Is Per Capita’s Executive Director a transphobe?

Emma Dawson is the executive director of Per Capita, a Labor independent attack thinktank purporting to oppose inequality in Australia. The organisation follows the ACOSS line on keeping welfare below the Henderson Poverty Line, and generally cheerlead notionally progressive Labor policy like the Jobs and Skills Summit that “listened” to pre-selected welfare recipients and pumped out a clearly pre-prepared list of policies that included mutual obligations for people on the Disability Support Pension, and ignoring bad Labor policy. All of the major faces of Per Capita are violently opposed to the Australian Greens, and even international left wing figures such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin.

Let’s start with who she followed on Twitter before she deactivated her account. Red denotes someone who is unsafe for trans people as indicated by the browser extension Shinigami Eyes, and while there is a chance of a false positive, all those captured in this screenshot are known to be ideologically transphobic.

Most of these are international transphobes, however, a few locals stick out. Sall Grover is the transphobe that caused Bill Shorten to remove inclusive additions to Medicare forms for new parents, and often shows up to public enquiries and transphobe events with anti-abortion activist Rachel Wong.

Another interesting follow was Councillor Rohan Leppert of the Melbourne City Council, who she explicitly gave support to when it came out that he was repeating the fascist great replacement of lesbians rhetoric by trans women, and criticising the affirmation only requirements of the anti-conversion therapy bill that passed in Victoria. Rohan Leppert has a reciprocal social media relationship with Victorian detransitioner Ollie Davies/Hackett who promotes the anti-trans organisation Genspect, and feeds rhetoric of his own transition regret to attack trans healthcare.

Of the others displayed, two are notable quislings of the trans community. Buck Angel is a trans masculine former porn actor who seems to oscillate between supporting transphobic rhetoric and asking the transphobic audience he cultivates to not misgender him. Buck is notable for also outing Lily Wachowski as trans. Debbie Hayton is a teacher in the UK and misgenders herself for her transphobic audience, and cops flak from them for using the women’s restrooms. Selling out to violent ideologies for a platform and twisting themselves into unrecognisable messes just to stay in good graces, these people will never know peace while they preach hatred of themselves.

A rather big one though is JK Rowling, once a children’s book author, now she rides the coattails of that past success and spends her time attacking the trans community, she’s notable for a few reasons, she is notionally a British Labour supporter of the Blairite variety – neoliberal as all hell. She also gets behind women’s rights in Iran, using their subjugation as shield for her transphobic politics. The fact she’s being quoted by far right politicians right up to Putin to justify attacks on the LGBT+ communities has not fazed her one bit. I shan’t need to go too far into the details, Rowling’s former dabbling in transphobia has become so blatant it is basically the only reason people follow her now. I will delegate the reasoning for her once quieter transphobia to this article by Katy Montgomerie.

Anyway, Emma Dawson had quite a bit to say before she nuked her Twitter account, laying into a fellow thinktank researcher and journalist Claire Connelly in the process.

Oh yeah, and that she frequently attack trans antipoverty activists like myself and Avery Howard, including weaponising the far right groomer slur and stalking us on LinkedIn.