I walked past the Department of Education building 2 weeks ago. The stroll from the city through Treasury Gardens is typical of beautiful Melbourne. The sun was shining, adding a touch of warmth to what was otherwise a wintry day in Melbourne. Then the shadows loomed large, and the temperature dropped as we hurried by the imposing building that is the Department of Education. 

Someone with me remarked, ‘This is a grand and imposing building’. I nodded in agreement and added, ‘but go inside and smell the musty carpet, and look at the bowed floorboards and notice the cracks along the walls’. The interior of these Government buildings is not always what they appear to be from the outside. 

As much of the world is reverse engineering a decade of damaging medical interventions and psychological harms created by queer theory, my State of Victoria is stubbornly resisting and is doubling down.

Rachel Baxendale is reporting in today’s The Australian that the Education Department of Victoria has updated its Respectful Relationships Curriculum, to include material for children as young as 5 and 6, encouraging them to explore, and yes, to doubt their physical body: “Five-year-olds taught their body parts may not match their gender”.

I need to qualify what I am about to say and laud people who wish to work against Domestic Family Violence (which was the original impetus for Respectful Relationships). There will be material in the Curriculum that is helpful and useful. However, the RR that exists often reads more like a Only Fans quiz than anything appropriate for children.

According to The Oz, the revised material offers scenarios suggesting that young boys may, in fact, be girls and vice versa.

“The revised curriculum for “foundation level” – children in the first year of primary school – includes a case study of a transgender girl called “Stacey”.

“She dresses like the other girls, plays with them and everything seems fine,” the sample lesson plan states. “But one day, Lara says Stacey should be in the boys’ team at sports, not the girls’ team.”

They are advised to tell their students that “Stacey” could respond by saying: “Yes I can play with the girls’ team because I am a girl!”, or “Go and ask the teacher if you don’t believe me. Our teacher says I belong in the girls team.”

The curriculum also seeks to educate the five and six-year-old students about the notion of being transgender, by telling them that “some people feel they did not get a good match for their body parts, and they do not want to be called a boy or a girl, but rather something that is right for them”.

On what planet can it be deemed virtuous to teach little children that they may be born into the wrong body? Does anyone want to hazard a guess at what kind of troubles this creates?

As world sporting governing authorities succumb to the pressure of reality, and therefore ban men from playing women’s sports, Victoria’s educators, with the wisdom of a goldfish swimming in hemlock soup, have produced material that teaches sporting equality means letting boys beat girls. Well, the AFLW season is kicking off this weekend. Why bother? Let’s drag in the future and have just the one footy competition, where the best men and women compete together! 

Teachers dare not speak up. And many parents are understandably afraid to raise concerns because they know the backlash can be tangible. If the school learns or indeed if your workplace becomes aware that you question what is essentially a totalitarian approach to gender education in our schools, you might as well jump into quicksand. Who knows what conversations teachers might have with your children? Parents are not always permitted to know. What we are witnessing, however, is a quiet dissent as large numbers of families remove their children from the state education system and pay the cost of sending them to independent schools. But not everyone can afford such.

 Professor Patrick Parkinson is among the growing number of voices who are trying to bring common sense to the discussion. One need not agree with everything he says, but he is rightly pointing out that we need a better way to discuss what is happening to our young people. In 2023, he wrote , 

“The transgender movement has been based on one truth and a thousand lies.” 

“the notion that there are not just two sexes, or that it is actually possible to change sex or be “non-binary”, or the idea that every child has an innate gender identity that awaits discovery. Most people know these things to be nonsense, but in polite society we have been asked to pretend otherwise….activists aren’t able to agree on whether gender identity is fixed and innate, fluid or socially constructed. Fashionable ideas about sex and gender do not matter too much if no harm is done, but the medicalisation of vulnerable children and adolescents, with lifelong adverse consequences, deserves the most careful scrutiny”

The Australian of the Year in 2023 was Taryn Brumfitt, a woman who is fighting to help children accept their bodies.  Brumfiit highlights a massive societal issue where children’s mental state is conflicting with their physical bodies.

”We really need to help our kids across Australia and the world because the rates of suicide, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, steroid use, all on the increase related to body dissatisfaction.”

Brumfitt argues that this relationship with our bodies results from ‘learned behaviour’. Key to her message is that “we weren’t born into the world hating our body”. In other words, our society is teaching and influencing our children to have negative thoughts about their bodies, which of course can lead to serious consequences. 

Australia has an uncomfortable relationship with the human body. There exists a sizeable disjunction between the message Brumfitt is advocating and what is now mainstream thinking about the human body. 

I don’t know Brumfitt’s views about transgenderism and how she makes sense of this new and sudden wave of bodily denial, but one thing is for certain, her calls to embrace our physical body is at odds with the ideology that is now sweeping our society and being forcibly taught and embraced from GP rooms to school classrooms and TikTok ‘programs’.

Our culture has adopted a modern-day gnosticism, where the ‘truest’ self is divorced from the physical. We are taught that the real you isn’t the physical body you inhabit but the immaterial desires and feelings that one experiences in the mind.  Gender has been divorced from sex, and personal identity cut away from physicality. We shouldn’t reduce our humanness to physicality, for we are spiritual and social beings and thinking and feeling beings. We are more than flesh and blood and DNA, but we are not less than those things. 

We are witnessing a generation of young people who no longer feel comfortable in their own skin, but are now taught from school to TikTok that their physical bodies betray them, and they may well be living in denial of their true selves.

The result is that a significant percentage of 18-24s (some studies suggest it’s as high as 30%) no longer believe they are heterosexual (embodied beings attracted to the opposite sex), but rather they are spread across an imprecise and growing spectrum of self-defining and often bodily denying sexuality and gender. 

Many girls and boys now undertake psychological and medical pathways to transition away from their physical sex. Once school hears even the tiniest doubt from a child, they are put onto the conveyor belt of transition. The number of young people beginning hormonal medications, psychological treatments, and eventual surgical mutilation of the body is skyrocketing. We are talking about an increase in gender dysphoria by 1000% in just the space of a few years. Call me, William of Ockham, but this drastic and sudden increase cannot be explained by natural selection. There is something else in the water. Indeed, the iceberg that looms beneath the surface is rightly scary, and we are ill equipped to do little more than chip away at it. 

Do we see the confusion? Here I say confusion because one wants to think the best of people‘s intentions. Parents who see their children in torment will do anything to find relief. And so if a doctor or counsellor says transition, then I understand them trusting the advice of the professionals. But surely there is also an ear of hypocrisy as well. How can we preach on the one hand, ‘be comfortable in your body’, and then insist on the other,  ‘you can reject your body and have it mutilated and permanently altered’ in the name of this gnosticism?

In her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, journalist Abigail Shreier explores the transgender phenomenon. She blames an ideology that has captured the heart of Western cultures. It’s what Carl Trueman refers to as ‘expressive individualism. Gender expression has become the trend, and because it’s now described in terms of human rights,  no one is allowed to question, doubt or help adjust a child’s sense of identity. 

Those living with discomfort and disconnection with their bodies need our care, not hatred, our kindness, not our complicity with a dehumanising project. As much as awareness of these issues helps and as much as positive thinking and imaging may benefit youth as they learn to live in their body, I think Christianity has something to add.  The Bible gives us what I believe is an even better message, one that is more secure. The ultimate resolution doesn’t lay in the self, for the self is existentially unstable. If the best of me can fail and disappoint, what about the rest of me? If this was not the case, we wouldn’t have a generation of Australians journeying down this dangerous and harmful pathway to physical destruction and mental anx. The Bible gives us a better story and greater hope. 

Psalm 139 exclaims, 

“For you created my inmost being;

    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

    your works are wonderful,

    I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you

    when I was made in the secret place,

    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed body;

    all the days ordained for me were written in your book

    before one of them came to be.”

Grounding our personhood in the knowledge that we are wonderfully made by God, is liberating and securing. But the Bible’s story doesn’t end there. The Scriptures also acknowledge ways we often hide from ourselves (and from God). The Bible points out the realities of the darkness in the world and in our own hearts. The story, however, doesn’t end with darkness and despair, for the Scriptures move us to the culmination of the story, 

“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—  and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. For this reason, he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:14-18)

I don’t expect Victoria to change its tune any time soon. The pied piper pays too well. One day, however, the cost of victims demanding compensation from the State will force change. For now, parents are right to ask questions and to know what our children are being taught. But, instead of trying to drown out the classroom Spotify playlist with loud and vitriolic noise, I want to point to a better song, a more beautiful melody that can bring solace and healing and hope to the human condition.

There is a constancy in a world of body image flaws and troubles. There is an anchor for all the spiritual and material wants and shortcomings. This Jesus, the eternal Son of God, didn’t abandon the body; he became human for us. He entered the physical and spiritual turmoil that fills the world, taking its sins and shame in order to bring redemption and life. He understands. He makes atonement. He helps. That is a good news message for Australians today.