The Political Villain

How Scapegoating the Vulnerable Is Causing Everyone Harm

I was a happy kid. Before the world got organised around me, before the categories hardened, I moved through life without armour. That kid existed. I remember her.

I also remember the weeks before the cruelty started. That part matters. Because it wasn’t instant. I had friends. I played with those kids. They knew me. And then, slowly, something shifted in the rooms around me. Not in me — in them. Conversations I wasn’t part of were clearly happening somewhere else. At dinner tables, in living rooms, in the ambient noise of parents and television and a culture deciding things. Week by week, I watched something change in the way those kids looked at me. I was the same person I had always been. But I was becoming something different in their eyes.

And then the cruelty arrived. Not from nowhere. It had been built, carefully, over weeks, by forces none of us in that schoolyard could see or name. The system — the one that runs more smoothly when people are afraid of each other, when difference is threatening rather than ordinary — had done its work. It had told those kids, through their parents, through culture, through the ambient noise of a society that polices its own edges, that something like me was a problem. Not a person. A problem.

That’s what I want you to hold onto. Those kids knew me. They had played with me, laughed with me, been ordinary children alongside me. And then the framing arrived and rearranged everything. I didn’t change. The story about me changed. And once the story changed, I stopped being a person they knew and became a concept they’d been taught to have feelings about.

Once you are a concept, you can be debated. Managed. Discussed. But you can’t really be hurt. Because you’re not really a person anymore. You’re an issue.

Those kids had a choice. Even after the framing arrived, even after the dinner table conversations had done their work, they still knew me. That knowledge was still there. Choosing it — choosing to see a person instead of a problem — would have cost them something. Social belonging. The comfort of going along. The ease of accepting what they’d been told rather than sitting with what they actually knew. That is a real cost. I don’t dismiss it. But they had the choice. And they chose comfortable convenience over the harder thing.

That’s the thing about the machinery. It doesn’t ask for cruelty. It just makes cruelty the most comfortable, convenient option available. And most people, most of the time, will take it.

—

I came out. I transitioned. I became visible. And the comfortable convenience followed me into the street.

I have had things thrown at me from moving cars. I have been spat on. I have had slurs screamed at me by strangers who looked straight through me while they did it. That’s the thing I keep coming back to — the way they looked through me. Not at me. I wasn’t a person in that moment. I was a concept they had feelings about, and their feelings needed somewhere to go.

As I got stronger, the tactics shifted. The violence got quieter. Not because the comfortable convenience of dehumanising me became less available to them, but because I stopped performing the fear they needed to confirm the story. When you refuse to be a concept, when you keep insisting on being a person, it disrupts something. The machinery stutters.

It never stops. But it stutters.

—

Australia has been running this machinery for a long time. The targets change. The mechanics don’t.

In the early 2010s, the conversation was about border security. About stopping the boats. About illegal arrivals. The language was precise and deliberate — every word chosen to transform people fleeing war and persecution into a policy problem. Not human beings making desperate choices. A border security issue. By 2014, the Scanlon Foundation found sixty-one percent of Australians supported turning back asylum seeker boats. And why wouldn’t they? They weren’t turning back people. They were taking a position on border security. The framing had done its work. Comfortable, convenient, morally frictionless.

Then came the marriage equality debate. And notice that word — debate. When you call it a debate, you have already made a decision. You have already agreed that some people’s rights are debatable. That their existence as equal citizens is a question reasonable people can take different sides on. Research published in the Australian Journal of Psychology found the 2017 postal survey was a measurable mental health event — LGBTIQ Australians reported significant increases in anxiety and psychological distress just from watching the nation discuss whether they deserved equal standing under the law. People weren’t debating a policy. They were debating human beings. But the framing had made that invisible. It was just a debate. And participating in it was comfortable. Normal. Civic.

The moment marriage equality passed, the machinery needed somewhere new to go. It had been running for years on the question of whether LGBTIQ people deserved equal rights. That question was settled. The infrastructure — the outrage, the media coverage, the political energy, the audiences trained to fear something — was still there. It just needed a new target. Trans people were available. And the pivot was seamless.

Now trans people are the issue. Not trans people — the trans issue. That shift in language is not accidental. It is the machinery operating exactly as designed. Bills are being tabled right now in federal parliament to remove gender identity protections, to redefine sex in law, to roll back rights built over decades. The debate is not about me. It is about gender ideology, about women’s safety, about protecting children. I am somewhere in there, but I am not really visible. I am the concept the debate is organised around. And every person who accepts that framing — who engages with the trans issue rather than with trans people — is choosing the comfortable convenience of not having to sit with my humanity.

Disabled Australians have always been a convenient target. That debate is not new. But it has gotten significantly louder at a particular moment — one worth noticing. Australians are beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about money. About why one of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas exporters is running a budget that apparently cannot afford to support its most vulnerable citizens. Australia exported over 80 million tonnes of LNG in 2023, yet the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax — the mechanism designed to return that resource wealth to the public — has delivered a fraction of what comparable nations collect. That is a question the system does not want you sitting with. So instead, it hands you the NDIS. The National Disability Insurance Scheme — a commitment to the lives of Australians with disability — has become a budget problem. A line item. A sustainability crisis. Look at the drain, not at where the water went. Research published in the Australian Journal of Social Issues found this framing has real consequences: people with psychosocial disability are now internalising shame about their own needs, choosing not to apply for support they are entitled to because the message that they cost too much has settled somewhere deep. The system turned their lives into a fiscal debate. And they believed it.

—

There is a clinical framework for what this sustained devaluation does to people. Minority stress — developed by researcher Ilan Meyer at UCLA — shows that people from stigmatised groups carry chronic, compounding stressors that sit on top of ordinary life. The vigilance. The anticipation of rejection. The accumulated weight of being positioned as a problem rather than a person. This produces measurable, lasting damage to mental health. LGBTIQ Australians are three and a half times more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety than heterosexual Australians. Three times more likely to have a depressive disorder. The system makes people sick. Then it debates whether their suffering is really that bad.

But the damage doesn’t stay contained. That’s the part the machinery needs you to miss.

When people choose the comfortable convenience of the scapegoat, they stop looking at what’s actually failing them. They are not looking at housing costs, at wage stagnation, at a healthcare system under pressure. They are looking at the issue they’ve been handed. And the systems that produced their actual suffering keep running, untouched, while the debate rages about people who had nothing to do with it.

The asylum seeker didn’t drive up your rent. The trans woman didn’t stagnate your wages. The disabled person didn’t hollow out your public services. But they were available. They were already framed as problems. And choosing them as the explanation was comfortable. Convenient. Easier than sitting with the harder, messier truth.

—

I’m not asking you to be uncomfortable forever. I’m asking you to be uncomfortable for long enough to notice what’s happening.

The next time someone hands you an issue — a debate, a problem, a question reasonable people disagree about — ask yourself what happened to the person inside it. Ask who benefits from you engaging with the concept rather than the human. Ask what you’re not looking at because the framing is pointing you somewhere else.

The machinery depends on you not asking those questions. It depends on the comfortable convenience of acceptance being easier than the discomfort of thought.

I was a happy kid. The system turned me into a problem before I had words for what I was. And I have spent my life insisting, in the face of everything organised to prevent it, on being a person instead.

I’m still here. Still a person. Not an issue. Not a debate.

Just a person. Asking you to see one.

Dylan Jade Rackley