By: Sall Grover
Published: Apr 9, 2026
After ending funding for ACON’s Pride in Diversity, the ABC faces scrutiny over media coverage and ideological influence on reporting.
In a telling move, the ABC has ditched its sponsorship of ACON’s Pride in Diversity program. Managing director Hugh Marks ordered an internal review and concluded the arrangements “no longer provided sufficient value” and risked editorial independence.
Who could have predicted that paying a trans lobby group for ideological approval might compromise a taxpayer-funded broadcaster?
For the past year, The Australian’s Stephen Rice was virtually alone among Australian journalists in exposing how deeply captured the public broadcaster had become. His reporting revealed the ABC chasing “platinum status” with ACON, spending large sums of public money, installing all-gender bathrooms, offering “gender affirmation leave” and allowing an activist group’s equality index to shape editorial priorities.
Positive trans stories earned points. Journalists received pronoun guidance. The ABC was effectively paying for ideological certification while claiming impartiality. Rice did the journalism that most outlets avoided.
The ABC’s exit from this arrangement is welcome, but it is time the entire Australian media confronted its broader complacency on gender ideology. For nearly a decade, too many newsrooms have treated biological sex as optional opinion and framed women defending sex-based rights and reality as the true extremists.
While children were placed on puberty blockers and women’s single-sex spaces were eroded, editors looked away or defaulted to the lazy “both sides” framing that obscured the evidence.
I know this reality intimately. In 2020 I launched Giggle, a social networking app for women only. When I was sued under the Sex Discrimination Act, my life was up-ended. I have endured years of court battles, more than $1m in legal costs, relentless stress and vicious reputational attacks, all for refusing to pretend sex is a feeling. The case, still awaiting its appeal decision, is arguably the most significant women’s rights matter in modern Australian history.
Yet much of the public knows little about Giggle v Tickle because the media has largely ignored it or downplayed it. When coverage appeared, ACON-aligned outlets cast me as the unreasonable bigot for insisting females have the right to associate on the basis of sex. The ABC has never responded to my repeated offers for interview, even as it produced near-daily stories on “trans” issues.
I am not alone. Kirralie Smith of Binary Australia has faced court proceedings and vilification complaints simply for stating that males do not belong in female sports and naming those competing. Jillian Spencer, a senior child psychiatrist, was suspended from clinical duties for questioning the rapid rollout of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without thorough mental health assessment, the concerns that drove the Cass Review in Britain and policy reversals in Europe and parts of the US.
Jasmine Sussex, a former breastfeeding counsellor, faces tribunal action for stating the obvious: only women breastfeed, and biological males cannot lactate as females do. These are not isolated incidents.
None of this is abstract. These are real Australian women – a business founder, an advocate, a doctor, a volunteer, all mothers – whose lives have been disrupted for refusing to affirm an ideology that erases sex.
The same ideology has quietly shattered the lives of other women and families across the country. Australian detransitioners such as Mel Jefferies have begun legal action against practitioners, alleging inadequate assessment, poor informed consent and failure to address underlying mental health issues before irreversible interventions. Their stories, and those of countless families dealing with the fallout in silence, rarely make headlines. Many Australians remain unaware they are not alone questioning the validity of gender ideology.
This is how ideological capture operates. You do not need formal censorship when newsrooms have internalised the ideology and been guided by lobby groups to dismiss dissenting voices as hysterical, outdated or irrelevant.
International wake-up calls such as the Cass Review, the closure of the Tavistock clinic in Britain, restrictions in Sweden and Finland, the British Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling confirming that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex at birth, and major US policy shifts protecting women’s sports and spaces have all received only a fraction of the coverage given to ACON-approved narratives, such as the ABC’s own claims that puberty blockers are “safe, effective and reversible”. Important institutions, including the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Department of Health and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, remain tied to ACON’s programs and continue influencing policy and narratives.
The ABC’s sponsorship was the most visible symptom. The deeper problem is an industry-wide reluctance to apply basic journalistic scepticism for fear of activist backlash. The US and Britain are confronting this issue with rigorous debate, policy corrections and judicial clarity. Australia risks looking increasingly captured by continuing to ignore the mounting evidence and silenced voices.
The ABC’s decision to stop paying ACON for approval is a small step forward. But until Australian media treats gender ideology with the scrutiny it demands – naming the evidence, acknowledging the harms and refusing to treat the defence of women and children as controversial – the capture will persist. Gender ideology has inflicted enough damage. It is long past time the media stopped enabling it. We are not asking for special treatment or gold stars. We are asking for honest reporting. It is time to leave more than ACON behind. It is time to leave the ideology in the past.
[ Via: https://archive.today/mFP2o ]
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It's telling that ACON actually stands for AIDS Council of New South Wales. It was created to support homosexual men and advocate for their rights.
Now it's just a skin suit for activist lunatics.
