Despite this it seems Australian bureaucrats will continue backing male inclusion in women’s sport. In response to the IOC news, Kieren Perkins, head of the Australian Sports Commission, said: “The ASC remains committed to fairness and inclusion for all athletes, while taking into account the legal frameworks in Australia (Sex Discrimination Act 1984).”
The fact is, Perkins and the ASC gave up on fairness in women’s sport when they partnered with Australia’s largest LGBTQIA+ lobby group to rewrite the rules for women’s sport.
In 2019 the Australian Human Rights Commission published its guidelines for the inclusion of transgender and gender-diverse people in sport. It told sporting clubs they must include males who identify as women in female sport. Not just that, those males also had to be included in the girls’ showers and changerooms.
The guidelines supposedly have the backing of the federal Sex Discrimination Act. In 2013, under Julia Gillard’s leadership, the Act was amended to include “gender identity” as a protected characteristic. Those same amendments erased the definitions of “woman” and “man”.
But the explanatory memorandum that accompanied the Gillard amendments makes clear it was never the intention of the legislation to include males in women’s sport.
The memorandum states: “It is legitimate to recognise that biological differences between men and women are relevant to competitive sporting activities.”
So why do the AHRC guidelines ignore those biological differences?
Enter ACON – the AIDS Council of NSW. This is Australia’s largest LGBTQIA+ charity. In the 2023-24 financial year, it received just over $20m – 72 per cent of its income – from government handouts. ACON also runs a for-profit scheme called Pride in Sport. Sporting organisations pay a membership fee to join Pride in Sport, which then advises them on how to make their club LGBTQIA+ compliant.
Both the AHRC and the Australian Sports Commission were founding members of ACON’s Pride in Sport, calling into question the impartiality of the trans inclusion guidelines.
The AHRC’s trans sports guidelines are an activist document, designed by and for the transgender lobby. ACON’s fingerprints are all over it. Women weren’t consulted when the Sex Discrimination Act was gutted, and we weren’t consulted on the guidelines either.
Source: https://archive.md/8AmwO
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Female athletes around the world will be breathing a sigh of relief after recent news that the International Olympic Committee looks set to ban males from competing in women’s events.