Mentions Australian Christian Lobby

Do I hear dominoes falling with grim predictability? Plus: there's a Northern Territory Government? You learn something new every day.

In short:

Health Minister Steve Edgington has announced the Northern Territory government will no longer fund puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormone treatments for children.

He said the government's public health focus would instead "remain on adolescent mental health services".

What's next?

Mr Edgington says the policy will affect "a handful of young teenagers" who had been accessing the treatments through the NT's public health system.

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Children in the Northern Territory will no longer have access to publicly funded puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones after Health Minister Steve Edgington announced the government would follow Queensland's lead in suspending the treatments. […]

"Territory kids deserve to grow up free from these dangerous, ideologically driven practices with irreversible consequences," he said.

"The Territory's public health focus will remain on adolescent mental health services."

The move follows pressure from the Australian Christian Lobby, which presented a petition to the government in October 2024, calling on it to "suspend all medical and surgical transitioning for children in the NT".

The Australian Christian Lobby has sent an election mail out in Victoria, spreading transphobia and trying to discredit The Greens.

Residents of the City of Yarra and Moreland City Councils contacted QNews after they received transphobic election material.

It arrived in their letterbox the day after Trans Day of Visibility.

The pamphlet from the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) was titled: “Male and Female Matter”.

It states that the Greens are “experimenting with biology at your expense”.

“Male and female matter, The Greens don’t agree,” the pamphlet read.

Siting that “while you wait for urgent medical care, The Greens want to use your tax dollars for free gender transition surgeries”.

The pamphlet also says that the Greens wish to put more gender clinics in hospitals while emergency departments are in crisis.

The Republican Party thought it could ride the tiger of the Christian Right: instead, that movement swallowed the party whole. There a presidential candidate’s victory could depend on their success at gaining the Christian Right leaders’ endorsement. The news released on Sunday that Coalition candidates submitted a Christian principles statement to the Australian Christian Lobby’s (ACL) voter advice site signals they are making the same dangerous gamble.

The ACL is not lobbying for the traditional Australian definition of Christian, which leans more to the “live and let live”. Rather, this is an organisation committed to coercive, American style Christianity. It has been listed as a “hate group”. Rumours in Pentecostal circles that the ACL is encouraging its leaders to undertake training from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a radical right American organisation that has argued for the “state-sanctioned sterilisation of trans people” need to be addressed. That body also works towards the (re)criminalising of homosexuality and stripping of access to reproductive healthcare. The ACL and the ADFwere both at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London in February, with the ADF’s Kristen Waggoner listed as a speaker. Many Coalition politicians are on the ARC’s advisory board and attended that conference.

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The statement concludes with a transphobic commitment to the “biological fact” that there are only two sexes. The Coalition’s statement deviates from the extreme position represented in Trump’s second government only by allowing that intersex biology exists. This grade school understanding of human biology, let alone psychology, is reductive and wrong. It also flags the continued misuse of trans people as the first targeted outsider in an ugly politics that prioritises the insider identity against a chosen mutual enemy.

Because of course it does.