A controversial anti-transgender activist has been involved in a heated clash on the University of Melbourne campus.
Canadian man Chris Elston — who goes by the name “Billboard Chris” for his signature sandwich board costume bearing messages including “children cannot consent to puberty blockers” — was filming interviews with students on Tuesday morning when a passer-by yelling “scumbags!” allegedly knocked his tripod and camera to the ground.
“Can we get police on this guy?” Mr Elston says in the video as he and a companion follow after the dog-walker.
“Some dysfunctional trans-identified person just came and smashed my phone down.”
The person tells them, “Transphobes can suck my d*ck. Have you got a problem?”
Mr Elston asks to “have a conversation”. “Why the violence?” he says.
“What violence?” the person says.
“Well you just came and smashed my phone down,” Mr Elston says.
“Do you know what actual violence is?” the person retorts.
“The actual violence is the institutional transphobia that goes on across the world. When my community is designated as medical experiments, when my community is being slaughtered in the streets, when my friends have died … a friend of mine died recently, killed herself, because of the violence that you perpetrate.”
Mr Elston asks, “What violence am I perpetrating? I’m sitting here having conversations.”
The person hits back that “you’re not having conversations, you’re spreading ideology”.
“You came and smashed my phone down and look how respectful I’m being towards you,” Mr Elston says. “You should be getting arrested right now.”
The person tells him to “call the cops”.
The pair then launches into a debate about Mr Elston’s sign, which the person asks him to read out loud. “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers,” he says.
“Alright, why?” the person says.
“Why? Because we’re sterilising kids,” Mr Elston says.
The person replies, “Did you know that once you cease taking puberty blockers that your fertility returns? It’s true, because I’m on those puberty blockers, I was one of those children.”
Mr Elston then raises the Cass Review, a major independent report into the UK National Health Service’s gender identity treatments that last month urged “extreme caution” in prescribing puberty-blocking hormones for under-18s.
The person dismisses the review as “garbage” and says its chair, pediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, was funded by Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
“Why are you even here? You’re an American,” the person says.
“Why is there a f**king foreigner in our universities trying to spread this idea that American conservatism should be coming into this bloody country?”
They continue to argue for several more minutes before a young woman steps in the way to block the video, accusing Mr Elston of harassing students.
“We exist in a world where trans people are oppressed,” she says, adding that his sign is “dumb and lame and cringe”.
A photo shared to X by Mr Elston’s companion showed three police officers later speaking with the person who allegedly knocked over the camera at a bus stop on Elizabeth Street.
Victoria Police has been contacted for comment.
Sharing the video on X, where it has been more than 900,000 times, Mr Elston wrote, “What are universities doing to these kids?”
Mr Elston was recently in the middle of a controversy between the Australian government and Elon Musk’s X, after eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant ordered the platform to remove a post allegedly harmful to a transgender activist.
In late February, he shared a post slamming the proposed appointment of Australian trans activist Teddy Cook to a World Health Organisation (WHO) panel on healthcare delivery.
The post was widely viewed and shared in Australia until Ms Inman Grant issued a take-down notice to X on March 22.
“An ordinary reasonable person would conclude that it is likely that the material is intended to cause serious harm to the complainant,” the letter said.
“This is because the material misgenders the complainant and reiterates that this point is deliberate. The material also contains a statement that implicitly equates transgender identity with a psychiatric condition. This statement is deliberately degrading and suggests that all transgender people — and in this case the complainant in particular — have something that is ‘wrong’ about their psychology owing to their gender identity.”
X complied with the order to hide the post for users in Australia, but said it would file a legal challenge.
“Earlier this week, X was ordered by the Australian eSafety Commissioner, subject to an approximately $800,000 fine, to remove a user’s post,” the platform’s Global Government Affairs division wrote on March 30.
“The post had criticised an individual appointed by the World Health Organisation to serve as an expert on transgender issues. X is withholding the post in Australia in compliance with the order but intends to file a legal challenge to the order to protect its user’s right to free speech.”
The eSafety Commissioner has since issued similar take-down orders for violent videos of the Sydney stabbings, which X is also challenging in court.