Inside ACON: The lobby group driving Australia’s trans rights revolution
A little-known former AIDS council is working to re-shape the way Australians think about sex and gender, sparking fierce backlash from the gay and lesbian communities it once served.
The power of Australia’s most successful trans lobby group was on glittering display earlier this year as hundreds of brightly clad executives gathered in the Grand Ballroom of Sydney’s International Convention Centre.
Among the partygoers vying for honours at the annual LGBTQ+ Inclusion awards were representatives from almost every major bank, law firm and university in the country, alongside officials from government departments up to and including Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Even Australia’s top spy and law-enforcement agencies were there – ASIO, ASIS, and the Australian Federal Police – all in the running for awards ranging from Bronze through to Platinum.
Many Australians would never have heard of the low-key awards organiser, the one-time AIDS Council of NSW, now rebranded as ACON, but they would likely have felt its influence.
As the nation’s self-appointed arbiter of “workplace inclusion” for trans employees, ACON boasts that more than 500 member employers – covering 25 per cent of the national workforce – have signed up to its trans rights agenda.
“The entanglement with ACON is everywhere,” says the Lesbian Action Group’s Nicole Mowbray.
“It’s spreading through schools, it’s going through the public service, through all facets of society, basically based on a belief that humans can change sex. It’s like a new religion and if you don’t believe that humans can change sex, you are well and truly on the outer.”
Hundreds of businesses and government agencies now compete in ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI), with points on offer for everything from cupcake days and gender-neutral bathrooms to paid leave for staff to “manage their gender-affirmation”.
Encompassing up to three million workers, the AWEI ranks each organisation out of a score of 200 on how they implement ACON’s policies.
Much of it is laudable work to protect vulnerable trans employees from bullying and requiring them to be treated with the same respect as every other member of the workforce.
But ACON’s workplace index is also the springboard for a wider and increasingly successful mission: to change not just the way trans people are treated by society but the way society defines sex and gender itself.
Hijacking ‘Pride’
ACON’s Pride in Sport program lobbies clubs to allow male athletes with trans identities to compete in female sports divisions.
Its Pride In Health+Wellbeing brand reaches deep into health departments around the country, advancing ACON’s push for “gender-affirming” medical treatment, including puberty blockers for children.
ACON works to ensure media coverage that reflects and supports its own ideology to the exclusion of contrary views; has successfully lobbied MPs to allow self-ID for anyone wishing to change their legal sex on birth certificates; and has helped ban women-only spaces that refuse to accept biological men.
With a mere $20m in taxpayer funding, ACON has effectively co-opted every arm of the state, from classrooms to courtrooms, to enforce its dogma that self-determined gender trumps biological sex.
ACON is not the only activist group to aggressively push the radical ideology increasingly accepted by the nation’s institutions, but it has spearheaded the movement.
Along the way it has driven one of the most successful social engineering programs ever undertaken in Australia, raising barely a murmur of protest – until now.
A growing chorus of voices, particularly from within the gay and lesbian communities, accuse ACON of hijacking the “Pride” emblem for an agenda they claim is narrow and exclusionary - the very opposite of its original aim.
The Blue Print
The AIDS Council of NSW was founded during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s but lost its core mission more than a decade ago as HIV infections began to plummet. By 2023, only 230 new infections were reported, thanks to the success of pre-exposure medication PrEP.
“ACON initially existed to help gay men through the AIDS crisis, and they did really good work around that, there’s no denying that,” Mowbray says. “But now that AIDS is much less a problem and we’ve gotten gay marriage, they’ve completely pivoted their focus to gender ideology.”
“They’re basically telling gay and lesbian people that we must accept opposite sex people in our dating pool, or we’re transphobic bigots. Well, no, it’s actually horribly homophobic to force on us people of the opposite sex.”
About eight years ago, ACON set about developing “a new strategic plan” led by the organisation’s then director of community health, Teddy Cook, a trans man and activist already running a sexual health campaign for trans men called Grunt.
But this new project was much more far-reaching.
“It was finally understood that trans people needed urgent intervention,” Cook would later tell a trans symposium. “We mobilised everyone, we brought people in, we consulted across the entire state and indeed across the country over a two-year period – it cost a lot of money.”
The product of that mobilisation was “The Blue Print” a masterplan that marked ACON’s metamorphosis from gay rights to trans rights, using its Pride in Diversity brand to leverage the switch.
‘A mockery of its original purpose’
At the same time, ACON was pivoting to expand into transgender healthcare advocacy, including the TransHub initiative, which promotes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery as part of gender-affirming care.
Many of the ideas were copied from UK charity Stonewall, another gay rights group shifting its focus to trans activism.
Pride in Diversity had been running since 2010, but now it adopted Stonewall’s Diversity Champions program, transforming workplace inclusion into a competitive sport and pushing organisations to embed ACON’s agenda into their policies and culture.
The success of the project is undeniable. Nine out of 10 of Australia’s largest employers are now members of Pride in Diversity, paying about $12,000 a year for the privilege, although many pay much more for training.
Pride in Diversity, in turn, runs the AWEI, touted as “the country’s national benchmarking instrument for LGBTQ workplace inclusion”.
Employers earn points out of a total of 200, filling in a questionnaire that can run to hundreds of pages with attachments “proving” that HR policies are inclusive to ACON’s satisfaction.
“The AWEI shows that ACON has lost its way and become a mockery of its original purpose,” says Marce Hamilton, president of prominent gay and lesbian group LGB Alliance Australia.
“Historically, ACON delivered one of the most successful public health responses in Australia. The AWEI now undermines its legitimacy - ACON has become a fringe group that no longer represents the interests of gay and lesbian people.”
Trade secret
Researcher Stassja Frei, who produces the Desexing Society podcast, argues the AWEI program was designed from the start as a form of social engineering.
“They were particularly successful in certain industries, like banking and finance, higher education and law,” says Frei, “or perhaps they had strategically targeted those industries due to their power and influence in society.”
Rather than an organic cultural evolution, AWEI is a top-down, manufactured social change, says Frei, whose podcast is the first to critically examine the transgender industry in Australia.
Frei began researching the impact of gender identity ideology on women and children after reading a pivotal 2020 essay by author J.K. Rowling.
She likens the AWEI to the “Safe Schools” program, a trans-lobby driven, government-funded initiative to help create more inclusive environments in schools for LGBTIQ+ students.
“It’s the adult version of Safe Schools - it forces the queer theory belief system onto Australian workers,” Frei says.
ACON claims the details of its AWEI program are a trade secret.
The organisation has opposed Freedom of Information requests lodged by The Australian with government departments, universities and media organisations to access the AWEI questionnaire, claiming that disclosure would infringe its intellectual property and “undermine ACON’s ability to operate as a sustainable business”.
One agency, the NSW Department of Education – which was bidding for Bronze status with ACON – refused an FOI request for the document on the bizarre grounds that providing it to a media organisation “could result in coordinated campaigns aimed at discrediting diversity inclusion efforts in government and public institutions”.
The games they play
Women’s rights advocate Kit Kowalski became intrigued by ACON’s strategy for infiltrating a wide range of institutions through its AWEI program.
Its brilliance has been in marketing its workplace agenda, she says, through the use of “gamification”: that is, having member groups compete against each other to win points and awards by jumping through ever more difficult hoops.
Organisations happily – albeit often unwittingly – race to embed the lobby group’s ideological agenda into their workplace policy and culture.
Kowalski started sending FOI requests to government departments about their attempts to score points in the program, a project documented on the ACON Exposed website.
What she found was an almost universal uptake of ACON’s demands.
Most government agencies now give annual leave for staff to “manage their gender-affirmation” or spend thousands of taxpayer dollars updating computer systems to include “Mx” as a non-binary title, all of which win more points.
Others hand out generous wardrobe grants for staff, “even if they’re transitioning from a female to a trans feminine non binary person with she/they pronouns,” as Kowalski told Frei in a recent episode of the Desexing Society podcast.
In Victoria, some enterprising male police officers quietly declared themselves non-binary to claim an extra $1300 allowance, a loophole quickly closed by the force’s Victoria Police, which nonetheless continues to boast its ACON-awarded “silver status for inclusion”.
A rainbow bow tie
ACON has a special award for CEO of the Year, and insists that all organisations have an internal Pride network involving a senior executive.
“It’s meant to help people feel more at home in their workplaces, and it’s really hijacking that concept to create a little mini arm of ACON inside the workplace,” says Kowalski.
For some of the participants there’s undoubtedly a tick-a-box element to their participation, citing cupcake days and pride networks for extra points.
“The vice chancellor wore a rainbow bow tie reflecting his support and pride in the LGBTQIA+ community”, Macquarie University submitted, with a hint of desperation.
For all the time and money poured into these programs there is “little evidence the measures recommended actually help LGBTQ people in the workplace”, says Kowalski, while some are actively detrimental to women.
Re-naming maternity leave as “new parent leave” (3 points) might seem innocuous, Kowalski says, but “it hurts women by erasing the recognition of biological motherhood”.
Likewise, all-gender toilets are not everyone’s idea of equality.
“The women’s bathroom is somewhere women go to talk to other women, to have some time away from whatever is happening at their desks and it’s literally a sanctuary in there,” Kowalski says. “Introducing a man into that space is not something I’m very interested in.”
‘Reina’ in the bathroom
It’s almost impossible to work in the public sector unless you agree to at least pay lip service to ACON’s requirements.
Staff in many NSW government departments are subtly pressured to add their pronouns to their email signatures and Teams profiles.
“These features are optional but are an inclusive way to demonstrate that you’ve taken the time to understand how pronouns can’t be assumed”, staff are informed.
Gender-neutral language in the office is required, so “partner” should be used rather than “wife” or “husband”, “child” instead of daughter, and so on.
Some requirements are not optional at all. Most federal and state employees have to complete mandatory online induction courses straight out of ACON’s training manuals.
One question poses the example of transwoman “Reina”, whose manager asks her if she could use the accessible bathroom, which is gender neutral, because her use of the female bathrooms is making her colleagues uncomfortable.
Is the manager’s request reasonable?
“No” is the only acceptable answer.
Answer yes and you won’t be allowed to proceed.
“You literally have to agree that Reina should be allowed to use the women’s facilities otherwise you can’t pass go,” says one woman who works in the NSW public service.
“So I’m literally forced by the NSW public sector to say that a man can come into our bathrooms, or I can’t get the tick I need to keep my job.”
“Trans-affirming practice”
ACON is now deeply embedded in the NSW health system, in some cases directly delivering the gender-affirming medical programs it promotes.
The astonishing scale of the marriage between NSW Health staff and ACON became apparent when The Australian applied under FOI for emails between the two organisations. The request was refused on the grounds it would require “an unreasonable diversion of resources”. A preliminary search had turned up 14,000 emails.
When The Australian agreed to reduce the scope of the application to emails between NSW Health staff and Cook the request was again refused. That search turned up 6450 emails.
The department has been in the thrall of ACON for almost a decade. By 2018, ACON was openly boasting that its staff had “already begun to influence the health sector” developing a Transgender Health and Gender Diversity Health Pathway “that provides guidance to GPs in the process of initiating hormone therapy”.
Seven years later, ACON provides training services for health staff throughout the NSW health system “increasing their capacity to deliver tailored, inclusive and affirming services to sexuality and gender diverse communities”.
NSW Health continues to rely on the highly controversial Australian Standards of Care for trans children and adolescents authored by Michelle Telfer and others from the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.
In a successful budget submission seeking $13m to implement the NSW government’s LGBTIQ+ Health Strategy, ACON identified “trans-affirming practice” as “the number one priority for health professionals seeking to improve their understanding of and practice with LGBTQ+ clients.”
But just how ACON spends the taxpayer’s money is a mystery.
Chilling effect
The organisation’s public funding comes via a NSW ministerially approved grant that refers to ACON only as “a statewide community-based organisation, funded to provide HIV & STI prevention, education, and support services to people at risk of and living with HIV”. There are references to programs for gay and bisexual men but no mention of transgender programs.
ACON does not report its expenditure across its different programs making it impossible to know how much it spends on transgender healthcare and advocacy rather than HIV/AIDS, or how much it spends on its direct political lobbying for changes to LGBTQ-related legislation.
NSW Health failed to answer specific questions in parliament earlier this year by Libertarian MP John Ruddick about ACON’s lack of clear financial reporting.
The department also declined to address concerns raised by Ruddick that its participation in the AWEI created an untenable conflict of interest, “given that ACON sets the standards that NSW Health is trying to meet in the AWEI, advocates for health policies and funding decisions that NSW Health oversees, and directly benefits from NSW Health striving to improve its AWEI score”.
“We can’t even get proper answers out of ministers about anything to do with ACON or funding for so-called trans and gender medicine”, says Sarah Morgan, another member of the Lesbian Action Group. “The chilling effect is absolutely everywhere.”
ACON told The Australian: “We believe all Australians deserve access to high quality health care and information. We directly assist thousands of people each year. We are fully accountable for how we use the funding we receive.
“We make our insights and expertise available to other organisations interested in working with LGBTQ communities. This includes submissions to legislative and policy processes and providing expertise in creating safe, respectful workplaces.”
ACON did not answer questions about the amount or proportion of ACON’s funding spent on direct political advocacy or whether it had a specific remit from the NSW government to use public money for these purposes.
‘Person with a cervix’
Beyond its $20m in annual NSW government funding, ACON receives significant federal funding, often diverted from more obvious health bodies.
Over the past two years, the Department of Health – a Platinum supporter of ACON’s Pride in Health + Wellbeing Awards – has handed ACON an extraordinary $7m for a “national cervical self-collection education and awareness campaign”.
That was 10 times more than other applicants received, dwarfing the $1m granted to the Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer, the leading expert body in the field for more than five decades.
ACON had approached the department seeking $533,600 but somehow ended up being awarded $7m without having to take part in an open tender. The campaign was originally intended to target “culturally and linguistically diverse women” rather than members of the LGBTIQ+ community.
The money was funnelled into ACON’s Own It website, which critics argue offers little more than the standard recommendations for cervical screening, apart from explicitly extending the advice from women to “a person with a cervix”.
Later that year the Department of Health won gold at ACON’s Pride in Diversity Awards.
Such health initiatives duplicate existing public health messaging and serve primarily to embed gender ideology into mainstream health communications, says Kowalski.
“It’s telling that they honestly think their functional operations as a health department should be getting them brownie points with an advocacy body,” she says.
In one recent survey the Department of Health won extra points for putting sanitary bins in male toilets, backing ACON’s position that men can menstruate. The department got more points for removing the word “mum” from pregnancy advice material.
A coalition of women’s and gay groups recently made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry that the department’s striving to win points under the AWEI created an “irreconcilable conflict of interest”.
“Australians cannot know if (the department’s) policy advice to the government on areas of interest to ACON is based on the ‘best available evidence’ or is designed to win points under the AWEI scheme,” said the Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances.
The AWEI scheme did not simply relate to workplace inclusion policies, the group pointed out, but “requires participants to provide evidence to the standards required by ACON of their public functions – their ‘outward facing policies and customer services’”.
Sham ‘talking points’
In its “whole-of-health” reinvention, ACON actively promotes medicalised gender change for young people, primarily through its TransHub arm, which claims medical interventions “are not only medically necessary, but life saving.”
TransHub was set up by Cook, who was also vice-president of the gender-affirming Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH).
ACON argues that all trans people in Australia should have full and free access to medical gender affirmation, including surgical interventions.
TransHub provides no hint that the “affirmative care” model is increasingly disputed by medical and legal authorities around the world, especially in relation to the efficacy of puberty blockers.
Documents obtained under FOI show the federal Department of Health endorses the “standards of care” developed for trans and gender diverse children and adolescents by AusPath in partnership with ACON, but never sought to evaluate them.
The documents reveal that the department advised Health Minister Mark Butler about these contrary assessments only in a set of media talking points clearly designed to discredit them.
The talking points repeat ACON’s disputed claim that “puberty suppression is reversible in its effects” and warn that “a national inquiry would not increase the scientific evidence available regarding gender dysphoria but would further harm already vulnerable patients through increased media and public attention”.
Butler has since launched a review into best practices for gender-distressed children due for mid-2026 but only last month claimed puberty blockers were a state matter despite his own review.
Few politicians from either side of politics have any appetite for challenging the shift to gender-affirmation. And ACON, in particular, has lots of friends in high places.
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The triumvirate
ACON extends its influence through an alliance with the politically powerful Equality Australia, led by former Labor staffer Anna Brown, and the markedly interventionist Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody, who acts under the auspices of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).
This triumvirate has been at the forefront of several high-stakes legal battles.
One was the astonishing decision by the AHRC to ban lesbian-only events as a breach of the Sex Discrimination Act because biological men who identified as women were not allowed to take part.
It was a decision that profoundly shocked many in the gay and lesbian community who had imagined that the legislation was created to protect them, not to criminalise them.
The ongoing erasure of biological sex in law is having a damaging effect on many in the gay community, particularly lesbians who say they are vulnerable to male sexual harassment and violence, and want their own spaces.
“This ideology is being forced on people and again, you’re targeted as being a Nazi bigot, a transphobe, if you don’t go along with what they’re trying to push,” says the LAG’s Mowbray.
“It’s quite authoritarian, and particularly for women, there’s no consultation, and certainly women haven’t consented to this.”
The triumvirate has also been coordinating in the sex discrimination claim against Sall Grover, founder of the Giggle for Girls app, who refused to allow transgender woman Roxanne Tickle to join the female-only networking platform.
Both Equality Australia and the Sex Discrimination Commissioner successfully applied to intervene in Tickle’s case against Grover as “friends of the court”, claiming only a desire to assist the judges in interpreting the Sex Discrimination Act.
That led to an extraordinary submission by Equality Australia – unchallenged by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner – that sex is simply “a way of classifying people along a scale between a man at one end and a woman at the other”.
Teddy Cook
One of the many common links in these cases is then-ACON director Cook, a long-time friend of Tickle, with the pair pictured together just days before Tickle initiated the complaint against Grover at the AHRC.
“That suggests to me that it was planned, that it was a set-up from the beginning,” says Grover, designed ultimately to create a precedent-setting High Court judgement that trans women – biological men – must be admitted to female-only spaces.
ACON denied that it or Cook had discussions with Tickle about pursuing legal action against Grover.
The highly networked Cook was one step away from being appointed to the World Health Organisation’s trans health advisory committee.
The venture came unstuck when questions were raised about Cook’s suitability to advise on such a critical and contentious area, after media reports highlighted his use of private social media accounts to post material relating to bestiality, public nudity, bondage parties and transgender orgies.
Cook resigned from ACON, but in the cloistered world of trans activism immediately re-emerged as Equality Australia’s chair of transequality.
Equality Australia denied Cook had been involved in the organisation’s amicus intervention in the Tickle case.
“Teddy Cook only joined Equality Australia as a consultant earlier this year and his personal friendships have no bearing on the decision by Equality Australia to intervene in this matter,” Brown said.
Betrayed
ACON claims to be acting in the interests of the entire LGBTQ+ rainbow, but its laser-like focus on the ‘T’ in the acronym has left many of those who founded the movement – lesbians, gays and bisexuals – feeling not just abandoned but profoundly betrayed.
The anger runs deep.
“Groups like ACON and Equality Australia have basically become the propaganda mouthpiece for the trans medical industrial complex,” says Mowbray.
“We hear this from young people, that there are no lesbian-only groups to go to anymore, because everything’s been forced underground. So their only choice is to come out at an LGBTIQ+ plus organisation where the pressure to take on a trans identity is immense.
“So we’re getting lots of young lesbians and gay men saying they’ve been same-sex-attracted all along, and yet they’ve been funnelled onto this medical pathway that’s completely unnecessary.”
Mowbray sees it as a form of conversion therapy for young people.
“Instead of changing our minds and our behaviour as they did in years gone past, they’re changing our bodies to make us into faux heterosexuals. It’s homophobia, coming from groups like ACON, and it’s insidious.”
The LGB Alliance Australia accuses ACON and its allies of taking part in “the institutional erasure of homosexuality”, arguing the extreme gender ideology they promote is “pseudo-scientific and presents a threat to people whose sexual orientation is towards the same sex”.
“Government departments should not participate in or fund a trans lobby group that undermines the rights of same-sex-attracted people and tells children they are ‘born in the wrong body’,” says LGB Alliance Australia’s Hamilton.
A growing number of gay and lesbian groups are joining with women’s rights groups to demand that all government agencies withdraw from partnerships with ACON.
Those calls are growing louder as evidence emerges of the lobby group’s unseen influence on one of Australia’s most important institutions - the national broadcaster.
Editor’s note: In an earlier version of this article Anna Brown was incorrectly quoted as referring to Teddy Cook as her. The Australian apologises for the error.
On Monday: How ACON captured the ABC
Do you know more about ACON? rices@theaustralian.com.au
