BuM: Alison Penfold Standing Up for the Rights of Women
Michael Barnett OAM
Alison Penfold Standing Up for the Rights of Women
Finally we are getting some pro-women action in parliament:
Alison Penfold, the NSW MP, has just read out her Private Members Bill to the federal parliament. It flows from the recent horrific Federal Court ruling about the Tickle v Giggle case that denied Sall Grover and her team the right to have women-only safe spaces. I wrote that story up here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/05/16/why-does-australia-hate-women/
Despite spending years in this warfare, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on it, the brave Sall Grover has said she will now appeal to the High Court. She needs our support: moral support, public support, financial support, and prayer support.
That is why the talk just shared in Parliament by Alison Penfold is so vital. Indeed, it is such an important initiative that I will here present it in full:
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Deputy Speaker, in my first speech to this parliament, I said that I was just an ordinary woman with an extraordinary privilege of doing an extraordinary job. Those words mean even more to me today because I still stand here as an ordinary woman. But today, I stand carrying the voices of millions of Australian women who no longer believe the law of this country protects them – women who increasingly feel that when they raise concerns about privacy, safety, dignity, or fairness, the message from too many in politics, in the media, and in public institutions is simple: Suck it up, Princess. We don’t care. Well, I do care. And millions of Australian women and men care, too.
The federal court ruling in Giggle versus Tickle that sex is changeable exposed what many Australians already knew was a serious and growing problem in our law. Women’s sex-based protections are no longer clearly guaranteed. When the law cannot clearly preserve women only spaces, women lose confidence that their rights to privacy, dignity, safety, and choice remain secure. That is not a criticism of the court. This court, the court interpreted the law that this parliament wrote. The fault lies here.
The parliament created ambiguity in 2013 when it amended the Sex Discrimination Act to insert gender identity protections without properly defining what should happen when they came into conflict with sex rights. And for years, this parliament hoped the problem would somehow disappear. That institutions such as sporting codes would quietly manage the issue. That women would simply adapt and accept. Except that they can no longer say no to men invading their space. That Australians would stop noticing. Well, we didn’t.
Deputy Speaker, before speaking to the specifics of this bill, I want to acknowledge the Australians who refused to stay silent while this parliament looked away. Women whose lives were turned upside down because they spoke publicly about women’s sex-based rights. Women of immense courage such as Sall Grover, Dr. Jessica Spencer, Louise Elliot, Jasmine Sussex, and my own constituent Kirralie Smith. These women did not seek fame. Many paid a significant personal and professional price for speaking out. Yet, they persisted because they believe women and girls should not be forced to stay silent.
I acknowledge the parliamentarians who previously attempted to confront these issues, including Senator Chandler, Senator Hanson, Senator Antic, and Senator Canavan. I also acknowledge Michelle Pierce from the Australian Christian Lobby and John Steenoff from the Human Rights Law Alliance for working with me over the past couple of months to develop this legislation.
For years, Australians from different political traditions have warned that the law was becoming detached from biological reality and increasingly incapable of balancing competing sex and gender identity rights created by the parliament. The ruling in Giggle versus Tickle has proved them right.
My bill seeks to restore clarity, certainty, and common sense to the law. It starts from a very simple proposition. The law must recognize and favour biological reality because laws only function properly when they are grounded in objective facts that can be consistently understood and applied. Biological sex is not a social construct created by parliament. It is not a matter of personal opinion. The role of the law is not to deny reality. It is to responsibly govern within it.
Biological sex matters, particularly in sport, health, privacy, safety, and women’s services. If the law loses the ability to distinguish biological sex where it is relevant, then sex-based protections become impossible to apply consistently and fairly. That does not mean transgender Australians should be treated without dignity or respect. It does not mean they should face harassment or blanket discrimination. The law must be capable of distinguishing between sex and gender when those distinctions carry practical consequences.
Australians are practical people and they do not like being told the law says something that goes against plain common sense. That a man can become a woman for all legal purposes. That biological differences are irrelevant. that sex itself is fluid and as Sall Grover has so eloquently put it, that women should ignore their own boundaries, their own discomfort and their own safety in order to avoid offending men. These words alone should trouble every member of this parliament.
Australians know instinctively that men and women are equal in dignity and worth, but they also know that biological sex still matters in some circumstances. And recognizing that reality should not be controversial. Deputy Speaker, the Sex Discrimination Amendment, Sex-based Rights Bill 2026, restores common sense legal language to the Sex Discrimination Act. It reinstates definitions of man and woman removed in 2013. It restores references to opposite sex rather than different sex and makes other definitional changes to secure sex as binary. And critically, it inserts explicit protections for women only spaces, services, and activities, including those online.
This bill provides the legal clarity that this parliament failed to provide 13 years ago. And importantly, it does so while retaining protections for transgender Australians against unfair discrimination where there is no conflict with a person’s sex. That is important because there will inevitably be those who seek to falsely portray this bill as an attack on transgender Australians. It is not. This bill is about grounding the law in the reality and safety of biology, making discrimination protections practically workable and legally clear.
The current Sex Discrimination Act has imposed confusion and chaos on many Australians. Women are prosecuted for denying biological men lessons in breastfeeding. Girls are forced to play with and against biological boys despite the threats to their physical safety, or forced to share change rooms and toilets, denying them their privacy. Women’s prisons and domestic violence shelters must harbor the very perpetrators they fear. Our language is defeminized. We now must chest feed. We are a birth parent, a pregnant person or a lactating parent. We are now people who menstruate, cervix-havers, and have a front hole instead of a vagina. What are normally articulate politicians now stumble with word salads to describe what a woman is.
Our institutions are making decisions not because the law is clear, but because they fear litigation and public backlash. That is not good law making. A liberal democracy cannot function properly when ordinary people become afraid to speak plainly. Nor can it function when parliament refuses to confront difficult issues honestly.
Deputy Speaker, with this bill, we could fix the Sex Discrimination Act and return women’s rights within weeks. That decision is in the hands of the Prime Minister. Like women under the Sex Discrimination Act, this bill is silenced at the end of my speech. As a private members bill, it is not treated with the same respect as government legislation. That is not by law, but by convention.
But the Prime Minister and his government can choose to take a different path. He can support this bill. He can support women. He can support fixing the legislation he voted for in 2013. The prime minister cannot run away from this in 2026. If the PM won’t support my bill, then I’m gracious enough to give him another option. He can support the establishment of a joint select committee into sex-based rights by both houses of the parliament to examine the operation of the Sex Discrimination Act and review the provisions of this bill.
Let women and girls, sporting organizations, schools, hospitals, service providers, legal experts, faith communities, the LGBTQIA plus communities, employers, families, and politicians from across the country have their say. Let this parliament do what it was elected to do. Listen, scrutinize, debate, and fix legislation that has become unclear, unbalanced, and harmful to the lives of ordinary Australians. This will take more time, but it will provide a pathway to reconcile the law that is failing Australian men and women.
If he won’t listen to me, perhaps he will listen to Sall Grover, who kindly provided some of her own words for me to share.
“In a free society, people can believe whatever they want. If you want to believe men can be women, or you’re a man who wants to call himself a woman, that is your business. What you cannot do in a free society is force anyone else to accept it. What is at stake here is the ability to lawfully acknowledge reality. If you care so much about trans rights, you can work out a way to get them without destroying the category of women in law, female spaces, sports services, the entire reality of lesbianism, and punishing citizens for acknowledging reality. The fact that you haven’t even tried makes it appear that destroying the rights of women is the goal. Any politician who will look an Australian in the eye and tell them that a man can be a woman is admitting that they will lie about anything and everything because the most obvious lie has already been told. If no one in this room can acknowledge reality and fix an obvious problem, you’re either malicious or incompetent. The days of dismissing this issue are over. This is not a culture war. It’s reality.”
With that, Deputy Speaker, I commend the bill to the House.
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You can see the MP read her bill here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxW7DaOLNk8
And the Australian Christian Lobby now has a petition up that we all need to read, sign and share: https://www.acl.org.au/campaigns/changethesda/
Women need justice. Please act on this. Share this article. Share her speech. Share the petition. Lobby your local MPs and Senators. And tell Alison Penfold you fully support her.
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