{"id":608135,"date":"2026-04-15T09:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T09:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/608135\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T09:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T09:16:10","slug":"lesbian-action-group-wins-federal-court-appeal-to-exclude-transgender-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/608135\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesbian Action Group wins Federal Court appeal to exclude transgender women"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Federal Court has allowed an appeal by a lesbian rights group that wants to legally exclude transgender women from its public events for five years.<\/p>\n

The closely watched case will have broad implications for transgender women and raise questions about sex-based rights and the freedom to associate.<\/p>\n

The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) sought an exemption to the Sex Discrimination Act so it could hold public events exclusively for lesbians who were assigned female at birth.<\/p>\n

This was the group’s third attempt at securing the exemption, after its initial application to the Human Rights Commission in 2023 was rejected and a later appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal was also dismissed.<\/p>\n

LAG celebrated the finding as a “win”, while Equality Australia said the ruling was merely technical, and meant the original ruling needed to be remade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his judgement handed down today, Justice Mark Moshinsky allowed LAG’s appeal ruling the decision of the tribunal should be set aside.<\/p>\n

Lesbian\u00a0group has no\u00a0reason to ban trans women:\u00a0commission<\/a><\/p>\n

Transgender women will have their dignity “undermined” and could be made to feel “inferior” if lesbian group is allowed to ban them from events, court hears.<\/p>\n

The matter will now return to the tribunal for another determination.<\/p>\n

Justice Moshinsky found exemptions to the Sex Discrimination Act could be allowed, even if they permitted conduct that would otherwise count as discrimination \u2014 contrary to what the tribunal ruled.<\/p>\n

He found the tribunal was wrong to treat the mere fact that the exemption would involve discrimination against transgender women as automatically making it unlawful, since it was possible discrimination could result in a net positive outcome.<\/p>\n

But Justice Moshinsky declined to make any ruling on whether that would be the case \u2014 finding only that the tribunal had erred in its legal reasoning and must reconsider the matter.<\/p>\n

He also found the Administrative Review Tribunal failed in its mandatory duty to have regard for two key principles:<\/p>\n

the “indivisibility and universality of human rights”, andthat “every person is free and equal in dignity and rights”.<\/p>\n

He said the tribunal did not fully consider the LAG’s arguments in relation to those human rights \u2014 having wrongly decided it wasn’t bound to \u2014 and must do so when it remade its decision.<\/p>\n

\"LAG<\/p>\n

LAG spokesperson Nicole Mowbray says today’s ruling is a relief. (ABC News: Patrick Stone)<\/p>\n

LAG spokesperson Nicole Mowbray said hard-won lesbian rights were being eroded by modern gender ideology, and not all lesbians wanted to share their spaces with people assigned male at birth.<\/p>\n

She said the legal challenge continued, but the group was relieved about today’s decision.<\/p>\n

“This is a definite win,” she said outside court.<\/p>\n

Legal director of Equality Australia, Heather Corkhill, said the court’s decision was only a technical win for the LAG.<\/p>\n

“The court has not endorsed discrimination against trans women, and it has not decided whether the exemption should be granted. It has simply identified legal errors in the tribunal’s reasoning, so the matter must now be reconsidered,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Federal Court has allowed an appeal by a lesbian rights group that wants to legally exclude transgender…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,70,251010,251009,44,252074,251011],"class_list":["post-608135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-federal-court","tag-human-rights-commission","tag-lesbian-action-group","tag-news","tag-sex-discrimination-act","tag-trans-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}