This article is by Rebekah Kinney, Founder and CEO of Her Court, as a guest blogger for the Australian Christian Lobby
In history, you can see there is always a moment when bad ideas are pushed too far over the line.
And for the argument on gender, I think Australia has found its line.
It came in the form of Roxanne Tickle pushing in where a transgender person didn’t belong.
NOBODY WAS COMING FOR WOMEN’S SPACES — UNTIL THE SPELL WAS BROKEN
For years, Australians were told this debate wouldn’t affect them.
That nobody was coming for women’s spaces.
That concerns about fairness, privacy and biological reality were overblown; bigoted, even.
But only a decade later, the country watched a biological man take a women-only app to court for excluding him for being male.
The spell has broken.
FEMALE-ONLY SPACES WERE CREATED OUT OF NECESSITY
People know that biological sex is real.
People know women are different to men.
And they know that female-only spaces were never created out of hatred, but necessity.
I have spent most of my life as a competitive athlete.
“SPORT TAUGHT ME MEN AND WOMEN ARE PHYSICALLY DIFFERENT”
Sport shaped the way I saw myself as a female long before politics ever entered the debate.
It taught me discipline, resilience and confidence, but it also taught me something else that suddenly became controversial over the last few years: men and women are physically different.
Anyone who has spent serious time in women’s sport knows how absurd this conversation has become.
Entire high-performance systems are built around the reality that male and female bodies are different – speed, power, recovery, strength output, injury risk.
ELITE ATHLETES KNOW THIS BECAUSE REALITY DOES NOT CARE ABOUT IDEOLOGY
None of this is controversial inside elite sport because reality does not care about ideology.
Female athletes know this so obviously because we live it every day.
We know the difference in strength, speed, aggression and power.
We know what male physicality feels like across the net, across the field, across the court.
GIRLS NEED SPACES CENTRED AROUND GIRLS
I stood on a tennis court during a match just a few months ago mentally assessing risk in real time.
What level of aggression, intimidation or physical risk would make me forfeit and walk away.
No female athlete should ever have to internally negotiate her own safety while doing the sport she loves.
It should not be radical to want girls to have spaces centred around girls.
AWAITING A MAN’S LETTER THAT WOMEN’S BOUNDARIES ARE DISCRIMINATORY
For most of human history that would have been considered common sense.
But this is where Australia now finds itself after the Tickle v Giggle case.
I look at the work I do in increasing female-only sport participation and genuinely wonder when the letter will arrive.
When some man, emboldened by ideology and backed by anti-discrimination law, decides that women’s boundaries are discriminatory.
“COST OF FEMALE-ONLY SPACES IS LEGAL THREATS AND PUBLIC SMEARS”
Why is it acceptable to our courts and parliaments that the cost of creating female-only spaces is legal threats, public smears or court proceedings.
We are now also watching biological men enter women’s community sporting competitions under self-identification policies, including in AFL leagues here in Australia.
When concerns were raised about fairness and safety, the response was effectively that nothing would change unless somebody got hurt first.
So apparently common sense, fairness, and safety no longer matter unless a woman ends up in hospital first?
FEMALE-ONLY SPACES EXIST ONLY UNTIL A MAN DEMANDS ACCESS TO THEM
That is an extraordinarily dangerous precedent to set in our communities and an extraordinarily stupid thing to be teaching the next generation.
Women should not have to absorb risk, intimidation or unfairness simply to prove what everybody already knows.
But the message now being sent is unmistakable: female spaces may exist, but only until a man demands access to them.
I think that’s why the Tickle v Giggle case struck such a nerve
IDEOLOGY HAS INFILTRATED OUR LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS
It wasn’t just about an app or a single person’s exclusion.
It exposed how far ideology had infiltrated our laws and institutions.
In 2013, biological definitions of male and female were removed from the Sex Discrimination Act.
Most Australians had no idea that change would eventually mean biological sex itself could become legally irrelevant in certain situations.
WOMEN NOTICE THE CONSEQUENCES
But women notice the consequences.
In sport. In change rooms. In medicine. In prisons. In language.
In the growing expectation that women should deny what they can plainly see with their own eyes in order to appear ‘kind’ and ‘culturally sensitive’.
THE FASCINATING POLITICAL RESPONSE
What’s been fascinating to watch in recent days is the political response that’s followed.
While leaders like Matt Canavan and Pauline Hanson have consistently defended the importance of biological sex in law and policy, figures such as Angus Taylor are now also more openly backing calls to restore biological definitions of male and female within the Sex Discrimination Act.
Regardless, what is significant is that representatives from three major political parties are now publicly supporting these changes.
But public patience has limits.
THE SILENCING OF WOMEN
Why are women having to be pushed this far before anybody in power was willing to say it out loud.
How many female athletes had to stay silent?
How many girls had to feel unsafe in their own environments?
How many women had to self-censor to avoid being labelled hateful for acknowledging biological reality?
And now apparently, how many women need to end up injured before common sense is finally allowed back into the conversation?
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