Outside Victorian Parliament, a group of women gathered for something that should not be controversial in 2026: the right to speak for their own sex. They stood for women’s sports, women’s prisons and every other space that should obviously be for women only. And they stood for a simple claim: a man does not become a woman because he says so.

Against them stood a familiar coalition. Trans activists and hard-left radicals, wrapped in keffiyehs, COVID masks and trans flags. They were not there to debate. They were there to drown the women out.

 

 

The dispute is not complicated. Self-ID lets a man declare himself a woman and brands any woman who objects a bigot. That is how male-bodied people end up in women’s toilets, change rooms and sports. In Victoria, they end up in women’s prisons. The women on the steps call that a human rights failure against the sex that cannot fight back on equal terms. The other side says “trans women are women,” that a woman is whoever identifies as one, and that questioning any of it is hate. When those two worldviews meet on the street, one side tries to hold a rally. The other tries to stop it.

Go Ad Free

About a week before the event, police told Louise, who was liaising for the organisers, that there would be no police presence and no exclusion zone. First, it was the budget. Then came a list of policy clauses that boiled down to this: when rights collide, the force picks a side. For 48 hours, it looked like police had picked the wrong one. Pressure led by Family First MP Moira Deeming forced a reversal. Police did turn up, late and in numbers. Once you have seen how this counter-mob behaves, that was the only sensible outcome.

Even with police on site, the tension never lifted. Organisers were told to keep things calm. We told officers we were there to cover the rally and had brought our own security to make their job easier. That team is not free. Every time we hit a protest like this, it costs thousands, and the only reason we can keep doing it is because readers chip in at ProtectAvi.com.

Across the road, activists hid their faces and complained about being filmed, all while trying to silence women on the most public steps in Victoria.

One co-organiser spelled out the stakes. If they cancelled, she said, women’s rallies at Parliament House would be finished, because the other side would take the no-show as proof that intimidation works. Another said she has watched this coalition of Marxists and trans activists up close. Let them near these women, she warned, and they will hurt them.

That is the fight. Women asserting sex-based rights on one side. Radicals in keffiyehs and dresses on the other. And a police force that nearly walked away until the politics got too hot.

I am with the women. You will not hear that on their ABC, so share this far and wide. If you want us on the next front line when radicals try to shut women down and the state needs reminding whose rights count, go to ProtectAvi.com now and help cover the security that makes this reporting possible. We cannot do it without you.