In 1995’s Nattering on the Net, Australian feminist Dale Spender explored the way in which online spaces were creating new possibilities for female interaction. “Women’s speech is generally restricted and restrained when men are around,” she wrote.

This is why women need women-only places where they can say what they think without fear of harassment or intimidation. It’s why women need everything from women’s studies to women’s refuges in real life; and why they need women-only networks on-line.

These were the early days of the internet, long before Mumsnet was deemed a “toxic hotbed of transphobia” and lesbian dating apps became “terf-free zones”. Even so, the woman-only online space was already in trouble. “Setting up women-only networks is one thing,” Spender noted. “Keeping them women-only is quite another.”

Well, quite. Last week saw the Australian Federal Court conclude that Roxanne Tickle, a trans-identified male, had been the victim of indirect discrimination after having been removed from the woman-only Giggle for Girls app. Giggle’s founder, Sall Grover, does not consider Tickle to be a woman, but the court disagreed, with Justice Robert Bromwich insisting that sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”. I would be surprised if he truly believes this — or if anyone does —–but that’s us feminists told. No more exclusionary networks for us!

While some have positioned this as another development in the “what is a woman?” debate, I tend to think of it as part of the endless war on women having anything of our own. Get in there, Bromwich and Tickle! You showed those mean vagina owners who’s boss! It is all so depressingly laddish, at least to anyone not viewing it through the distorting lens of gender identitarianism. Tickle is no human rights hero. He has simply engaged in the latest, most fashionable form of territorial pissing, finding yet another way to assert that there shall be no space, none whatsoever, from which a female person may exclude a male person. He is very much a part of the global backlash against the rights of women and girls. 

I know that to some the loss of an app — just one app! — can seem a minor thing, certainly compared to assaults on women’s rights elsewhere. There is more to this, though, and not just in terms of this ruling’s relationship to trans activism’s further demands. There are broader patterns that one can trace, ones which recur the world over, wherever there are men who cannot accept that women exist in our own right. Always we see the same denial of anything which suggests an independent female subjectivity, the same rage at women gathering away from men, the same rampant self-pity in the face of female self-assertion. Above all, there’s always the same monstrous pettiness. 

Imagine not being able to cope with women reading in public, or raising their voices, or casting their eyes on men who are not close relations. Imagine not being able to cope with women having their own dating apps, or rape crisis centres, or political movement. Imagine not being able to cope with the very existence of the word “women” unless it might also refer to you. How small a person would you have to be?  

Even if you don’t believe Tickle is a woman, there is social status to be gained — and censure to be avoided — in pretending otherwise

In spite of this, there are those who consider themselves progressive — even feminist — who will be taking the side of Roxanne Tickle in this particular instance of women losing out. This is because Tickle has been able to capitalise on trans activism’s repositioning of female people as oppressors of male people within the category “woman”. Even if you don’t believe Tickle is a woman, there is social status to be gained — and censure to be avoided — in pretending otherwise. And once you are claiming that Tickle is a woman, then the analysis of who is withholding resources from whom must be turned on its head. In this misreading of reality, the privileged cis women are denying the oppressed trans women access to the very woman-only resources which, as Spender wrote, all women need. 

In her essay “Some Reflections on Separatism and Power”, Marilyn Frye makes the distinction between segregation, “when the group in power excludes the group without the power”, and separatism, “when the group without the power denies access to the group with the power”. The woman-only meeting, Frye writes, “is a fundamental challenge to the structure of power”. It is not the same as men excluding women from public life and political representation. Women do not gather without men in order to maintain some imaginary dominant status; any male outrage at being “excluded” arises from the dominant group’s expectation that the subordinate group be “unconditionally accessible”. 

The Tickle case is a perfect demonstration of the way in which forcing women to pretend that male people are female can be used to reinforce this expectation of unconditional accessibility. Whenever women say no to him, the trans activist can claim that female people — as those with “cis privilege” – are the group with power, while male people — as “victims of misgendering” — are the group who lack it. Henceforth, women are deemed to have no legitimate grounds for refusal. The balance of power has not changed in the slightest, but linguistic trickery has permitted the powerful to masquerade as the oppressed. 

Women who encounter Roxanne Tickle on what is supposed to be a woman-only app may still feel their speech is “restricted and restrained”. Tickle is unlikely to care. After all, there’s another win to be added to the great “taking things off women” scoreboard. 

And it is a win, insofar as it is a loss for women. At the same time, it is one that looks small and selfish and mean. You won your pissing contest. Good luck with attempting to claw back any dignity.