A decision in the Federal Court last Friday confirmed a shocking reality that many of us already knew; it is now illegal for women to publicly make a single sex space in Australia, under the current operation of the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) (SDA). The SDA is no longer fit for purpose, or rather, its purpose is now to threaten women into submission.
The destruction of the sex category in which women hold civil rights is not “unintentional consequences” of gender identity protections. The legislation that Justice Bromwich ruled on in the Federal Court in the Tickle V Giggle case is the SDA operating exactly as it is intended to operate by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), who have been strategically removing the ovaries from the SDA for decades.
Justice Bromwich in the Federal Court ruled that Sall Grover and Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd had engaged in indirect discrimination, by removing, the obvious male, Roxanne Tickle from the social media App that Grover had created for female people.
All the arguments mounted by Grover’s legal team failed, except for the argument that Grover could not have “directly” or intentionally discriminated on the basis of gender identity, because gender identity can’t be discerned on sight, because gender identity is invisible. Gender identity is essentially a legally protected sexed soul built from stereotypes.
Significantly, Bromwich declared “that in its contemporary ordinary meaning, sex is changeable”. Bromwich based this on a few cases in the last 30 years, where a legal fiction had been applied to trans identified people for compassionate reasons.
Noone thought to gather all the cases and legislation where women and girls are dealt with by the law as humans with a specific reproductive path. The Sex Discrimination Act, under which Sall Grover and her business were sued, was once such a piece of legislation.
The SDA originally recognised that the female body had a reproductive path that placed women and girls at a structural disadvantage in society. In the 40 years since its inception, the SDA has been the victim, like so many women and girls, of unbridled molestation.
The SDA came into effect under the Hawke Labor Government in 1984, after years of campaigning by women’s rights activists. The legislation wasn’t original, but a type of civil rights legislation that was being trialled in western nations to encourage full participation of women in society, free from discrimination and male pattern sexual harassment.
The SDA, has been altered 56 times since 1984, often at the instigation of the Australian Human Rights Commission who administer the Act, and most famously by the Gillard Labor government who removed the definitions of “man” and “woman” from the SDA in 2013.
It was clear in the Explanatory Memorandum of the 2013 change, that the definition of man and woman was removed from the SDA specifically to include trans identified males into the definition of women. The memorandum states;
These definitions are repealed in order to ensure that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not interpreted so narrowly as to exclude, for example, a transgender woman from accessing protections from discrimination on the basis of other attributes contained in the SDA.
When Julia Gillard was asked last year about the 2013 amendments by Women’s Rights Network representatives, her rationale for the change was that there are a “number of people who genuinely believe that they are trapped in the wrong body and they want to be recognised as the gender their mind and soul have always told them that they are.”
To be fair, Gillard may not have predicted the SDA would be used in tandem with “self ID” legislation, and that this pairing would be accepted by the Federal Court. Anyone who has been studying this issue as long as I have will know that this is absolutely the intention of those who mould modern government policy.
The second key piece of legislation Justice Bromwich relied on in his decision was the newly minted Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration (Act 2023) (BDMRA), which only came into effect between the trial in April and the judgment last week. We refer to the BDMRA as “self ID” legislation because it allows any person to change their legal sex with a simple declaration of gender identity.
Because the validity of the (BDMRA) was challenged constitutionally by the Giggle legal team, and tested against international women’s rights treaties, and failed on both accounts, in the Federal Court, the implications of the ruling by Bromwich goes much further than birth certificates.
The legislation, that the Federal Court just recognised as constitutionally valid, and not being in contravention of international human rights law, states in black and white, that the kind of “internal” gender identity that is protected over sex, the kind of gender that factually changes sex, doesn’t exist in a document, but can exist in “name, dress, speech and behaviour”. Gender identity in law is quite different to the legal fiction that preceded it, that gave compassionate allowances for a few people to present as the opposite sex.
A male wishing to gain access to women’s spaces, doesn’t even need to have a certificate, because gender identity protections under the BDMRA, protects a man performing female gender via a hat, a garment from Millers, a tilt of the head or a higher octave of voice.
Any outward demonstration of “woman gender” allows a man to access all female only areas, for any reason, and he can’t legally be removed, unless he breaks the law. To be protected as a change in sex, gender identity doesn’t need a certificate, because gender identity is an internal soul, and the outward manifestations are evidenced by words, clothes, names and behaviour.
The way Bromwich disregarded concerns for the constitutional validity of gender identity legislation and the international human rights concerns it raises, is a clear indication of how the legal establishment in Australia have been authors and enablers in the removal of women as a sex class.
We call this a culture war, but this is a class war, playing out in our institutions.
How many working-class fathers do you think would accept grown men identifying into the change rooms where their daughters are compelled to change while the child is in the custody of schools and sporting institutions?” All schools and sporting institutions will fall under the authority of this ruling, and we need to take away its structure piece by piece.
When Shannon Fentiman introduced the Qld BDM Registration Act to Parliament she said that “I am proud to rise to introduce the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2022. I want to start by acknowledging the many trans and diverse people and their allies in the gallery today. These are the people this legislation is for.”
Under the Queensland constitution, members of Parliament are bound to make laws for the people of Queensland, not fringe interest groups or invisible gender souls. The Qld BDM Registration legislation redefines human sex categories against criteria the government itself provides. The mandate to allow the government to re-define human sex categories in law was never given to the Queensland Labor Party.
Individuals simply won’t be able to fight these dictates in court. In the process of Giggle V Tickle, Sall Grover’s business has been ruined, and if she didn’t have a group of supporters to fund her, she would certainly be bankrupted by the legal fees. Combined with the $10,000 awarded by the judge to Tickle personally, Sall Grover is obliged to pay Tickle’s costs (that are only partially capped). The legal fees that Sall is facing, including her own, will come close to $1M, and that is not including the High Court challenge she is about to embark on, which will likely exceed an additional 500K.
Tickle was funded by the Grata Fund, which is listed as a legal aid charity, who fund social justice causes by donors who give “strategic gifts”. The Grata Fund took this case specifically to cement the pairing of gender identity with self ID in the law.
In endeavouring to interpret the correct intention of gender identity protections, Bromwich was compelled to adopt the ideological language early on, without which it is impossible to make gender identity make any sense at all.
Bromwich stated;
“cisgender refers to a person whose gender corresponds to the sex registered for them at birth. That is to be contrasted with a person whose gender does not correspond with their sex as registered at birth, commonly referred to as transgender. The respondents do not accept the legitimacy of the terms cisgender and transgender. I find both terms useful and convenient for the purpose of deciding and discussing the relevant facts and in accordance with the gender identity discrimination provisions in the SDA”
The problem with “assigned at birth” as a sovereign concept in law, over the more scientific understanding of human sex as an immutable characteristic, is that sex is not a birth condition, sex is a life condition. Furthermore, the life condition of sex is authoritative in the life of girls and women in a way that places them at a structural disadvantage.
If you have been saying to yourself “surely this won’t get through the courts”, you can stop that now. We should all support Sall Grover and her crowd funder to continue her fight to the High Court, but personally I have little hope of this legislation being challenged in the courts. The Australian courts are the very venue where women’s rights have been recklessly disregarded and dismantled.
This issue, I believe, will only be fixed through the political process, through bringing our politicians to account, and for the conservative parties to take up this cause in earnest.
People are in favour of gay rights, we already know that, but not this is not that. Gender identity protections are a massive safeguarding failure instigated by the western state.
The Australian Human Rights commission has destroyed the SDA and it must be disbanded. Gillard’s Amendments to the SDA in 2013 must be repealed, as should all mention of gender identity in the SDA. David Crisafulli, if he should gain power in Queensland in October, must fully repeal the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 2023. And that won’t even touch the damage gender identity ideology has done to our children and workplaces. To achieve any of this, the Liberal Party of Australia will need to learn to communicate with two key groups of abandoned constituents, the working class and women.
NZ just going through the same ordeal the Green Party want to include gender identity, DSD and non binary protections in our human rights act. We have till next week to make public submissions to put a stop to it. However I have a feeling they will ignore the submissions against gender. We must protect sex based rights. As you rightly pointed out most of the human rights sex discrimination act were written to protect women and girls. Not so long ago women had to give up work once pregnant. Couldn’t sign mortgage papers, could only hold down certain types of jobs, no sit down toilets for females on building sites, restrictions for uni courses the list goes on !!! And we bloody well are agin going backwards so a minority can put on a dress and say they are a women this is bullshit !
Thank you for your brilliant analysis of the piece-by-piece dismantling of women’s sex-based rights & protections by Australia’s Human Rights Commission. I am equally incandescent with rage about the now-worldwide trend of the erasure of women’s language, spaces and protections. Here, on Terf Island, we have a war of attrition over self-ID and gender woo. I continue to be astonished at the willingness of so many feminists to embrace gender nonsense, seemingly unconcerned about the threats this poses to themselves and other women & girls. An excellent piece, Edie. Will share.