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Although they’re celebrating it as a “definite win”, yesterday’s decision to allow the Lesbian Action Group an appeal to ban transgender women from their events is anything but.

In his ruling, Federal Court judge Mark Moshinsky said exemptions to discrimination law could be allowed if the group could demonstrate a more positive outcome without the inclusion of transgender women.

鈥淲e need to be able to rebuild lesbian community, provide safe spaces for lesbians, provide role models for young lesbians, and lobby for lesbian rights in Australia without the threat of litigation from the trans lobby,” said a LAG spokesperson after the decision.

鈥淢en cannot be lesbians, human beings cannot change sex, and we should have the right to say that.鈥�

I’m not going to waste my time explaining the long history of trans women in healthy, functioning lesbian spaces, nor am I going to expand on the shared nuances of gender that lesbians, trans and cis alike, experience. I no longer want to appeal to the humanity of the Lesbian Action Group when it is clear we have two incredibly differing ideas of what lesbianism means. If they’re struggling to find lesbian community, it’s not because of the “infiltration” of trans women. It’s because of their own bigotry.

If this case was purely about who the LAG wanted to exclude from their events, they’d be welcome to it. It’s clear that no one wants to share spaces with them anyway. However, it’s the ensuing legal connotations brought about by a ruling in their favour that would be detrimental not only to trans people, but to the wider queer community as a whole and, ultimately, women. Even the most heterosexual and cisgender of them.

Sall Grover, founder of Giggle For Girls app and lead defendant in the long-running Tickle v Giggle case this morning in The Australian that the entire thing could be boiled down to basic biology.

“Lesbians are women attracted to other women, full stop. Their orientation is rooted in biology, not the latest trends in self-declared gender. Forcing them to include heterosexual men does not promote equality, it destroys the meaning of same-sex attraction.”

Brushing aside the absurdity of a woman who regularly appears on Sky News telling my dyke ass who I’m allowed to fuck, reducing humans to their chromosomes or genitals is insidious at best and fascist at worst. The idea that people are limited to certain behaviours or characteristics based on their biology is bioessentialism, pure and simple, and it’s the same ideology that would sooner have Sall back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, regardless of whether she advocated for it or not.

It’s not a coincidence that TERF events are regularly “crashed” by Nazis, nor is it a coincidence that the organisers refuse to denounce their association with the cause. Nazism relies on “biological truth”- eugenics – to justify the supremacy of white, heterosexual males, the role of women as baby-making machines to contribute to the proliferation of the white ethno-state.

While it might sound like a bit of a stretch to conclude that transphobia = Nazism, the rabid policing of who is allowed to be a lesbian or who is allowed to be a woman is, to quote many a gay marriage naysayer, a slippery slope.

We can see it already in the International Olympic Committee’s recent decision to “gender screen” athletes: which bodies are allowed to be seen as female? What parts of their biology disqualify them from being seen as an “acceptable” woman, regardless of how society perceives them, or what science says? It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how easy it is to get from where we are now to the policing of women- even ones like Sall Grover- when it comes to the jobs and behaviour their biology permits them to do.