We Are Not Going Away
Joe Ball's Higginbotham Lecture reminds us that the fight for trans rights is not new, not extreme, and not separate from the fights that came before it.
I want you to imagine standing in a law school lecture theatre, listening to a transgender man speak the words that George Higginbotham, a Victorian-era judge and champion of the weak, could never have dreamed would one day be spoken in his name. That is what happened at RMIT University recently, when Joe Ball, Victoria’s Commissioner for LGBTQA+ communities, delivered the annual Higginbotham Lecture. The ABC broadcast it. I listened. I cried a little. Then I wrote this.
The Rights We Inherited
Joe opened with something that I think about constantly, which is the idea of inherited rights. He traced his own right to be transgender back to the second wave feminist movement, to the women who walked into doctors’ offices asking for the contraceptive pill when society told them they had no business doing so. He connected that struggle to the AIDS activists who refused to let fear and stigma decide who deserved to live. He named these as the soil in which his truth is planted.
This framing matters enormously, because one of the most common arguments used against trans people today is that our existence is somehow new, fashionable, or invented. Joe’s lecture dismantled that idea gently but thoroughly. The first gender clinic in the world was established in Berlin, he reminded us, by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish, gender non-conforming gay man who Hitler called the most dangerous Jew in Europe. The Nazis destroyed it. They burned the research. That was the world’s first book burning. The history of transgender identity is not a few decades old. It runs as deep as any human history.
What this tells me, as a doctor who has spent years trying to help trans people access timely, affordable care, is that we are not asking for something unprecedented. We are asking for what every marginalised group before us has had to fight for: the right to make decisions about our own bodies, without fear, without shame, and without waiting for permission from people who do not live in our skin.
The Inversion of Power
Joe spent a significant portion of his lecture on what he called the oldest trick of power, which is the strategy of convincing a majority that a minority is the source of their suffering. He traced this through history with precision: Chinese miners blamed for poverty on the goldfields while mine owners hoarded the wealth; women seeking the vote branded as home wreckers; refugees painted as the cause of low wages when the real decisions were being made in parliament and boardrooms.
Today, he said, the same story is told with new characters. Trans women in sport have become the convenient distraction. He quoted the evidence carefully: Sport Australia and Victoria’s Office for Women in Sport both document the barriers facing women and girls in sport as a lack of equal access to facilities, a lack of zero tolerance for harassment and assault, and a lack of pay parity with men. Trans women do not appear in those reports as a barrier to female sporting equality, because they are not one.
He put it plainly, and I will share his words because they deserve to be heard: it is cheaper to bully a ten-year-old trans girl out of a school sports carnival than it is to build new change rooms.
I have been saying versions of this for years, and every time I do, I am told I am being political, or ideological, or that I should stay in my lane. Joe Ball said it in a law school, in a lecture named after a man who devoted his life to protecting the weak against the strong. That is exactly where these words belong.
What This Has to Do With Medicine
I want to bring this back to healthcare for a moment, because that is where I live, professionally and personally. Joe made the point that when trans people fight for timely, affordable access to medication and surgery, we are carrying forward the same human rights struggle as the women who fought for the pill and the AIDS activists who demanded antiretrovirals. Life, he said, cannot wait.
This is not a metaphor. It is a medical and human reality. The evidence base for gender-affirming care is robust, consistent, and built over many decades. The people who are suffering while waiting lists grow, while access is restricted, while politicians debate whether our identities are real, are not abstractions. They are patients. They are young people. They are adults who have waited long enough.
When access to gender-affirming care is paused, as it has recently been in Queensland, people do not simply pause their lives. They continue to experience gender dysphoria. They continue to suffer. Some of them do not survive the wait. This is the clinical reality that gets lost when the conversation becomes purely political, and it is the reality that Joe Ball was gesturing towards when he spoke about the stakes of this moment.
The Social Media Ban and the Young People Who Need Connection
One of the most striking exchanges in the Q&A session came when an audience member asked Joe about Australia’s social media ban for under-sixteens, and specifically about the young LGBTQA+ people who find community, helplines, and pathways to support through those very platforms.
His concern was immediate and clearly heartfelt. He spoke about rural and regional young people who may have no other way to find information about who they are, no local groups, no affirming adults in their lives, no visible community. He noted that LGBTQA+ young people are the most overrepresented population in suicide statistics, and that no one seemed to have fully thought through what comes next for them.
This is not a minor administrative issue. When you remove the primary means by which a vulnerable young person finds out that other people like them exist, that they are not broken, that there is help available, you do not create a vacuum that simply fills itself. You create a silence. Joe said it himself: silence is where injustice breathes easiest.
As someone who has worked with many families navigating questions of gender identity, I know how powerful it is for a young person to realise they are not alone. That realisation can be lifesaving. We should be thinking very carefully about what we are taking away, and what we are offering instead.
Learning to Trust Again
Joe’s lecture built towards something that I found genuinely moving, which was a call to rebuild trust. Not naive trust. Not forgetting. Trust that insists institutions become worthy of it: transparent, accountable, serving people rather than donors.
He spoke of learning to follow, not always to lead. He pushed back against what he described as a culture of individualism that has crept into social justice movements, the performance of radicalism, the racing to find flaws, the competition for moral purity. Change, he said, happens through people choosing to work together over years and decades, not in outrage but in respect and persistence.
I recognise this. The work I have done, and continue to do, has never been about being the loudest voice or the most uncompromising position. It has been about turning up, consistently, with care for real people, and refusing to let complexity be used as an excuse for inaction.
Joe Ball did something extraordinary in that lecture theatre. He stood as living proof that the law can protect the weak against the strong, that rights are cumulative, that the battles people fought before us gave us the ground we stand on, and that we are planting seeds now for people who do not yet have the words for what they will one day need.
All that we are is enough. More than enough. We are not going away.
What part of Joe’s lecture landed most powerfully for you? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
You can listen to the full lecture on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Search for Big Ideas, ABC Radio National.
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I do appreciate your post here, and learned something. In doing a little of my own background research, I was able to confirm the incredibly sad statistic that in fact this community IS overrepresented in suicide and suicide ideation. It's fully understandable why, of course. It's not of course due to mental illness, but the incredible stigma placed on diverse people which leads to an understandable fear of the hatred and even violence pointed in their direction.
I did also do a little reading on Magnus Hirchfeld's clinic, which I've known about for decades -- and your statement that it was "the first book burning." That -- is not true, but -- it's a minor point comparatively to the aforementioned fact. All in all, it would be helpful for us all to be connected to this speaker's work. He is calm, clear and well-spoken. We need many many more Joe Ball's out there setting the bar and the example. Thanks for sharing this, Doc.