News from Australia

A round up of recent events down under

Australian Women Speak Out

In central Melbourne on Saturday, 26 April, 2025, barricades and 200 Victorian police, including riot squad members, were needed to protect around 80 women at the Women Will Speak rally.

On the other side of the barricades, approximately 450 radical trans activists - many masked, some wearing keffiyehs - used bullhorns and drums to disrupt the event. Outnumbering the women’s rights attendees, they chanted, burnt the Australian flag and blocked the streets, aiming to drown out or stop the rally.

The fact that the women on the other side of the barricades were older left-wing feminists, trade unionists, community and domestic violence workers, nurses, teachers, lesbians and parents of gender-confused youth made little difference to their chants of ‘right-wing fascists.’

Police permitted the rally to run for an hour but requested an early closure after trans activists threw missiles and scuffled with the police.

Radical trans activism and the Silencing of Women

Radical trans activism seeks to silence women on the streets, in the courts and in the mainstream media.

A similar women’s rally, Let Women Speak held on the steps of Parliament in 2023, threatened the political career of the Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming and cost the Australian journalist Julie Szego her job at The Age.

Media coverage of the 2023 event was relentlessly one-sided. The ABC and left-leaning outlets framed it as ‘anti-trans’, branding speakers Kellie-Jay Keen and Moira Deeming ‘Nazi-sympathisers’. Victorian political leaders – John Pesutto (Liberals) and Dan Andrews (Labor) publicly vilified and shamed Moira Deeming and by extension all women at the event.

The coverage served as a stark warning to Australian women: speak out about the erosion of women’s sex-based rights and you risk your job and reputation.

It took courage for women attending this year’s rally to face the vitriol of the trans activists, lines of stony-faced police, and journalists eager to ignore what the women came to speak about and frame their stories with outrage.

Below are some accounts from the 2025 rally, highlighting the impact of gender identity ideology in Australia.

Jasmine Sussex: Men are not Mothers

A mentally-ill man trying to feed his baby with…something

The Women Will Speak rally was organised by Victorian woman Jasmine Sussex, a breastfeeding counsellor with 15 years’ experience supporting mothers and their babies.

A growing trend - trans-identified men ‘chest-feeding’ infants.

In 2021, Sussex was sacked by her employer, the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) for her “excessive” use of the word “mother” and her refusal to adopt gender-neutral terms like “parent” or “chest feeding.”

Sussex faces three complaints from Jennifer Buckley, a trans-identified man who began transitioning in 2017 and induced lactation in 2019 to breastfeed his biological son. Sussex criticised an American trans-identified man, Nominal Naomi, calling it "experimental" and a "dangerous fetish.” Buckley claimed her statements incited hatred and filed a case with the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) under the anti-vilification laws.

In May 2023, Buckley also reported a post by Sussex on X, where she described Buckley’s chest feeding as “delusional.” The Australian eSafety Commissioner, under the Online Safety Act 2021, deemed the post “offensive to community standards,” resulting in it being geo-blocked in Australia.

Trans-identifying men are prescribed drugs like domperidone to induce lactation, despite US FDA warnings of risks including cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest, and sudden death when used intravenously, with unknown risks to infants.

The QCAT case between Sussex and Buckley remains active and could set a precedent for using anti-vilification laws to silence women addressing gender identity ideology’s impact on women, children, and newborns.

Krystle Mitchell: Truth is not a Crime

Krystle Mitchell, a former acting Acting Senior Sergeant with 15 years in the Victorian Police, worked at the Gender Equality and Inclusion Command and Family Violence Command, dealing with domestic violence, sexual assault and rape. Since resigning, she has spoken out against Victoria’s Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-vilification and Social Cohesion) Bill 2024, passed on April 2, 2025.

The law expands hate speech protections to include gender identity, alongside sex, sexual orientation, race, and religion, introducing criminal penalties of up to five years for inciting hatred or making threats. Mitchell argues these laws are being weaponised against women like Kirralie Smith, who face legal action for identifying trans-identified men in women’s sports. She stated:

She stated: “In Victoria you can face five years in prison for trafficking cannabis, possessing an unlicenced firearm or committing perjury in court – the same length of sentence for ‘vilifying’ a man who says he is a woman in case it causes, ‘harm’ or ‘distress’. This law is a political weapon. It’s state-sanctioned gaslighting and it forces us to say things we know are false and it punishes us for saying things we know are true.

The laws make male violence unspeakable - because if he says he’s a woman and wears a wig, he is a woman and the police will force the victim to shut up or else. This is about power. It’s about the control of speech. The control of thought - the power to redefine ‘woman’. And when the word woman means nothing. We mean nothing”.

Mitchell now writes for The Spectator Australia and advocates for women’s rights as a public speaker.

Men in Women’s Prisons

Hilary Maloney, a trans-identified Victorian man, was convicted of serious sexual abuse against his daughter, including 19 instances over a month when she was five. Maloney, who began identifying as trans around the time of the abuse, photographed and filmed the assaults, sharing them online with a US paedophile

Maloney’s counsel, Mx Skaburskis (non-binary), argued that Maloney’s emotional distress, exacerbated by others not affirming his gender identity, contributed to his offending. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee claimed that, as Maloney “identified and lived” as a woman and was “hormonally female,” his offending aligned with patterns seen in female perpetrators, which he argued indicated a low risk of reoffending.

Judge Nola Karapanagiotidis accepted these arguments and reduced Maloney’s sentence from a maximum of 25 years to 4 years and 9 months. Maloney is now housed in a women’s prison with a mother-and-baby unit, despite the seriousness of his child sex abuse convictions.

Three Victorian Attorneys-General—Jill Hennessy, Jaclyn Symes, and Sonia Kilkenny—have overseen policies permitting men in women’s prisons.

Pravda Down Under

Julie Szego, a veteran Australian journalist, author, and former The Age columnist attended the 2023 Let Women Speak rally as a reporter. Her column on the event was spiked by The Age editors, who labelled her an extremist for attending.

Szego had previously written for The Sydney Morning Herald in 2022 about Jay Langadinos who sued her psychiatrist, Dr. Patrick Toohey, for negligence over her gender transition which included cross-sex hormones, a double mastectomy and hysterectomy. Langadinos, who no longer identifies as male, claims Toohey failed to assess her suitability for these treatments.

Julie Szego was sacked by the Age’s incoming editor, Andrew Elligot, in 2023 after objecting to her spiked column. Now writing on Substack, Szego spoke at the 2025 rally, saying:

“Journalism bodies that set the standards - the Press Council, that adjudicate press complaints and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance have allowed trans activists to write the guidelines. Journalists covering medical transition must only quote doctors approved by ACON, a trans activist lobby group.

Gender-affirming care, with its serious consequences like sterility and sexual dysfunction, is a potential medical scandal enabled by journalistic malpractice. Even as the UK, Sweden, and Finland moved away from gender-affirming care due to weak evidence, the ABC claimed the science was settled.

Too many journalists no longer see their job as writing the first draft of history but in terms of barracking for, as they see it, the right side of history. On this occasion, I think they’ve got it wrong.”

The UK Supreme Court ruling: Will Australian courts listen?

On 16 April 2025, the UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favour of For Women Scotland, clarifying that “sex,” “man,” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex, not certified sex. This ruling overturned 15 years of trans activist claims that ‘trans women are women,’ challenging the influence of groups like Stonewall and Mermaids on UK institutions.

Australia is more like the US than the UK, with a federal system and a mix of State and federal discrimination laws. The Australia Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 2013 under the Gillard Labor government, which replaced “woman” with “gender identity.” It may be much more difficult to dislodge gender identity ideology in Australia.

Key legal challenges in 2025 include:

· Sall Grover, founder of the women-only app Giggle for Girls will appeal the August 2024 Federal Court ruling and Justice Bromwich’s ruling that ‘sex is changeable’.

· The Lesbian Action Group appealing the Human Rights Commission’s denial of an exemption to hold lesbian-only events, arguing that biological sex defines lesbian identity.

· Kirralie Smith and Jasmine Sussex are defending vilification charges for stating trans women are men, hoping the UK ruling will influence Australian courts.

Krystle Mitchell’s Final Words

Krystle Mitchell at the Women Will Speak rally

“Women are being vilified by the very system that once swore to protect us. This is not inclusion - it’s erasure. They’ve taken our spaces, our toilets, our changing rooms and our sports. And now they want our voices too. No. Not today. Not ever. We will not back down, we will not be erased. Women are not a hate group. Truth is not a crime. We are reality and reality does not need permission to speak.”