Politics
Tasmania transformed?
WHEN it comes to the anti-Green ads that featured in the Tasmanian election what’s the real issue?
Is it majority government, anonymous political interventions, advertising disclosure laws, conspiracy theories about shadowy forces, Green Party immaturity, unholy alliances between theocrats and corporate bosses, bad losers, bad winners?
The real issue is, in fact, not an issue at all. What’s ultimately at stake here is people’s lives.
How many of the candidates and commentators who have raged against ads linked to the Exclusive Brethren, or have raged for the Brethren’s right to express their views, or who have just raged, have paused to consider what impact those ads had on the people they targeted.
No, I’m not talking about the Greens.
I’m talking about the transgender and intersex people whose fundamental rights the ads claimed will “ruin society”.
A few people in positions of influence have dismissed this attack on gender minorities as foolish bunk not worth even responding to.
They are clearly oblivious to the extreme vulnerability of transgender and intersex Tasmanians.
They are obviously ignorant of the extraordinarily high rates of prejudice, sackings, bashings, and suicides that make life as a
transgender and intersex person as hard as all hell.
But at least they said something.
The new inclusive Tasmania …
What happened to all those Liberal and Labor candidates who ordinarily can’t stop talking about the new inclusive Tasmania, who spout endlessly about how far we’ve come, how much we’ve changed, who slap each other on the back for supporting reform, and wax lyrical about the lessons Tasmania has learnt?
When it really mattered they were silent, every last one of them.
For them, all the lessons of the New Tasmania are nothing next to the one great lesson of the Old: look away.
And just in case you think I’m being partisan, the Greens’ don’t get off lightly either.
Not one Greens’ party flier, letter-to-the-editor, website posting, or reported press statement directly defended their transgender and intersex policies, or pointed out that many of the same policies can be found in the voting records of the other parties and the Acts of the State Parliament.
Their decision to deal generically with “fear and smear” left transgender and intersex people high and dry.
But like I said, this isn’t about parties or elections, it’s about people.
An island so done with hate
Imagine what it’s like when being true to yourself after years of agonised confusion means revealing to your colleagues and loved ones that the person they knew as Stephen is in fact Stephanie?
Imagine what it’s like knowing, deep down, that the gender a doctor arbitrarily assigned you at birth is the wrong one, and spending decades searching for answers in a world that has none?
If you’re lucky you might find a bit of security, fulfilment and even love in such a world — a job where nobody laughs at you, a street where people say hello, a partner who sticks by you no matter what, and an island so done with hate it promises you too can belong.
Then one day you open the paper and there’s an ad denouncing your rights, your identity, your life.
The next day the same trash is in your letter box.
You wait to hear reassuring words of sanity and common sense from the community leaders who were only too willing to shake your hand last week.
But they don’t come.
Nothing. Silence.
Imagine what that would be like?
Transgender and intersex Tasmanians are our friends and colleagues. They generate our jobs, make our food, heal our bodies, and teach us the meaning of courage.
But when they needed us most we, as a society, abandoned and betrayed them.
We turned away and raged instead about political interventions, disclosure laws, and conspiracy theories.
Is this the New Tasmania; this very, very Old Tasmania, where nothing’s changed and nothing’s learnt unless it’s how to be even more callous than before?
The choice is ours, and it’s ours to make now.
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