In a local Melbourne eatery, women from the Lesbian Action Group (LAG) broke bread with one of the greatest female athletes the world has ever seen. Martina Navratilova dominated women’s tennis for decades, winning 18 Grand Slam singles titles and 31 major doubles titles. While in town for the Australian Open, Navratilova offered her support for LAG’s February appeal case for the right to hold single-sex public events for lesbians.
Nicole Mowbray from the Lesbian Action Group outside the Federal Court in Melbourne
Background
In 2023 LAG wrote to the Victorian Pride centre for permission to hold an event to celebrate International Lesbian Day on October 8th for “lesbians born female.” Pride Centre, CEO Justine Dalla Riva refused. LAG then embarked on a series of legal challenges to rebuild the once-thriving lesbian community forced underground since the early 2000s when women lost the right to refuse entry to men.
Round one:
In 2023 LAG applied to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for a temporary exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA)1984 to hold public events for “lesbians born female.” The AHRC refused.
Round two:
LAG appealed the AHRC’s decision to the Federal Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) in January 2025. The ART upheld the AHRC refusal.
Round Three:
LAG appealed to the Federal Court on 23–24 February with a ruling expected in six months.
How did we get here?
The SDA was enacted in 1984 to implement key parts of the international bill of rights, CEDAW – (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) and both sought to protect women on the basis of the biological reality of sex. But under the Gillard Labor government, the SDA was amended in 2013 to include “gender identity” as a protected characteristic opening the door for men who self- identify as ‘women’ access to single-sex spaces and services.
Justice Bromwich Ruling
In August 2024, Federal Court Justice, Robert Bromwich ruled in Tickle v Giggle for Girls that “sex” in the SDA was “changeable”, not “necessarily binary” and not “fixed at birth”.
The Bromwich ruling compels Australians to accept a metaphysical claim that a person’s subjective ‘identity’ overrides biological reality for all legal and social purposes.
The Bromwich ruling erases homosexuality because sex is no longer a biological category but a matter of a subjective, self-declared ‘gender identity’.
The ruling is built on a central contradiction - to prove discrimination it’s necessary to have a comparator of a “different sex.” But if “sex” already incorporates men with a “gender identity” then men are already “women”. Bromwich forecloses legal challenges to identity-based inclusion and for the cases making their way through the courts he tips the scale to collapse “sex” altogether.
Sexual coercion of young lesbians
In 2012 the trans activist and porn performer, Drew DeVeaux coined the term “cotton ceiling” to frame the issue regarding lesbians who supported ‘trans rights’ but refused to have sex with ‘trans women’ - in 87-95% of cases men who identify as women remain fully intact.
The cotton ceiling was both the metaphorical and literal ‘barrier’ lesbians needed to overcome to demonstrate their support for the ‘full acceptance’ of ‘trans rights’.
The grassroots U.K. organisation Get the L Out conducted a survey in 2019 with 80 women (78 lesbians and 2 bisexual women) about their experiences in the LGBTQi community. Here are some of the results:
66 per cent reported being intimidated or receiving threats for stating they were lesbians (not attracted to trans identified males). Threats included physical or sexual violence, being doxed, threats to kill family members and being sent unwanted “trans woman nudes”.
56 per cent were pressured or coerced to accept a transwoman as a sexual partner.
50 per cent reported being excluded from their LGBT group/s for questioning any aspect of queer doctrine and labelled as ‘transphobic.’
Respondents reported experiencing sex by deception, being raped, sexually assaulted, and socially shamed and excluded for not ‘going along’ with the doctrine.
“I was told that homosexuality doesn’t exist and I owed it to my trans sisters’ to unlearn my ‘genital confusion’ so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me”.
“I thought I would be called a transphobe or that it would be wrong of me to turn down a transwoman who wanted to exchange nude pictures – young women feel pressurised to sleep with transwomen to “prove I am not a TERF”.
“The man I went on a date with, unknowingly, was mutual friends with people I knew, he threatened to out me as a TERF and risk my job if I refused to sleep with him. I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory, so he was a “woman” even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and he raped me”.
It’s not surprising that young lesbians between 18 – 24 years old are most vulnerable and susceptible to both group and ideological pressure.
Young lesbians in Australia who attended LAG’s first conference (held in secret) told the same story; they are under enormous pressure to accept and publicly support gender identity dogma: “trans women are women”, “penises are just another body part”, “some lesbians have penises.”
“The language of transition lends itself readily to abusive gaslighting that disguises and distorts women’s ability to name what is happening”. (survey respondent)
LAG’s legal arguments
LAG appealed to the Federal Court to reinstate their right to freedom of association and protection from male coercion and sexual predation. LAG’s barristers, Megan Blake and Leigh Howard argued that:
1. The legal meaning of “sex” in the SDA, “should be interpreted as a biological class separate to gender identity.”
2. Maintaining “sex” as a biological category alongside “gender identity” preserves the integrity of both without collapsing one into the other.”
3. Justice Robert Bromwich’s earlier ruling in the Tickle v Giggle for Girls case (2024) was wrong in finding that “sex” can be “changeable and non-binary.”
4. The ART ruling created an unlawful “hierarchy of rights” and that lesbian rights to freedom of association and expression were subordinated to “unidentified rights of the transgender community.”
5. The ART ruling creates an “oppressive interference” and a “chilling effect” on an already marginalised group amounting to “state-endorsed discrimination.”
6. Lesbians have a right to seek their own spaces free from “the male gaze”.
The AHRC’s response
Justice Mark Moshinsky cut through the legalese to point out the obvious hole in the HRC case by asking barrister, Celia Winnett a simple question:
“On what legal basis does the Commission distinguish between the exclusion of natal men and transgender women, notwithstanding their shared biological sex?”
Winnett replied that there was “no error of law” and that:
“Trans lesbians see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as women and lesbians. The exclusion here seeks to perpetuate the view that actually they are neither of those things.”
Listening to Winnett’s argument brought to mind the scene in the movie Michael Clayton in which Tilda Swinton plays Karen Crowder, a senior counsel paid to defend an agrochemical conglomerate U-North, from a billion-dollar class action lawsuit. In an oscar-winning scene, we watch Swinton practise her speech in front of a mirror - choosing and then discarding a particular word, rehearsing her timing, phrasing, delivery and adjusting her body language in order to create a façade convincing enough to get away with a billion-dollar lie.
Like Karen Crowder, Winnett had anticipated the question and prepared her answer – each word chosen with care. The two sentences a perfect pair of self-reinforcing ideological axioms.
Winnett’s rhetoric is designed to impose the state-approved narrative that, in the so-called modern era is simply extraordinary. It demands that we discard everything humanity has long accepted as true on the basis of biology, empirical science, observable evidence, evolutionary history, and cross-cultural human experience.
Winnett’s “trans lesbian”is not a minor linguistic tweak, it requires we accept a reality in direct opposition to those foundations and is built on the following interlocking propositions:
We each possess an innate, unfalsifiable “gender identity” that exists independently of our physical body and cannot be tested or disproven.
This subjective identity is the “true self”; the material body a mere container.
Children can be “born in the wrong body,” and their sense of self at odds with their sexed biology.
Biological sex is not an immutable, binary characteristic but merely a social construct.
A “woman” is anyone with a “female gender identity,” irrespective of biological reality.
A man can be declared “female” through identity or medical intervention.
Sexual orientation is keyed to gender identity, not to sexed bodies.
Same-sex attraction is therefore erased and replaced with “same-gender” attraction.
Consequently, a biological male who identifies as a woman and is sexually attracted to women qualifies as a legitimate “trans lesbian.”
“Trans lesbians see themselves” Winnett reinforces queer theory - trans identities are “constructed”. A man lookS in the mirror to see what he desires to be - a “real woman”.
Winnett’s use of “manifest” implies a performative act a la Judith Butler that ‘gender’ is simply the result of oft repeated behaviours, as opposed to the gay rights “born this way” that recognised homosexuality as a stable, biologically-determined sexual orientation.
Winnett frames LAG’s appeal as ideologically driven and exclusionary – “the exclusion here seeks to perpetuate a view.”
But this is an ideological bait and switch a cynical reversal. It’s gender ideology that is the “view” being imposed. The demands of men whether medicalised or fully intact to enter all women’s spaces is the real erasure. The erasure of women’s historical rights for single-sex spaces and services.
Winnett uses “actually“ to imply there is an objective truth. But this is the truth according to the Commission and Justice Bromwich and not the truth according to biology, truth and common sense.
Tilda Swinton’s fictional character exposes the extreme cognitive dissonance required to tell billion dollar lies.
Women like Winnett and men like Justice Bromwich must become hypocritical, cynical, cruel and indifferent to the fate of vulnerable girls and women in prisons, hospitals, changing rooms, universities and sports. And in order to get away with it, you must monster the women as “bigots”, “transphobes” and “sexual racists”.
Women in sport
Martina Navratilova co-founded the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (WSPWG) in 2021 with athletes, lawyers, coaches and medical experts. The group spent two years exploring the issues of trans inclusion in women’s sport and concluded biological males retain significant, unfair advantages over women.
In 2021 Navratilova wrote an article in the Sunday Times and said:
“…hundreds of athletes who have changed gender by declaration and limited hormone treatment” have achieved “honors as women that were beyond their capabilities as men.”
Navratilova went from gay icon and celebrated trans ally to global hate figure overnight. The Guardian and CNN described her comments as, “disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic”, while Athlete Ally, a U.S. not-for-profit that advocates for trans inclusion in sport removed Navratilova as ambassador and said her comments were:
“… transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence.
First of all, trans women are women, period. They did not decide their gender identity any more than someone decides to be gay, or to have blue eyes.”“
In a 2025 article, “Martina Stands with Monsters,” the sportswriter Dave Zirin wrote:
“In many ways, tennis trailblazer Martina Navratilova is worse than a Trump supporter…. I’m sickened by what Martina has become. To see her align herself with the right on transgender rights has been so repugnant and shows how her claims of being liberal about everything but this issue is pathetically hollow and deeply cynical.”
Before the young Martina defected to the U.S. in1975 from communist Czechoslovakia, her stepfather warned her not to come back; “no matter what I tell you on the phone because we may have a gun to our heads”.
Navratilova became persona non grata in Czechoslovakia following her defection, stripped of her citizenship, erased from records and branded a traitor who chose money over her country. Yet after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 Navratilova was rehabilitated and became a symbol of courage and awarded the Order of the White Lion in 2025 as a national hero.
Likewise Martina Navratilova was a gay icon and early trailblazer in the U.S. for gay rights. That was right up until the moment Navratilova refused to lie about biology and sporting advantage. Navratilova was soon erased from Pride narratives, called out in interviews and monstered in the public square.
Both Navratilova and LAG are fighting to assert simple truths:
Humans are a dimorphic species.
Sex is biological.
Homosexuality is same-sex attraction.
Men who identify as ‘trans lesbians and insist on ignoring women’s boundaries are heterosexual, predatory men.
In a recent post on X, LAG wrote:
“Some of us fight for lesbian-only spaces free from men who say they are lesbians. Some of us fight for women’s sport free from men who say they are women. Same fight. It was an absolute thrill to meet Martina.”
The LAG ruling is due around August 2026.
Great article Jenny. What a privilege for the LAG to meet Martina. A true lesbian icon.