The American comedian Wanda Sykes — the woman Chris Rock jokes would win "best portrayal of a Black best friend" every year if there was a Black Oscars category — does a great bit about the threats facing modern American children.
The real threat, as Wanda sees it, is not the scourge of obesity, or poor diets or lack of access to education or health care — Wanda thinks the real danger is something a little more quotidian, even while the generalised anxiety about the current threat to kids is dressed up as something else.
You would have heard about the US school districts and the states that have acted to remove "dangerous" books from classrooms and stopped scary drag queens from reading those and other books to them, but with school shootings a weekly occurrence across the country, Wanda doesn't see books as the problem.
"Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird," she deadpans, "I think you're focusing on the wrong shit."
There's been a bit of anguish expressed my way recently about safety concerns for children, after a talkback caller rang my show, horrified by a story about a trans mum in the UK who had breastfed her child.
The caller described what the mum (not the word she used) had done as using a baby to indulge a fetish with the result that the infant had been exposed to an unnatural toxic goo that represented a new low against women. She said it was important that we be able to have a conversation about it.
That's what my show is, within the boundaries of defamation and offensive language — an ongoing conversation about the issues of the day, big and small. But when I responded to my caller that it seemed reasonable to me that a trans mum, like any other mum, would breastfeed her child if she was able to and wanted to, a social media version of sounding a fox bugle was blasted across Twitter (sorry, X) and all came running.
It was curious to see the number of outraged people who turned up, given that few of the most notable of them live in the state in which I broadcast: Katherine Deves, the Liberals' failed candidate for the seat of Warringah in NSW, and Lyle Shelton, director of the Family First Party also in NSW.
The angry responses and the denunciations of me included that I was contemptuous of normal people and callous towards babies; that trans mums were "cosplaying" and that I was casually giving away the rights of women.
But as the social media ripples spread and the pile-on continued, the broader discussion became about the safety of the child itself, and the "abuse" it was being subjected to by the feeding.
I clearly had no care for a child who was, the posters argued, at serious risk from unnatural feeding. "It's straight up child abuse," they wrote.
Kids do need our attention
The issue of trade unionist Mika Minio-Paluello feeding her baby has become a cause célèbre for anti-trans activists in Britain, and when viewed en bloc the rhetoric here was all of a kind — seemingly coming straight from the activists in the UK who reported the trans mother to the leading children's charity there, the NSPCC.
The NSPCC responded to their report and found that there was no danger to the child and that no action was needed. And while some claimed that the mother's milk was toxic, the reality is that just like adopting mums who want to breastfeed the child they have not gestated, Minio-Paluello took the same combination of hormones that can safely bring on lactation with no danger to the child. (One of the hormones used can be risky, but it's a danger posed to the mother who could be at an increased risk of developing a serious heart condition.) There's more information here.
It's never pleasant being at the centre of a pile-on on Twitter (sorry, X), but that really wasn't what bothered me. As my old editor always said, if you can't stand the heat …
What confused me was all this deeply felt concern for children, when I really hadn't seen much anxiety similarly expressed for all the thousands of Australian kids who live in dangerous, damaging, high-risk circumstances and whose lives are being compromised and even cut short, all with our full understanding of their problems.
I guess I might take all the outrage a bit more seriously if I heard wails of anguish about the more than 15,000 children in Lyle Shelton's state who need foster homes and can't live safely with parents who I assume are mostly still the gender they were assigned at birth; the criticism would be easier to take if it came from people who daily expressed horror at the 1.3 million Australian children who went without enough food every day, or the more than 50,000 kids who don't get to go to school.
State and territory child protection services responded to more than 178,800 children in 2020–21 — an increase from about 168,300 in previous years — and the issues ranged from child abuse or neglect through to care and protection orders, or placement in out-of-home care.
It's only natural to feel and express concern for the safety of little children — their vulnerability pierces all our hearts no matter how we see the world. But it seems to me there are real dangers, confected dangers and also concerns about dangers that only seem to exist for one extremely small group of children who all have mums that have travelled a similar path.
And if these are the only kids who are keeping you awake at night as their mums struggle just like the rest of us to raise them the best they can, while so many other Australian children have real and crucial unmet needs every single day, then like Wanda says: I think you're focusing on the wrong thing.
This weekend we are waltzing the Matildas, remembering the rum and never forgetting the incomparable musical legacy of Sinead O'Connor.
And if warm, funny and thoughtful is your thing then this week's You Don't Know Me is a wonderful big Aussie hug from living national treasure Ernie Dingo: you can listen and sign on for weekly episodes here – please share it with your friends.
I only saw Sinead O'Connor live once, and it was in her later years, but she was utterly mesmerising; furious, untethered, and otherworldly.
I think this is the song of hers that means the most to me right now. Go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.