Category: Transgenderism

Nine months after hearing the appeal, the Federal Court held that a woman, Sall Grover, had directly discriminated against Roxy Tickle, a person “designated” male at birth but with a female gender identity, when she removed Tickle from an app called Giggle for Girls.

Grover was ordered to pay damages of $20,000 for Tickle’s hurt feelings including aggravated damages for “misgendering” Tickle during the trial by using a male rather than female pronoun. The Federal Court said all it was doing was applying the law, but was it?

If special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia is granted, four matters may be of interest:

Was the Federal Court wrong to hold that the “ordinary meaning” of woman includes a person such as Tickle? Why did the court adopt the contested terminology of one litigant rather than use the terminology in the Sex Discrimination Act (Cth)? Did the court misapply the SDA when finding that Grover had directly discriminated against a protected group, of which Tickle is a member, by assuming all such persons have “male facial features” and all persons born female have “female facial features”? As Grover had a genuine belief that only persons born female could be women, was it wrong for the court to increase the damages because Grover “misgendered” Tickle?

One is left with the impression that the court bent over backwards to achieve a particular outcome. The adage “hard cases make bad law” is apt in this case.

Source: Sall Grover ordered to pay $20k in Giggle for Girls discrimination case | The Australian

Women Speak Tasmania will tomorrow be presenting their submissions at TASCAT over our appeal against the rejection by the Anti-Discrimination Commission of our complaint of discrimination by Libraries Tasmania for the cancellation of our room bookings.

Libraries Tasmania had cancelled meeting room bookings by WST at which discussions were to be held on various political, legislative and human rights aspects of the controversial sex self-ID laws.

“Libraries Tasmania’s cancellation of WST meetings is a breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Australia is a signatory.”

“These controversial laws have eroded Australians’ rights to freedom of speech, political opinion and freedom of association.”

“WST has received increasing feedback from Tasmanians that these laws must be repealed,” says WST advisor Isla MacGregor.

Source: Women’s Right to Freedom of Political Opinion Hearing at TASCAT – Women Speak Tasmania

I have been invited to speak in Sydney about my new book on climate change at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in August. Filling out the author information form, I have been asked to nominate my gender. In fact, the form asks me to nominate my “Gender Identity” and gives four options.

The options presuppose that sex, biological sex, is either irrelevant or subsumed within the category of “gender identity.” The word “identifying” quietly installs the premise that sex is a matter of self-ascription rather than biological fact.

The question has been designed in such a way that to answer is to capitulate to gender ideology. In philosophy this is known as a “presupposition fallacy.” Linguistically, it’s a power play. The act of answering legitimizes the framework because the question has smuggled in an assumption that I may not accept but would be endorsing by ticking one of the boxes presented to me.

The festival’s gender question is Foucault in action because it exemplifies how institutional power normalises a particular “regime of truth”. It is doing so not through argument but through bureaucratic procedure. The form is not trying to persuade me that gender identity supersedes biological sex. I am simply being administered on that assumption.

Foucault argued that a system of everyday rules and institutional routines is far more powerful than overt argument precisely because it presents itself as neutral data collection. The festival organisers do not say “we believe gender identity supersedes sex”; they simply act as though it is already settled fact, just common sense.

Rather than skip the question, I decided to tick the “Other” box. When a space for explanation popped up, I wrote in it: “I am not male identifying. I am male”. It seems, though, that I have been Othered.

Having solved that problem, the author form next asked me to nominate my pronouns.

Note that the form does not ask me to nominate my “preferred pronouns”. It turns out that “preferred” should not be used because “identity is not a choice”.

Foucault would be proud.

Government bureaucracies across Australia now routinely administer us as if self-assigned gender trumps biological sex. The courts have embedded this Foucauldian theory into law so that now it is unlawful to act as if sex should have priority over gender in, for example, women-only spaces.

The Festival of Dangerous Ideas presents itself as Australia’s most audacious and thought-provoking event, one that is, in the words of one of its speakers Stephen Fry, “a rare corner of the world where free expression isn’t just tolerated, but celebrated.” It boasts about making those who attend feel uncomfortable. Well, the author form did that for me.

Apart from a soft discussion about J.K. Rowling with a Youtuber in 2024, I cannot find in the festival’s program any discomforting gender critical feminist voices.

Once the idea of objective truth is discarded, we all drown in a post-truth world where nothing counts but opinion and subjective feeling.

Source: Dodgy Pronouns and Phantom Identities – Clive Hamilton

At his time of life, you would think Drew Hutton had greener pastures to tend – specifically, on his retreat in the verdant Sunshine Coast hinterland. Or that he would be busy living up to the promise he made to his wife that he was through with the guff and grind of politics to finally put her first.

But here he is, aged 79 and with the fire burning afresh in his flat belly, walking away from the party he co-founded in 1992 with his old friend Bob Brown to strike out in a bold new venture.

There’s no doubt some in the Greens will say good riddance. Hutton’s falling out with the hierarchy in his home state of Queensland has been epic. What began as a dispute over the right to speak his mind – on transgender policy, of all things – metastasised into a tooth and nail struggle over the values and direction of the party, pitting the stalwart activist against both a vindictive state machine and Brisbane-based federal Greens leader Larissa Waters. 

Hutton’s last hurrah was to steer Larissa Waters through preselection to become the first Greens senator from Queensland in 2010. They no longer speak.

“I’ve never been one for putting hard work into a hopeless cause,” Hutton tells Inquirer.

“Given that fanatics are in ­control and the membership just simply is either too frightened or too uninterested to take back control of the party, it’s a hopeless cause. I’m not going to waste my energy on it.”

“My politics are still exactly the same as they were back in the 1980s when I first started setting up green political organisations,” he says. “I believe in the four pillars of green politics: ecological sustainability, social justice, democracy, and nonviolence. They’re my guiding principles, but they are no longer the guiding principles of the Greens.

“The issue for the Greens is they have no ability to talk to people outside that particular constituency,” he explains.

“These people have contempt for ordinary Australians. They’re university educated and predominantly from the inner city. They’re into identity politics. They’re professional, managerial elites and they don’t relate to … working-class Australians.”

“Unless somebody wakes up Labor and the Greens to the fact that they are not representing the people they purport to, the progressive side of politics is going to disintegrate in this country,” Hutton warns. “The Greens are going to stay at a sub-primary (vote) level, Labor is going to become increasingly unpopular out there and One Nation is going to cannibalise their vote. The left is going to have to take a very good look at ­itself if it wants to stay relevant in Australian politics.”

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

More than a year of FOI requests and appeals has produced a broadly consistent picture of how the Australian Government manages its relationship with the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem.

The entries on the document list from September to November 2024 confirm that Ms Alsalem’s letter to the Prime Minister and her 4 September statement on Tickle v Giggle were treated as requiring prompt attention.

The documents show that officials asked internally whether a reply to Ms Alsalem’s letter to the Prime Minister was required, and were advised that no response was needed because it was treated as a “courtesy letter” and no reply had been requested, although AGD could respond if it wished and DFAT would then “consider further”. Whether Australia subsequently replied remains unknown; the scope limitations and redactions do not allow us to determine this.

[S]ubject lines strongly suggest that, after a period of cross‑agency deliberation over February 2025, officials were acting on advice that Australia would not provide a submission in response to the Special Rapporteur’s call for inputs on sex‑based violence.

In October 2025, following an internal review of an earlier refusal, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations released, in part, the transcript of a ‘Fireside Chat’ held on 18 September 2024 and jointly hosted by DEWR and the Department of Education for their staff. That transcript (LEX 1781) revealed that Ambassador Campbell had told staff that Ms Alsalem had “taken a fairly difficult position on transgender rights in a way that doesn’t conform with our views”, and that “we are directly engaging through various different mechanisms” to deal with those concerns.

The department determined, in accordance with section 11C(1) of the FOI Act, that publication of the information provided in relation to FOI request LEX 1781 would be unreasonable and therefore chose not to publish it on the department’s disclosure log. We publish it here in the public interest.

In the material released so far under LEX 13100, the only detailed meeting preparation disclosed is for engagement with Graeme Reid, the Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity (IE SOGI), while comparable material for direct engagement with Ms Alsalem has not been released. Detailed talking points were prepared for a meeting with him, including references to disagreements between his mandate and that of Ms Alsalem as Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. Mr Reid’s mandate appears to be closer to the Government’s preferred framing on these issues.

On the documents released so far, Australia appears to have spoken about Ms Alsalem’s mandate, and around her mandate, but there is no disclosed record of substantive two‑way engagement with her on the Tickle v Giggle decision or her December 2024 call for inputs to understand, test or even seek to correct her views.

Source: “Australia not to provide a submission”: Inside DFAT’s management of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls – The Women’s Advocate

When a political party starts treating a good person, a hero even, as an evil bigot, it has become an authoritarian cult. Drew Hutton, who helped found the Australian Greens, was first suspended for pointing out that trans women are not, in fact, women. He was subsequently booted out, was reinstated on appeal, and finally resigned this week. 

Hutton became one of the countless victims of a crackdown on free speech, and the party, on a global scale, becoming obsessed with woke causes. His case is a classic example of a party that has become dogmatic, authoritarian and exerts top-down control over its members.

I have interviewed Greens in a number of countries during the past two years, looking at the purges, mainly of women but also of men, for wrong think. 

Massive divisions about extreme transgender ideology, the LGBTQIA2S+ politics of Green Youth, its support for the surrogacy trade, reframing prostitution as a job like any other, and being so obsessed with Palestine to be bordering on being pro-Hamas, the Greens have abandoned the planet for pronouns.

I contacted Hutton, whom I know from my previous research into the Greens, to ask how he was feeling about leaving. He said: “I am very sad to be leaving the party I founded and which was much of my life’s work, but I couldn’t retain any integrity if I had stayed in. It was started with such great hopes 34 years ago but has descended into an identity politics, authoritarian nightmare.”

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

For more than five minutes of human history, society accepted biological reality as a simple fact. In primary schools everywhere, children were taught that XY chromosomes make someone male and XX meant female, and this understanding formed the basis of our laws. This foundation, once unshakeable, has been demolished in Australia by a combination of judicial decisions and legislative overreach – a process that culminated in the bizarre Full Federal Court decision in Tickle v. Giggle. Sall Grover, the founder of the women-only networking app Giggle for Girls, recently lost her appeal after being found to have discriminated against Roxanne Tickle, a biological male identifying as a woman. The court didn’t just uphold Justice Bromwich’s finding – it increased the penalties against Grover, delivering a watershed moment that enshrined a male’s right to self-identify as a woman over a woman’s right to single-sex spaces.

I recently rewatched the classic film Some Like It Hot. In it, men dress as women to escape the mob after witnessing a murder; the absurdity is the point. The joke relies entirely on the audience knowing that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are still men beneath the wigs and dresses. At no point does anyone truly believe they have become women – that’s the entire premise of the comedy. Fast-forward to modern Australia, and the absurd script of a 1950s Hollywood farce has become a legally binding tragedy. To make matters worse, legacy media have lined up to applaud this travesty. The ABC published an article gaslighting its audience, insisting that the ruling against Grover was a victory for women’s rights. It takes a unique brand of journalistic delusion to describe a Federal Court decision fining a female entrepreneur for creating an app exclusively for biological women as a triumph for her sex.

Source: Justice miscarried | The Spectator Australia