The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) has won its appeal in the Federal Court of Australia.
Some members of LAG outside the Federal Court
The Federal Court of Australia has allowed an appeal by the Melbourne based Lesbian Action Group Inc (LAG), finding the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) made legal errors when rejecting LAG’s appeal (here) of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) 2023 decision to reject their request for a five year exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA)1984 to hold women-only events. Such events would exclude all males, including those who identify as women.
The Federal Court’s Justice Moshinsky allowed LAG’s appeal on two of the four grounds they proposed. He ruled that ART, guided by the AHRC, had made a “material” error in the underlying reasoning they used in denying LAG an exemption to the SDA.
Justice Moshinsky set aside the decision of the ART because he found it had wrongly held that exemptions cannot be made under the SDA that “endorse overt acts of discrimination”. Given that the fundamental purpose of the SDA is to discriminate for women based on biological sex (the provision of granting an exemption is to balance the rights of different groups), it seems to LAVA that the view of ART approaches the same incoherence referred to by the UK Supreme Court in its April 2025 ruling in favour of For Women Scotland.
It is important to note that the Australian Federal Court did not rule on whether the exclusion is lawful, but clarified that exemptions permitting discrimination can be allowed under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) 1984 and must be properly assessed.
Contrary to the tribunal's ruling, he found that discrimination could be “justified” if it had an overall positive outcome.
The second legal error found by Justice Moshinsky was the tribunal’s failure to take into account that human rights are indivisible, universal, and every person is free and equal in dignity and rights - women’s rights should not be put aside for “trans rights.”
The ruling, released on 15 April 2026, means the case will return to a differently constituted Administrative Review Tribunal for another determination.
Read the full decision here.
LAVA Comment:
Lesbians are same sex attracted, take away sex, and you take away homosexuality. It would seem that the AHRC, just like the HRC (NZ), refuses to accept this and expects lesbians to either go underground or include men in their spaces, dating pools, and events. LAG, like LAVA, has heard from many young lesbians who experience shaming, bullying, and exclusion for insisting on their boundaries. This is state-sanctioned homophobia.
Justice Moshinsky has come down on the side of observable truths, biological reality, and sex-based rights in ruling that gender identity rights do not override women’s rights.
In writing this, I have referenced the Glinner Update Substack, written by Jenny Nabben (17 April) and Edie Wyatt’s Substack (17 April), as well as the Guardian and the Australian Newspapers. Marg Curnow