The Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act 1982 was drafted to protect women and girls. In 2024, it is now employed as a weapon by those wanting to see a woman they disagree with dragged before a court and punished.

Last week, the Federal Court found that Australian Sall Grover – the creator of an app designed for women – had no right to refuse access to the app to Roxy Tickle, because Tickle has a birth certificate issued by the Queensland Government with ‘female’ written on it. That’s despite the judgement, which was handed down last week, confirming that Tickle ‘was male sex at birth’.

Consequently, we have a woman being punished by a court for not opening up a female-only service to someone a judge describes as being male at birth on the grounds that a person born male ‘legally’ became female in September 2020. You don’t need any further evidence than that to tell you that the legislation this case is based upon is fundamentally and fatally broken.

The Sex Discrimination Act was originally drafted to guarantee certain rights of the female sex. This current interpretation, though, completely upends all the sex-based protections in the Act by creating a status of ‘legal sex’, by which a biological male can apparently be legally a female, and benefit from all the rights and protections that have previously (and rightly) been available for biological females.

As a result, we now have laws under which the words ‘woman’ and ‘female’ can mean two directly opposite things – either someone who is biologically female, or someone who is biologically male.

Under such absurd laws it becomes impossible to operate a female-only service, because someone biologically male can demand entry on the grounds that they must be recognised as female. This problem has been highlighted (and ignored) time and again as women have been put in a succession of dangerous and unfair circumstances. When a biological male convicted of multiple heinous sexual assaults was allowed to identify into a women’s prison several years ago, it became obvious that Australian women had lost just about all legal rights to single-sex services and spaces.

The Tickle v Giggle case highlights a hypocritical contradiction embedded at the heart of our legal system and our political culture. At one moment, we will (correctly) be told how predatory men create danger for women and girls online – from threats, harassment, sexualised abuse, and the appalling reality that there are a large number of men online who target women and girls for sexual gratification. On the other hand, the courts have told women that you’ll be punished if you create a female-only online space.

The vast majority of Australians would agree that there are many spaces, sports and facilities where it is sensible and appropriate to separate females from males. Public changerooms and bathrooms, women’s health services, prisons, domestic violence shelters, the boxing ring and the football field are some of most obvious examples, although there are many others. To tell women that they – and their mothers, sisters, and daughters – aren’t allowed to maintain these spaces as single-sex if someone born male wants to enter them is appalling. To do so by demanding that we recognise someone born male as legally female is positively Orwellian.

The amendments that created this absurd attack on women’s rights were legislated by the Gillard government in 2013. When I drafted a Bill to re-affirm the biological meaning of sex and stop sports from being taken to court if they asked a biological male not to compete in women’s sports, left-wing critics including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese claimed the Act was fine as it was.

Now that we have an Australian court stating that someone born male is legally a female and punishing a woman for not going along with it, it’s very clear that the Prime Minister was dead wrong. Under Australian law as it stands, Australian women and girls have no rights to the single-sex services and spaces which so many rely on. That has to change.

Claire Chandler, Liberal Senator for Tasmania | Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs