“It is a legal fiction that Tickle is a woman. His birth certificate has been altered from male to female, but he is a biological man, and always will be. We are taking a stand for the safety of all women’s only spaces, but also for basic reality and truth, which the law should reflect.” —Sal Grover
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” —George Orwell
Roxanne Tickle, an Australian man who says he is a woman, has scored a victory in the Federal Court, Justice Robert Bromwich finding him to have been the victim of unlawful discrimination after being banned from the woman-only app Giggle for Girls. The founder of Giggle, Sal Grover, has been ordered to pay damages to Tickle, as well as court costs. Giggle for Girls was marketed as a safe space for women to share and discuss personal experiences. Court filings indicate that the platform had about 20,000 users in 2021. The app has been suspended since 2022.
In 2021, Tickle downloaded the app knowing that it was marketed as exclusive to women. Tickle, who underwent “gender-affirming surgery” in 2019 (presumably breast augmentation, orchiectomy, and vaginoplasty), was banned a several months after joining. Giggle’s AI filter determines the gender of users, a policing function necessary for maintaining female-only spaces. In time, it correctly identified Tickle’s gender (AI is quite good at this) and removed his profile. In Australia, however, a man enjoys the privilege of falsifying primary documents—his birth certificate, passport, etc.—so that he is a woman in the eyes of the state. Legally, it did not matter that Tickle was actually a man; it only mattered that Tickle possessed documents saying he was.
As someone who identifies as a woman, Tickle argued, he was legally entitled to use services meant for women. Moreover, Tickle claimed, Grover’s “persistent misgendering” had prompted “constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts.” For its part, Giggle’s legal team, led by former Liberal candidate Katherine Deves, argued that sex is a biological concept. Giggle freely admitted that Tickle was discriminated against on these grounds; refusing to allow Tickle to use the app therefore constituted lawful sex discrimination, since Tickle is a man. Lawful sex discrimination has been a valid legal construct across the West for decades, enlightened populations finding it necessary in the light of intrinsic differences to establish equitable circumstances for girls and women, as well as safeguard them from male sexual predation. The app was designed to exclude men for this reason.
Tickle’s attorney, Georgina Costello, asked Grover, “Even where a person who was assigned male at birth transitions to a woman by having surgery, hormones, gets rid of facial hair, undergoes facial reconstruction, grows their hair long, wears make up, wears female clothes, describes themselves as a woman, introduces themselves as a woman, uses female changing rooms, changes their birth certificate—you don’t accept that is a woman?” Grover replied, “No.” Costello responded that the facts of Tickle’s surgery and her female birth certificate mean “it is clear that Ms Tickle is a woman.”
The corruption of truth at work in Australia (and there are other countries that corrupt truth in this way), represents not only a threat to women specifically but a threat to fact-based law generally. Surgery and a birth certificate don’t change the sex of a person. If one operates from a reality-based standpoint, which one should, Tickle is a man, i.e., an adult male human. Sex is binary and immutable. A man cannot be or become a woman. This is an impossibility. What Tickle’s attorney describes is not a woman but a simulated sexual identity, a simulacrum of a woman.
Crucially, Grover and her legal team did not deny the construct of “gender identity.” A woman who identifies as a man could be on Giggle, since trans men are women. The problem was that Tickle was a man. It was that basic. However Justice Bromwich, agreed with Tickle, ruling that Grover and the Giggle app had “discriminated” against Tickle, thereby effectively ruling that women do not have a right to women-only spaces. The argument that the judge merely affirmed the law’s arbitrary redefinition of men as women is specious; the premise of the ruling is false on its face, as it asks the court to accept as true the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5. The judge ordered Grover and Giggle to pay $10,000 in compensation plus legal costs.
“This decision is a great win for transgender women in Australia,” said Professor Paula Gerber at Monash University’s Faculty of Law. Since gender ideology is designed to confuse the public about what is actually being said, we need to translate: Gerber is saying that this decision is a great win for men in Australia. Although I doubt the majority of Australian men believe this was the correct decision or intend to take advantage of it, some will and appeal to it when assuming activities and resources reserved for women and trespassing upon their spaces. Tickle did and will certainly do it again.
“This case sends a clear message to all Australians that it is unlawful to treat transgender women differently from cisgender women,” Gerber continued. “It is not lawful to make decisions about whether a person is a woman based on how feminine they appear.” This term “cisgender women” is a propaganda construct designed to convey the possibility that there are different types of women. There is only one possible type of woman—an adult female human. The point about appearance is beside the point; a man is a man no matter how feminine he appears. To be sure, gender ideology works from stereotypes, but law should be based on fact and reason not stereotypes.
Tickle found Grover’s public statements about him “distressing, demoralizing, embarrassing, draining and hurtful.” What about the distress, demoralization, embarrassment, and so forth, provoked by a man’s presence on a women-only app? How does it make a woman feel to have divulged an intimate matter to a man she presumed to be a woman? Betrayed, deceived, violated—these and other feelings come to mind. Do women matter? Their feelings? Their safety? To they have a right to community of women? Should women’s rights be shredded to accommodate a man who has deluded himself into believing is not one? There’s a word for people who believe a man’s desire takes privilege over the rights of women. The word is misogyny.
The assault on the truth about the sex binary, not only in Tickle v Giggle case, but in a myriad of other cases, most recently in the IOC’s decision to allow permitting males to complete in women’s boxing, and the inclusion of Hailey Davidson in LPGA Tour (Davidson stand only two steps from becoming a member), should concern everybody who believes in the right of girls and women to have the same opportunities boys and men have enjoyed for millennia.
Human dignity and freedom is at stake for all of us when our institutions accept such an obvious falsehood as the claim that human beings can change their sex. Orwell wrote in Nineteenth Eighty-Four, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The inverse is equally as true.
freedom and reason 