Trans lobby defends a lie that silences women
So here goes: there is such a thing as binary sex. It is etched in your chromosomes and biology, and you cannot change it. Human beings are male or female. A vanishingly small number are intersex. That is a biological anomaly. It is not a third sex. We also use the words man and woman. That is gender. You can legally change your gender. If you wish to do so, good luck to you. No one should discriminate against you. But your rights are not the only rights, and when identity collides with reality in a plural society, compromise is unavoidable. As a general rule, the vast majority should not be forced to make profound changes to customs, laws and language to accommodate a tiny minority.
The legal right to change gender should not compel others to deny the reality of sex, because it is the definition of tyranny that you demand I sign up to a fantasy. Conceding that gender can be changed with nothing more than a form and a fee is a big enough leap. Conceding that sex is fluid is an assault on reason.
Giggle vs Tickle and a demand to deny reason
But the obvious is now being obscured. The concession to change the law on gender now leads to a demand to deny science. The activist playbook never changes: assert, extend, sanctify, silence. Sentiment overrules reason, and those who insist on fidelity to the truth are traduced. Who could have imagined that the ordinary meaning of male and female would one day be put on trial, and that the very body created to defend women’s rights would argue that “female” is essentially meaningless?
Yet that is exactly what is happening in the Giggle v Tickle case, in which Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman, successfully sued the women-only social media app Giggle for Girls for excluding her, with the Federal Court finding this was unlawful indirect discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act.
The effect has been to light a fire that now burns the city of meaning to the ground. What was once fixed was unmoored.
The case has gone to appeal and the Sex Discrimination Commissioner has intervened as a friend of the court, submitting that sex is “not a biological concept referring to whether a person at birth had male or female physical traits”.
“Nor is it a binary concept, limited to the ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex,” the commissioner’s submission argues. “The word ‘sex’ takes its ordinary meaning, which is informed by how that term is used throughout Australia including in state and territory legislation. ‘Sex’ can refer to a person being male, female, or another non-binary status. It is also broad enough to encompass the idea that a person’s ‘sex’ can be changed.”
The ordinary meaning of words is as old as the language itself, and the words “male” and “female” have carried stable, biologically rooted meanings in English for more than 600 years. Most Australians understand what those words mean and the Oxford Dictionary defines sex as “either of the main divisions (male and female) into which living things are placed on the basis of their reproductive functions”. By treating a legislative novelty a dozen years old as the measure of ordinary meaning, the commissioner has abandoned the highway of plain speech for a legal cul-de-sac of confusion.
When Labor’s Susan Ryan introduced the Sex Discrimination Bill in 1983, she made her purpose clear. The law was to give effect to the United Nations convention on the elimination of discrimination against women. That convention, and the Australian law that followed, were built on the recognition that women had been held back precisely because of things proper to their sex. Pregnancy and the possibility of pregnancy were named because they had long been used as reasons to sack women, deny them jobs, or block their advancement. Ryan told the Senate the bill would outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sex, marital status, or pregnancy. These protections were grounded in biology and were designed to secure equality for women as a group.
A Trojan horse wheeled inside the walls of the law
That clarity did not last. In 2013, the act was amended and the definitions of man and woman were quietly repealed to accommodate protections for gender identity. Where the law once spelled out that a man was a member of the male sex and a woman was a member of the female sex, the federal parliament now said those words should take their “ordinary meaning”. It was presented as a technical change, but it was nothing of the sort. It was a Trojan horse wheeled inside the walls of the law. The effect has been to light a fire that now burns the city of meaning to the ground. What was once fixed was unmoored.
This has opened a door for the commissioner to argue that even the act’s pregnancy provisions – protections written precisely for biological women because of their capacity to conceive – should be read as extending to trans women.
“The act defines ‘potential pregnancy’ to include the fact that the woman has expressed a desire to become pregnant, or that the woman is perceived as being likely to become pregnant. The repeal of the definition of ‘woman’, together with the comments in the 2013 notes on the law, suggest that a trans woman should be able to access protections like this, which in turn confirms that the word ‘woman’ is intended to include a trans woman.”
A trans woman may “desire” pregnancy, but no rational person could ever perceive her as capable of it. Yet the commissioner stretches the law to that absurdity, because the absence of definitions in the act allows it to conflate the moveable feast of gender with the biological reality of sex. That is a basic logical mistake, a category error, mixing up things that don’t belong together, like trying to measure temperature with a ruler.
Institutional betrayal of women
Parliament left this door ajar but the commissioner’s reasoning is as scrambled as its priorities. It ignores the common understanding of words, leaps across logic, and concludes that law can remake biology. That is like parliament declaring gravity does not exist. You can write it into a statute, but the apple still falls from the tree.
The terrifying thing in this is it takes a highly intelligent person to make an argument so reckless. Only an academic or a lawyer could do it. Only a court, a campus, or an inner-city dinner party could entertain the argument that the ordinary meaning of male and female is meaningless. It would not pass the pub test anywhere west of Chippendale.
The Sex Discrimination Act itself recognises that women sometimes need protections that are single-sex. Section 32 permits single-sex services where the nature of the service requires it, and section 42 expressly allows exclusion in competitive sporting activities where strength, stamina or physique are relevant. So, the act was written with the clear understanding that biology matters, and that there are circumstances in which women need spaces and protections of their own.
In dissolving the boundary between sex and gender, the commissioner is engaging in institutional betrayal. The office created to defend women now seeks to erase them. If the word “female” can be colonised by biological males, the law cannot protect women as women and every protection won over generations collapses. Even the experience of pregnancy and childbirth will be claimed by those who can never endure it. In the end, women lose not only their rights but their recognition. They will be pushed into a legal limbo, where their very existence as a class is denied.
The most insidious part of the commissioner’s argument is that it acts to silence women who dare to dissent. Women’s organisations already face orchestrated pressure to change their language and practice to accommodate aggressive activists. If sex is stripped of its biological anchor in law, on what grounds could any male who declares himself female be denied entry to real or virtual single-sex spaces?
Does the commissioner truly believe that in a world where any man can change gender by nomination alone, predatory men will not exploit that licence to prey on women?
The erasure of sex is just one skirmish in the war on reason waged by identity politics. It is an ideology aimed at dissolving the foundations of meaning, built on the belief that all human relationships are exercises in power. Confusion is the objective. When the meaning of basic terms is unmoored, power flows to those who dictate the new definitions.
The commissioner seems determined to etch a dangerous precedent into law. Its staff may feel on the right side of history, but they are morally adrift. They are defending a lie – and no law or court can make it true.
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