John Louis

[Bernard Lane @Bernard_Lane]

At last, Australia's first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, has spoken about the 2013 change to anti-discrimination law which appears to allow subjective "gender identity" to trump biological sex.

At a public event in the UK, Ms Gillard responded to a question about the erasure of women & girls in the statute, The Australian newspaper has reported.

These issues, the former PM said, "were not raised by anyone [back then] because they simply weren’t a matter of public discourse the way they are today.”

"It was a different time. So it is an error to uplift what we know now and the public discourse now and just putting it down to 14 years ago."

https://t.co/R4loXeOh61

It would be interesting to hear from the legally trained politician Mark Dreyfus KC.

He was the attorney general who pushed through the 2013 changes whereby definitions of "woman" and "man" were removed from the Sex Discrimination Act.

Not only that. The invisible and changeable concept of "gender identity", untethered from biological sex, was introduced as a characteristic to be protected from discrimination.

The real-world effect, so far, has been to demote the sex-based rights of females, while promoting the demands of trans-identifying males.

https://t.co/nQCoQyosax

In his second-reading speech to Parliament in March 2013, Dreyfus said the Gillard Labor party government had taken the trouble to "ensure the definitions [in the amendment] are meaningful".

For gender identity, the government adopted a definition recommended by a Senate committee.

Gender identity was defined as "the gender-related identity, appearance or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of a person (whether by way of medical intervention or not), with or without regard to the person’s designated sex at birth".

"Opposite sex" in the Sex Discrimination Act was replaced by "a different sex".

Meaningful?

Dreyfus was not alone in projecting confidence on matters little understood.

In his 2013 speech, former Liberal party Senator Simon Birmingham, one of the "moderates" who opposed One Nation party motions for an inquiry into supposed sex changes for minors at gender clinics, explained the superiority of the term "different sex".

"The use of 'different' rather than 'opposite' reflects the recognition in the bill of those whose sex is categorised as intersex or by reference to their gender identity," Birmingham said.

Did he really think intersex people--those with male or female disorders of sexual development--constitute a third sex? Or that trans-identifying people constitute a different sex?

https://t.co/vDHHeM0836