Women in Australia today walk a landscape where they no longer have the legal right to define themselves accurately as female people, ensuring that society allows them to provide services to each other according to their sex. Crucial services such as women’s refuges, rape crisis centres and others can no longer exclude men if they say they are women. The landmark judgement in the case of Tickle v Giggle for Girls PTY Ltd (No2) (2024) makes clear, in law, that the sex of human beings can change and a piece of paper — a birth certificate, for example — can prove it. 

This is of course a legal fiction, as there is not a single example, globally, of a human being changing their biological sex. Not one single male person has been able to perform the magic act of changing into a female person. There is no science-fiction style anomaly — there is only a blind drunk court process legitimising apparent nonsense. 

The Tickle v Giggle case should terrify us all. It opens up the worldwide possibility that the correct meaning of “female” will gradually cease to exist as each case comes before blinkered judges.

Sall Grover, the CEO of Giggle for Girls PTY Ltd (Giggle) set up a networking app in 2020 for sole use by female people. Roxanne Tickle, a biological male, with an amended birth certificate to show a female sex marker, applied to be a member of the app but was, after initially being accepted to the app, subsequently rejected, because he is not in fact, despite such paperwork, female.  

The judgement in favour of Roxanne Tickle states:

They (the respondents) claim that Ms Tickle was discriminated against on the basis of her sex, which they consider to be male, not her gender identity. They consider sex to mean the sex of a person at birth, and that is unchangeable. Those arguments failed, because the view propounded by the respondents conflicted with a long history of cases decided by the courts going back over 30 years. Those cases establish that, on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable.

For an argument that people cannot change sex to fail, you should need to produce an example. Not an example of words, birth certificates and passports, but an actual concrete human example of a person who once was male, who is now female. No smoke and mirrors trickery can do that and in the case of Roxanne Tickle, that would have been a lot of smoke and a great number of mirrors, and to no eventual avail. 

The judgement contains so many phrases that reveal how completely overawed society is, by men telling falsehoods about themselves; increasingly afraid to tell them “no” and ask them to get their coats. Sall Grover bravely tried to do this, and she failed.

A further ludicrous passage in the judgement reads:

The evidence goes no further than establishing that Ms Tickle’s exclusion was likely to have been a byproduct of excluding those who were perceived as being men, by use of the visual criteria that failed to distinguish between cisgender men and transgender women.

Since both categories of people are male, what this part of the judgement appears to take issue with is … eyes. Eyes can’t see the difference between a man saying he is a woman, and a man who isn’t saying he is a woman, thus eyes are at fault. This part of the case did not succeed, and eyes were temporarily off the legal hook. 

The reprieve for eyes was unfortunately short-lived, as the judge continued:

The indirect discrimination case has succeeded because Ms Tickle was excluded from the Giggle App because she did not look sufficiently female, according to the respondents.

Of course there is a very good reason for this. It is not possible to “look sufficiently female” because there is not a sliding scale of the sex of being female. There is only the truth of being biologically female. I really think the law needs to go easy on eyes, eyes do not decide sex. It’s too big a legal responsibility really isn’t it.

CEDAW, “the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women” (1979), relied upon in the case by Giggle, makes very clear that protections are afforded “only to women, and the word ‘women’ in CEDAW only means adults who were female at birth sex”. Thank goodness that in 1979 sensible women were in charge — to quote Ricky Gervais, “the old-fashioned kind”. 

Justice Bromwich however, dismissed CEDAW as being relevant to his final decision making which found that Tickle had been indirectly discriminated against by Giggle, on the basis of gender identity. Tickle had alleged in this action that Giggle “placed her in the same position as men”. What other position could Tickle possibly be in? 

 What CEDAW could presumably never really have envisaged is the extent to which men identifying as women would seek to push the physical and legal boundaries of female people and the horrifying consequences which that might bring. This horrific judgment insists on all barriers to men who choose to identify as women in Australia being lowered so they can hop into women’s crucial services, such as those provided after they have experienced rape and sexual assault. 

Eating lunch with my 22-year-old daughter, she offered:

It seems to me like they want to find technicalities everywhere these days!

She’s right. The Roxanne Tickles of the world are bold; they are empowered; they are vindictive. More of these cases will inevitably follow and there will be a sinister hand reaching out to extend the power of this morally mistaken judgement far beyond Australian shores. 

I believe it is not a hysterical or hyperbolic reaction to assume that the overall aim of the whole trans activist movement, is to reduce the term woman to a nonsense, a vague idea; in fact to make “female” into nothing, leaving women therefore with nothing which is our own and which excludes men.

The problem with the Roxanne Tickles of the world is that they cannot bear the continued existence of the thing they can never really become. 

As Bev Jackson of LGB Alliance said:

Those who are today gloating about the ruling in Giggle v Tickle have no idea of the tsunami of rage that is building among women around the world, and which will end with self-ID being struck down in every country that has so thoughtlessly adopted them.