Liberal senator Hollie Hughes has voiced her support for colleague Claire Chandler’s bill which would allow for sports groups to discriminate against transgender women. Senator Hughes says when it comes to sport transgender people should consider completing in a separate ‘trans’ category.
The New South Wales senator shared her thoughts during an appearance on The Rita Panahi Show on Sky News. He support for the bill follows Prime Minister Scott Morrison voicing his support earlier on Tuesday.
“I think it’s a really good bill, it is sensible.” Senator Hughes said of Senator Chandler’s private members bill which would allow sporting groups to ban transgender women from taking part in sport.
Senator Hollie Hughes said people only needed to look at US college swimmer Lia Thomas to see why Australia needed to bring in legislation to keep transgender women out of women’s sport. Senator Hughes said transgender women wanting to play sport was part of a larger political agenda.
“It’s part of this agenda we see to cancel biological women, that we’re chest-feeders not breast-feeders, that we’re a pregnant person, a person with a uterus, and these are really offensive terms to a lot of women, because it is cancelling women out.
“Men, or biological men with the testosterones and those hormones are physically strong then women, which is why you have men and women’s sport in the first place.
“I appreciate that there will be some in the trans community who are upset by this, but perhaps we need to have trans sports, or same as when we look at what’s happening in the AFL and some of the other sporting arenas, it physically more dominant participants, that are overriding the women who train so hard, but purely because of physical differences are being relegated to second place.”
Melbourne’s Deputy Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece, who was appearing on the panel alongside Senator Hughes and former Speaker of the House Bronywn Bishop, said the Prime Minister’s endorsement of the bill was a move to appease the hard-right of the Liberal Party and the legislation was not needed.
“Anyone with half a brain will know that this is Scott Morrison again turning transgender people into a political football.” Reece said. “We saw that Religious Discrimination Bill go down in flames when the Prime Minister got in a tangle because he wanted religious schools to be able to discriminate against transgender kids and that offended so many people, that eventually he had to defer it off into a committee.”
“We all agree that there need to be rules around people of gender and transgender people participating in sport, nobody disagrees about that, and in fact sporting codes in Australia I think have done a pretty good job within their sporting codes of developing rules around these things.
“You are just massively overstating this as an issue, you’ve cited just one case from United States…and now bringing it up as some crisis in Australia sport. There is no such thing. The only reason this is on the agenda is because Scott Morrison needs to satisfy the hard-right of his party after his humiliating backdown and the mess he made over the Religious Discrimination Bill.”
Reece was shouted down by Hughes, Bishop and Panahi when he suggested the Prime Minister was weaponising anti-discrimination legislation. Bishop said Reece was “better when he was silent”, Panahi said his comments cheapened the issue, while Senator Hollie Hughes declared “people without uteruses should just sit down.”
OIP Staff
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