IDAHOBIT DAY.
On the night of May 21 last year, the Australian Army could have been forgiven if the door of the barracks had have swung open and a commanding officer had turned on the lights and paraphrased Bob Hawke by saying, “Any MP who court martials someone for being drunk tonight is a bum.” Why? The quasi-fascist regime of the Liberal In Name Only Party had come to an end, and with it, the term of the Defence Minister, a man not renowned for tact. This was a man who did not want to understand that the role of Defence Minister is to fight for adequate funding for defence and to ensure that the spending is properly targeted, not to micro-manage the defence forces by issuing directives to the chiefs that they are not permitted to engage in morning teas to celebrate IDAHOBIT Day. The old fashioned comment was that serving in the Army would make a man out of you, and for some people, someone I know among them, the Army gave them the courage to be their true selves and transition from male to female.
Having homosexuality discovered used to be grounds for dishonorable discharge from the Army, until the laws were changed. Some of the World War Two era heterosexual ex-servicemen, among them the RSL’s former Vice-President, Bruce Ruxton, claimed that they should be banned from the army full stop. Another bigoted RSL figure, Alf Garland, said that you wanted your comrade-in-arms to tell you where the enemy was and not declare their love for you. I remember an episode of Foyle’s War, where Andrew Foyle’s girlfriend accused him of cheating, when what actually happened was, his squadron mate was homosexual and developed a crush on Andrew Foyle and stole his photograph from somewhere and volunteered for a mission for which he was in danger and was killed, rather than have his homosexuality revealed. In what would have been a crushing blow for Bruce Ruxton, an Australian World War Two veteran later entered a homosexual relationship with a Japanese man and wanted to get a partner’s card for him. A journalist made the preposterous comment that it was ironic that a World War Two veteran had a Japanese boyfriend, to which I say, 22 Australian ex-servicemen married Japanese women in 1951 and brought them back to Australia, so why is it ironic that 51 years later, a veteran would have a Japanese boyfriend? It’s not.
This year, the Armed Services will be able to host such a morning tea to observe IDAHOBIT Day. In the age when various states in the USA are winding back protections for LGBTIQA people, and criminalizing some things, it is vital that people who support us stand up and be counted. When transphobes enter government and use their position to punch down on trans rights, they attack a vulnerable minority. It is not too difficult or too much to ask, in this day and age, that trans folk be permitted to live their lives without fear of physical, verbal or non-verbal abuse.
TERFs and gender critical folks need to be reminded of the case of prominent Australian lawyer, Irene Moss (nee Kay Chee). When Irene Moss was in primary school, in the final exam, she came second, and demanded a recount. The teacher thought she was being insolent, when in actual fact, she was standing up for her rights and had been unjustly robbed of the first place through racism. The recount vindicated this. TERFs are akin to racists. That teacher didn’t want to accept that a Chinese girl could top the class and TERFs don’t want to accept that transwomen, by in large, just want to be accepted as women, not viewed as men putting on a facade. The extreme cases of Adam Graham are just that. Extreme.
IDAHOBIT Day has to be a day when LGBTIQA people and allies stand up to those punching down on rights, not join in on those attacking. After all, that Defence Minister, now Opposition Leader, isn’t doing too well in his new role.