I was a protester – now a protest has been directed at me

My first time on the receiving end of a protest was confronting. On Tuesday evening, eight or nine noisy trans activists tried – but failed — to shut down a forum I was chairing at the University of Melbourne. Their efforts to stop about 100 people – mostly university staff and students – from holding an interesting and important debate have left me puzzled and worried.

The forum they interrupted – and tried to stop completely – was at the periphery of transgender issues, but the same has been happening with lively discussions on other topics, including religious belief. It is a small example of a bigger problem. If you demand respect, then you have to give it.

Protesters tried to shut down a discussion at the University of Melbourne on Tuesday.Credit:Wayne Taylor

This week’s confected furore over the clumsy handling of the appointment of a new CEO at Essendon Football Club bore similar hallmarks. It has been widely mislabelled as a tussle over freedom of religion. It was no such thing. This was an arm wrestle over respect.

Reduced to its simplest, someone starting a new job had a conflict of interest. Andrew Thorburn had to choose which of two leadership roles he valued most. You cannot be a leader in a otherwise. But there are consequences for him that follow that choice. Portraying him as the victim is disingenuous.

Until I started working at the ABC in 1989, I attended my share of protests. As a university student, I threw a few water bombs at the governor-general in the aftermath of the Dismissal (none of them got even remotely close), I raised my voice marching with many others over our national disgrace of race relations, and I joined in many other worthy and noble causes. I don’t mind a good protest – I consider it as a signifier of a healthy democracy.

Until I started working at the ABC in 1989, I attended my share of protests.Credit:Illustration: Matt Davidson

It therefore came as something of a shock this week to find myself being aggressively accused of transphobia, of creating a risk to other people’s health and safety, simply for wanting to have a discussion.

The forum was called “Pride and Prejudice in Policy” and was hosted by the School of History and Philosophy of Science within the Arts Faculty of the University of Melbourne. Hardly a hotbed of reactionary or conservative thinking – quite the contrary.

Speakers were invited to represent the different views – for and against – on the emerging role of “benchmarking”, a process used to assess diversity programs, which which is a tool to measure and advance the commitment to end all forms of discrimination, particularly gender-related.

Much more can and must be done to enshrine a safe and secure workplace for LGBTQI+ colleagues. The history of stigma, exclusion, and sometimes violence aimed at transgender and gender-diverse people must end.

The forum was a discussion about how diversity benchmark programs work. Nobody was questioning transgenderism itself. But apparently some trans activists believe that even discussing benchmarking is to be equated with being transphobic. They argue that any debate which could lead to discussing the difference between sex and gender is in itself a transphobic discussion.

Not one word undermining the lived experience of transgender and gender-diverse people was uttered at the forum – nor was ever going to be. The three-person panel included long-standing activist Dr Julie Peters who has frequently documented her own transition and has become the unofficial archivist of the struggle for transgender rights.

To try to stop the forum from even being held, to yell at Peters that she is not allowed to discuss her lived experience — because doing so might be harmful to people who are not even there — is bordering on the absurd. But that is what happened.

Another of our panellists, Linda Gale, is a long-serving and distinguished member of the Australian Greens and a union official. As she explained in a column in The Age in June, she was this year removed from the elected position of convenor of the Victorian Greens after trans lobbyists objected to some aspects of an internal Greens discussion paper she had written a few years before.

It’s hard to comprehend how a life-long feminist leftie, who has devoted herself to a smorgasbord of progressive causes, could be described as transphobic. Trying to shout down a forum on how a workplace diversity program operates seems a lot like bullying.

Free speech is an essential ingredient to any functioning democracy and particularly any independent centre for scholarship and deep thinking, such as the University of Melbourne. Free speech never means open slather – there are all sorts of qualifiers including the laws on defamation and hate speech. But a respectful and sensitive discussion of issues that can be a major influence on our community must never be declared off limits.

I am mystified at how some people within the trans community have become so aggressive and censorious. Attacking your friends does not help in the battle against real enemies. When it comes to supporting diversity, the champions of diversity must show they can embrace diversity of opinion, too.

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