Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the Paris Olympics, the world saw what happens when you put the safety of women in the hands of fools who say it's impossible to know what a woman is. One of the world's most powerful organisations allowed eight women to be punched repeatedly in the head by two boxers it had been told were biological males. We witnessed the brazen attempt of the IOC president to claim the moral high ground, even while refusing to guarantee female boxers that they wouldn't have to fight a male. The IOC put women in danger to protect their commitment to an ideology that was inevitably going to lead to this point.

Female is a sex, and the differences between the male and female sexes are the reasons why women's sport exists. To claim being female is a marker on a passport or how someone was raised or something that anyone can identify as is to deliberately remove to right for women to have anything single sex. If it can happen to women's boxing, it can happen to any women's sport or space that you, your mother or your daughters rely on.

It's not difficult to understand why the IOC allowed this disgraceful and dangerous travesty. At the Tokyo Olympics, they allowed a 43-year-old male to compete in the women's weight lifting at the expense of a young woman from Nauru. That's why they can't permit sex testing. They have already decided that you don't have to be female to compete in the women's category. Rather than admit the Olympics boxing scandal is the result of the deliberate decision they've made to deny women single-sex competition, for the last two weeks the IOC has tried to gaslight, obfuscate and bully their way through the scandal in Paris in exactly the same way that governments and other sporting organisations have done for years.

Not long ago, Australia's first female Prime Minister responsible for removing the sex based definition of 'woman' from the sex discrimination act was asked what is a woman. She described this question as 'a gotcha parlour game'. As the Paris Olympics have shown, this is no game. It's the answer which determines whether you allow a male to punch a woman in the face and be rewarded with an Olympic gold medal, whether you allow a male rapist to identify into a woman's prison or whether you will embarrass yourself, like the IOC president has, claiming it's scientifically impossible to tell the difference between males and females.

This was Australia's most successful Olympics because of the amazing performances of our female champions. The fact that our female Olympians were the stars of the show, even though we know that their times and records would not be medal winning performances if there were no female category, shows the importance of single-sex sport. That's exactly why swimming and athletics and rugby and cycling looked at the science, consulted female athletes and took steps to protect the female category. At the very same Olympics that those sports were delivering single-sex female sport, the IOC was refusing to do so in boxing.

Those of us who have been in the fight to protect women's single-sex sport for years watched as the IOC tried on all the same excuses that organisations and commentators enthralled to gender ideology have used over and over again. Sporting bodies will cover up the fact that there are males in women's sport for as long as they can, and, when it finally becomes impossible to cover it up any longer, they'll go on the attack and call it bigotry or a culture war to say that women's sport should be for females. And they know that, when they run out of excuses, at least they'll have media outlets like the ABC there to mislead the public by labelling women's rights campaigners as 'anti trans'.

In 2022, at a meeting with the Australian Olympic Committee, I warned them that Australian sport must reverse its refusal to guarantee single-sex sport for women and girls. I was told that it wasn't a big issue for the Olympic movement and it wouldn't be an issue in Paris. I was told that the inclusion framework the IOC has in place would deal with it. Two years later, the whole world is talking about the IOC's failure to deal with this issue, and, disgracefully, as we stand here today, Australian sporting bodies are still on the same page as the IOC when it comes to refusing to guarantee single-sex sport for women and girls.

Senate adjourned at 19 : 50