St Joseph’s Catholic College in Hunters Hill has updated its enrolment policy to state that students must be “biologically male” and identify as such.

For a school founded on Christian convictions about the nature of the human person, this should require no explanation. Under the current state of Australian law, it requires a great deal.

In NSW, religious schools are exempt from some provisions of anti-discrimination legislation, allowing them to make enrolment and staffing decisions in accordance with their faith.

The Independent Education Union has already written to the NSW government calling for those exemptions to be removed. It says the exemptions permit discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and are “increasingly misaligned with contemporary community standards”.

The clear implication is that a school’s authority to enrol only students consistent with its principles is not a freedom to be protected but a problem to be fixed.

Women’s Forum Australia chief executive Rachael Wong put it plainly: “It is extraordinary that schools now feel the need to spell out what a boy or a girl is, rather than relying on the ordinary biological meaning of those terms.”

She is right. The fact that an enrolment policy must now define biological sex tells us something important about the direction of Australian law. What never needed clarification has now become contested terrain.

The broader context matters here. Last month, the Full Federal Court upheld the ruling in Giggle vs Tickle, finding two instances of direct discrimination against a transgender-identifying man who had been removed from a women-only social media platform.

The court’s majority found that sex, as used in the Sex Discrimination Act, encompasses those who are legally recognised as female through amended birth certificates. What that means for single-sex institutions operating under the same Act remains an open question.

Australian Christian Lobby NSW Director Joshua Rowe welcomed St Joseph’s policy, noting that it “provides clarity for families and protects the school’s ability to operate according to its Christian beliefs and educational mission”.

This is a practical issue, not just an ideological war of words. Schools that operate from a Christian anthropology need to be able to say so in their governing documents, apply it consistently, and act on it without legal exposure.

The ability to do that depends on legislative exemptions that are now under active political threat.

There is also the question of the wellbeing of all students. A school community is not simply a delivery mechanism for curriculum. It is a formation environment.

HRLA provides advice to Christian schools navigating Australia’s anti-discrimination framework and working to preserve their religious ethos. The legal and cultural pressures facing schools like St Joseph’s are not hypothetical. They are present, and they are growing.

But St Joseph’s College is resisting, and we can pray that the cultural tide may be turning.