Good news, bad news from Down Under: Queensland became the first state in Australia to ban conversion processes – while Australia’s Senator Pauline Hanson incited against parents of transgender children and announced that they should be taken away from their parents.  Hanson is Senator for Queensland and co-founder and leader of the extreme right-wing One Nation party. Hanson and her party are considered right-wing populists.

The good news first: On August 13th, Queensland declared in a historic vote as the first state of Australia that conversion procedures are an inhumane practice and should be banned. Anyone who opposes the ban can expect up to a year in prison – if the patient is underage, it can even be a year and a half.

However, this does not please everyone. In a discussion during the vote, Senator Pauline Hanson (66) made deeply disturbing remarks.

“Confusing kids and going to the doctor and parent’s saying ‘Look, my four-year-old they really can’t identify, and we want to change their sex. You are bloody idiots, how can a kid at four years old know if they want to be male or if they actually want to be a girl”

Although Hanson, as she shows, has no idea about the subject, she uses her platform to run dangerous smear campaigns against parents and families of transgender children:

“There’s more to this and these parents need their heads read or the kids taken off them, because they want to change their sex because the kid has gone and played with a doll.”

Nor does Hanson understand the term “queer”, as she explains in the interview:

“The Q is for queer, and I asked the question in parliament – well what is queer? I have no understanding, I’m sorry, I’m from the old school, I’m sick of all these letters. There are about 37 or 39 different categories.”

MEP supports his two transgender children

But fortunately, there is another way: The Australian politician and member of parliament from West Victoria, Andy Meddick, publicly supports his two transgender children, setting an important counter-example to Hanson’s tirades. Meddick showed on Twitter how to be a proud parent of Trans*Kids. He wrote:

Meddick has also done a lot for the Trans*Community in politics. He made a fiery plea for a bill that would allow transgender people to have their birth certificates amended without surgery. He declared that society could never advance in the acceptance of trans*-persons if they were not legally recognised as their true self.

“Look into your hearts, feel their pain. Doing all you can, as a parent (of a transgender child) isn’t anywhere near enough, when the law isn’t on your side or their side.”

Every child, every adult and every parent who is in this situation should know that they are not alone.

“We must lift up and support young transgender people, because the rate of self harm and suicide among them is the highest in our community. And it’s all because of the arguments of hate and hysteria, of closed-mindedness, of values that are no longer relevant to our modern world.”

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