The gender debate in Australia has long been driven by women. It’s women who’ve had their community sports made unsafe and unfair with the participation of biological men. It’s women who’ve been reduced to ‘cervix havers’ or ‘pregnant people’ through dehumanising gender-neutral language. It’s a change most women detest.

The debate stems from the 2013 addition of ‘gender identity’ into the Sex Discrimination Act. This addition states that you can’t discriminate against a person because of their sex (a biological objective measurement) or their gender identity (a changeable subjective belief). Two very different and contradictory things.

A lion that thinks it’s a dog cannot always have the same rights as a real dog. Sure, it can be treated by a vet, but it can’t play in the dog park.

This impossible legislation pits fact against feeling, real against imagined. Single sex rights based on biological sex have become a hill to die on for many women.

Yet the gender debate is not just a women’s issue. It’s a human issue. As a movement impacting the foundations of family, science and society, it’s bigger than petrol prices, or capital gains tax. It’s about life as we know it.

Activists know that presenting the gender debate as a harmless identity movement needing women’s kindness will likely succeed. Women are more psychologically inclined to seek harmony, be kind and avoid conflict.

But the darkest side must be hidden at all costs. Truthfully presenting the movement as also involving denial of biology, damaging drugs, surgery and the indoctrination of children will likely fail. Both women and men will defend their children. Men aren’t as kind. Men don’t avoid conflict. Men fight.

The full picture is that transgender ideology is being promoted in our hospitals and taught in our schools – both places where scientific fact should be paramount.

In hospitals, and especially in Victoria, Pride flags adorn many walls. As a 69-year-old man having an MRI last year, I was asked if I was pregnant or breastfeeding.

In Australian schools, being ‘born in the wrong body’ or with the ‘wrong body parts’ are phrases used in Respectful Relationship courses. It’s a fanciful statement with zero scientific basis. Education departments don’t seem to care.

Children who then identify as the opposite sex can be fed puberty blockers and hormones. Some will go on to surgery. They will be infertile, unable to achieve sexual satisfaction and medicalised for life.

Men’s sport and spaces may not be at stake, but the future of their sons’ and daughters’ health certainly is. In Australia, it is mainly girls who’ve fallen for the ‘born in the wrong body’ line with far more seeking gender affirming medialisation than boys.

Yet in 2026, the number of boys seeking this treatment is rising. Young men, alienated by a Woke education system, are following girls down the transgender pipeline.

Most legacy media outlets have downplayed this. They’ve been happy to toe the activist line and report trans-folk wanting access to single sex spaces as friendly victims of discrimination. Those who oppose them are unkind, non-inclusive, and even potentially listed as bigots. Medical research is ignored.

The state media gave only one article to the influential Cass review condemning gender affirming treatment. The British Medical Association has just reversed its policy and endorsed the Cass Review. Will our media report it?

The importance of media downplaying the medical aspect was highlighted in the 2019 document about how to create public acceptance of transgender ideology. It states:

‘Many of the activists we interviewed mentioned de-medicalisation of gender recognition laws being important in their campaigns.

‘Therefore, campaigns which seek to reform legal gender recognition laws have the task of separating these concepts through educational campaigns, so that legal gender recognition can be seen in the eyes of the public as distinct from gender confirmation treatments.’

Being ‘seen in the eyes of the public’ as separate and disconnected issues is, in my opinion, the dubious aim. They are not separate and disconnected at all.

It is here that men must join with women in raising their voices. Chemical or surgical castration of confused young people is an issue for everyone.

Parents must insist their child be removed from school Respectful Relationships gender sessions. They must ask their children’s doctor where they stand on this issue. They must champion their children’s health and stop the cultural rot caused by reality denial. Humans can’t change sex.

Both men and women must defend the family structures based around biological reproductive sex. They must fight the ‘womb for hire’ mentality of commercial surrogacy – a lynchpin of progressive gender politics.

No matter how activists try to frame it, two men or two women cannot make a baby. Men can’t get pregnant nor can they breastfeed.

Every human, in their deepest, deepest conscience, knows this. It ensures the survival of families, our society and our species. Be loud. Sex matters.

Phil Dye is the founder of the Declaration of Biological Truth Australia and a past educator in the School of Medical Sciences at UNSW.