and the cultural institution of matrimony as both nature and culture have their own prerogatives. Legal, religious, and economical rraints are weaker today and the economic self-reliance of women has increased. Divorce rates have increased in many Western countries. The present-day situation, therefore, increasingly reflects all the diversities of intimacy and companionship of Homo sapiens: monogamous when necessary, polygamic when possible. The fear of conservative groups that the traditional values of matrimony and the family are at stake is very realistic: these values are at stake indeed. The reason, however, is not that humans are immoral; it is that in modern Western societies men and women now have more freedom to pursue a plurality of relationships (or lack thereof).
This is by no means meant to be a prescription that everyone should revert back to polygamy. We are, after all, products of our social environment. Not only this, our society isn’t designed for the communal living from which we came. However, if we are to bring down these systems of control and domination, we must at least be open to other ways of being and loving.
Art: Vivienne Laurie-Dickson
and pulled them all into a group hug, jumping in the air. “So, ready to see your little pookiebear?” Aurix couldn’t help try-
“Nalin– you gotta stop them, they’re being mean.” Sky pleaded.
“You asked the wrong gay, short-cakes.” Nalin shrugged. “I couldn’t even fight
“Depends which kind of bear we’re talking about.” Jasmine’s mischief was
“Jasmine! We don’t need to hear about my hookups.” Nalin gasped, faux scan-
“Ugh, can we just get inside already?” Sky huffed. “Lola’s pod is entering orbit
“Oh, you soo can’t wait, can you.” Jasmine prodded mercilessly.
“You’re the one that’s late, dude.” Nalin quipped back. “We’re also waiting on Sky; she wanted extra time for her makeup or something.”
Aurix heard Jasmine’s stifled snicker in the background.
“Oh, because that’s a surprise.” Aurix rolled their eyes and pushed off as the light changed. Everybody knew about Sky’s not-so-secret crush on Lola. She hadn’t seen them since first year, after ‘the kiss’. Lola had left on a planetary exchange program soon after. “I’ll be at the spaceport in ten, okay?”
Aurix knew Jasmine’s trademark dramatic sigh well. “Just be here before Sky, she’s super nervous about this.”
“Of course!” Aurix yelped as they ducked under a shop sign, feeling the beep at their wrist as Jasmine ended the call.
A few scrapes and street crossings later, and Aurix was smoothly looping around the corner to the sound of jet-engines and the funk of pod fuel. “Beep beep!” Aurix couldn’t help but grin as they slowed to a stop, met with the sight of Jasmine’s purple skin and bald head, and Nalin’s metalhead tee. “Show-off.” Nalin rolled his eyes, pushing blond hair out of his eyes. “Why did you need to rollerblade here anyway?”
“It’s fun!” Aurix shrugged, glancing down at their hot pink roller skates. “You just hate it because you think vintage is pretentious.”
“It is pretentious.” Jasmine adjusted her miniskirt, brushing off the dust Aurix had disturbed with their arrival. “Hover skates are ten times easier, boomer.”
“Sorry, I forgot you were allergic to joy. I still got here before Sky.” Aurix couldn’t help but be smug as they sat themself on the bench outside the spaceport to remove their gear.
“You’re lucky, Jas would have had a fit if you didn’t.” Nalin sat, putting an arm around Aurix.
“Aurix!” They perked up at the sound of their name as Sky bounded up. “Sky!!” Sky tugged Aurix in an enthusiastic hug, a huge grin splitting their face as they embraced.
“You’re just salty your girlfriend’s off world for the month.” Nalin supplied, and Jasmine’s mutinous look was as much confirmation as anyone needed. “Surely you’ve missed Lola too, Jasmine.” Aurix added, crossing their arms and shepherding the group out of the sun’s dry haze. The crowd at the shaded, busy spaceport was a hubbub of people of all sorts of species, dressed in a dizzying variety of fashions.
The open-air spaceport was all smooth metal and curved edges, so much so that it was louder inside than it was outside. The crowd buzzed and echoed, blooming with chatter. Families waited impatiently, children chased each other around with excitement. If anyone looked for Lola’s family here, they would not find them.
They’d only find Aurix, Jasmine, Nalin and Sky.
Sky’s face gleamed with joy as the group scanned the arrivals hall, watching the doors with barely contained impatience. Aurix was sure that Sky was thinking of Lola, their enviable waxy green hair and copper skin.
Each of them had a story, pain that left Aurix in bed for days sometimes. The words of others stung more bitterly than any of them would like to admit.
Lola was still bruised from her home planet, Cricord 3.
“Sky!” A familiar masculine shriek rose above the crowd as the arrival doors opened. The group chased after Sky as she broke into a run across the spaceport.
“Lola!” The group chorused back. The Cricoridian was bowled over and joyfully tackled within an inch of their life.
As Aurix got up from the floor amidst the crowd, Lola laughed, eyes pricking with what could be tears.
It was worth the wounds for this, the warmth of their pile up hug and the tenderness found in Sky’s gaze shielding them from the sharp stares from the spaceport strangers at bay.
Hidden somewhere in Aurix’s shoddy parking and Jasmine’s gossip were intergalactic silver linings of something beyond them. Unspooled thread connecting each of them together, tugging tighter when times were rough. What were the bonds of friendship, if not love at its most beautiful?
“I’ve missed you guys.” Lola croaked from their spot on the floor, cradled up next to Sky. The others snickered fondly as they recovered from their excitement.
Nalin shared a glance with Jasmine, his shoulders relaxed and eyes sparkling. “Don’t worry. We missed you too.”
Reviewed: Holding the Man
Jesse Carpenter looks back.
Two men are dead. I knew these men, I think, despite never meeting them. I’d lived my entire life without ever really being aware of the AIDS Crisis. I was too young, too separate. I knew that it was an autoimmune disorder, that gay men were at risk, that it killed people, but I don’t think I really understood it until I read Holding the Man. I finished the book, and cried for Tim and John. I cried for a whole generation, for myself, for all the queer kids out there kissing at school, fighting with their parents, fucking in the grass or saying goodbye.
The beauty of Holding the Man is its honesty. You experience everything through Tim. He is vulnerable, open, raw, flawed and in love. He is so deeply and tangibly real. He died ten days after completing his memoir. You feel it when you read it, you really do. The book is haunted, in a sense. The story is so deeply alive, but you feel death seep through it. Death lingers between lines until it finally eclipses the beautiful life they built together. In every word, every kiss, every mistake, you cannot forget these two men are dead. This same spectre haunts so much of queer life. AIDS has left a legacy in what it’s taken from us, a legacy of absence. There are 8,000 people who should be here today, who each have a story as soulful as Tim’s, and instead they are gone.
One of my favourite myths is the idea of a swan song; that before a swan is about to die, it breaks a lifelong silence to sing a beautiful song. The origin of the proverb is lost, but it goes back to the myths of Ovid. For thousands of years, the swan has sung, but was it with sorrow or with joy?
Holding the Man has made me so incredibly happy. To know that 50 years ago, two boys met in a stuffy private school in Melbourne and then spent the rest of their lives in love, a deep and beautiful love, gives me a joy that is just as tender as the sadness it evokes. Every tear I’ve shed, every kiss I’ve shared, is steeped in history; a million people who have felt how I’ve felt over all time.
I could never call Holding the Man a swan song — much was lost in the AIDS epidemic, but the queers were never silent. They have left a legacy to queer youth, one of resistance, protest, resilience, and love. Tim has never stopped singing. The beauty of Holding the Man comes from the life it contains, not the death that ends it.
Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the Man was published in 1995, a couple of months after the author’s death. The memoir has since been adapted into a play by Tommy Murphy, and a feature film.
Upcoming: Joan Marie
Anastasia Dale looks at the audience.
Joan Marie follows two lovers as they traverse the myriad worlds where their love could exist, as reality seeps slowly back in. Joan and Marie journey through the literary, the historical, the folkloric, and the absurd. The play explores the relationship between two women, yes, but also the worlds that surround them.
In writing this play, I was greatly influenced by the poet Gertrude Stein, whose work is queer in every sense of the word, queer readings of Shakespeare, and folk tales passed down through oral tradition. Joan Marie is a sort of collage, a work that twists and turns through vignettes, showing reality through fantasy and fantasy through reality. In my artistic and writing practice I constantly return to dreams, fantasies, and abstractions of meaning as ways to express the inexpressible.
I was also influenced by my Gender Studies classes, in particular after being introduced to the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Strangely, it was not Adrienne Rich or even the CompHet MasterDoc, but de Beauvoir’s The Woman in Love, that crystallised compulsory heterosexuality for me: a woman as a ‘thing’ in the world, existing for others, and the only way “to overcome her situation as inessential object [is] by radically assuming it… she wants to melt into him, forget herself in his arms.” I found resonance and enchantment with Butler’s words in Bodies That Matter, and found myself perceiving a glittering city of high-rise hegemonies and billboard enforcements, on the outskirts of which live the abject, the queer.
It’s been such an amazing process to work on Joan Marie with the cast and crew. Both cast members, Evie Lane and Ava Jenkin, uplift the work and breathe so much life into every line. Erin Murphy, one of my favourite painters, is designing a set with a painted backdrop and furniture made from canvases. The kitchen, with its orange wallpaper and floral accents, borrows from Carol and Holding the Man. We’ll have a Lynchian little sound design. There’s a rhythm and weirdness to the tone we’ve struck in rehearsals. The work is non-linear, odd, at times farcical. It’s a queer story told in a truly queer way.
Nominations for the 2024 SRC Elections are closing soon!
The close of nominations shall be at 5:00pm August 16th 2024. For more information on how to nominate, please refer to the Candidate Information Pack available on the SRC website at: bit.ly/SRC-noms
Authorised by R.Scanlan, 2024 Electoral Officer, Students’ Representative Council, University of Sydney p: 02 9660 5222 | w: srcusyd.net.au
MARIE: Now you be Carol and I’ll be Therese.
JOAN: No, no.
MARIE: Oh, can’t we? Then let’s be Vita and Virginia.
JOAN: Come on, no.
MARIE: Okay, you be Sappho, I’ll be one of Sappho’s muses.
JOAN: Let’s be Joan and Marie.
MARIE: Oh. Yeah, okay. When you get back, okay? After you get back.
JOAN goestoleave,stops,turnsto MARIE.
JOAN: I do believe I have been searching for you in castles and stages since the Middle Ages.
JOAN goestoleaveoncemore.Sheisalmostatthedoorwhen MARIE speaks.
MARIE: I understand I am blindfolded in the castle tower. I am being led downstairs, I can’t see, I can’t see, but it feels like it’s raining. It smells of the earth.
President’s Report
Harrison
Brennan
The last few weeks have shown how much power students have when they come together. Whether it’s defying the new draconian Campus Access Policy with unauthorised stalls, breaking the rules for notification of a protest by joining the NTEU rally against the CAP, or the monumental Student General Meeting where over 600 eligible students voted (and over 800 attendees) for this university to cut its ties to weapons manufacturers, Israeli institutions and pledge to campaign for a Free Palestine. This year the SRC and activist groups on campus have mobilised hundreds of students into campaigning for Palestine, and after the SGM it’s vital that we do not lose this momentum. Follow the SRC instagram (src_usyd) for updates about all upcoming events and I will see you at the next rally!
Education Officers’ Report
Grace
Street & Shovan Bhattarai
SRC Reports
on protest last month. We stand in solidarity against the horrific violence, disappearances and torturing of certain student leaders, and of the community in Bangladesh at large.
The fight against the Campus Access Policy still continues, and we hope to see you at our next Education Action Group meeting to discuss the next steps to protect free speech and protest on campus.
Women Officers’ Report
Eliza & Rand
The Women’s Officers did not submit report this week.
Welfare Officers’ Report
Gerard Buttigieg, Jasmine Al Rawi, Julius Wittforth & Ellie Robertson
The Welfare Officers did not submit a report this week.
Environment Officers’ Report
physical presence of support for Palestine.
We hosted a Satellite Meeting of the Student General Meeting at the Conservatorium, with all students voting in support of the motions. General discussion of the SGM has increased numbers of engaged students with Palestine action. We also hosted a stall in the Foyer of the Conservatorium as part of the Unauthorised Stall Day.
We’re planning towards two events at the Con for the National Week of Action for Gaza. The first is a screening of “The Idol” — a film about the singer from Gaza, Mohammad Assad. The other is a cultural challenge night, showcasing Palestinian art and food, with panelists sharing their experience in activism, all to help Con students find ways they can fight for Gaza. We hope to see these events replicated at other conservatoria through the Australian Music Students’ Association.
With the upcoming SRC elections, we are putting in efforts to ensure more awareness for students wanting to nominate and vote.
Last week was an amazing show of support for Palestine at our Student General Meeting! It brought together hundreds of students to vote almost unanimously on a motion for our University to cut ties with militarism and Israel in line with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and a motion recognising the right of resistance under international law and calling for a singular state in the lands of historic Palestine.
It is shameful that the University is now trying to claim that we were a small bunch of rogue students that do not represent the student body. We reject these attempts to smear and discredit our campaign, and call for everyone involved with the SGM to continue to speak out and support Palestine on campus.
Some actions coming up are;
Tuesday 13 August 5:30pm: Rally outside of Inner West Council for BDS motion, Ashfield Service Centre
Wednesday 21 August 1pm: Students Against War rally for USyd to cut ties, Sydney Uni
Wednesday 28 August 1pm: Students for Palestine school and uni student strike for Palestine, UTS Tower (Building 1)
The weekly Palestine Action Group weekend rallies
We also congratulate the students of Bangladesh for their successful fight for reform, and mourn the hundreds that died at the hands of the government’s crackdown
Jordan Anderson, Madeleine Clark & Thomas Williams
The Enviro Office remains committed to the Palestine solidarity campaign. We turned out for the Student General Meeting last week, which over 800 students attended and voted for USyd to end their complicity in genocide. This demonstrates the enduring importance of student activism and we implore everyone to continue to show up for Palestine.
Intercampus Officers’ Report
Lydia Elias, Alexander Poirer, Zijun Shan & Zifan Xie
The Intercampus Office has been organising more events for students at the Conservatorium to engage with the work for Gaza. This is being done alongside the Sydney Con for Palestine Committee, made up of CSA executive members and other students from the Con. There is a lot of sympathy for Gaza at the Con, and we are working to turn that now into action.
Last semester, we hosted a Bakesale for Gaza, raising AUD$422 for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. This happened during one of the largest concerts in the Con’s Lunchbreak Series — a major educational choir and brass concert for school students — and was great to get more public
Difficult Homelife? What are your options?
You Can’t Live at Home
One of the ways of establishing independence for Youth Allowance with Centrelink is to show that it is unreasonable for you to live in your family home. To apply for this payment, you will need to complete three forms in addition to the regular paperwork: One by you, one by a parent (I know… ridiculous right) and one by a third party. Centrelink will probably ask to contact your parent, but you can instruct them not to if you believe this would put you in danger.
The third party should be aware of your family situation and should be someone like a counsellor, doctor, police office, teacher, religious leader, grandparent, adult relative or – as a last resort – friend.
What is “Unreasonable”?
It is considered unreasonable for you to live in a home where there is extreme family breakdown, where there is serious risk to your physical or mental wellbeing, due to violence, sexual abuse, or other similar unreasonable circumstances, that occurs in your home. It does not have to be perpetrated on you or by someone who lives there. It is also considered unreasonable to live in unstable accommodation. This might include a lack of electricity or running water, or illegally occupying the property. You cannot be receiving continuous support, whether directly or indirectly, and whether financial or otherwise, from a parent.
What is extreme family breakdown?
Extreme family breakdown does not refer to the “normal” differences that
If
Extreme family breakdown does not refer to the “normal” differences that young people have with their parent(s). Centrelink will look for documented evidence of violence, behavioural problems, or threats to your emotional or physical wellbeing.
young people have with their parent(s). Centrelink will look for documented evidence of violence, behavioural problems, or threats to your emotional or physical wellbeing. Centrelink does not deem extreme family breakdown to have occurred just because your parent(s) disapprove of your relationships or lifestyle, (e.g., religion, sexuality, (transgender), unless this is a threat to your physical or emotional wellbeing.
Before moving out?
Consider your safety. If you are at immediate risk of harm talk to an SRC caseworker or Uni Wellbeing team member about emergency accommodation. Also consider your accommodation choices if you move out before making any decisions. Talk to an SRC caseworker about what options you have.
Ask Abe
SRC Caseworker Help Q&A
Recreational Drug Use
Hi Abe,
I’m struggling a lot lately. I feel very lonely because all my friends and family are overseas. I’ve also been using N2O bulbs by myself, because they help me to disconnect and forget that I’m so sad. I know I need help, but I don’t even know where to start. Nangs.
Hi Nangs,
I am sorry to hear that you’ve been having such a hard time lately. It might be helpful for you to speak with a mental health professional, so that you can develop some healthy coping strategies.
The University’s wellbeing team can provide free confidential advice, or Headspace.org.au have an online or telephone service
There are a lot of myths and misinformation around recreational drugs, so get your information from reliable sources, like, health.nsw.gov.au/aod. They will tell you about science behind the drugs and the risks that you are taking.
If you would like to talk about how your studies are going, contact an SRC caseworker through our online contact form Abe.
NSW Health Recreational Drug infomation portal: https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/
Weekly quiz
1. Who was the first person to open a gender affirming clinic in Weimar, Germany?
2. Which famous Ancient Greek hero was rumoured to be in a gay relationship?
3. What was poured on Kelly J Keen at her anti-trans rally in New Zealand?
4. What is the collective noun for a group of maggots?
5. Which anatomical process means raven or raven-like in Latin?
6. What is the Australian slang word for having sex?
7. Is Mark Scott top or bottom?
8. Who invented gay pop?
9. Which flower became a symbol of lesbian or sapphic affection?
10. “The Birdcage” is a remake of what French film?
Dusting off the cobwebs
Word Search
1.Magnus Hirschfeld, 2. Achilles (with Patroclus), 3.Tomato Juice, 4. A grumble, 5.Coracoid process, 6. Root, 7. He tops the students, he bottoms for Israel, 8. Jojo Siwa, 9. Violets, 10. La
Cage aux Folles
Joking X-Ray Porn Advertisement, Honi Soit, Homosexual Edi tion, Issue ten. 1976
DailyMale.Co.Uk
JK ROWLING FOUND LIVING
AMONG BLACK MOULD IN IN INNER WEST SHAREHOUSE
DRUG DEALER CAUGHT WITH POPPERS: SNIFFER DOG FEELS THE RUSH
