The Australian Human Rights Commission wants to hear your views on dangerous male sex offenders being allowed to identify as women and be held in women’s prisons. But only if you’re in favour of it…

Our highly paid, taxpayer-funded Human Rights Commission would love to hear your thoughts on males demanding to be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Providing you’re all for it, obviously.

Many would argue that bureaucrats in Canberra have long given the impression that they don’t want to interact with the general public who pay their salaries, but rarely has it been so explicitly spelled out by the bureaucracy.

‘Please note that only subject-matter experts are invited to submit,’ the AHRC specifies in its new consultation about ‘threats to trans and gender diverse human rights’.

‘Please note that we are unable to accept submissions from non-specialists in this area.’

The ‘expert’ category, says the AHRC, includes activists and academics. The AHRC’s ‘non-specialists’ covers women, girls, parents, and anyone not inside the elitist bubble who decided that it’s ‘progressive’ to undermine sex-based rights and the reality of sex.

The effect of this anti-democratic pronouncement is that more than 22 million Australians are being told by the Human Rights Commission we’re neither qualified nor welcome to be involved in their consultation. Never mind that the Commission has a legislated duty to ensure it acts with regard for ‘the indivisibility and universality of human rights’ and ‘the principle that every person is free and equal in dignity and rights’.

Which brings us to the key question: What are these ‘trans and gender diverse human rights’ that the AHRC says are under threat? Do they mean the asserted right for a male to enter women’s spaces or facilities without consent? The AHRC can’t, or won’t, say. They’re asking for a select group of people to tell them about the supposed opposition to human rights, despite not being able to specify what these human rights are. That reveals the activist agenda that is really at play here.

The debate at the centre of gender ideology is a very important public policy matter. Women have long had access to single-sex sports and certain services or facilities that are necessary to protect privacy, dignity and safety. Advocates of self-ID policies argue that males who identify as women must be allowed to access these female spaces, whether or not the women who rely on those spaces consent. Extraordinarily, many of our elites have decided to go along with the fringe idea that women’s consent doesn’t matter in this context.

Since human rights are indivisible, universal, and equally available to all, the AHRC cannot seriously suggest that there is a human right for a specific group of males to enter a space or sport designed specifically for females. So why hasn’t the AHRC made clear in its terms of reference that opposition to males demanding that right is in no way a ‘threat’ to human rights, but in fact a majority-held position that Australians are perfectly free to advocate in a democracy?

The AHRC is a taxpayer-funded body with significant powers and authority. Yet this consultation is straight out of the playbook of hard-left activist groups and media platforms that have actively targeted women for abuse. I’m one of millions of Australians who believes that women and girls should be entitled to single-sex sports and spaces. Because activists and virtue-signalling elites can’t mount a rational argument against this position, they simply scream that anyone supporting single-sex sports is ‘anti-trans’ or an ‘extremist’, or campaigning against ‘trans rights’. It’s a laughably misleading tactic, or at least it would be if it hadn’t been adopted by much of the media and bureaucracy, and in doing so given abusive men the green light to unleash hideous abuse and threats against women. There’s no excuse for the AHRC not to be aware of this, yet now they are adopting the exact same tactics by setting up a witch hunt against Australian women who have stood up for women’s sex-based rights.

Let’s be very clear here: the AHRC is actively seeking input from male activists who have campaigned for the rights of dangerous male offenders like ‘Lisa Jones’. And they are asking for these men to complain how women are a ‘threat to trans and gender diverse human rights’ for pointing out Lisa Jones is actually a dangerous paedophile and repeat sex offender who should never be referred to as a woman by media or placed in a women’s prison.

Worse, the AHRC are actively preventing women from putting in a submission to point out this is exactly what has happened in Australia under the banner of ‘trans rights’. Their terms of reference makes clear that a submission from a female prisoner about the dangers of placing male sex offenders in women’s prisons would not be accepted by the AHRC.

Once again under the Albanese government, the tropes of ‘dis- and misinformation’ are being used to shut down legitimate debate and free speech. When seeking the votes of the Australian people, Albanese himself conceded that a woman is an adult, human female. It is his government’s subsequent efforts to silence Australians, for holding that same position, which is extremist, radical, and a danger to democracy.