The rise of extremist protest against public drag performances is a worrying trend.
Two reports from Melbourne in late 2022 show that what has become common in the US since 2017, has now become more common in Australia. One event was disrupted by protesters in September, and another postponed in December, after comments made in an online forum by extremists about plans to protest at an end-of-year event for 12 to 25-year-olds. Much of the invective against these events from protesters draws on the well-established and harmful conflation of same-sex attraction and related gender identity with paedophilia and child "grooming" that is invoked episodically to denigrate LGBTQ individuals and communities. In turn, this prejudice can dictate how LGBTQ expression is filtered, framed and amplified through social and other media platforms.
This trend is a clear reminder of the durability of stigma against same-sex attraction and related gender identity based on legacies of criminal law and medical and psychiatric pathology.
Homosexuality was decriminalised in NSW in 1984 and across Australia by 1997. The "gay panic" defence in NSW was abolished in 2014. Same-sex marriage was enacted across Australia in 2017 after the postal vote across the country returned a convincing yes to marriage equality. December 2022 marked the sixth year of of lawful same-sex marriage in Australia, and the codification of same-sex marriage in the US to ward off a US supreme court challenge to marriage equality. But at the same time, we see a rise in networked anti-LGBTQ hate locally and globally.
In my new book, I discuss how the relationship between stigma and the networking capacity of digital platforms has facilitated this new wave of hate against LGBTQ groups and individuals through inadequate moderation of digital platforms, while the responsibility for the publishing a range of content remains unsettled. As such, we are still in a wild west online of such conduct. Digital platforms and traditional media companies can profit from the amplification of online and in-person bias-motivated conduct, which can originate online and manifest in in-person hateful conduct, and the other way around.
In Australia, an estimated 11 per cent of the population have diverse sexual orientation, sex or gender identity. That proportion of the population (if they feel safe to publicly identify as one of those identities) may be subject to ongoing stigma ranging from vilification to assault, to discrimination from employers. This is despite the expansion of legitimate categories of vulnerability enshrined in anti-discrimination legislation, and criminal law in some jurisdictions.
Recent protests show that despite this progress, the cultural origins of stigma remain.
That's why the judicial inquiry into gay and transgender hate crimes between 1970 and 2010 is so important. The inquiry is not only an opportunity to further narrow the gap between public and police expectations on how to address cultural issues through criminal law. It's an opportunity to address the cultural underpinnings of conscious and unconscious bias though public debate. On issues of culture, it was of particular interest to me that the NSW Police Force's first hate crime coordinator at a hearing for the inquiry said that the NSW Police Force bias crime unit was not popular "because there is a belief [in the NSW Police Force] that we're a multicultural society and everything works well".
The timing of the incorporation of the bias crime unit into the fixated persons unit in 2015, and the effective dissolution of the bias crimes unit, sits in contrast with the recognition of the impact of bias motivated conduct on victims through the creation of a new offence in the NSW Crimes Act (93z) in 2018 of publicly threatening or inciting violence on grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex or HIV/AIDS status. That period also saw an increase of bias motivated conduct in the US and in England and Wales, in a permissive political environment endorsed by Trump's inflammatory rhetoric.
Public institutions such as the police play a key role in trust building within communities who are politically vulnerable. The inquiry provides another opportunity to hear from victims and their families, and those within criminal justice institutions who have sought to address wrongs, but who may not have had the support or resources to do so for long enough to definitively resolve some of the cases that are once again under scrutiny. Researchers have argued that the murder of Alan Edge in October, 1977, requires further scrutiny as a potential bias-motivated crime. (Mr Edge was found strangled in his Newcastle East flat when a colleague went to check on why he hadn't reported for work at the Newcastle Herald).
There is a pressing need for clarity on the past to mitigate the risks of further stigmatisation into the future. Let's hope that through this inquiry, through this reckoning, that the issues raised can be settled, and justice can finally be done and be seen to be done for those affected directly and indirectly. Doing so will send a very clear message to extremists today that bias-motivated protest is not welcome in Australia.
Dr Justin Ellis is senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Newcastle Law School. His next book is out in 2023 with Bristol University Press - Representation, Resistance and the Digiqueer: Fighting for Recognition in Technocratic Times.
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