Kirsti Miller
This Advance Australia post is exactly the problem. Advance Australia is on it. Pauline Hanson is on it. A transgender woman was discriminated against, and suddenly the political machine is pretending Australia has collapsed. Come on. We are talking about a tiny, marginalised group of people just trying to live their lives. Where is the great national emergency here? Women in Australia face real danger. Domestic violence. Intimate partner violence. Sexual assault. Coercive control. Harassment. The serious harm women face in this country is not being driven by transgender women. It is being driven by male violence. But that is a harder problem to face. So instead, the political machine finds a smaller, easier target and tells everyone to panic. That is not protecting women. That is scapegoating. This is how culture war works: find a rare, difficult case, strip out the human being, inflate it into a national emergency, then watch everyone fight. And of course, within five minutes, this gets dragged into the usual panic about toilets and public bathrooms. But honestly, if someone is spending their day wondering what is going on with the body of the person in the next toilet cubicle, I’m not sure they are defending women. I think they might just be the weirdest person in the bathroom. Debate the law if you want. But turning a tiny minority into a national punching bag is ugly politics. We can do better than this.
