The Lesbian Action Group will be in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Melbourne on 2-3 September 2024 to appeal the Australian Human Rights Commission's (AHRC) decision last year not to grant them an exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act to run female-only lesbian events.
The AHRC said they would be unlawfully discriminating against "transgender women who are lesbians" (in other words, men who identify as women, who identify as lesbians).
In the summary of its decision on 12 October 2023, the AHRC wrote:
“The Commission is not persuaded it is appropriate and reasonable to make distinctions between women based on their biological sex at birth or transgender experience, and to exclude transgender lesbians, from a community event of this kind.
The Commission notes that if this exemption had been granted, it may have led to the further exclusion of and discrimination against transgender women who are lesbian.”
In other words, the AHRC makes no distinction between males and females. It believes that men can be lesbians because it believes men can be women, and maintains that excluding them from a lesbian event on the basis that they are biologically male would therefore be discriminatory.
The only thing more absurd than saying men can be women is saying men can be lesbians.
We hope that the Tribunal comes down on the side of biological reality, but given the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s and court’s position in Tickle v Giggle – which was that sex is not exclusively biological and is changeable – we won’t be holding our breath.
Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act, which was amended by Julia Gillard’s Government in 2013 to remove the biological definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, urgently needs amending to restore the sex-based rights of women and girls.
Find more information about the Lesbian Action Group’s case on the Feminist Legal Clinic’s website.
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