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August 23, 2024 - 10:00am
Women no longer exist as a separate category in Australia. Sex is ‘changeable’, according to the judge who has just ruled in a case that effectively destroys single-sex spaces and services for Australian women. It’s a devastating blow for female rights in the country, which is experiencing an ‘epidemic’ of violence against women according to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
The court case turned on whether a women-only app, Giggle for Girls, could legally exclude a trans woman. The judge decided that Roxanne Tickle, who is biologically male, suffered indirect discrimination when he was excluded from the app by its CEO, Sall Grover. She set up the app as an ‘online refuge’ for women after experiencing the damaging effects of social media abuse while living in the US.
The implications of the judgment, while not directly about sexual and domestic violence, are far-reaching. There has never been a more urgent case for single-sex services in Australia, yet the outcome confirms that ‘gender identity’ now takes precedence over sex. One of the most shocking features of the case is that the result has been welcomed by Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, who issued a press release stuffed with familiar jargon.
‘Gender equality means equal treatment for people of all genders, including trans people,’ the statement said. ‘We will continue to stand with trans communities and advocate for the rights of all women, including women who are trans.’ The extent of the assault on women’s rights was exposed during the hearings, when a barrister acting for the Australian Human Rights Commission claimed that ‘sex is not a binary concept and it is not exclusively a biological concept’.
These are shocking sentiments, elevating an undefinable — and unverifiable — ‘gender identity’ above biological sex. But while an array of courts, politicians and human rights organizations have decided that sex is no longer obvious and immutable, the same cannot be said about the assumptions of men who murder women.
Last year, 64 women were killed by someone known to them in Australia, a higher rate even than in the UK. In April, six people — five of them women — were murdered in a rampage in a shopping mall in Sydney. It belongs in a horrific series of attacks based on sex that stretches all the way back to the Montreal massacre in 1989, when 14 female engineering students were murdered. The latest addition to this grim list happened in the UK last month, when three little girls were killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport.
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