When it comes to transgender issues, our Prime Minister is a weathervane trapped in a man’s body. His pronouns are yeah/nah.

On Tuesday Mr Morrison backed a campaign to ban trans women (by which I mean men) from competing in women’s sports.

For a moment I thought he had won the election. The self-censoring, exhausted majority are fed up with LGBTQ insanity, and if Mr Morrison stood up to it he could win the election on this issue alone.

Most people have shut up about trans issues because they know that if they say anything at all, they will get unhinged, shouty criticism.

So they don’t say anything.

And then they vote.

But by Thursday, Mr Morrison had changed his mind.

On Tuesday Mr Morrison praised his candidate in the Sydney electorate of Warringah who had taken a strong stand to protect women’s sport.

‘Katherine is, you know, an outstanding individual. And she’s standing up for things that she believes in, and I share her views on those topics. And it’s got nothing to do with the broader gender debates. This is just about common sense and what’s right.’

But just two days later, after LGBTQ activists history-mined Katherine Deves’ Twitter feed for evidence of transphobia, the PM quickly swung in a different direction.

Deves had tweeted:

‘They will not stand for seeing vulnerable children surgically mutilated and sterilised in furtherance of an unattainable idea. The lawsuits will be legion, as the will the government inquiries. Complete failure of safeguarding. Mark my words.’

She was referring to young girls having double mastectomies and other treatments that leave trans people sterile for life.

Such comments were, according to Deves’ political opponent Zali Steggall, ‘appalling and divisive’.

Hardly.

If the Prime Minister had any courage, he would have defended his candidate and insisted that the only ‘appalling’ thing was Zali’s attempt to normalise people surgically altering their genitals to appear more like the opposite sex.

Someone with a backbone would have insisted that the truly ‘divisive’ thing was Zali’s approval of men competing in women’s sports on the basis that they believed themselves to be women.

But instead, Mr Morrison capitulated to the twitterati bullies and, after a quick conviction reassignment, denied ever endorsing Deve’s (now deleted) comments.

Mr Morrison said that his comments regarding trans individuals competing in sport were actually in relation to another politician’s Private Member’s Bill.

Moreover, he said his government would not support the Bill, brought by Claire Chandler, which would ban biological men from competing in women’s sports.

And so by the end of the week our PM, who was wrongly assigned conviction politician when elected to office, was now living as his authentic self – identifying as a weathervane who can be relied on to point whichever way the winds of popular culture are blowing.

Talk about a lost opportunity.

This is one of the Liberal’s great faults; always kowtowing to people who will never vote for them. It pains me say this, but you never see Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews or West Australia Premier Mark McGowan do that. They play to their mob 100 per cent of the time.

If only Mr Morrison identified as a man of principle.

You can follow James on Twitter. You can order his new book Notes from Woketopia here.

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