Let us pray

Legislation before the Victorian parliament under the pretext of preventing transphobia blurs the boundaries between public and private life and provides cover for harassing churches or individuals with no consequences. By Nick Cater.

The Premier who thought it was OK to handcuff a pregnant woman in her pyjamas for something she posted on Facebook has launched a fresh assault on freedoms hitherto thought sacrosanct.

Legislation before the Victorian parliament will make the act of prayer a criminal offence in some circumstances. Yet in an era when it is cool to self-identify as anything but a Christian, hardly anyone is making a fuss.

The pretext for the bill is transphobia, a contagion for which the Andrews government believes the church is a super spreader. It will be illegal to counsel a person to change or suppress their chosen gender identity. Prohibited actions include “carrying out a religious practice, including but not limited to, a prayer-based practice”.

The prohibition applies whether or not the subject consented to the prayer-based activity. The penalty is up to 10 years’ imprisonment or an enormous fine.

Complaints can be made anonymously and come “from any person”, even those not affected. In other words, it is a charter for anti-religious activists to harass and intimidate churches or individuals at no cost to themselves.

COVID-19 became an excuse for leaders such as Daniel Andrews to flirt with authoritarianism. He has clearly acquired a taste for it. This bill betrays a government that has lost every trace of modesty. It is insensitive to the boundaries between public and private life in a liberal democracy.

It is not just church leaders who might find themselves in strife for failing to affirm a person’s sexual or gender identity. Parents are in trouble, too. The Human Rights Law Alliance warns that “parents who struggle with their 13-year-old daughter’s sudden presentation of gender confusion and who oppose chemical and surgical practices to transition appearance to that of a male, could be made criminals and face jail time”.

None of this will surprise anyone with a child in a Victorian state school where the wishes of the parent are routinely dismissed on matters of gender identity. The Victorian Education Department has created a unique category of child they call “mature minors”, students who in the opinion of a school principal or other professional can make their own decisions about gender identity without parental consent. Hence a child too young to consent to sex is considered capable of making decisions about their gender.

Since the consequences of such a decision are not trivial, prudence would allow as many checks and balances as possible. The duty of care to minors requires us to acknowledge their immaturity and protect their vulnerability.

That is not how gender reassignment works, however. The prevailing medical approach is known as “gender-affirming care”, in which priority is given to the child’s self-diagnosis. To question the patient’s judgment would be transphobic, abusive and insensitive, we are told. On questions of gender identity, unlike decisions about safe alcohol consumption or watching an R-rated movie, the child’s judgment is supreme.

Transgender activists are a pushy bunch, convinced of the righteousness of their extreme agenda. They ward off their enemies by laying trip wires. Counter-arguments are equated with physical violence and those who make them are toxic. Good people are inclined to retreat lest they are caught in the eye of a Twitterstorm or something much worse.

The legislation cruised through the Victorian Legislative Assembly on Thursday afternoon with barely a murmur. The opposition demand for a period of consultation went the way of all Liberal Party amendments and the bill was on its way to the upper house by 10 past five.

Outside parliament, the response has been equally feeble, save for the interventions of the Australian Christian Lobby, the Catholic Church and the Presbyterians. Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop, Peter Comensoli, wrote: “No government has an interest in what a person prays for, who they pray to, who they pray with, or what conversations happen between members of a family.”

The question that demands to be asked is: What is the problem to which this is the solution? Why are so many teenagers, girls in particular, claiming to be uncomfortable in their own bodies?

A decade ago, gender dysphoria was a rare condition that mostly became apparent in early childhood. The concept of adolescent-onset gender dysphoria began appearing in medical literature in 2012. Today, the incidence of rapid-onset dysphoria during or after puberty has the sociological hallmarks of a craze, a collective obsession that spreads through peer contagion.

Physician Lisa Littman from Brown University, Rhode Island, studied 256 cases and found 82 per cent of those who identified as transgender in adolescence were born female, a reversal of previous findings. The average age of their announcement was 15.2 years. In 87 per cent of cases, parents reported the onset had been preceded by an increase in their social media or internet use or that one or more friends in the child’s friendship group were transgender-identified, or both.

The children were predominantly white and 74 per cent of their parents had a graduate or bachelor degree. The parents held predominantly liberal values in the American sense with 86 per cent in favour of same-sex marriage and 88 per cent in favour of transgender rights.

Littman’s findings oblige us to reassess the assumption that every child who expresses discomfort with their natal gender is suffering from dysphoria. We are also obliged to interrogate the transgender influencers who attract millions of young followers to their YouTube channels, preaching the glitter gospel and issuing medical advice that is dangerously unsound.

We should be encouraging minors to seek a second, third or fourth opinion from doctors, priests, pastors and other professionals before embarking on a path that could alter their bodies irreversibly with a limited chance of improving their mental health.

Yet the Victorian law will make it illegal to do anything other than pat them on the head. The issue here is not the maturity of minors, but the intellectual immaturity of adults who exploit teenage anxiety for ideological ends.