All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
In October 2024, the student newspaper of the University of Adelaide, On Dit, published two articles written by students. The first article, by Sage Tasman Jupe, was titled, “Why ‘TERFS’ Are Wrong About Women’s Oppression”. This article claimed that “transphobic ‘women’s rights’ posters and stickers” had been appearing on the University’s North Terrace campus”. These posters and stickers were promoting the Feminist Women’s Association Adelaide (FWAA), a group established to provide single-sex spaces for women to socialise, discuss feminism and take action on feminist issues.
The Jupe article referred to the members of the FWAA group as “TERFs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and included the mistaken accusation, often repeated by trans activists, that sex-realist women are transphobic and homophobic misogynists allied with anti-abortion Christian extremists and neo-Nazis.
Sienna (Charlie) Noble-Labore, the founder and Director of the FWAA, approached the Editor of On Dit and requested ‘right of reply’ to the Jupe article. This was granted, and Nobel-Labore published an article in On Dittitled, “Why You Actually Agree With TERFs”.
In November 2024, Kansas Bird, President of the University of Adelaide’s Pride Club, submitted a complaint to the SA Commissioner for Equal Opportunityabout the FWAA posters and stickers and about Noble-Lahore’s On Dit article. This complaint alleged that the FWAA promotional material and the On Dit article were “transphobic”.
Fortunately, the Commissioner of Equal Opportunity responded to Bird’s by stating, in part: “After carefully reviewing the material provided, I have determined to decline and close the complaint”.
This should have been the end of, at least, the overt attempt by trans activists to exclude the AWAA from the University of Adelaide and punish its founder for expressing her sex-realist understanding of the conflict between women’s rights and transgenderism. However, a few days before Bird’s complaint was submitted to the Commissioner of Equal Opportunity, the Integrity Unit received an extraordinary letter from “Varo they /them”, Chief Executive Officer of the SA Rainbow Advocacy Alliance (SARAA). This letter was headed, “RE: ANTI-TRANS HATE AT UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE”.
The SA Rainbow Advocacy Alliance also published examples of FWAA promotional material on its website and identified this material as transphobic examples of hate speech.
I have no way of knowing whether the intervention by the SA Rainbow Advocacy Alliance and, possibly, ACON, was instrumental in persuading the Integrity Unit to re-visit the trans activist complaints against Noble-Lahore. However, she has now been summoned to face a Student Misconduct Tribunalon 15 December 2025.
As a retired University professor who was once the Chair of my University’s Equal Opportunity Board, and having carefully read all the documents relevant to this situation, I am appalled by the way the University of Adelaide has responded to the absurd complaints that words on a poster, a sticker or the pages of a student newspaper have significantly harmed the mental health of students simply by exposing them to ideas with which they disagree. I can only wonder whether the University of Adelaide believes its purpose is to make ideas safe for students or to make students safe for ideas.