Good policy demands open debate

On Tuesday, Scott Morrison endorsed the Save Women’s Sport Bill of Liberal senator Claire Chandler. The response from Equality Australia, which campaigns for transgender rights, was swift, decrying a cruel exclusion of trans people from sport.

This continues the tradition of trans rights advocacy with weak arguments and the emotive framing of contrary views as hateful and bigoted. Such a strategy is doomed to fail. There can be no denying that there are serious conflicts between trans rights claims and the interests of others, in this case women and girls who rely on the long-protected nature of female sport. Until recently, those in the federal bureaucracy, peak sporting bodies and activist groups promoting trans inclusion had little need to consider the rights of others. They had the inside running and were able to tilt the playing field to their side.

In 2019, two public agencies, Sport Australia and the Australian Human Rights Commission, issued a trans inclusion guideline putting pressure on sporting codes to reorganise games on the basis of self-declared gender identity – a concept confined to the academic fringe until relatively recently. The clear implication was that sports trying to hang on to the female-only category risked uncapped financial penalties under federal anti-discrimination law. In theory, there is still a qualified exemption for female-only sport – based on the obvious physical advantages of male over female bodies in many competitions – but government-backed activism has come close to intimidating any sport seeking to rely on that exemption. The risk of injury and unfairness to girls and women has been overshadowed.

It is telling that to this day Sport Australia and the AHRC refuse to say which groups they allowed inside the tent to influence the drafting of that 2019 guideline. So far, the Coalition government has shown no interest in demanding a review of this unbalanced document.

Equality Australia is deluding itself if it thinks it can dodge a good-faith public debate by misrepresenting Senator Chandler’s bill as seeking to exclude trans people from sport. Like anyone else, trans people can take part in sport; one option is an open category. The Chandler bill would bolster the lawful nature of the female-only category. It’s up to the trans inclusion activists to persuade Australians that sporting categories should be divided according to a person’s subjective idea of their gender identity, even when this is at odds with their objective biological sex. After all, it’s male and female bodies that jostle in sporting competition, not gender avatars.