Transphobia is rising. Half of all trans people in Australia have experienced verbal harassment. For one in ten, the abuse includes physical violence. Discrimination is a daily occurrence. One in three have faced employment discrimination. It is therefore unsurprising that 19 percent of transgender people are unemployed — nearly three times the national average.
Access to life-saving healthcare for trans youth is under relentless attack, with the Queensland government extending its ban until 2031. Then, last December, the Northern Territory government joined Queensland in banning puberty blockers. The Territory also incarcerates trans women in male prisons.
Far-right groups are spreading Trump’s war on trans rights around the world. In Australia, they fan anti-trans panic — seen, for example, in transphobic bigotry all over social media.
But rampant transphobia is also festering in a less likely place: the Board of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG)!
For more than a decade, the activist group, Pride in Protest (PiP), has been campaigning against the corporate domination of Mardi Gras. Standing grassroots candidates for the board has been part of their organising. The current PiP-aligned directors are Luna Choo, a trans asylum seeker, and Damien Nguyen, a migrant rights activist and sex worker. Choo was elected to the board in 2025 with the highest ever popular vote, while Nguyen topped the vote count in 2024. The pair are currently leading a tenacious fightback against the board’s transphobia.
They follow in the footsteps of other pro-trans, anti-corporate directors. Mardi Gras has a terrible record of mistreating democratically elected directors who don’t back a festival designed to maximise pink dollar profiteering. Skip Blofield, a unionist seeking to bring Mardi Gras back to its working class and anti-police roots, was a director from 2022-23. Stood down by the SGLMG Board in 2023, they say they experienced what the board “has done to most people of colour and trans people in recent times.”
The current battle kicked off at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) last November. The membership passed a resolution encouraging all participants to make transgender rights a part of their float. Additionally, parliamentarians were to be informed by the board that they would not be welcome unless they were prepared to commit to anti-discrimination reform in a timely manner – reforms Labor is refusing to back without bipartisan support of the Liberals! But instead of acting on the will of the membership, the board majority decided to tell members by email that it would not implement the resolution.
When Choo and Nguyen responded to members’ correspondence supporting the AGM motions, they were locked out of their official email accounts. The Board co-chairs then put motions censuring both of the pro-trans directors — even misgendering Choo, the only trans person on the board. Two weeks before the start of the Mardi Gras season, the Board endorsed these censure motions.
This hardly ended the turbulence for the SGLMG Board. Just 25 days before the big parade, the CEO announced the cancelation of the two-million-dollar parade afterparty. Last year the board had outsourced this mega event to Klicks Entertainment, which is a target of the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions campaign. A subsidiary of Live Nation, Klicks is a project that art-washes genocide. It seems that the Mardi Gras ethical charter, which states the organisation must not accept sponsorship or enter into contracts with companies connected to war and genocide, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on!
PiP argues that the board is scapegoating the trans community to distract from the afterparty cancellation — described by PiP’s Miles Carter as “an outsourced smouldering wreckage.”
The next step is a campaign to call an emergency general meeting of members to remove the undemocratic co-chairs. The meeting will also insist that Mardi Gras implement the AGM motions prioritising transgender rights. We say bring it on!
Three cheers for PiP and its crucial campaign to get cops, profiteers and warmongers out of Mardi Gras. Many of the ‘78ers, who faced police abuse and mass arrests at the first Mardi Gras, back the PiP project to return the event to its protest roots. Centring the struggles of the most oppressed within the LGBTIQA+ community — including trans and gender-diverse people and queers of colour — is the beating heart of this battle.
