The Devine truth about girls

One of the challenges with conflicting yet unprovable news reports is knowing what to think. It’s what I call the Jane Bennet problem: even if you want to believe both sides there may only be enough truth for one of them to be right (I’ve written on this before).

I started feeling this way a few hours after Miranda Devine — a journalist I quite like — published a piece last week that had me believe my daughters’ school would no longer be calling them girls.

My first response was shock. My second was disbelief. Then it was cold fury. How could they? And so on.

What made the article so alarming was its unusually high degree of specificity. It’s not often you read an inside scoop from your children’s school that lists so many facts you should have known, but didn’t. The claims were so shocking they had to be true.

Around 7:30pm the same day I was waiting to collect one of my daughters from a dance class when a friend tweeted a refutation from the Guardian. The article contained a link to a Facebook post from the school (since deleted, and reposted). The post contained the word girl twice (three times, if you include the account name).

At which point my wife and I started arguing (my wife is the last person to be convinced of anything, but then she grew up in Asia knowing what it meant to go hungry. I’m more privileged.). I maintained the extreme unlikelihood of a school using publicly a word they had told staff they would be made to feel unwelcome for using, or fired for. Equally, the idea that the principal would be so deceitful as to say one thing to the world and an utterly opposite thing to her staff — over a matter of such fundamental relevance — beggars belief. Imagine the unfair dismissal suits.

Even were she so brazen, the fury with which Ms Bridge addressed the school the next day (mentioning the word girl so many times that my daughters afterwards all but rolled their eyes telling me about it) was too real to be faked.

That night my wife wrote an email to Ms Bridge. We acknowledged the broad rebuttal of the school’s Facebook post but pointed out that Miranda’s article made a couple more claims which the post — while doubtless sincere — failed to address. Could we have a meeting?

The following day I received a phone call from an official at the NSW Department of Education. Could my wife and I come in and talk? Yes, we could. What days worked? I checked with my wife, called back, and locked in a meeting.

We went on Tuesday.

If you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, now is the time to pop this article on hold, hop across to Book Depository, and buy yourself a copy. All set? Good.

There were three glasses in the meeting room at the DEC’s offices. The official (whom I will not name, in view of the fact the investigation for the Minister is still ongoing) poured water for the three of us. “Your glasses are just like ours,” I quipped. “No two of them are the same.”

And then we got to it.

I had with me the article of Ms. Devine’s from Sunday night, with my as-yet unanswered bits in yellow highlighter. I had also by this stage seen the Media Watch piece.

Jane Bennet, lance lowered, full tilt in pursuit of the facts.

The investigator faced me across the meeting room table, looked me in the eye, and told me with measured calmness that he had taken formal statements from several teachers (I don’t recall a number, but I got the sense it was at least four; pick your own number) who were at the meeting. Each interview took place 1:1.

All the interviewees were emphatic that no prohibition to use the word girl was given. The suggestion that it had been was vehemently denied by all interviewees.

We asked about Safe Schools. He did not know why the page in question had been taken down, but took an action to find out. He confirmed CGHS has signed up to the program. What it has not done, he said, is roll out any of the content. So…it’s in, but not: I can see the confusion. Parents will be notified before any content is deployed, he said. Fair enough.

So now we’re down to the short strokes.

Was there a meeting last term. Yes.

Was anti-discrimination discussed. Yes.

Was gender-neutral language raised. Yes: apparently, a couple of students at the school are transgender and would prefer to be called by their given names. Even if that’s disingenuous, I find it wholly unobjectionable.

The DEC gentlemen whose hand my wife and I shook is a thoroughgoing professional of many years experience. His exasperation — though admirably concealed — was palpable. I don’t think he was faking it.

I like Miranda. For the record, she has written some pieces I admire. She has at times shown real guts in the face of what I would call bullying. No part of me wants to believe she would make this story up. Call me naive or call me Jane: I can’t do it.

No-one has the right to ask Miranda to name her source. And I wouldn’t advise them to come forward: Facebook has already shown the filth it is capable of unearthing on this issue. For the record, I have found the left’s comments more tempered than the right’s, and I’m politically conservative.

But I would ask Miranda to quantify the reliability of her sources.

Were they at the meeting? That’s a primary source. Or were they someone who spoke to someone who attended the meeting? That’s secondary (one step less credible). And so on.

Also, how many sources — who were at the meeting or spoke to someone who was — does she have? That goes to quantity.

The more primacy, the more quantity, the more reliability.

And let’s compare scores.

But to be honest, I’m over it. Endlessly repeating second, third, or fourth hand information isn’t getting to the bottom of things, it’s getting further away from them. This issue has been deeply — and I begin to suspect needlessly — divisive. In my lounge room, in the school community, and throughout NSW. To say it’s been handled in an ugly fashion would be an understatement.

Maybe Miranda has better sources than me. I doubt it. But I would be thrilled to be wrong. Because then at least I’d know.

Not everyone likes Susan Bridge. She’s confident. She’s strong-willed. She may or may not be a tough nut to work with. She’s tall. (If I talked like this about a male CEO, people would say I was being condescending. They’d be right.)

But she loves dogs, and she’s been kind to me. And she’s a dyed in the wool feminist.

Maybe a scenario was mooted. Maybe it was corrected. Sensibly, matter of factly.

Maybe I’ll never know.

But I reckon the day Susan Bridge lets a member of her staff be sacked for calling one of her students a girl is the day hell freezes over.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that would have been her position a year ago. It’s beyond obvious it’s her position today.

So even if Miranda’s source is calling it like it was, absolutely nothing at the school has changed.

Which makes you wonder.

Maybe the Reds are under the beds, but they’ll have to go through Susan Bridge to get to her girls.

Good luck with that.

Graham Rees lives in Epping with his wife, two daughters, and a very cute dog. If you want to be awful about him on social media, you probably need help.