Sport is not the place for social engineering

The dragging of local sports clubs into the contested debate about gender theory may prove to be the final over-reach of LGBTIQ political activists.

Most of us who are involved in our local non-elite sporting clubs – usually through our kids on a Saturday morning – are not remotely thinking about the politics of whether-or-not “Johnny” should be allowed to strap on a skirt and join the netball team as “Mary”.

But thanks to guidelines released earlier this month by the ACT Human Rights Commission, local footy and netball club volunteer office holders are under pressure to wade through 34 pages of complex law and gender ideology to make sure they avoid getting fined under the Discrimination Act.

With the Orwellian title “Everyone Can Play”, this gender-bending gobbly-gook is redefining the way we are supposed to look at human biology by striking at the heart of Australian’s simple love of sport.

Anyone who remotely understands the culture of local non-elite sports will know that the idea of “everyone can play” is already deeply entrenched in our sense of the fair go.

The HRC’s suggestion that our local sporting clubs are excluding anyone is quite frankly an insult to the volunteers who week in, week out, go about making sure everyone is included.

In my decades of involvement in junior and senior sports I’ve seen club communities work together to make sure reasonable accommodations are made based on gender, age and disability so that “everyone can play”.

This is what comes naturally to ‘fair go’-minded Australians who don’t need Big Brother looking over their shoulder.

But the HRC’s guidelines are using sport and the law to coerce radical cultural change under the pretence of a conversation.

In fact, the not-so-subtle implication is that if you are not on board with the idea that gender is a social construct, you are a bigot and there is a ‘process’ followed by the threat of court and fines to bring you into line.

But there is no dispute in Australian culture that everyone should be treated courteously and with respect.

Often the best examples of our ability to self-regulate the necessary behaviours of civil society are witnessed at Saturday morning sport.

We of course are not perfect and we’ve all seen ugly incidents but what warms the heart is our ability to call this out and deal with it without a government-mandated ‘process’.

We don’t need the HRC to tell us that bullying – for any reason – is wrong.

Any compassionate person, of which I believe most Australians are, will be sensitive to a young person working through issues of sexuality or gender identity.

But without recourse to a free and open conversation about how we might accommodate them, the HRC’s guidelines require sporting clubs to allow men and boys identifying as women to use the toilets, showers and change rooms of their chosen gender.

This is not a suggestion, it is a legal requirement under the Discrimination Act, according to the HRC.

The key question is, are the mums and dads of Canberra comfortable with their daughters sharing intimate facilities with males (no surgery is required according to the HRC guidelines) who have decided to identify as females or indeed no gender?

The ‘T’ in LGBTIQ is used to describe these people as Transgender and of course it applies to women identifying as men.

Those pushing for change argue there is no threat to women and girls from allowing men with penises, who identify as women, to share their intimate facilities.

For most this is probably true. But we are talking about a very new social phenomenon about which there has been little community debate before the HRC stepped in with its legislation-backed “guidelines”.

The Washington DC based conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, recently documented 130 incidents of men in North America using new-found access to women’s facilities for acts of voyeurism.

It is naïve to think that girls and women will not feel uncomfortable and vulnerable to abuse through such an ill-thought out law.

The HRC, like many of the political activists pushing for change, conflate the heart-breaking physical issue of babies born with ambiguous genitalia – a condition known as intersex – to push for transgender rights.

A very tiny proportion of children are born this way and a compassionate society makes every reasonable accommodation to ensure they are not stigmatised.

But those wishing to identify as someone other than their biological gender need to realise that this has consequences for the rights and freedoms of other people.

And all of us should be free to have a civil and respectful discussion about what it means to be male and female without our politically correct overlords forcing us to use new language or change the locker room policies at our local sports club.

Reasonable accommodations can and should be found for anyone working through issues of gender identity.

But using sport to drive law-backed contested gender ideology through our culture is un-Australian and potentially unsafe.