This is the speech I gave to the ‘Restore Women’s Rights’ rally in Martin Place, Sydney, on 23 August 2026.
We Australians are mostly a tolerant bunch. We are fine with other people living their lives in all kinds of ways we find quirky or niche. We shrug and let them get on with it. Until, that is, they infringe on our own rights or demand that we must change how we speak and act to conform with their beliefs.
Gender ideology is the politics of the 1% that demands compliance from the 99%. It has captured our institutions, and individuals who do not conform are punished harshly.
Sall Grover was fined for refusing entry of a biological man into her women’s only chat group. But her penalty was increased because she referred in court to Roxanne Tickle as “he” and “him”. The judges insisted that she must act out gender ideology, against her deepest beliefs. Sall Grover was scheduled to speak at this rally but has pulled out after credible death threats.
Dr Andrew Amos, a psychiatrist at James Cook University, was suspended by the College of Psychiatrists because he expressed clinical reservations about gender-affirming care for adolescents. So now, Australian doctors who follow the evidence risk losing their jobs.
At Melbourne University, the feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith had to have her own security guards because of repeated threats by trans activists. She was denounced, vilified and threatened with violence, all aimed at cancelling her lectures.
The eSafety Commissioner took a sledgehammer to an acorn when she issued a take-down order against breastfeeding counsellor Jasmine Sussex for the crime of saying that biologically male transgender women cannot breastfeed because breastfeeding is a female maternal function. Really?
And in Tasmania, public libraries across the state have banned the gender-critical group Women Speak Tasmania from holding events to discuss puberty blockers and gender medicine.
We are in the midst of a great silencing. Critics of gender ideology¾or those who just want to protect the hard-won rights of feminism and gay activism¾are now subject to legal sanction, loss of employment, bans from public facilities, deplatforming, institutional discipline, reputational damage, campus intimidation, online slander and threats, and even physical attack.
Just think about how much institutional machinery and bureaucratic energy has been mobilised to stop people saying something that in every culture for millennia is the most ordinary observation, “men are not women.”
The punishment of one can silence thousands. A cloud of fear now hangs over this debate. It’s no wonder academics, journalists, doctors, public servants and ordinary citizens have learned to keep their mouths shut.
What frightens me most about this whole conflict is not that certain words and arguments are silenced, but that we are being coerced into declaring that certain falsehoods are true. If you can make others say things they believe to be false, you have achieved something more sinister than winning an argument. You have shown who has the power to name reality.
In recent times, science has been under attack on several fronts. Now gender activists use the techniques refined by climate science deniers to suppress the material facts of biology.
You don’t have to agree with everything each speaker says here today. You only have to agree that voices critical of gender ideology and trans fanaticism should be heard because the chilling of free speech by concerned citizens goes against everything a liberal society is supposed to stand for.
When what can be said around the kitchen table cannot be said at the office, the school, the hospital or the university, something has gone badly wrong in democratic life.
The kind of silencing and punishment that has spread across Australia creates legitimate grievances, even more so when enforced by public institutions. These grievances are easily exploited by malign forces.
Without courageous people willing to exercise the right to free speech, we would never have had a women’s movement. We would never have had a gay liberation movement. Now we have a deformed outgrowth of those movements shutting down free speech.
To protect our democracy and our right to express ourselves we must resist. We must speak out.