Politics

Please Enjoy This Trans Teen Dragging Scott Morrison On ‘The Project’

Evie: 1. ScoMo: 0.

Scott Morrison

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A 13-year-old transgender girl has smacked down Scott Morrison over his shitty tweet about transgender kids. And no, we probably shouldn’t need a teenager to lecture the Prime Minister about being a decent human being, but that’s where we are.

Morrison was on the receiving end of some heavy criticism this week after he retweeted an article published in The Daily Telegraph which claimed that teachers being taught to identify and support transgender children had led to a sudden spike in kids receiving “irreversible surgeries” and undergoing other supposedly harmful procedures.

“We do not need ‘gender whisperers’ in our schools. Let kids be kids,” Morrison tweeted in response to the story.

We’ve since fact-checked the article and found it to be, in a word, bullshit. I guess the Prime Minister isn’t a Junkee fan though, because the tweet is still up several days later.

Enter Evie McDonald, a transgender teenager who did not mince words with the PM when he stopped by The Project on Thursday night.

“There are thousands of kids in Australia that are gender diverse,” said McDonald in a prerecorded message. “We don’t deserve to be disrespected like that through tweets from our Prime minister.”

“I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of attitudes like this,” she continued. “I went to a Christian school where I had to pretend to be a boy and spend weeks in conversion therapy. We get one childhood and mine was stolen from me.”

When asked for a response, Morrison defended his remarks, telling the panel that he loved “all Australians whatever background they come from”, but that he didn’t think teachers should take the place “of parents and the choices that families make”. Which is demonstrably not what’s happening, but sure.

Morrison also came under fire over the Peter Dutton au pair controversy. If you haven’t been following this particular shitfight, you can get caught up here. The short version is that Dutton may have misused his ministerial powers when he intervened in a number of visa cases during his time as Immigration Minister. Unsurprisingly, Morrison reckons that nah, it was actually fine.

“I couldn’t tell you all the people I worked with 20 years ago,” Morrison insisted, when asked about the fact that one of the au pairs who got a visa worked for one of Dutton’s old colleagues in the Queensland Police Force. “There was no personal relationship.”

You can watch Scott Morrison’s appearance on The Project below. Evie McDonald appears at the four minute mark.