How AIDS charities are erasing gay men – The Spectator Australia
An HIV+ gay man claims to have been denied counselling by an AIDS charity because he openly refuses to include females in his dating life.
Jason Whitehall is a regular Aussie guy in many ways. He lives in country Victoria, he has chickens and a brown dog that travels with him in his Holden ute to town. Jason is also gay and has been living with HIV since the late 80s.
The 80s was a terrifying time in Australia for many gay men. Jason remembers volunteering for the Victorian AIDS Council when very sick gay men were needing crisis accommodation and support services. He told me that dying men left estates and legacies to fledgling organisations that were struggling to meet demands for support. I got the feeling that this gave Jason a sense of ownership over the services that are now offered to what is called the ‘LGBTQ+ community’. He feels like the organisations he once volunteered for are a legacy of support from brothers and lovers that are now passed.
People now live long active lives while HIV+, but many are not without need of specialist support. Jason is suffering from PTSD and several other conditions related the stress on his life as a HIV+ gay man. Jason found himself seeking the phone counselling service that is offered free of charge by the former Victorian AIDS Council, now Thorne Harbour Health.
Wanting to be honest, Jason told Thorne Harbour Health that one major source of anxiety in his life is the inclusion policies of public and private services for gay men in Victoria. Jason has been self-excluding from dating sites, gay bars, and saunas because he is anxious about encountering trans-identified females.
Jason understands that some women feel like they have a male soul, but he doesn’t understand why gay men can’t be allowed exclusive spaces, not just dating, but for a space of community and release from heterosexual society.
Jason is a gay man because he is not attracted to women, that is how he became vulnerable to HIV. Jason’s health needs are directly tied to his sex and his sexuality.
Initially, the person Jason talked to at Thorne Harbour indicated that they would be able to offer a service to him. They conducted a long survey over the phone with a lot of personal questions. Jason left the conversation thinking he would be allocated a counsellor and told them he would prefer one with an understanding of his ‘biological reality’. Jason didn’t want to be counselled in the very gender identity ideology that he is finding alienating and homophobic.
After a week or so, a woman from Thorn Harbour Health called Jason and told him that due to the nature of his problem, they could not help him, because they were an ‘inclusive’ service. He claims that he was deemed ineligible for phone counselling because he doesn’t ‘accept trans men as gay men’.
Thorne Harbour Health claims to use a ‘social model of health’ aligned with the World Health Organisation’s Ottawa Charter. The Ottawa Charter places the discipline of Health Promotion at the centre of the rationale for population health. Health promotion is the mechanism by which disease and vulnerability to disease and sickness are placed as part of a larger framework of social justice.
The aim of the Ottowa Charter is ‘to reorient health services and their resources towards the promotion of health; and to share power with other sectors, other disciplines and, most importantly, with people’.
Health sectors are given specially mandated powers in a liberal democracy, because individual freedom sometimes needs to be overridden to prioritise sanitation, disease control, and border enforcement for the general population.
The sharing of the mandate to power that the health sector holds to politicised social justice is illegitimate. AIDS charities could be said to have a popular mandate to power, as pluralist organisations often do. Any popular mandate that AIDS charities hold is based on the sympathy that Australian people have towards gay men, fuelled as it is, by the many broken hearts that AIDS and the persecution of gay men has produced.
Neither the popular nor the healthcare mandate to power or gives AIDS charities the right to stand on the graves of gay men and lecture homosexuals about their sexual preference or hand out equity points toward the erasure of factual human sex categories in public discourse and law.
No one can give us a better idea of how the former AIDS infrastructure is being repurposed for politicised social justice in Australia than Teddy Cook. Cook is a tans-identified female, and acting director of Community Health at ACON (AIDS council of NSW), and vice-president of Australian Professional Association for Trans Health. ACON is the peak LGBTQ organisation in Australia and our largest AIDS charity.
Teddy ‘oversees client services, LGBTQ community health programs’ at ACON. Taking health from the individual to the ‘community’ is a key step in distributing the mandate that democracies have given the health sector for disease prevention into politically contentious social engineering.
Cook set up a website called Grunt in 2016 that is designed to help ‘trans men’ (women who identify as men) negotiate the male gay dating scene. The site has been taken down, possibly for reconstruction, but it is archived and it boasts the support of the Australian Federation of AIDS organisations.
There is a claim on Grunt that ‘what makes you a man is inside you, not what your body looks like’. That is only true if what is inside you is a prostate. Of course, they refer to the ubiquitous yet mysteriously unproven gender soul.
There is a passing mention on Grunt that gay men may not be into ‘what you’ve got’, as if this is an insignificant issue. The fact that gay men are not attracted to female bodies is the single most important defining factor that separates them from the rest of the male population and what has made them a minority, it is the main factor that has made them persecuted and the exact thing that has made them vulnerable to AIDS.
If AIDS charities are guilty of taking on the ideology Cook displays in Grunt, it would make sense that men like Jason are feeling alienated. Shaming gay men for their lack of attraction to female bodies is the single most appalling thing that an AIDS charity can do. Let’s not forget one AIDS charity (ACON) runs the largest workplace equity benchmarking scheme in the nation.
Gay men have their own needs that are more specific to them, and this is completely ignored in advice to female people in going to a gay male sauna. Grunt suggests that ‘trans guys’ shouldn’t ring first to check; ‘If you want to go – Go!’ The most important thing is that it is a ‘validating experience to be in these types of gay male spaces’. The gay male space has been repurposed, along with women’s change rooms as an affirmation tool for the gender dysphoric, with no consultation, no logical argument, and no sensible debate.
I know for a fact that the business model of gay clubs and saunas in Melbourne is starting to falter under the regulatory legal pressure to accept females as males. With self-ID and gender identity protections, there is no longer any way in Melbourne for a proprietor to secure a venue, even one they pay rent on, for the exclusive meeting of male homosexual people. I also know that some private operators are fighting this with the full knowledge that the fight is almost certainly futile.
Any application to human rights bodies to exclude trans-identified females from a single-sex male venue in Victoria, or any state with ‘self ID’, will likely face the same issue that Jessica Hoyle faced in Tasmania. Equity Tasmania ruled that you can’t create a single-sex venue without ‘intrusive questioning’ to determine a person’s sex. Although in a sauna with everything hanging out, I wonder if that argument would stand up (pun intended).
In the UK some gay men have said that they are again meeting underground, sometimes literally, in basements, where there is no pressure to negotiate mix sexed dating. One gay man recently tweeted that it is a sign that gay men are ‘taking control of our spaces again’. That may be true for middle-class gay men, but I wonder if a resurgence of underground dating is such a joyous thing for same-sex attracted boys from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
It was in underground dating where HIV infections once thrived and where gay men were sought out in unsecured locations to be bashed for recreation.
Grunt tells trans-identified females that if they are engaging in certain types of sex with gay men, the fact that you are a female, may not even be ‘worth mentioning’. This is rape culture, sexual coercion, and sex by deception, all packaged as ‘community health care’.
When the ACT were proposing a tightening up of consent laws last year, The ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS) sought consultation with the lawmakers to try to protect the interests of the ‘LGBTQ+ community’. More specifically ACTCOSS was keen to prevent legislation that ‘has been used to prosecute and incarcerate several transgender men in the UK’.
In a sympathetically framed ABC story ACTCOSS actively advocated for political interference in rape laws to prevent the prosecution of trans-identified females who perform sex acts on gay men without revealing their biological sex. The ABC framing is that ‘the sex was considered consensual, until the transgender identity of one of the parties was discovered’. The ABC, I will remind you, have a gold ranking on ACONs equity index scheme.
If gay men were meeting in social justice groups and deciding to make all their gatherings mixed-sex, this couldn’t be further from my business. But it seems to me that millions and millions of taxpayer dollars is going into former AIDS charities to use their mandate and cultural and political capital to groom and coerce gay men into understanding that male biology, including a penis, is not an essential requirement for being a man. Trying to train gay men to have sex with females, even medically altered females, is conversion therapy, and this is not appreciated by many veterans of the gay rights movement.
Fred Sargeant is a gay rights veteran and was present at the original Stonewall riots in 1969 (after which the organisation Stonewall was named). When I asked Fred for comment on this issue, he told me that the ‘pressure on gay men and lesbians to conform to gender dogma is enormous. It’s the same old “you just haven’t met the right man/woman yet” lie, except with their own agender…They’re still trying to introduce gay men to the “right” woman’.
In going public I already know how Jason’s will be framed by trans activists, as does he. The new mob of social justice activists see Jason’s reluctance to embrace fluidity in his sexuality as a social disease that harms trans people. The angry virtual and physical mobs that gather around this issue are almost indistinguishable from those who once gathered around gay hook-up locations. Recently after commenting on a gender-related issue, Jason received a death threat, with the new generation of thug calling him a ‘homophobe’ of all things.
After many emails Jason finally emailed one of the Directors of Thorne Harbour Health at his workplace. The man was unimpressed, but Jason received a response quite quickly from Thorne Harbour claiming that they did not refuse him service. It seems that they just couldn’t find a counsellor that would accept his belief that his innate sexual attraction to men is exclusive to men. They are, they reminded him again, very inclusive.
Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism. She blogs at ediewyatt.com and substack.
With thanks to Kit Kowalski for help with research and editing.
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.