Tuesday, 3 October 2023

Sex discrimination

Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (17:31): (465) As I have pointed out many times in this house from my maiden speech onwards, the erasure of biological sex based rights in the law and this government’s internally incoherent anti-discrimination laws are harming Victorians. Recently it was reported in the news that a 10-year-old autistic girl was suspended from her school for objecting to the presence of a male student in the female toilets. I am not surprised, because this is the law that Labor has made. Surely it is self-evident that toilets and change rooms are facilities designed primarily to protect sex-based rights to bodily privacy and sex-based safeguards to protect females from males. They are not designed to serve gender identities. I call on the Minister for Education to apologise to the family involved in this debacle and to reinstate the prior rights of female students to single-sex toilets and change rooms in Victorian schools.