Milquetoast Questions, Backflips and Being a Quisling Coward.

This is an unhinged rant about the census.

UPDATE: 48 hours after the release of what the scrapped census questions were, Treasurer Jim Chalmers confirms that due to the fallout the census WILL include questions on LGBTQI+ and gender. This piece was written between the release of questions on Friday 6 September and this new announcement on Sunday 8 September.

My discord is blowing up.

Late last night someone posted the ABC article detailing the dreaded "scrapped LGBTIQ+ Census Questions” in the feed. If there’s one thing that the queers know to do in a time of abject fuckery, it’s that you turn to your community and bellow “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?”

All of this hand-wringing? All of this back and forth? For this? THIS?

Fucking extra-strength-weak-sauce, milquetoast, USELESS questions? Nothing about these questions is actually dangerous or offensive to the public. They are an artful crafting of words to do precisely nothing. There is little to no new data to gleaned from these questions.

Let me lay it out for you.

1) What is the person's gender?

With the explanation that: “Gender refers to current gender which may be different to sex recorded at birth and may be different to gender recorded on legal documents.” And you have the option of: Man; Boy; Woman; Girl; non-binary; uses another term; prefer not to answer.

Okay, ABS… point to me how any of those, short of me writing “I‘M A FUCKING TRANNY” on the page will let you know if a person is trans. Wonderful that non-binary people finally get a look in after being shafted in 2021. The ABS’s own website explains that the “other” umbrella option was woefully inadequate to capture the nuance of such a diverse group, stating: “…the ABS does not support the use of the non-binary sex category to estimate the prevalence of any specific group in the community.”

Yet here we are… We’re allowed to have the nuance of if a person is an adult male “man” or a male child “boy”, as if the age of the respondents wasn’t ALREADY BEING COLLECTED ELSEWHERE. But we can’t get a “transman/transwoman” box to tick.

2) How does the person describe their sexual orientation?

The options are: straight; gay or lesbian; bisexual; uses another term(specify); don't know; prefer not to answer.

Big round of applause here for the bare minimum. It’s not like studies show 20% of 16-24-year-olds don’t identify as straight. It’s not like this cohort is small either. This is 12% of Australia… 3.2 million individuals… and 20% of them are queer as hell. That’s 640,000 people. That’s nearly 200K more than the population of the ACT. Just picture it… The “Australian Faggot Territory”. The AFT, a place where you can be yourself, where you can forge your own identity. The true seat of progressive politics in this country.

3) Has the person been told they were born with a variation of sex characteristics?

Accompanied by the text: “Sometimes called intersex or differences of sex development, this question refers to innate reproductive development, genetics or hormones that do not fit the medical norms for female or male bodies. These specific characteristics may be noticed at birth or develop in puberty).”

The options are: yes; no; don't know; prefer not to answer.

This one particularly grinds my fucking gears. This is a response to the quoted: “very small number indicated a variation of sex characteristics term such as intersex or 47XXY/Klinefelter syndrome” results from the 2021 census data entered in the “other” field.

There’s so much to fucking unpack here it makes we want to scream into a tiny lace pillow embroidered with the words “YOUR GENDER BIOESSENTIALISM IS SHOWING!”

First up let’s talk about this being a “very small” percentage of Australians. Intersex or 47XXY/Klinefelter syndrome occurs in one in 500-1000 men in Australia… that’s between 13,000 – 26,000 thousand people (for context that’s like… a little less than the population of Alice Springs). Treatments typically include testosterone supplements and surgery to remove developed breast tissue. Yes, there’s a higher incidence of this genetic condition among transwoman, BUT… Klinefelter syndrome is not the same as just “being trans”. The two are often associated, but a penis owner-operator can have XXY chromosomes and lead a perfectly normal life as “a man” and not even know. Which is why only 25% of XXY men are diagnosed, let alone even aware of it!

Which brings me to the next bit of fuckery with this question.

Options for “don’t know” and “no”? Which one do I answer? I haven’t been told that I’m “medically intersex”, but I also don’t know if I am. Unless you’ve been tested for it, how could you know? Sure, I think broad spectrum genetic testing would be fascinatingly confronting to all those “gender is part of the woke agenda” gormless shit-heads. It’d be a riot! Just like when you see Aryan Nation morons discover they are not quite the “pure race” they thought they were when the results come back. But we as a nation can’t even get fucking dental on Medicare let along broad spectrum genetic testing into people’s genders. So what is the fucking point of this?

I’d also consider saying “prefer not to answer” because I WOULD prefer not to answer lest I feed their conflation between biology and gender. That is what this question does. Placing it here, in this section firmly plants a flag that the ABS still doesn’t understand the difference between “gender”, the range of social and cultural identities that sit separate from “sex” which is the presentation of specific physiological characteristics that present as a spectrum.

The fact that these three questions are so confronting to the establishment speaks volumes. It has long been my opinion that understanding certain aspects of things can be gleaned by changing the scale of them. The way when you look at the veins of a leaf and the stalks of a twig they reflect each other. You will see repeated shapes. Same for the twig and the branch, the branch and the bough, the bough and the tree. I think about the way I’ve suffered at the hands of abusers, and I can see those same shapes reflected back in the statements of our political leaders.

Why are these three (terribly considered) questions such a problem?

Because they open a crack in the bulwark. Anyone who has suffered abuse can tell you that the first way that they control you is to deny that they are doing anything wrong. To allow these three questions would establish that gender IS something that can be self-defined. That it can be different from the official documentation. That it can be a complex interaction of social, mental, physical experiences that require nuance and consideration. We are living in a world where we’re being subjected to “DARVO”, the “deny, attack, reverse victim order” tactics of abusers by the people we elect to lead us.

As the structure of the leaf mirrors the structure of the tree.

So once again my high hopes of having accurate representation, firm numbers that we can point to, are dashed. All the mealy-mouthed explanations in the world can’t hide the fact that this is yet again another example of the spinelessness of the Australian political class. We saw it with the marriage plebiscite. That bonkers moment in Australian history where a small group of elected conservative queers found a window to force the discussion into the mainstream against the wishes of then Prime Minister. A Prime Minister who could at any point have spent his political capital to just pass the law without public vote. Who could have enacted change without spending millions on an unnecessary process. Who could have prevented untold costs on citizenry who were forced to endure public debate about how they were unnatural and that their indecency would lead to widespread bestiality and paedophilia.

Yeah. That spineless Prime Minister could have just made it happen.

Cause the only reason we were in that position in the first place was because a previous Prime Minister in 2004 decided to change the Marriage Act to explicitly limit it to a man and woman. But instead, we got months vile rhetoric and leader who took the victory lap for the efforts of others.

God, I had high hopes when government changed. I felt that flutter in my gullet. Maybe now, maybe this time a leader will stand for something. They will see which way the wind is blowing, and they will act out of conscience. They will act out of a sense of duty to the people and not to “the economy”, the “shareholders” and “donors”. I had hoped that we would see a leader who stood firm to principal and not one who backflipped when the job got hard.

But no, just another quisling traitor.

We spend so much of our lives being told we are isolated aberrations, that we are so far outside of the norm that they can’t even be bothered to count us. But the truth is, if they did count us, they would be faced with the cold, hard fact:

We are millions.

–S