The Make-Believe Danger Of Gender Neutrality

By Samuel Leighton-Dore

So the world is ending, you guys.

Grasping a copy of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, the maintenance man at my workplace was visibly unimpressed. In fact, he was bordering on enraged. Of course, he hadn’t yet read the article he was so upset about.

But that’s completely beside the point.

You see, The Daily Telegraph has never so much encouraged reading as it has mindlessly flicking through a politically biased curation of shocking and blatantly misleading headlines. Not that Miranda Devine’s alarmist small print would have done very much to sooth this poor man’s growing sense of unease at the imagined army of PC Social Justice Warriors threatening to invade his fair-dinkum island nation home.

Of course, this particular article (on the introduction of gender-neutral language to Cheltenham Girls High School) is to be expected from The Daily Telegraph. It’s the bread and butter for a small stable of conservative right-wing columnists including Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt. Indeed no news is too small or insignificant for a front-page headline when it correlates with their long-running theory of the destructive gay agenda.

In this case it was a single mother’s complaint about the introduction of the Safe Schools Program at her daughter’s school. At a time of such unforeseen international terror and political upheaval, you’d be right in assuming that one mother’s complaint would be lucky to make page 17 of the Inner-West Courier. But one mother’s outrage is the perfect spark for Miranda Devine’s hefty tank of gasoline – and The Daily Telegraph is more than happy to fan the flames as they spread throughout media outlets (Devine’s article was discussed on 2GB radio, with host Chris Smith describing it as “deplorable” that schools were being led by “that twisted bible, the Safe Schools program”) and onto the radar of parliamentary agenda.

With yesterday’s front page article titled THE GIRLS SCHOOL WHERE GIRLS ARE BANNED, it comes as little surprise that those without the patience to dissect fact from fiction might be left with the bitter impression that the gay-brigade has started robbing young women of their right to a gender identity. Scrap that – their right to an education. Such an emboldened  title evokes haunting images of girls being forcefully undressed and made to wear pants and ties. Such a title suggests girls are being turned away from school for being who they are.

Fucking hell, readers would be quite right to find such a prospect horrific.

That is, if it were real.

Which it isn’t.

Headlines like these are designed to frighten. They’re designed to further alienate and provoke those who already feel out-of-step with the march for national equality. They’re designed to perpetuate the narrative that the LGBTIQ community is different; that we’re not only trying to change the laws, we’re trying to change everyday people – that we’re trying to change what it means to be an Australian.

As the article eventually stated, the Safe Schools Program being implemented by the prestigious girls school was simply encouraging “the use of gender-­neutral language such as ‘students’ in place of ‘girls’ and ‘boys'”. Right. You know, kind of like in the real world where employees are referred to as ’employees’ and not ‘women’ or ‘men’. Blasphemous.

In a post to Facebook on Wednesday afternoon, the school denied the very basis of Devine’s article, saying that it had “a proud ongoing tradition of providing high quality education for girls”.

“The school has not and will not change the way students’ gender is referred to.”

Devine’s article is equivalent to reporting a plane hijacking at the mention of a Muslim man standing on a QANTAS flight to use the restroom. Of course, such an article may still be reported. It’s only Thursday.

Regardless, it should go without saying that shifting to the use of inclusive language in the presence of diverse communities and groups of young people is completely harmless and should be encouraged. Gender-neutral pronouns are just that: neutral. Neutrality isn’t scary. Nobody is denying these young women their gender. Nobody is trying to masculate them.

Programs like these are simply attempting to phase out the unnecessary use of gendered terminology as leverage for division or exclusion.

And writers like Devine are hell-bent on achieving the very opposite – dividing and excluding.