It was the 'trans men pregnant' brainfart heard across the country. But there's another side to Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Coddy's embarrasing waffle: PVO

By PETER VAN ONSELEN, POLITICAL EDITOR, AUSTRALIA Published: 02:36, 2 June 2026 | Updated: 02:54, 2 June 2026 The Sex Discrimination Commissioner shouldn’t need a Senate Estimates hearing to establish that biological males can’t become pregnant. Nor should she require a political backlash to understand why that matters. Yet Anna Cody’s recent commentary has brought us exactly here. Asked whether a transgender woman could be protected under pregnancy discrimination provisions, Cody defaulted to a technical legal answer.  'If someone applies for a job, for example and it is a trans woman, she may be asked whether or not she intends to have children,' Cody said.  'If she replies, "Yes, I do," and then doesn't get the job, because that employer doesn't want to employ women who may be of child-bearing age, then she may have been subjected to unlawful discrimination on the basis of potential pregnancy.' To translate, her answer was effectively 'yes' - not because biological males can become pregnant, but because anti-discrimination law addresses adverse treatment based on an employer’s mistaken assumptions.  There is a legal nuance there. Discrimination law often turns on perception, assumption and motive, not simply underlying fact.  But Cody’s problem isn’t the absence of a technical argument. It’s that she deployed it in a way that seemed to deny a clear-cut biological reality. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody claimed transgender women could face unlawful discrimination on the basis of 'potential pregnancy' during a fiery Senate estimates hearing  Last week's fiery Senate Estimates hearing followed the recent landmark Full Federal Court ruling in the Tickle v Giggle case. Pictured is Roxanne Tickle after the verdict A better, more intelligible answer was readily available: biological males can’t become pregnant, obviously.  And when senior public officials sound incapable of stating the obvious, public trust drains away. Pregnancy discrimination protections are principally therefore directed at women, because pregnancy is a female biological reality.  Separate protections apply to gender identity, and the law occasionally deals with mistaken assumptions, but these categories must not be collapsed together. Instead, Cody allowed a narrow legal point to become a public spectacle.  Her commentary is damaging not just to the Australian Human Rights Commission, but to the trans-rights cause she appears to be trying to defend. Protecting trans people from arbitrary discrimination doesn’t require denying biological reality.  Nor does it require a Sex Discrimination Commissioner to treat women’s biological realities as awkward obstacles to abstract legal theory.  The landmark case began after Giggle for Girls founder Sall Grover (pictured) removed transgender woman Roxanne Tickle from the women-only app. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner's remarks allowed a narrow legal point to become a public spectacle, PVO (pictured) writes How should we balance protecting trans rights with acknowledging women¿s biological realities in law? What's your view?In fact, when advocates refuse to state ordinary limits plainly, they make it easier for critics to frame trans rights as a zero-sum contest with women’s rights.  This style of advocacy makes acts of inclusion look like erasure. A competent commissioner must be able to hold two thoughts at once: trans people deserve protection from unfair treatment, because they are some of the most vulnerable and discriminated against people in our community.  And women deserve protection for sex-based realities the law was specifically designed to recognise, because it’s an embarrassment that half the population is treated the way women often are. Cody’s answer made it sound as though the law’s internal logic mattered more than the social reality it serves. This isn't an isolated instance for Cody. Cody’s involvement in the Tickle v Giggle litigation, and her broad statements on gender-affirming healthcare for minors, highlight a pattern of counterproductive behaviour.  She leans heavily on 'rights' language, which can clarify but also conceal. Used poorly, it turns hard questions into moral binaries.  Essentially, accept the legal abstraction, or be accused of denying someone’s humanity. Anna Cody's commentary is damaging not just to the Australian Human Rights Commission, but to the trans-rights cause she appears to be trying to defend The political damage at Senate Estimates occurred because Senator Michaelia Cash pressed a simple point Cody should have conceded immediately.  Cash knew what she was doing, she came off a very long and obvious run-up. Yet the Sex Discrimination Commissioner still fell for it.  By the time Cody clarified her stance, the damage was done. Many women heard an institution established to combat sex discrimination treating sex as negotiable when inconvenient. There is a striking irony here. The same voices defending Cody’s reliance on fine legal nuance, distinguishing between biological fact and discriminatory perception, often abandon nuance elsewhere.  Many in the same ideological orbit readily collapse the distinction between an allegation and a finding in ‘believe women’ campaigns, for example.  If the law can distinguish between biological reality and discriminatory perception, public debate must surely also distinguish between accusation and guilt. Nuance shouldn’t appear only when it serves a preferred ideological outcome. Ultimately, Cody is asking the public to accept fine distinctions in complex contexts while failing to supply the basic reassurance that common sense remains intact.  A more defensible answer would have made it clear that trans inclusion need not come at the expense of women’s rights. Instead, Cody’s evasive and legalistic approach helped her critics make their strongest case.  By refusing to state obvious limits plainly, she leaves women rightly wondering whether the Sex Discrimination Commissioner still understands what her office was primarily created to address. Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.