Category: Prose

The controversy over a book and its purpose

“What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?”

—Lewis Caroll, ‘Queen Alice’ in Through the Looking Glass

I hear myself speak, and the proximity of the sound appears to guarantee the contiguity of the words to thought.… It is pure auto-affection, and we therefore tend to treat it, our voice, as our most intimate version of ourselves — or as ourselves completely.

—Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps

In 2023, in Australia, Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing released Welcome to Sex by Dr Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes, part of a series of books aimed at young teens dealing with issues like consent, ‘your period’ and ‘your boobs’. There was controversy, of course, because the book is explicit and covers a lot of territory, including issues that many parents (and pundits) think should not be mentioned to minors. The supermarket chain Woolworths, a major distributor of magazines and books, withdrew Welcome to Sex from its shelves but continued to sell the book online. In interviews, Yumi Stynes revealed she had received death threats, and she offered the opinion that Woolworths’ compromise was a vote of confidence in the book and a reaction to its duty to keep its employees safe. “Police have arrested a man who allegedly threatened author Yumi Stynes, the co-author of an educational book aimed at helping teenagers understand sex and sexuality that was recently removed from shelves at Big W after staff members were abused,” The Guardian reported.

Welcome to Sex stakes a claim, which Stynes asserts in public very forcefully, about its usefulness, citing the delay in sexual activity of young people, and reduction of possible harms, as proof. Note, though, as only one indicator among many, that adolescent birth rates have been declining between 2000 and 2024, almost everywhere in the world—and it is not because sex education books for 11–15-year-olds are required reading.

The controversy was widely reported, often focussing on one aspect of the content: the book contains information and advice about anal sex. This may have been the easiest, most easily understood complaint about the content that journalists could find. Pointing their attention and cameras at a page containing the word ‘anal’, surely there could be no need for further verification that the Hardie Grant people were asking for trouble, maybe even hoping for it, since bad publicity can be great for the sales of books that are good, bad, and mediocre. Anal sex is the poster child of transgression.

There’s a section of the book on myths, and a section on “more myths,” as well as pregnancy, feelings, flirting, fingering, scissoring, awkward moments, and “expanding your vocabulary”—something no young person, and every parent, should be afraid of. Reports of the outrage about the book focus on the reaction of adults. I did not find any complaints from children of any age; the book is written for 11–15-year-olds. It’s possible that no one looked for such complaints, or bothered to ask. News framed the complaints as parental concern, usually without verification of the parental status of the complainants.

Then, late in 2024, to make matters worse or better, depending on from which side of the controversy you are looking at it, Creative Australia (a quasi-autonomous government authority) announced that Welcome to Sex had been shortlisted for the Australian prime minister’s literary award in the category of young adult literature. It didn’t win. In the public relations and reputations game, though, it is enough to be shortlisted to claim a new dot point in one’s résumé. The unnamed judges’ report for the award said of Welcome to Sex …

A fearless, frank and important resource for young people, Welcome to Sex is meticulously researched and comprehensive in its representation of sex and sexual experience. The text is very inclusive in its language and the content can be read by all young adults regardless of sexual orientation, identity, gender or culture.
Kang and Stynes’s combined voice is warm, friendly and approachable—brooking no awkward silences in what can be a difficult conversation between young people and adults. Young people are themselves represented in the text, through letters and other contributions, alongside adults and sexual educators, adding extra layers and thoroughness to the book.
High production values from publisher Hardie Grant and wonderful illustrations from Jenny Latham complete an informative, entertaining, and potentially life-saving book that should find a place in every home (even ones that don’t contain a teenager).

Is this judgement or boosterism? There is no published evidence the judges read the book at all, or read it closely, or actually considered the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the text.

Googling for reviews of Welcome to Sex earlier in 2024 it was very noticeable that almost all of the internet ‘reviews’ of the book were not reviews at all, but merely regurgitations of Hardie Grant promotional material. —Of course. That is how the internet works. You throw stuff in, and you get stuff out.

“What became clear to my research team, which included professors Alan McKee and Kath Albury, was that the main thing young people wanted to know more about was not ‘plumbing and diseases’ but how to communicate,” said Catherine Lumby, who “is a professor of media and communications at the University of Sydney, [and] was interviewed about her research for Melissa Kang and Yumi Styne’s book …. ” Lumby’s opinion of the book—it’s “brilliant and accessible”—is quoted by Hardie Grant on its website, without mentioning she provided research for it, according to her own report. I do not suppose, nor should anyone, it can be just by chance that McKee and Albury are also professors of communication and media studies. Professor McKee makes an appearance in Welcome to Sex early on, on the page that attempts to define ‘sex’, possibly signalling that the book will emphasise language more than biology.

Does Welcome to Sex succeed in presenting all the relevant information a child (by which I mean a person below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority) may need to have about what sex means, or what it may come to mean for them? How could anyone begin to talk about such meanings to children, when we hardly know what the answers are ourselves?

What do we need ‘sex education’ books for, anyway? In the form of a small sculpture of female fertility or in the making of a bone phallus, people have transmitted their knowledge and feelings about sex since humans began to make and learn. For the ancients it was enough to put up raunchy pictures in bathhouses. Children survive childhood and puberty to understand the impulses of their own bodies without the help of books. ‘Yes, but unharmed?’ I imagine Stynes reply, and she would be right to ask.

The appearance of ‘sex education’, sometime in the nineteenth century, was not a response to a need for information about what sex is, how it is done, or how to make baby humans. Sex education is, has always been, surplus to minimum requirements of the thing it purports to teach. Sex education might be a kindness to children. When children stopped being ‘little adults’ that could be exploited, it became necessary to imagine them as vessels of future adults that would make a future world. And then, in the last century, sex education developed its second dimension as social engineering to prevent disease and the burden, personal and social, of unwanted pregnancies. Sex education now does all that, and a whole lot more in the realm of violence, consent, and social relations. Almost everywhere in the last century and a half there have been debates, fights, and changing policies, about what and how to teach children about sex. Neither Catholics (in France) nor communists (in the USSR) could settle amongst themselves what sex education should do or say. In wartime, most pundits agreed, soldiers need to be warned against syphilis. Later, everyone needed information about how to have sex without exposing themselves to HIV-AIDS, even though there was no agreement about what constituted ‘sex’, and who needed protection from whom, or what.

Sex education now does all that, and a whole lot more in the realm of violence, consent, and social relations. Almost everywhere in the last century and a half there have been debates, fights, and changing policies, about what and how to teach children about sex.

Just how little do we think children know? Are they not, normally, mentally, super-absorbent creatures? Don’t they, by the time they are adolescents, reach some conclusion about the hypocrisy of their adult minders? A child growing up in Pompeii was no more or less enveloped in a sexualised and gender-stereotyped society than a child today. Every child grows up learning by heart its guardians’ clichés.

❦

‘Sex education’ requires us to ask, among many questions: Who are the teachers, and by what authority do they teach? These are such slippery questions, most journalists did not bother to ask Dr Kang and Ms Stynes who they were, by what authority they wrote, what qualifications they have or what qualifications are necessary or desirable.  Instead, the current of outrage flowed freely from the idea the authors had presumed to supplant the educational bond between parent and child. —Though some parents, we all know, would have been happy to slyly leave on a reachable bookshelf a book with some colorful drawings, or else leave a little person to randomly soak up reality by cultural osmosis.

Hardie Grant, and the authors themselves, have therefore crafted a presentation highlighting authority and trust. Dr Kang is a doctor, a real general practitioner, with actual patients. Ms Stynes is an award-winning truth-teller and podcaster (with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation). They are women. (—It feels dangerous to make such a claim, considering what is about the be revealed.) And they have children of their own. Briefly: they are the kind of experts you should feel happy to leave your children with, while you make a cuppa and check email. Their expertise is their experience, and their practice: they have been at it for years, and so must know what they are talking about. Dr Kang said, in an ABC News video published on Facebook:

‘Dolly Doctor’ [an advice column in Dolly magazine] finished at the end of 2016. It was pretty abrupt. We know that teenagers now turn to the internet when they have those kinds of questions. I guess what I think might have been lost is that sense of a personal relationship. It was a way to hear the voices of young girls that was absolutely unique and now I really, really, really do miss it.

What I love about working with adolescents as an adult is even though it’s filled with angst, conflict and arguments with parents, for example, it’s such a gorgeous stage of life. I don’t know that I’d go back to it myself if I had the opportunity, but it’s still something that, you know, we’ve all gone through and learnt about ourselves from, and I just love witnessing that over and over again.

Kang’s palpable concern and care for young people is moving. I have much the same ‘read’ on Stynes.

But there is the question of what we do not know, deemed private, not explicitly deemed irrelevant, but placed by the publishers and authors in the ‘none of your business’ column. Some of the questions might be whoppers (in hard-hitting, journalistic terms), and very rude: Are your children ‘yours’ or adopted? Are you lesbian? Are you married? To men? Readers of ‘entertainment news’ might have gathered Stynes was one party to a dispute over separation from an ex-husband. I include the questions here because Welcome to Sex hints at this kind of challenge to, or question about, its authority. Stynes says, of herself …

This sexual identity disclaimer is juxtaposed (Could it really be by chance? —And if it is, it is very careless!) with the image of the non-binary pride flag. In the following pages Kang and Stynes make clear what surely cannot be clear: that ‘sexual identity’ and ‘sexual orientation’ are so close to being the same thing, there can be no point trying to distinguish between them.

Sexual identity labels
Your sexual identity is about how you define yourself sexually. It’s usually about the gender of the people you feel sexually or romantically attracted to. Those attractions can change over time, or they might stay constant. There’s no right or wrong — you’re you! … GAY: I’m sexually and/or romantically attracted to people of the same gender as me. This label is used more commonly by males who are attracted to other males, but it is sometimes used by people of all genders.… LESBIAN: I’m female and sexually and/or romantically attracted to other females.[Welcome to Sex, pp. 75–76]

The authors and the legion of communications professors appear not to have come to an agreement about the relevance of ‘sexual orientation’, or maybe consider that language passé. It is at this point the text’s inaccuracies and fudgings begin to pile up. The definition of ‘gay’ emphasises it is a term applying commonly to “males” attracted to other “males”, but calls this an attraction between people “of the same gender”. The definition of ‘lesbian’ does not mention gender at all.

The linguistic enigma of the verbal phrase “identify as” is everywhere, placing (our poor, helpless) adolescents always at one remove from the reality of ‘is’. A boy is not a young male person. No: a boy is a young person who identifies as male, who ‘thinks’ or ‘feels’ he is male.

Is it honest to suppress the fundamental importance of ‘sexual orientation’? Or is that the way you might talk about sexual orientation (about being heterosexual, gay, lesbian or bisexual) if you wanted to give it status not greater than ‘asexual’ and ‘aromantic’?  In a section on aromantic versus asexual, children are told that “Being asexual means a person doesn’t experience sexual attraction towards any people. An asexual person might, or might not, feel romantic love towards others. Some people are aromantic AND asexual while others might be one or the other.” [Welcome to Sex, p. 78]

This misemphasis is at work and play throughout Welcome to Sex. Sex is, Welcome to Sex tells us, “doing anything with your body that feels sexy. […] The most useful definition of sex is what sex means to you.”

Defining sex is beautifully complicated. Sex is anything as long as the people taking part in it think it is sex. It excludes violence, and it includes pleasure. Professor Alan Mckee [Welcome to Sex, p. 8]

The professor omits the complicated and nuanced part. Welcome to Sex does not leave biology out of the text, but it carefully strategises diminishing its importance in the calculations children will be asked to make. The unspoken and not-totally-bad rule of the book is: first, check your feelings.

“Gender is how we define ourselves as being female, male, neither, both or something else.” That is one way to think about gender; but can it be correct? Being female is not an act of definition. It is not, in any sense, about language. ‘Being female’ is not something adolescents do to themselves or find ‘in’ themselves. In the list of sexual identity labels ‘female’ is not defined at all, but there is a definition of “cis-female.”

The linguistic enigma of the verbal phrase “identify as” is everywhere, placing (our poor, helpless) adolescents always at one remove from the reality of ‘is’. A boy is not a young male person. No: a boy is a young person who identifies as male, who ‘thinks’ or ‘feels’ he is male.

Transhub—let’s call it the ‘official’ definer of things trans in Australia—says gender is:

• Who you know yourself to be. This may be called gender identity, or simply gender. (e.g. Man/woman/non-binary/male/female),
• A role or set of roles a person has or is expected to perform in their society or culture. (e.g. mother, father, sibling, parent, spouse, wife, husband),
• The way a person expresses their gender to themselves or to others. (e.g. through masculinity, femininity and/or androgyny, wearing hair longer or shorter, facial hair, the clothes you choose, the pronouns you have),
• How their identity relates to what was presumed at birth. (e.g. cis if they have the same gender as presumed at birth, trans if it is different).

The emphasis here shifts away from ‘feelings’ to the much more assertive, and confident, ‘knowledge’ of self; but this definition leads to the same problem. The principle is: Who is going to contradict you when it comes to your knowledge of yourself? The answer to that question, children will need to understand, eventually, could be very embarrassing.

❦

Welcome to Sex is subtitled “Your No Silly Questions Guide to Pleasure, Sexuality and Figuring It Out.” The cover contains graphics of eggplants, a peach and two cherries, which may be amusing to children and render the content relatively harmless at the supermarket checkout. The book starts with a prologue. “[W]e’ve crammed as much realness into this book as possible so that you’ve got a rock-solid resource on sex that you can trust.” [Welcome to Sex, p.2] This prologue ends with a note about words and labels used in the book.

When we talk about sex and pleasure we’re not just talking about body parts and feelings, but also about people and relationships. We’ll use words like ‘person’, ‘teen’, ‘penis-owner’ or ‘vulva/vagina-owner’ a lot of the time. On occasion we might use ‘girl/woman’ or ‘boy/man’ when we’re talking about cisgender people and referring to a specific question or story or research: for example, ‘research shows that heterosexual women don’t care that much about penis size.’ [Welcome to Sex, p. 4]

The list of contents spreads over three pages, with very big type and prominent pictures of people kissing. These pages very clearly establish an equivalence between gay and heterosexual relationships. The first page of the contents section shows what appear to be two boys, the second page two girls, and the third page a ‘straight’ couple, a boy and a girl. The images neatly reference the speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium.

Welcome to Sex soon confronts older readers with an age barrier: while the questions are framed from the perspective of 11–15-year-olds, the great majority of ‘answers’, in the form of quotes, come from people who are just out of adolescence and in early adulthood, in either their late teens or twenties: ‘Megan’ is 21; ‘Casper’ is 20; Lisa is 23; ‘Holly’ is 24; someone called ‘Christian’, who’s age is not offered, is the father of two teens; ‘Dominique’ is 17; ‘Grace’ is 18. In this way the text links trust and credibility to a certain narrow range of ages and roles. The first illustration associated with text about a parent shows an angry ‘man’.

The illustrations, by Jenny Latham, are computer-constructed stereotypes of people, groups, races, and cultures. They are tediously predictable mashups of facial features, hair, and color, from an imaginary world where there is only one kind of nose and eyes do not have irises. Problems with the illustrations may be the consequence of artwork being managed by an editorial committee that feels an urgent need to remind us that dicks come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, thus …

… but is very coy about depicting girls or women wearing hijab and kissing boys. There’s definitely no interracial, same-sex antics going on in that ethno-religious sex category. This is the raunchiest it gets:

Hijab-less girls get it on with boys, and other girls, in all kinds of sexy ways. The authors and publishers have considered very carefully which minorities, religions, and ethnic groups they are prepared to offend or encourage. And when there is something mildly censorious to say about other cultures, quoting ‘the help’ puts the blame somewhere else:

I met up with ‘Mo’ when I was 16, he was 17. We didn’t have sex, we just talked. He said, ‘Men like [you and me] will get married and cheat on our wives with men.’ I didn’t want that, I would never want that. I think that reflects attitudes towards women that are prevalent in Arabic culture; I think it denigrates women. Bee. from the podcast One Foot In. [Welcome to Sex, p.89]

… Suggesting, as well, that orientation should not be so ‘fluid’ after marriage, for Arabs, anyway.

In the imaginary pleasure dome of Welcome to Sex you can be a black lesbian amputee with hairy (or is it tattooed?) butt-cheeks and be down for some satisfying scissoring, but if you have had your breasts removed in a fit of gender-affirmation you will find yourself sexually unrepresented and invisible.

A sex education book that bravely expounds on anal sex and the importance of soap [p. 167], premature ejaculation in the bald, black, cartoon-character community [p. 183], and has a full-page spread on vulvas and pubic hairdos [pp. 114–115], cannot find even one corner of about 300 pages to depict a woman (young or old) who has had her breasts removed. Other books for young people have introduced their readers to the brave new world of breast elimination. This feels like a missed opportunity to satisfy the urge for completeness, and honesty. The authors know there is a point where culture meets the control of sexual pleasure, and comment on it briefly …

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION
Female genital mutilation (FGM, sometimes called female genital cutting) is when some parts of the genitals are removed, usually when the child is young. It can involve removing some or all of the clitoris tip and hood, and inner and outer labia. This has been practised in some cultures for many centuries but is illegal now in Australia and most other countries, because of its inherent violence and because it causes long-term health effects. [Welcome to Sex, p. 40]

With so much attention paid to a great variety of subjects, much more could—and should—have been said about body modification, surgery, and the effect of drugs on pubertal, sexual, and psychological development. Such subjects are much more difficult to navigate and the authors of Welcome to Sex have decided it is more important to focus on the positive, enjoying sex, than on the negative, the infertility and unhappiness that might follow on decisions made in adolescence that a girl or boy was born in the ‘wrong body’. These subjects are part of every young person’s future as an adult sexual being, and Welcome to Sex is highly focussed on the feelings of the present.

Authors and publishers have made difficult and revealing choices about how far to go in exploring issues that adolescents might be interested in, and the limit appears to have been determined by factors other than ‘need to know’. There is no heading on the contents page for ‘Pronouns’, though this is the way everyone, including young people, refer to each other. ‘Xe/Xer’, ‘Ze/Zer’, ‘Ey/Em’, ‘Hir/Hir’, ‘Fae/Faer’, and ‘Hu/Hu’ are not discussed as options, though they are in use in some circles. There is a section on expanding one’s vocabulary, by which the authors mean they provide a list of pre-approved words with unhelpful or wrong definitions. ‘Omnifutuant’ does not get a guernsey. ‘Endosex’ gets two mentions [p.79]: “We tend to learn about bodies being ‘female’ or ‘male’, and have standard ideas about what their body parts (both inside and out) look like. The label ‘endosex’ describes people whose sex characteristics align with these ideas.” Actually, it means ‘the opposite of intersex’ and is a word that has been in very limited use only since about 2000.

Welcome to Sex sometimes reads like a manual of sexual comedy …

I try to imagine what it is like to be a girl categorised in this way. Would I be wrong to think myself cheapened by the idea parts of my body were spoken of like kitchen appliances that came with tips for proper use? Is this the language parents should be using to talk to their children? My own biography will give readers an insight into my shortage of qualifications to answer these questions. But, I assure you, I was an adolescent once.

❦

A fog descends on the minds of young and old alike:

Sex and gender—what’s the difference? Sex is to do with the genitals, chromosomes and hormones we have, usually ‘female’, ‘male’ and ‘intersex.’ Gender is how we define ourselves as being female, male, neither, both or something else. [Welcome to Sex, p.77]

In a book that intends to tell everything about ‘sex’ we are introduced to a world where there are three sexes, ‘intersex’ is counted as “usual”, ‘gender’ concerns only self-definitions rather than behaviors and stereotypes, we can be “both” male and female, or “neither” or “something else”. The perfect liberty to label oneself extends now to the possibility of being a “trans male” (instead of ‘man’) or “trans female” (instead of ‘woman’), and suppressing the meaning of all words we use to distinguish between sexes.

If to be gay is to be sexually “attracted to people of the same gender,” are penis-owners having sex gay if one of them ‘identifies as’ non-binary? To put it another way: if one cis-gendered penis-owner still identifying as a man has sex with a penis-owner who identifies as non-binary, could we say these penis-owners are occasionally heterosexual? How crucially important is it, from an epidemiological or statistical or medical point of view, to have a meaningful answer to that question?

Dr Kang and the publisher’s fact-checkers, if there were any, should have known better than to triumphally present ‘intersex’ as a third sex, smashing the binary duopoly of Nature’s norms. Note the emotional exclamation point …

It’s estimated that about 1.7 per cent of people have an intersex variation—that’s almost two in a hundred! Many intersex people are given hormones or have surgery done to change their genitals […] [Welcome to Sex, p.35]

This forgets to mention people with intersex conditions who object to being roped into the confusion of ‘sex’ and the many clinicians without ideological objectives who have argued (for decades) that the numbers are very wrong. (To be clear: the 1.7% figure is a statistical sleight-of-hand and clinical absurdity.)

Opening the book for the first time, I did not doubt Kang and Stynes have a strong protective impulse that they hope will empower young people to make sensible decisions. I believe that’s a correct assessment. So, why the blather and nonsense about ‘gender’? Why do the objectives and methods not seem to fit together?

Sex education in the 1980s and 1990s focussed on ‘safe sex’ to prevent disease. Sex education now combines practical information about safety with an unstated attempt to dismantle the damaging effects of prejudice against people who simply want to live and love differently. To achieve this, the power of insult and prejudice to inflict pain and to damage ‘identity’ (the sense of oneself) has to be dismantled: if everyone is to be included, no one must be held apart.

Kang and Stynes bring to sex education a Rouseauist attitude to children and politics in which the unblemished subjectivity of a maturing child needs to be both protected and guided. The terms of a new gender-sensitive language have double meanings. ‘Non-binary’ pretends to assert something real about the nature of sex, but in fact it is only the standard, pseudo-technical way of saying ‘Mind your own business’ or ‘I’m omnifutuant’ or ‘I’m still thinking about it, or might change my mind.’ Permitting male persons to demand and expect inclusion in lesbian groups can be reduced to an endless back and forth over the meaning of ‘woman’, or to a legal fiction intended to show compassion to a vanishingly small portion of the intersex population; but it is promoted, in practice, by disinformation about basic facts of biology.

Kang and Stynes think they are creating the conditions for freedom of subjectivity and identity. Instead, they prioritise gender over sex, feelings over judgement, present (pleasure) over future (consequences), sexual identity (feeling you were meant to be a woman) over sexual orientation (being a lesbian).

The practical consequences of this strategy are all around us now: male boxers put in the ring with women; male rapists sent to women’s prisons; young girls required to undress in front of adult men; women’s crisis centres run by men who seek to send those they are sheltering for gender ‘re-education’; the creation of an industry for modifying female bodies to look more like men, and male bodies to look more like women.

Disinformation about sex or gender is not a kindness to women, or to the many homosexuals who think that body modification to achieve stereotypical gender presentation is a new form of conversion therapy. In a book stuffed to bursting with foggy language about gender and sex, I found only one remark, within a couple of sentences about medically assisted pregnancies, on the effects of “gender-affirming hormones”. The other consequences of ‘puberty blockers’ are not mentioned at all:

Young people who have medical treatments that might affect their ability to conceive later in life can also receive information and advice about medical assistance. This might include children and teens having cancer treatment, or teens having gender-affirming hormones. [Welcome to Sex, p.251]

The ‘warning’ is much too little, much too late.

❦

The most significant assumption at play in Welcome to Sex is that the inner voice, with which we simultaneously talk and listen to our thoughts and report our feelings, is a source of certain knowledge about ourselves. The book is an extended mash-up of sexual liberation and gender solipsism. The effort to dismantle social barriers to acceptance has come to depend entirely on a foundation that is unreliable. If the sources of our truth are entirely private, the character of our social intercourse is certain to be conflicted.

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About the writer

Stephen J. Williams is a childless and unmarried writer and artist whose opinions on the subject of this essay may, and probably will, be easily dismissed; but he was young once, and that should count for something.

Supporting and additional information

• Welcome to Sex by Dr Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes. ISBN: 9781760509538; Pages, including folds: 304; Publisher: Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing; Published: 17 May 2023.
• Yumi Stynes in the media »» ‹https://bit.ly/3vrXISK›.
• The media (television) reporting of the book »» ‹https://bit.ly/3ShAbNh›.
• The clinical perspective on intersex statistics »» ‹https://www.leonardsax.com/how-common-is-intersex-a-response-to-anne-fausto-sterling/›.
• The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards »» ‹https://creative.gov.au/advocacy-and-research/events/prime-ministers-literary-awards›. Archived at ‹https://archive.md/vhZxx›. Accessed 8 October 2024.
• Dr Melissa Kang speaking on the Australian Broadcasting Commission »» ‹https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=310211996230038›.
• Transhub »» ‹https://www.transhub.org.au/101/sex›. Accessed 9 October 2024. [Where ‘gender’ is defined in relation to ‘gender’; and ‘sex’ does not appear anywhere in the definition of ‘gender.’]
• Subjectivity and identity »» Didier Eribon, Insult and the making of the gay self (Duke University Press, 2004).
• History »» Jonathan Zimmerman, Too Hot To Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Princeton University Press, 2015).
• Jean Jacques Rousseau »» ‹https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/›.
• Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and the interior voice »» Paul Salmon, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (Verso, 2020).