Category: Australia

Clash between trans and women’s rights

The founder of a women’s only social networking app has found herself at the centre of a charged debate about the cross section of trans and women’s rights.

It’s a battle between advocates for trans rights – who have said trans people suffer from high rates of abuse and assault, and are already marginalised – and advocates and lawyers for women’s rights – who say sex discrimination laws allow for “special measures” to promote women’s equality and exclude men.

Ms Grover, the founder of the female-only social networking app Giggle, has been accused of discriminating against a trans woman after she denied her access to the platform.

Roxanne Tickle, the Lismorebased trans woman, filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission on January 20 this year. “The app provider appears to not recognise transgender women as female. I am legally permitted to identify as female,” her complaint stated.

The case was brought to the Federal Circuit Court, but was inexplicably dropped on Monday.

Ms Grover welcomed the news on Wednesday, but may consider action to prevent a similar case from being brought against her in the future.

Ms Grover, who is about to give birth to her first child, said all she ever wanted to do was create an online “safe” space dedicated to women.

Source: Subscribe to The Australian | Newspaper home delivery, website, iPad, iPhone & Android apps

An impossible choice between violence and poverty: 60 per cent of single mothers report past domestic abuse, research finds – ABC News

A ground-breaking report, authored by leading feminist researcher Anne Summers, has revealed 60 per cent of single mothers have experienced domestic violence at the hands of a previous partner, compared to 17 per cent of women more broadly.

The report also sets out the immense financial challenges women face when leaving abusive relationships — and the lack of adequate government support for single mothers when they do escape, whether temporarily or permanently.

“When a woman leaves a violent relationship, we applaud that, but we never think of what happens next,” Summers says, “and that, in some ways, her life might be worse.”

While the number of single mothers who have experienced violence is shocking, it’s eclipsed by the number of women who remained in violent relationships at the time of the survey.

In 2016, 275,000 women reported suffering physical or sexual violence from a current partner. Of these respondents, 193,400 lived with their abusive partners at the time of the survey and almost 90,000 said they wanted to separate but were unable to.

A quarter of these women attributed being unable to leave to having no money or financial support. Other considerations included having nowhere else to go, fear of their partner, concerns for the safety of children or pets, and cultural and religious reasons.

“Women who experienced violence had to make a terrible choice: they either stay with the violence possibly continuing, or possibly getting worse, or they leave,” Summers says. “And if they leave, they have a 50 per cent chance of living in poverty.”

Terese Edwards, the chief executive of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children, has spent years supporting single-parent families, many of who are dealing with poverty, violence and financial hardship.

“My heart has been broken numerous times when I have worked with families only to discover that they’ve decided to go back to the hands of their abuser because they thought it was a better outcome for their children than living rough or not being able to give them the necessary clothing or food,” Edwards says.

Source: An impossible choice between violence and poverty: 60 per cent of single mothers report past domestic abuse, research finds – ABC News

Tickle vs. Giggle | The Spectator Australia

A landmark case is about to hit the Federal Court that will either confirm or challenge the ongoing attempt by the Australian government to erase ‘women, ‘female’, and ‘girl’ as sex-based categories.

Tickle vs. Giggle could be the title of a tween pillow fight, but it is the culmination of years of the legal erasure in Australia of the link between Australian women as recognised legally and the vulnerabilities of the female body.

Unfortunately, this is by no means a fair fight. Gender identity is a top-down movement, and the push for sex-based rights is bottom-up. Tickle will seek assistance from affiliates of billion-dollar law firms like Dentons, while Giggle and Grover will look to crown[sic] funding predominately from ordinary women.

Flat White

Tickle vs. Giggle

A landmark case is about to hit the Federal Court that will either confirm or challenge the ongoing attempt by the Australian government to erase ‘women, ‘female’, and ‘girl’ as sex-based categories.

Tickle vs. Giggle could be the title of a tween pillow fight, but it is the culmination of years of the legal erasure in Australia of the link between Australian women as recognised legally and the vulnerabilities of the female body.

Sall Grover is a Gold Coast businesswoman who heads a social media company called Giggle. Giggle is an app for females. The intention of Giggle is to provide a safe digital space for women and girls, where they can find a flatmate, organise socially, date (if they are same-sex attracted), and chat in an environment free of males. You can read Sall’s story for yourself, which involves her recovery from the well-publicised systemic sexual abuse problems in the Californian film industry.

In the early days of the Giggle app, Sall was faced with the decision to make the app for women as a sex or women as a gender. After a sustained campaign of abuse and harassment by people calling themselves ‘transwomen’, Sall decided to make the app exclusively for females, including trans-identifying females or ‘transmen’. On Giggle, it would be the possession of female body, regardless of identity, that puts you in the ‘in’ crowd.

In January 2022, Sall Grover received a complaint from the Australian Human Rights Commission. The complaint was lodged by Roxy Tickle and referenced a tweet exchange between Sall and Roxy in January 2021 in regard to the McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney. The complaint also referenced interaction on the Giggle app where Roxy allegedly gained access and was removed on the basis of sex.

Sall Grover received the initial AHRC complaint by Tickle not long after she announced her pregnancy on Twitter. The complaint remains unresolved because Sall refused to attend gender identity re-education and open her app to males.

Tickle has now filed for a hearing in the Federal Court against Giggle and Sall Grover personally.

Unfortunately, this is by no means a fair fight. Gender identity is a top-down movement, and the push for sex-based rights is bottom-up. Tickle will seek assistance from affiliates of billion-dollar law firms like Dentons, while Giggle and Grover will look to crown funding predominately from ordinary women.

‘Trans women’ we are told must be trusted without question by women, mothers, lesbians, and children in exactly that same way as biological women are, not because, as in days of old, that these males are physically or chemically castrated, but just because they have a special female essence or morality. Like it or not, women don’t always trust men who claim to have mystical powers that make them innocuous.

If Tickle wins, it will establish that males have a legal right, not just to the female sex category, but all female spaces, to view the female naked body in those spaces and to expose his male body to women and girls in public female facilities. It will also compel women to submit to the state-mandated definition of a woman, which makes her not just a subset of her own sex class, but an underclass.

Reflecting this in a dystopian tweet in February last year, Tickle insisted that Sall Grover should not refer to herself as ‘female’. Tickle said, ‘You keep on using the word “female” but I think you mean cis female?… with an F on my birth certificate … I am legally female in Australia. All of my cis girlfriends treat me the same as them.’

Grover replied, ‘For me, being treated as female is getting death threats.’

[ed: Since this article was printed Tickle has discontinued the proceedings]

Source: Tickle vs. Giggle | The Spectator Australia

The 2021 Australian census in 8 charts

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Women are more likely to have a long-term health condition, and more likely to have multiple conditions

Women are more likely to have a long-term health condition, and more likely to have multiple conditions

Women are still doing (much) more housework than men

Finally, the census showed – again – that women are doing the lion’s share of unpaid domestic work.

Women were much more likely than men to be doing more than 30 hours of unpaid domestic work in the week prior to census night, and men were more likely to have done none at all.

 

Three or more conditionsTwo conditionsOne condition17.9%17.9%5.1%5.1%2.7%2.7%

Source: The 2021 Australian census in 8 charts

The Greens party is too important to abandon it to social media mobs

I have been a member of the Australian Greens since 2010, but the recent, ugly episode that saw me ousted as Victorian convenor raises real concerns about the future for a party that claims to champion democracy.

The Greens fight for things I believe in: social justice, economic redistribution, peace, and trying to save our planet from environmental catastrophe. As a feminist, anti-racist, education activist, trade unionist and environmentalist, of course, I became active in the Greens, just as I have been active all my life in many community and campaign groups.

I was decried as “transphobic” because, in 2019, I co-authored an internal discussion paper in response to a proposal published by other Greens members titled “Trans Exclusionary Rhetoric”, which sought to ban debate around issues of sex and gender.

I asked whether there were potential complexities about the rights of non-trans women – in sport, in intimate medical procedures, in domestic violence shelters, in hospital wards and prisons – and if so, how should the party address them? A political party that aspires to legislate must be mature enough to deal with such complexities.

As the social media storm blew up around me, to my shock and dismay, instead of calming matters down by reassuring trans members about the Greens’ well-established support and advocacy for LGBTIQA+ rights, the party’s parliamentarians decided to pour petrol on the fire. Led by Senator Janet Rice, MPs and local councillors including Tim Read, Sam Hibbins and Lidia Thorpe used social media to declare that my tenure as convenor was untenable.

The attacks were personal and distressing, but there are much more important things at stake here than my feelings. Those attacks challenge whether members have the right to discuss complex and sensitive issues inside the party. And the overturning of my election is a disturbing move by a party that upholds grassroots democracy as a core principle.

After four days of escalating attacks, Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam used an administrative process to have the election overturned. The party’s internal tribunal set the election aside and ordered a fresh election. This decision was wrong, but I accepted it.

It seemed clear to me that this wasn’t about process; it was about politics. Ratnam said I should not run again.

This is an existential moment for the Greens. Will the members continue to run the party? Or, like the Labor Party, will we cede that to our elected representatives, with the members just along for the ride?

The Greens party is too important to abandon it to social media mobs.

Source: The Greens party is too important to abandon it to social media mobs

Two Women Canceled by Australian Green Party for ‘Transphobia’

In June 2022, two women were “canceled” by the Greens Australia for “transphobia” – Anna Kerr in the state of New South Wales and Linda Gale in Victoria.

The newly elected Victoria Greens convenor (chair), Linda Gale, was ejected from her role “on a technicality” after party members made various allegations against her, including one of election manipulation, “attempting to stifle debate,” and “transphobia.”

In the 2019 text that Rice alluded to, titled “Trans Exclusionary Rhetoric, Contending Views,” Linda Gale argued that the party shouldn’t ban statements such as “there are two sexes,” “trans women aren’t the same as biological women” and “the science is not conclusive” as this runs against the Greens ethos of encouraging robust debate.

In her Convenor’s Report, Gale wrote the social media campaign against her continued “in subsequent days by social media statements by a significant number of state and federal parliamentarians (…) calling for my resignation unless I made a public statement admitting I was a transphobe, and some going so far as to say it was now too late and I must resign regardless of what I said.”

The “smear campaign” ended with Gale being ousted from a role she had held for just seven days.

Meanwhile, in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), Anna Kerr was suspended from NSW Greens for “disrupting Greens actions and discussions with transphobic and trans exclusionary views.”’

In May 2022, WDI Australia sent a survey to political candidates and politicians, in regard to the upcoming Australian federal election. The nine-question survey’s purpose, was, in Kerr’s words, to “raise awareness of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.”

Women’s Declaration International adds reasons for the termination of Kerr’s Green Party membership included her expressing “concern at the Green Party’s attempts to delete the word ‘woman’ from new legislation protecting unborn babies.”

According to WDI, Anna Kerr has also come under criticism for supporting Australia’s only single-sex pool – McIver’s Ladies Baths.

Recently, Australia’s Green Party co-founder Drew Hutton has come out in support of the two women, stating:

“I believe in full human rights for trans people at the same time as supporting the right of women to be safe from patriarchal oppression. I am also prepared to say these things publicly. Unfortunately, in the Greens at present that would seem to make me a ‘transphobe’ and already one state convenor has been sacked and one member in another state expelled for stating much the same thing. This is authoritarian and anti-democratic and I call for saner voices to be heard on this issue. If not, let me know when my expulsion from the Greens begins, will you?”

Another expression of support has come from Australian leftists who have issued a petition:

“We on the Australian left, whether members or not of the Greens, decry this travesty of process, of justice, and of democracy, and call on the Greens to reinstate Kerr and issue a formal public apology to Gale.”

Source: Two Women Canceled by Australian Green Party for ‘Transphobia’

Ousted Greens convenor defiant amid party’s trans row – The Age

The woman at the centre of a row within the Greens over transgender rights is likely to defy her party’s leadership and recontest for the role she was removed from last week.

Long-time party activist Linda Gale told The Age she was looking to stand again for the position as the Greens’ Victorian convenor after the party overturned her election amid an internal dispute over transgender issues fought through social media.

It is the latest flashpoint in an emotional and divisive debate within the Greens over whether party members are allowed to raise concerns about whether trans rights can conflict with the rights of biological women in some circumstances.

“The crisis of democracy in the Greens will continue for as long as the ‘no debate’ edict stands around issues of sex and gender, which affect us all,” said Leppert, who in 2010 managed Adam Bandt’s successful campaign for the federal seat of Melbourne.

“I am optimistic that we [the Greens] will rise above this,” said Leppert, “but to do that we will need to recommit to collectivism and rediscover the importance of debate.”

Divisions within the Greens have been reflected across the country, with the expulsion of feminist lawyer Anna Kerr from the NSW Greens.

Source: Ousted Greens convenor defiant amid party’s trans row

‘Increased risk of harm’: call for transwomen to stay in male jails

NSW now has three transgender women housed in the state’s female prison population – with questions being raised about security for female sex assault and DV victims.

The issue has become controversial in the UK and in the US after rapes and pregnancies within jails – and now several Australian feminist groups are calling for the Sex Discrimination Act to be changed to protect female prisoners.

Coalition for Biological Reality founder Stassja Frei said sex segregation was necessary and said trans women were not the only males at risk of violence in men’s prisons — therefore the solution was separate wings in those jails “for all vulnerable men, inclusive of trans women” .

Source: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/…/e01963b82be731eda7e…