Just a little update from Australia. Last month the Lesbian Action Group went to court seeking an exemption in order to hold female only (and gay only) lesbian events. They had previously applied to the Australian Human Rights Commission who denied the exemption, so this is the next step. Live tweets are available on Lesbian Action Groups twitter/X account Feb 23 & 24, and online submission available Lesbian Action Group Inc. v AHRC: Online file if anyone wants to check it out.
Overall LAGs lawyers did a great job of explaining how sex and gender ID (along with sexual orientation) in our Sex Discrimination Act work more fairly if treated as separate characteristics each deserving of protection, rather than assuming Gender Identity changes one's sex for the purposes of the law. Provided guidelines from the time describing sex as biological and gender identity as social characteristics or something like that. The equivalent of Ben Cooper's approach in FWS, and IMO the most likely to be successful.
The AHRCs reasoning is that TWAW and excluding a vulnerable sub-group of women is discriminatory, that 90% of TW say having their GI publicly affirmed is important to them and they have high suicidality. And that the Sex Discrimination Act should not be used to discriminate against people protected within it (interestingly sexual orientation was added to the SDA at the same time as GI, yet AHRC had no problem with LAG excluding gay men from their events, so they are not being very consistent with their reasoning).
The outcome of the case may be affected by the ruling on Giggle V Tickle when that comes out soon. It wasn't obvious how the judge is leaning, but he did call out the AHRC's lawyer claiming LAG want to exclude TW because they see them as "unworthy", when there was no evidence of that in any of LAGs submissions. He also asked how the AHRCs reasoning applies to the exclusion of cisgender men, as the AHRC didn't seem to have any problem with that part of the exemption. (The answer was that being excluding from lesbian events validates men's identity so it's fine. Not sure that holds up well if you think about other groups who might be discriminated against in ways that are typical of how society treats people of a particular ethnicity etc).
While there wasn't a visible 'peaked in court' arc like Lord Hodge in FWS and the judge in Deeming V Pesutto, the questions suggest at least neutrality and willingness to explore the arguments, which is refreshing.
So now we wait and see.