It’s hardly surprising that the landmark Tickle v Giggle battle for female-only spaces has caught the attention of the rest of the world, including author and women’s rights crusader J.K. Rowling, who this week alerted her 14 million followers on social media.
But if you read the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, or watch or listen to the ABC, you’d never know it.
This week the full bench of the court hearing the appeal has been asked to rule not only that “sex” is non-binary, but that the distinction between men and women has all but disappeared. Lawyers for Equality Australia, which claims to represent gay and trans people, have proposed that sex is simply “a way of classifying people along a scale between a man at one end and a woman at the other”.
“As a matter of ordinary meaning, the statute is agnostic as to where persons are plotted along that scale,” barrister Ruth Higgins added unhelpfully.
No matter what your view of its merits, the idea that sex is a continuum between men and women is a radical interpretation even of the confused 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act. But the proposition was apparently supported – and certainly not challenged – by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, who also insisted to the court that sex was non-binary, and that a trans woman – a biological man – cannot be excluded from a female-only space.
Apart from The Australian, the only other mainstream outlet to have reported on this week’s case was the Guardian, and to its credit, it covered it fairly.
The Federal Court understood the significance of the case and live-streamed it on YouTube, as it has for other major cases like the Ben Roberts-Smith and Bruce Lehrmann defamation trials. But from the rest of the media – thunderous silence. Not a peep.
Why have they shrunk from one of the most important legal cases of the year?
How many Australians silently support the right of women to have their own spaces but can’t risk losing their job or their friendship group for fear of being called a bigot or a TERF?
The absurdity of many of the propositions put by the Tickle camp may eventually prove self-defeating. But not if they escape scrutiny by a vigilant media.
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The most radical restrictions on the rights of Australian women in more than a decade – and the most profound changes to the legal definition of ‘men’ and ‘women’ – have been proposed in the Federal Court this week.