Councils pushing the intolerant trans ideology
Features Australia
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13 May 2023
9:00 AM
As most readers would no doubt have been made aware, later this month the City of Monash had planned to host a ‘Drag Story Time’ event at a local library in celebration of IDAHOBIT Day.
For all the benighted cretins out there, IDAHOBIT Day is, of course, the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, and to celebrate the occasion men in drag had planned to read, among other things, She’s My Dad! to the urbane three-year-olds of Oakleigh – a suburb previously best known for its Greek and Chinese restaurants, and food malls you could smoke in.
Despite the initial storm of protest and counter-protest, where everyone was predictably a ‘fascist’ or a ‘child groomer’, Monash remained unwavering in its support – in itself interesting, not least because no ratepayers appeared to be in any rush for Drag Story Time at any stage prior to this.
That, however, collapsed this week, when proud neo-Nazi and convicted thug Thomas Sewell, who seems to spend his days working out and searching the internet for things he can gatecrash, reportedly promised to ‘bring as many Nazis as possible’.
Children shouldn’t be exposed to the presence of an agro menace like Sewell and Monash wisely cancelled the event, but that shouldn’t necessarily prevent us from taking a closer look at what was planned, and critics of it shouldn’t be traduced as transphobes any more than the councillors who supported Drag Story Time denigrated as pedophiles.
In her defense of Drag Story Time a few weeks ago, Monash mayor Tina Samardzija argued that, ‘It’s a way to challenge the idea that we’re all supposed to look, act and behave in a certain way.’
Moving on from the first question this all-too-familiar platitude suggests, namely that who asked Tina Samardzija, or the Monash Council for that matter, to say anything on the question of how people ‘look, act and behave’, a challenge indeed awaited the children of Oakleigh – the first of which probably would have been staying awake.
In She’s My Dad! we’re introduced to the tale of Mini and her dad Haley, a transgender woman.
‘Dad and I take turns in painting one another’s nails. Oh didn’t I tell you? My dad is a she!’ Mini tells the reader.
‘Dad’s changed her name to Haley and asked me to use the pronouns she/her instead of he/him.’
A passage of dialogue between Mini and her cousin Kat a page or so later encapsulates the tediousness and weird, covert moralising combined in She’s My Dad!
After a ‘funny story’ shared by Mini’s dad (the contents of which, in a bitter deprivation, we are left only to imagine), Kat turns to her cousin and says, ‘Mini, I really like Haley, he’s so funny!’
‘“No, not he, my dad is a she,” I say to Kat.’
‘It makes her feel sad when people use the wrong pronouns,’ the narrator reflects.
If it wasn’t immediate, one certainly gets the impression now that Drag Story Time is much less about challenging ‘the idea that we’re all supposed to look, act and behave in a certain way’, and more about familiarising children with edicts of an increasingly intolerant orthodoxy.
Nor would the challenges have stopped there for the kids of Oakleigh unlucky enough to have found themselves lugged along to Drag Story Time.
Enter local drag queen SamT, who the Monash Council hired for the event to provide some ‘extra sparkle.’
One of the more striking images on SamT’s public Instagram page shows ‘her’ modelling a skin-tight leopard-print gimp suit in high heels – ‘gimped and gorgeous’, the caption reads – with the back of ‘her’ legs seductively bare.
If you were too incurably dim to be familiar with the significance of IDAHOBIT Day, the description of a leopard print gimp suit might also leave you confused – but this really isn’t the time or the place to expand on the nuances of BDSM fetishes – for that, the Oakleigh library will probably be happy to help.
How all of this came about in the first place, presumably at the expense of Monash locals, isn’t entirely clear.
At the end of the day, what is there to make of it?
It should go without saying that parents have the right to raise their children in whatever manner they see fit.
Yet, as is repeatedly the case with ultra-woke trends, seemingly always sniffed out first by local councils with a tenacity that suggests they have nothing better to do, this is not about something as basic as the rights of parents and children.
The reality is tens of thousands of parents in the Monash council area already raise their children in whatever way they see fit, and have precisely no interest in what their local councillors might suggest in this area.
She’s my Dad!, SamT, and Monash Council’s stated pursuit of ‘Rainbow Tick’ accreditation seem to get closer to the point.
The former isn’t a children’s book, but a how-to-guide in trans dogma aimed at young children, the exercise of whose curiosity and imagination shouldn’t be burdened by the self-righteous preachings of a movement that, in any event, will be an inescapable tyranny for the rest of their lives.
SamT raises a different question concerning the sexualisation of children’s environments.
‘Gimped and gorgeous’ she may be, she hardly seems the appropriate candidate to perform Drag Story Time in front of children.
Supporters of the event will invariably argue that the session, which was reportedly sold out, proves that there is desire for this service, and that all of its opponents are just a bunch of unregenerate bigots whose views are no doubt ‘harmful’ and ‘not helpful’.
But this would miss the point – there’s a market for most things out there. Just because twenty people might be interested in an event doesn’t mean the local council needs to fill the gap in the market.
This leads to a second point. People, not least Monash ratepayers, might well object that they don’t need their local council to use other people’s money to prosecute a worldview that has made serious impositions on the rights of women, and threatens the rest of society with cancellation lest their demands on language, science and gender ideology be submitted to.
The abuse and threats reportedly made by opponents of Drag Story Time were rightfully highlighted this week, but one can’t help wondering if any of this was necessary to go through in the first place.
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