In court, you must swear to tell the truth. Not telling the truth is considered a serious offence and harmful to determining justice. So why, then, is it tolerated for teachers, entrusted with the solemn duty of educating our next generation, to be driven to lie about biological reality?
This is the education system today.
Institutions coerce teachers into addressing children as something much of the world, throughout history, considers they are not: boys as girls, girls as boys or children as something else altogether.
The policies
From the New South Wales Education Department policy:
The department’s Code of Conduct and the individual school’s discipline and welfare policy should be utilised where staff or students deliberately or repeatedly use names or pronouns other than the one identified by the student concerned.
The link referring to the Code of Conduct redirects the user to a page displaying the message “Missing page – 404 We can’t find this page. Sorry for the inconvenience.” In my view, this conjures up the message from God to his creation in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. The inference being that life wasn’t intended to be as complicated as it turned out and that mankind has a way of creating confusion from elegant simplicity.
Not to be outdone, the Victorian government in its policy on School Operations states: “Schools must work with students affirming their gender identity to prepare and implement a student support plan.” Included in this consideration is the line “the referencing of and recording of student’s affirmed name, gender identity, and pronouns (he, she, they and so on)”
The Legal History
The steps which have brought us to our current predicament are quite convoluted but I have attempted to summarise them below:
1. The creation of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984
2. 2013 Gender Identity act (Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013). This took the word sex out of the Sex Discrimination Act. Specifically:
Subsection 4(1)
Insert:
gender identity means the genderrelated identity, appearance or mannerisms or other genderrelated characteristics of a person (whether by way of medical intervention or not), with or without regard to the person’s designated sex at birth.
Subsection 4(1) (definition of man )
Repeal the definition. [“man” means a member of the male sex irrespective of age]
Subsection 4(1) (definition of woman )
Repeal the definition. [“woman” means a member of the female sex irrespective of age]
The arbiter of this legislation has become the Sex Discrimination Commission under the Human Rights Commission.
3. The Birth, Death and Marriages Act (Allowing for change of registered sex)
4. The HR Commission insistence on a conciliation process in each case
5. The Federal Court case (Tickle v Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd 2024)
Justice Bromwich, 23 August 2024:
They claim that Ms Tickle was discriminated against on the basis of her sex, which they consider to be male, not her gender identity. They consider sex to mean the sex of a person at birth, and that this is unchangeable. Those arguments failed, because the view propounded by the respondents conflicted with a long history of cases decided by courts going back over 30 years. Those cases establish that, on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable.
In other words, the legal definition of sex trumps reality defined by biology.
Human Rights Commission
Trans@School, produced by the Queensland Human Rights Commission and published in 2020. Actually, they produced two documents, one targeting schools and the other students. In these documents they refer to:
Affirming gender means affirming the gender that matches a person’s gender identity. For example, if a person was assigned male at birth and identifies as female, the person affirms their gender as female.
The documents go on to instruct children on how to successfully change their gender identity and how the school should support them in this process, even if parents disagree – affirmation must come first.
Schools
School principals have been left with an unenviable choice. If they don’t insist on teachers submitting to the pronoun police, they face the Sword of Damocles from of the Education Department, Human Rights Commission or aggressive activists or politicians. It they do insist, many parents would consider them being complicit in subverting biological reality or contravening conscience or religious practice.
They may also face litigation for disciplining teaching staff not prepared to follow the Human Rights’ Commission mantra, as in the case of “Max” who “filed an employment claim against the school. At mediation, Max achieved a favourable settlement including a retraction of his dismissal, a letter of recommendation, an acknowledgment of service and a substantial monetary payment” (https://australiawatch.com.au/max/). To add to the complexity, this is “at a time when international media and the overwhelming evidence of harm of what this can lead to” (Rachel Baxendale, UK Safety fear put Australian gender clinics on notice, The Australian, 22 Feb 2026).
In a separate case, a teacher sued a Catholic high school over forms of address. According to the Catholic Weekly, “the school and Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS) reportedly drew the line at Sanders’ request to use they/them pronouns and to be referred to as Mx rather than Mr, and so now MACS is being sued for discrimination.” (https://catholicweekly.com.au/school-pronoun-fight-set-to-begin/) There is a real legal risk to schools relating not only to students, but to teachers who seek to use pronouns that may not align with the religious ethos of the school.
Christianity, Religion and the Enlightenment
Many view diversity as an asset, and the Australian education system reflects this through its broad spectrum of schooling models, including State, Catholic, Anglican, Christian, home schooling, and various independent alternatives.
The State often draws its inspiration from enlightenment values centred on two core ideas:
- Truth through the scientific method
- Individual liberty
Religious schools expand on this by asserting that the measure of worshipping something is the significance you give it. Worshiping God means putting His will above your feelings. So, what does God say about feelings that your sex is not aligned with your biology?
It is important to know that, historically, this is not a new phenomenon and appears wrapped up in the question of “mind over matter” where the aim is to transcend our corrupt physical bodies into something spiritual and pure.
To boil the argument down to its essential elements, we read in Genesis 1:27:
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Two sexes were created and created in God’s image, not in each other’s image or imagination, but God’s.
OK, but is it such a big deal if we ignore this bit? Well yes, the first commandment written is “You shall have no other gods before me”. Don’t put government, institutions or even yourself before God. This is followed by “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath”. Our image is created in God, it is His image and we are not to alter it to satisfy our own desires. Thirdly, “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.” Christians and institutions that claim Christ as Lord represent Him. Putting God second in descriptions or decisions breaks these commandments and makes Him, and us, liars.
Reality
The reality is, we should all have serious concerns about the weaponisation of our institutions against the private beliefs held by members of the public. We should feel sympathy for anyone going through the trauma and confusion of who they are, even more so when dealing with young people. Yet emotions are heightened in teenagers as they develop from childhood to adulthood. Allowing kids to make such dramatic decisions does not provide care and protection for them when they are most vulnerable. Many teachers over the years have used the words, “depressing teenagers is like shooting fish a barrel.”
And it is no wonder the kids are confused. Even the Health Secretary did not appear to know what a woman was when asked by Senator Antic. He replied, “I think there are a variety of definitions.” Who would have thought that the 1990 action-comedy Kindergarten Cop would turn into an instructional video? “Boys have penises, girls have vaginas!” declares a child from the floor of a primary classroom. The nation’s former chief health leader must have missed that lesson.
Barrister Louise Clegg said recently that it has been a failure on behalf of conservatives not to prosecute the cause of freedoms, choosing, instead, to cede the space to progressives. She went on to offer the sage advice that owning the language on a daily basis emboldens our legal fraternity to produce decisions more in line with traditional thought. It appears that justice, like politics, is downstream of culture. A pertinent example is the use of the term ‘sex’, which continues to denote biological classification, in contrast to gender, whose meaning has evolved considerably over the past seven decades, shaped in significant part by the work of sexologist Dr John Money.
Solzhenitsyn offers this parting advice: “when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.” This may well be the treatment required to help heal the cultural wounds in Australian society and embolden teachers to teach what is true.
Jason Strecker has nearly two decades of experience in education and is a director at Australians for Science and Freedom (scienceandfreedom.org). He can be contacted at jason.strecker@scienceandfreedom.org or on X @JasonStrecker.
