Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to address the attacks we've witnessed on our young trans people and their families in recent days, fuelled by Trump's harmful attacks in the US and by those here in Australia who feel emboldened by them. Trans issues are being weaponised at present to divide us, to foster fear and more than anything else to distract us. That is what is happening when the Queensland Premier shuts down gender-affirming care. That is what is happening when Senator Canavan and Mr Barnaby Joyce say Australia should follow Trump's lead, weighing in on the health care of our trans kids. This weaponisation has a particular purpose: to create a political distraction from the very real challenges affecting our communities, like access to health care, the cost of living and access to housing. Trans folks and their families need the best medical and healthcare advice in calm, considered spaces, evaluating the best evidence, not kneejerk political decisions to suspend care based on untrue claims. On the other side of these claims are real people—carers, families, young people—who do not need uninformed political weaponisers deciding on their health care, putting their treatments and certainly their health and in some cases their lives on the line.

When some years ago one of my adult children, Indi, told me that they were transgender, I did not need the advice of politicians. I did not give my local senator a call. I was a parent on new terrain, facing a new challenge. I looked for help and support, but the last person I needed was my local MP. I needed to build my understanding based on the evidence of expert caregivers and those living the experience, and I had a lot to learn. Indi and the trans community and many people in South Australia who know a lot and provide extraordinary care and support were up for teaching me. The most important thing our trans folks need, alongside the best clinical care and the same rights, protections and services as every other Australian, is freedom from hatred, judgement and bigotry and to be free from having their decisions used as political footballs by politicians.

Every parent has critical moments with their kids: a scary midnight fever, a new school—so many things. What we need in those moments is not judgement and not misinformation but well-informed advice and support from trusted experts who know the score—exactly the sort of thing I needed, for example, when another of my children, Jake, was diagnosed with a brain tumour in his 20s. Once again, we did not need the help of politicians. We needed a really good neurosurgeon with excellent knowledge of the latest clinical guidelines and lots of experience operating on brains. We needed experts who actually know things, backed up by a good public health care system that gave us quality, accessible, affordable care. It worked. Jake is here with us tonight. Thank you, Dr Bhadu Kavar and Professor Andrew Lee.

Of course, a brain tumour is nothing like being transgender. The point, however, is that we don't politicise brain surgery. Senators don't weigh in with an opinion on treatment. In the same way, we must not politicise gender-affirming care. Last week, 491 young people on the waiting list for that care in Queensland were denied that help, thrown into panic and fear because of a harmful political decision. An enormous amount of careful work will surround being on that list. With their families by their side, people will have been through or faced thorough medical assessments by multidisciplinary teams. Australia's gender-affirming care regime is well established, widely supported and evidence based. Its supporters include the AMA; the royal colleges of GPs, physicians, psychiatrists and pathologists; the Endocrine Society of Australia, the Australian Psychological Society; the World Health Organization; the World Medical Association; and many other bodies.

Of course, all medical treatments change over time and must be subject to evidence based review by scientists like those at the National Health and Medical Research Council—treatments like brain surgery protocols and gender-affirming care. The appropriate care of our trans youth should not be a political issue, a weapon used to distract us from the real challenges that threaten our economic and social wellbeing—issues like inequality, poverty and the climate crisis. No-one should misuse the wellbeing of young trans kids like the 491 kids on that waiting list in Queensland, many of them at the most critically vulnerable moment in their lives, to advance their political fortunes. There is no room in those decisions for politicians any more than there's room for them in the operating theatre for brain surgery.

I have sat in this chamber too many times, at least five since the last election, listening to horrible, ignorant, judgmental speeches about trans people. We heard it today from Senator Roberts and Senator Babet, endorsing Trump's attacks on our trans folks. That talk fosters bigotry. It aims to increase fear. Fortunately the great majority of Australians, almost 80 per cent, believe trans people deserve exactly the same rights as anyone else. Ninety-three per cent of those who know a trans person believe trans people deserve the same rights as anybody else. No trans person or their family or community deserves the judgement or uninformed medical opinions of politicians who simply have no idea. Such judgement makes every aspect of life for trans people and their loved ones harder, more dangerous, more fearful and more unsafe.

These debates exact a price in health and in life. Transgender kids between 14 and 25 years are 15 times more likely to attempt suicide than the rest of the population of this age. Uninformed bigotry affects the mental health of some of our most vulnerable citizens, and, as a trans person recently said to me: 'These attacks are also just bloody inconvenient. They take such an enormous effort to deal with, and they make life so unnecessarily complicated.' Our kids have done nothing to deserve that bigotry, and their families have done nothing to deserve ugly buckets of angry, ignorant rubbish. It's these buckets, these people and the licence they aim to create for trans hatred in our communities which inflict the high mental cost and loss of life in our trans communities.

Being trans is not the problem; being subject to ignorant judgement and prejudice is, and shame on any politician who plays a part in fuelling it. Shame on those politicians who have done so in recent days, milking the vulnerabilities of our kids for a few votes. Is there anywhere lower for a politician to go? What price for those votes? I've thought of the trans community so much in recent days when hearing these stories. They want something simple but profound, something most people take for granted: the right to live freely as they choose.

This bigotry is being wielded on a new scale by Donald Trump, and some Australian politicians are following his lead, emboldened by him. He wants us to be frightened, afraid and angry with trans people. Some people in this chamber want the same. But I say to every parent and all the young people affected out there that there are plenty of us who will fight to make sure you get the advice and support you need from those you trust, informed by the best evidence and experience we have. You are loved. You belong. Be yourself.

Trans people are everywhere. They are doctors, mechanics, gardeners and politicians. They don't seek to be heroic, but they are heroic—utterly heroic in their steady insistence on being who they are, no more or less—and they have a thing or two to teach the political performers in this place who attack a tiny minority, many of them young and vulnerable, to distract us from the true challenges of our time: inequality, the extraordinary power of the super-rich and the climate crisis affecting the future of our young people. Using a small, vulnerable cohort of young people, our trans kids, to distract us from the real game in town is simply wrong—truly ironic, truly horrible, utterly unacceptable and wholly un-Australian.