A decision in the Federal Court last Friday confirmed a shocking reality that many of us already knew; it is now illegal for women to publicly make a single-sex space in Australia under the current operation of the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) (SDA). The SDA is no longer fit for purpose, or rather, its purpose is now to threaten women into submission.

What we are seeing is not the ‘unintentional consequences’ of gender identity protections. The legislation that Justice Bromwich ruled on in the Federal Court regarding the Tickle v Giggle case is the SDA operating exactly as it is intended to operate by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), who have been slowly re-purposing the SDA for decades.

The Federal Court ruled that Sall Grover and Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd had engaged in indirect discrimination by removing Roxanne Tickle from the social media App that Grover had created for female people.

All the arguments mounted by Grover’s legal team failed, except for the argument that Grover could not have ‘directly’ or intentionally discriminated on the basis of gender identity, as gender identity can’t be discerned on sight because gender identity is invisible. Gender identity is essentially a legally protected sexed soul built from stereotypes.

Significantly, Bromwich declared ‘that in its contemporary ordinary meaning, sex is changeable’. Bromwich based this on a few cases in the last 30 years where this had been applied to trans-identified people for compassionate reasons.

No one thought to gather all the cases and legislation where women and girls are dealt with by the law as humans with a specific reproductive path. The Sex Discrimination Act, under which Sall Grover and her business were sued, was once such a piece of legislation.

The SDA originally recognised that the female body had a reproductive path that placed women and girls at a structural disadvantage in society. In the 40 years since its inception, the SDA has been the victim, like so many women and girls, of unbridled molestation.

The SDA came into effect under the Hawke Labor government in 1984 after years of campaigning by women’s rights activists. The legislation wasn’t original, but a type of civil rights legislation that was being trialled in Western nations to encourage full participation of women in society, free from discrimination and male pattern sexual harassment.

The SDA has been altered 56 times since 1984, almost always at the instigation of the Australian Human Rights Commission who administer the Act, and most famously by the Gillard Labor government which removed the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ from the SDA in 2013.

It was clear in the Explanatory Memorandum of the 2013 change that the definition of man and woman was removed from the SDA specifically to include trans-identified males in the definition of women. The memorandum states:

These definitions are repealed in order to ensure that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not interpreted so narrowly as to exclude, for example, a transgender woman from accessing protections from discrimination on the basis of other attributes contained in the SDA.

When Julia Gillard was asked last year about the 2013 amendments by Women’s Rights Network representatives, her rationale for the change was that there are a ‘number of people who genuinely believe that they are trapped in the wrong body and they want to be recognised as the gender their mind and soul have always told them that they are’.

The second key piece of legislation Justice Bromwich relied on in his decision was the newly minted Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration (Act 2023) (BDMRA), which only came into effect between the trial in April and the judgment last week.

Because the validity of the (BDMRA) was challenged constitutionally by the Giggle legal team, and against international women’s rights treaties, and failed, the implications of the use of the act go much further than birth certificates.

The legislation that the Federal Court just recognised as constitutionally valid, and in no way contravenes international human rights law, states in black and white that the kind of ‘internal’ gender identity that is protected over sex, the kind of gender that changes sex, can exist in ‘name, dress, speech, and behaviour’.

A male trying to gain access to women’s formerly safe spaces, doesn’t even need to have a certificate, because gender identity protections under the Qld BDM Registration Act, protects a man performing female gender via a hat, a garment from Millers, a tilt of the head, or a higher octave of voice. Any sign of ‘woman gender’ allows a man to access all areas for any reason and he can’t legally be removed if he claims a gender identity, unless he breaks the law, he doesn’t need a certificate because gender identity is an internal soul evidenced by words.

In my opinion, the way constitutional validity of gender identity legislation has been handled, combined with the discarding of international human rights concerns, has left the courts as the enablers of women being removed as a sex class.

We call this a culture war, but this is a class war, playing out in our institutions.

How many working-class fathers do you think would accept grown men identifying into the change rooms where their daughters are compelled to change while the child is in the custody of schools and sporting institutions? All schools and sporting institutions will fall under the authority of this ruling, and we need to take away its structure piece by piece.

When Shannon Fentiman introduced the Qld BDM Registration Act to Parliament she said, ‘I am proud to rise to introduce the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2022. I want to start by acknowledging the many trans and diverse people and their allies in the gallery today. These are the people this legislation is for.’

Under the Queensland constitution, members of Parliament are bound to make laws for the people of Queensland, not fringe interest groups or invisible gender souls. The Qld BDM Registration legislation redefines human sex categories against criteria the government itself provides. The mandate to allow the government to redefine human sex categories in law was never given to the Queensland Labor Party.

Individuals simply won’t be able to fight these dictates in court. In the process of Giggle v Tickle, Sall Grover’s business has been ruined, and if she didn’t have a group of supporters to fund her, she would certainly be bankrupted by the legal fees. Combined with the $10,000 awarded by the judge to Tickle personally, Sall Grover is obliged to pay Tickle’s costs (that are only partially capped). The legal fees that Sall is facing, including her own, will come close to $1M, and that is not including the High Court challenge she is about to embark on, which will likely exceed an additional 500K. You could almost buy a house in Brisbane for that.

Tickle was funded by the Grata Fund, which is listed as a legal aid charity, that fund social justice causes.

In endeavouring to interpret the correct intention of gender identity protections, Bromwich adopted the terminology, without which, it is impossible to make gender identity make any sense at all but that makes human sex a birth condition that is subject to change. He stated:

‘…cisgender refers to a person whose gender corresponds to the sex registered for them at birth. That is to be contrasted with a person whose gender does not correspond with their sex as registered at birth, commonly referred to as transgender. The respondents do not accept the legitimacy of the terms cisgender and transgender. I find both terms useful and convenient for the purpose of deciding and discussing the relevant facts and in accordance with the gender identity discrimination provisions in the SDA.’

The problem with ‘assigned at birth’ as a sovereign concept in law, over the more scientific understanding of human sex as an immutable characteristic, is that sex is not a birth condition, sex is a life condition. Furthermore, the life condition of sex is authoritative in the life of girls and women in a way that places them at a structural disadvantage.

If you have been saying to yourself ‘surely this won’t get through the courts’, you can stop that now. We should all support Sall Grover and her crowd funder to continue her fight to the High Court, but personally I have little hope of this being changed in the courts.

This issue, I believe, will only be ultimately fixed through the political process, through bringing our politicians to account, and for the conservative parties to take up this cause in earnest.

People are in favour of gay rights, we already know that, but not this is not that.

The Australian Human Rights commission has destroyed the SDA and it must be disbanded. Gillard’s Amendments to the SDA in 2013 must be repealed, as should all mention of gender identity in the SDA. David Crisafulli, if he should gain power in Queensland in October, must fully repeal the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 2023. And that won’t even touch the damage gender identity ideology has done to our children and workplaces. To achieve any of this, the Liberal Party of Australia will need to learn to communicate with two key groups of abandoned constituents, the working class and women.

Edie Wyatt writes on culture, politics, and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt, blogs on Substack and you can catch her on Welcome to the Dollhouse