ACON, Transhub.org
 

ACON ("Aids Council of NSW") was a charity set up to advocate for gay men during the AIDS epidemic. Today it's Australia's largest trans lobby group that receives over $15 million in annual government funding and administers the Pride franchise; Pride in Sport, Pride in Diversity (workplace), Pride in Health and Well-being and the Australian Workplace Equality Index which the Department of Education, Skills and Employment has signed up for. 

​​These Pride franchise promote the presumption that gender identity is paramount over sex, and enlist government departments, tertiary institutions and private sector, such as law firms, banks, and corporations, as paying members to embed this position into internal and external policies, marketing and communications, employee behaviours, employ officers to assess and enforce compliance, and collate data on their compliance to be provided to Pride in Diversity. Organisations pay ACON to audit compliance and to be ranked on the Pride in Diversity Australian Workplace Equality Index.
 

 The programme imposes a positive and substantial compliance and financial burden on organisations: 

• Paying for Pride in Diversity "Diversity and Inclusion" programme training for employees,

• Imposition of gender theory language such as including pronouns in email signatures and replacing sex-based language with gender-neutral. i.e., replace 'woman' with cervix-havers, menstruate, bodies with vaginas, vulva owners etc.

• Removal of single sex spaces such as toilets, changing rooms for women and replacing them with 'all gender' or 'gender neutral toilets' allowing males to enter female only spaces.

• Employing people specifically to ensure compliance with Pride in Diversity's programme in internal and external policies, corporate communications and external marketing;

• Providing additional special paid leave for employees to undergo sex reassignment or 'gender-affirming' medical procedures and surgeries;

• Collating and providing data on their compliance to AWEI that Pride in Diversity then uses for own benefit;

• Expecting employees to perform allegiance to the programme by participating in particular activities;

  • Displaying support and celebrating all the many days, weeks and months of significance in the ACON calendar​

  • Executive sponsorship and fundraising for approved charities and events;

  • Publicly signalling their support with approved corporate branding including purchased merchandise such as lanyards
     

ACON is also a member of ILGA which receives funding from the ARCUS foundation, a trans funding foundation run by Stryker Medical Corporation a multi-billion pharmaceutical organisation run by Jon Stryker. ILGA World's ECOSOC status with United Nations was removed 10 years ago for its ties to PIE, Paedophile Information Exchange and NAMBLA, North American Man Boy's Love Association. ILGA denies a paedophile agenda but in March it again pushed for the lowering age of consent for sex with minors. ILGA world is a significant organisation in the trans movement providing change management, sales and marketing to young activists to spread trans activist goals outlined in the Denton's Handbook.

ACON's other ties and sponsors in the pharmaceutical industry from the Pride in Inclusion member list are:

• AstraZeneca Pty Ltd

• Eli Lilly

• Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies, Australia

• Novartis

• Pfizer

• Roche Products Pty Ltd

• Sanofi Aventis Australia

ACON also hosts the TransHub.org.au website, a repository of gender ideology information mainly aimed at young people distressed about their identity. The ‘gender-affirming’ approach Transhub encourages can include deeply invasive and irreversible medical and surgical interventions. Such interventions are highly controversial, as evidenced recently by major international changes to legal and medical advice.

Transhub.org in effect acts as a marketing arm of the Pharmaceutical and Medical industry in promoting gender transitioning for youth, products and services despite the risk to the physical and mental well-being of youth. 
 

For example, AstraZeneca produces Goserelin, it is also known as Zoladex and is used off label in minors to ‘suppress’ normal puberty. Northside Clinic, a Melbourne centre for medically altering minors’ bodies, name it in their patient information. You can read the PBS discussion about Goserelin here.

In addition, I note, that ACON’s still provides misleading information on puberty blockers suppressing normal puberty ; E.g., “Studies on puberty blockers have shown that they are an effective and safe part of the hormonal therapy toolkit for young trans people.” In fact puberty blockers are experimental, off label and can cause harm.” Lesbians United put out a statement against puberty blockers here.

Transhub downplays not only the risks of these interventions, but also the proven ‘watchful waiting’ alternatives to immediate transition, especially for vulnerable children.  ‘Watchful waiting” approach is a traditional form of ‘talk therapy’ that reconciles youth with their sex. The outcome for this solution according to transgendertrend.com’s analysis of over 10 studies shows that the majority of children treated for gender dysphoria, between 73 and 98 percent were observed to cease a transgender identity and reconcile with their biological sex.
In other words, they grew out of gender dysphoria. 
 

However, if I think from a pharmaceutical’s business point of view a ‘watchful waiting’ approach only benefits a small number of trained psychologists and there is no recurrent or residual revenue when cured patients exit the market. However, if youth are encouraged to take a transition pathway (gender affirmation model) they are worth approximately 150K per person over their lifetime in order to create and maintain the appearance of the opposite sex.  Not just from initial surgeries but from medical products and procedures that provide the pharmaceutical industry an annual recurring revenue stream.) ACON’s push for youth to medically transform their bodies, means that, that 73-98% that normally would exit the system will follow instead a path that results in irreversible damage to healthy bodies and become lifelong patients.
 

Please see “The Business Model of Youth Transitioning” presented at the United Nations, March 2020

Transhub.org in effect acts as a marketing arm of the Pharmaceutical and Medical industry in promoting gender transitioning for youth, products and services despite the risk to the physical and mental well-being of youth.

The major target market for transitioning products are lesbian, gay and bisexual youth, which given ACON is a charity set up to provide health services to the LGB community, instead is a major dis-service to the LGB community.

 

We have seen in the UK that the promotion of mandatory affirmation policy has shown that homosexual and bisexual children are vastly overrepresented amongst children presenting to the Gender Identity Disorder Service (GIDS) through the Portman and Tavistock Trust. In “Sex, gender, and gender identity: A re-evaluation of the evidence” [1], the authors report that in 2012 for instance, only 8.5% of girls referred to the service described themselves as heterosexual. Given that the overall percentage of lesbian and bisexual women and girls in the UK is less than 5%, the underlying causes for this overrepresentation should have been urgently investigated. Although empirical evidence[2] has shown that a cross-sex identification is a better predictor of a child growing up to be bisexual, gay, or lesbian rather than growing up to identify as Trans, these children were immediately put on the medical pathway. This happened to such an extent that clinicians at Tavistock raised concerns they were practising a form of gay conversion therapy.

In 2019, staff interviews conducted as part of an internal review confirmed that homophobia was an underlying issue in many cases of children seeking to transition but children were referred onto the medical pathway to transition anyway.

The Times of London reported: 

So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left.”

“It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” one male clinician said. “I frequently had cases where people started identifying as Trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay,” he told The Times.

“Young lesbians considered at the bottom of the heap suddenly found they were really popular when they said they were Trans.”

Another female clinician said: “We heard a lot of homophobia which we felt nobody was challenging. A lot of the girls would come in and say, ‘I’m not a lesbian. I fell in love with my best girlfriend but then I went online and realised I’m not a lesbian, I’m a boy. Phew.’

Mandatory gender affirmation is in effect homophobic, and another form of conversion practice based on sexual orientation. In countries such as Iran where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death, this affirmation policy is followed through with surgical sex reassignment to rid Iran of homosexuals and other gender non-conforming individuals.
 

We have seen the new conversion therapies in the ACT and Queensland follows this homophobic trend. In 2018 as reported in ‘The Australian” the Medical Association Queensland’ took a stand against these transition practices based on the safety and ethics of transgender drugs and surgery for children, calling for a host of practitioner groups to come together and devise new national treatment guidelines. The organisation covering more than 9600 doctors said it “strongly supports” the concerns of branch member Philip Morris, a leading psychiatrist, who questioned the capacity of under-18s to make decisions about life-altering hormonal treatment or surgery “now shown to be not without harm”.

In medicine the rule is ‘do no harm’ which means, which if there’s a choice between no harm or risk, the path to take is no harm. The number of detransitioners now number 47,000 on the reddit/detrains board, young people who reaching their early twenties now face the gravity of permanent harm done to them in their youth.    

Organisations like LGB Defence, LGB Alliance Australia, Coalition of Activist Lesbians, the Gay Network and LGB Tasmania have in their media releases and letters to NSW health demanded that ACON be investigated as whether as a charity ACON is not putting possible funding revenue from vested interests over the care and well-being of youth.

 

Lastly  Transhub.org.au, was produced by Teddy Cook (trans identified female) who serves as the Director of Community Health where she oversees client services, LGBTQ community health programs, Pride Training and Trans Health Equity. Teddy Cook also is associated with the soft-porn site Grunt and Pash.TM. As well as activism against homosexual male sex venues if they exclude women, i.e., straight women who identify as men.  These sites were closed, but they promoted how to illicit sex by deceit, trans identifying females to hide the fact from gay men that they were not males. Homosexuals are same sex attracted, its stigmatising homosexuality anew when homosexuals boundaries are not respected. There is arguably a disrespect by ACON for those who are same sex attracted. 

 

Therefore, should an advocacy organisation that benefits from an ideology that provides the branding for gender affirming care products, disrespects the sexual orientation of homosexuals and is negligent in being current with the latest research on puberty blockers, be considered an impartial advisory organisation on the healthcare of homosexuals,  transgender diverse and vulnerable people when they primarily profit from one therapeutic model?

 

 

[1] Griffin, L., Clyde, K., Byng, R., & Bewley, S. (2020).

[2] Childhood Gender-Typed Behaviour and Adolescent Sexual Orientation: A Longitudinal Population-Based Study.

​