After being ousted as leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) 13 years ago, Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, said of her legacy: “It will be easier for the next woman, and the woman after that and the woman after that. And I am proud of that.”
One can imagine that Gillard, who has been the target of a vile, ill-informed and misdirected witch hunt over her role in amending her country’s Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) by the sore loser and her supporters in the recent, much-hyped court ruling in the Giggle v Tickle matter, probably never thought that her next act post-politics would be quiet. But one wonders if she imagined at the time that she’d meet with such a force that is the anti-trans movement, and if she ever thought that act of amending that legislation - ironically just two days before she was “rolled” in a leadership “spill” as we say in Oz - would come back to haunt her more than a decade on.
First the pitchforks came out on X, much of it rehashing the same tired tropes, from Australians who never liked Gillard. This time though it’s also come from new critics, or should I say trolls since most are not about debate only hate. Enter the UK’s vociferous and relentless anti-trans activists, and to a lesser extent some in the US, underscoring again the different paths that Britain and America have veered towards on trans rights versus Australia. Egged on by our Murdoch media, particularly The Australian, who have now even hysterically blamed her for the price of capsicum 13 years after she stood down, offline Gillard has also been heckled at the Hay Festival, which she appeared at two weeks ago. If it rains tomorrow in Wales, will someone blame her?
Interestingly, she was sitting beside another woman who’s too come under attack from this force, former deputy leader of UK Labour Harriet Harman, while another, ex-First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party Nicola Sturgeon, featured at the festival later. You wonder if they got together to have a drink afterwards and to exchange notes. Tell me again why you’d go into politics if you’re a woman in 2026 given all you have to face not just in office but beyond, including the biggest gotcha question of our time, “what is a woman?”
Yesterday, Gillard again encountered protesters while arriving at an event for the Women’s Prize, of which she is this year’s panel chair. Ironically, this was just before she released a statement speaking out in support of Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan after she’d been targeted in billboards urging voters to “ditch the witch”. It’s the very same sexist slogan that was used against Gillard as prime minister in 2011, suggesting sadly that Australians may not have progressed that far in their treatment of female MPs. Incredibly, Grover and her supporters have already dismissed but weaponized this latest round of sexism involving Allan to fit their cause, arguing that she is not suffering real misogyny and the actual victims are themselves, who are simply asked to respect trans women.
Much of the pile-on against Gillard this time round has occurred on X, which may now be dismissed as just a dark, far right corner of the internet and not indicative of the opinion of the average person, although there are also threads mentioning the former MP on equally delightful site Mumsnet. Maybe there’s a silver lining in that - that most Australians don’t even view this as an issue - maybe not. It’s interesting to look at Bluesky and not see one word written about this there (although some might now say that platform is too far left). But still I can’t help but ask, has anyone in the public light defended our first female leader from a group who have now spoken of hounding her for the rest of her days, such is their obsession with this issue?
Gillard has kept quiet on the subject, with the most recent media she’s given in The Times just over a week ago, titled “I didn’t suffer sexism or misogyny until I was prime minister”. It’s a curious headline, given that if you’d asked me before reading this, I would have said that the former prime minister, who was derided for voice and even had her fertility compared to an empty fruit bowl in her kitchen, faced this from the get-go as an MP. But let’s not thought police her on this given she’s speaking about her own experience.
The current witch hunt though feels like déjà vu for Australians, who during Gillard’s leadership watched journalists produce stories about the time she lost a shoe, be asked on-air by shock jocks whether her then partner was gay and be told by others that her father had “died of shame” over her alleged lies, and, that she should be “put into a chaff bag and thrown into the sea”. I’d actually missed this little beauty about her voice. I have written on here before and elsewhere about how it’s been pointed out to me a number of times that I sound like Gillard and that’s not a good thing. But I’m pleased to say that the author of this piece appears to no longer be working in journalism.
Even the circumstances surrounding Gillard’s famous misogyny speech, which prompted Australia’s national dictionary, the Macquarie Dictionary to update its definition of the word “misogyny,” was voted the “most unforgettable” moment in Australian TV history, and has had at least four million views, have been questioned.
Yet despite leading a minority government, Gillard passed over 570 bills, delivering transformative reforms including a major overhaul of education funding, the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and a landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. She has been criticised for a broken promise on carbon tax and her failure to resolve the asylum-seeker deadlock, among other things. Gillard herself admits she made mistakes. In an interview three years ago, speaking about same-sex marriage which she voted against in 2012, she said, unflinchingly, she was “very happy” to state she’d gotten it “wrong”.
Her post-political work however has been built around gender equality, in particular trying to improve the lives of women and girls around the world. Gillard now evenly splits her time between Australia and Britain. In the UK, she serves as chair of the Wellcome Trust and of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. The latter are behind some very insightful research on young people’s attitudes to masculinity and women’s equality. I saw her speak at the world’s largest gender equality conference put on by NGO Women Deliver, of which she is an ambassador, in Melbourne, in April. In Australia, Gillard has been involved with mental health charity Beyond Blue, too.
Then there’s her very successful A podcast of one’s own, a nod towards Virginia Woolf, now in its eighth season. One of the recent sessions that she recorded was done live at Women Deliver with our eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. Both she and Gillard were talking up Australia’s world-first social media ban for teens. I should note that I couldn’t disagree more with them on this subject, given the evidence that has emerged on whether it’s working so far.
More recently, Gillard added chair of judges for the Women’s Prize for Fiction to her CV. You could say that in 2026, she is living her best life, while doing important work.
I’d take bets that most of her new detractors couldn’t identify the former leader if they bumped into her in the street, and in fact when notorious gender critical journalist Hadley Freeman tried to join the Gillard pile on X two weeks ago, she couldn’t even get her name correct. Nor do I think these people have studied the Giggle v Tickle judgment. I don’t think they’re poring over the SDA for their bedtime reading, either. I’d say most don’t know much about Australia too.
But if they’d followed recent coverage of the Giggle v Tickle case and the fallout, they might have noted that Australia’s courts have been moving away from the British position on transgender issues for more than three decades, as Margaret Thornton, an emerita professor in the College of Law, Governance and Policy at the Australian National University, stressed in The Saturday Paper.
Or that since the 1990s (long before Gillard even became an MP), we have had protections for trans people in our state and territories anti-discrimination law, as Heather Corkhill, legal director of NGO Equality Australia, wrote on this very site a week ago. Of course I’d argue at any time that protecting these people was the right thing to do. But it’s only up until recently that this issue has been whipped up by people to suit their own agenda,
If they’d read even the Giggle v Tickle explainer provided by Equality Australia, they would have also seen this:
The Court however didn’t decide definitively on single sex spaces in all circumstances. Australian law already contains specific exemptions in some situations, including parts of the Sex Discrimination Act that allow certain single-sex services, sport exclusions and religious exemptions.
Sall Grover did not use these exemptions in her arguments in this case, and had not applied for an exemption to allow her to exclude trans women from the app.
The case did not remove those exemptions. Instead, it confirmed that businesses and services cannot create blanket exclusions against trans people unless the law specifically permits it. Temporary exemptions of up to 5 years can still be granted on a case-by-case basis to allow for discrimination when it’s necessary, appropriate and justifiable in the circumstances.
As mentioned above, the SDA includes an exemption for sport, which has also been highlighted in some sections of our media. If only so many around the world had bothered to do their background reading on all of this, before they decided to weigh in with their hot take.
But then even if critics had this information they wouldn’t care, because any movement needs a scapegoat, and Gillard is unfortunately now it until they find a new one.
The legal question in the Giggle v Tickle matter has been settled, for the time being at least, in a court in Australia - we are a democracy and make our own laws - and while freedom of speech does exist here and in the UK and one has the right to protest, one could also argue that the ruling should also be respected.
Grover has indicated that she will appeal the Federal Court ruling. As Thornton writes, this is not automatic but is likely to be granted in the High Court, given the social significance of the case. Whether she’ll win or not is any one’s guess. But given there will likely be ongoing legal proceedings, could Gillard speak out about this matter even if she wanted to?
Online demands that she must apologise, from Grover and her fans, have been loud. But when people speak of fixing up a “mess” and a “disastrous legacy”, what exactly do they mean? What do they want Gillard to explain? And what do you hope to get out of all of this? Trans women don’t pose a threat to others in Australia as we know, there are no stats to support this. The ones that do exist however show that trans people suffer disproportionately compared to cisgender women and men. And as our current prime minister Anthony Albanese rightly said last week when questioned about this: “We have a major program for women’s safety. I’m concerned about issues that Australians are concerned about, which is domestic violence.” He added that he was “not engaging in culture wars”. Bravo.
I think Gillard, not just a seasoned MP at the time but also a former lawyer, had the best intentions of amending the SDA, and there are other protections all Australians get from this. But she doesn’t play an active role in politics in Australia anymore and has never done so in the UK. She has no great influence in either country, for all the good work she does. And as has been stressed, there were others involved in the amendment and passage of that legislation, and successive governments who could have repealed it and didn’t. I don’t see anyone gunning for them now.
The amendments to the SDA passed with broad bipartisan support and were not, at the time, understood as a threat to women’s spaces. It may be fascinating to ponder what Gillard envisaged when she changed the law and what a former leader owes its country decades on, and why. But legislators should not be held personally accountable for every if any subsequent judicial interpretation of laws they passed years earlier.
Even if Gillard spoke about it, we know that it wouldn’t be enough for people and that they would never be happy. Our Murdoch media would not be satisfied. Of course the other side of politics in Australia and even her own may criticise her for getting involved in an issue when she is no longer an MP, too, as we have seen in the case of former UK prime minister Tony Blair. Two weeks ago he published his thoughts, all 5,700 words of them, on the current state of affairs in the UK.
Gillard should not be immune from criticism, of course. But the current witch hunt by anti-trans activists isn’t just unfair, it’s not grounded in facts, and shouldn’t be entertained by any one. She wasn’t perfect, but as our first female prime minister, Gillard showed me, she showed my niece and she showed millions of other Australian women what’s possible. She deserves some respect for this, for what she achieved in office, and for all the good things that she’s done since, and there is no justification for continuing to hound and harass her like this.
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