No Laughing Matter
Giggle v Tickle - Australia's Federal Court to decide - What is a Woman?
When Two Tribes Go to War
The legal showdown in the Federal Court in Sydney saw three Federal court judges hear an appeal in the landmark Giggle v Tickle case. Giggle and its CEO, Sall Grover challenged the 2024 ruling of indirect discrimination against a trans-identified man, Roxanne Tickle, by barring him from a women-only social media app.
In the Sydney court room over three days, August 4-7, were two tribes – sitting on the left of the court was Team Reality - lifelong feminists, lesbians, mothers and women who understand both the importance of, and fragility of women’s rights in Australia in 2025.
Sitting on the right - was Gender Gilead, led by the Human Rights Commissioner (HRC) Anna Cody - the Hall Monitor with a band of lawyerly women come to witness their dismantling. Ambitious, educated and progressive women who are unlikely to need domestic violence shelters or safety from men in women’s prisons.
On day one, Anna Cody entered looking imperious - dressed head-to-toe in a hot pink pantsuit, shiny pale pink shoes, jet black page-boy haircut and expensive jewellery. I imagined her sartorial deliberations designed to achieve maximum impact in a room full of black-gowned lawyers - her pantsuit a symbolic phallic ‘fuck you’ to the women on the left.
Roxanne Tickle sat with his back to the room surrounded by his lawyers - all the better to see his bald patch, thin frizzy grey hair, large hands and feet, tan trousers and dark brown jacket – a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Tickle’s sartorial choice his own ‘fuck you’ to the women on the left. Both Cody and Tickle stuck to predictable gender stereotypical presentations – hot pink and dull brown, but perhaps that was the point – fuck you.
Judge Melissa Perry was not Perry Mason
Judge Melissa Perry, who led the three-judge panel signalled her trans allyship in an early exchange with Grover’s barrister, Mr Hartley when she clarified to him (and the room) that a man who identifies as a woman may not have a gender presentation aligned with their female identity . We had certainly noticed.
Perry later schooled us in using correct and ‘inclusive’ language by referring to people as ‘cis’, ‘assigned a sex at birth’, ‘gender presentation vs gender identity’ and ‘gender expression.’ We were heeded to be as expansive as possible in our understanding of these terms. Perry pooh-poohed Mr Hartley’s early suggestion that the Commissioner’s last-minute intervention as amicus curiae (friend of the court) may be partisan given her submission supported Tickle’s case - Perry was having none of it.
Day one felt brutal. Listening to Judge Perry and knowing that Equality Australia - a lobby group for LGBTQi+ had been granted permission to argue against lesbian rights was the administrative state’s own fuck you.
Legal Arguments be damned - What is a Woman?
To an untrained ear, the legal arguments were convoluted, complex, repetitive and involved analysing logical constructions, clarifying definitions in law and definitions in ordinary usage, considering clauses, sub-clauses, Parliamentary Acts, Statues, case law and previous judicial commentary on cases.
Except the case wasn’t really about any of those things. The judges were being asked to rule on the question - What is a woman? Women’s rights to female-only spaces depends on their answer.
Judge Bromwich had ruled in the previous Tickle v Giggle case that, “in its contemporary ordinary meaning, sex is changeable,” and that sex is not strictly binary or tied solely to biological characteristics but includes social and legal recognition.”
Giggle’s defence challenged the Bromwich ruling with an argument that Tickle could be excluded from a female-only app because his gender identity placed him in a ‘sub’ class of women. It may be the best legal argument to win the case but it sums up the degree to which the ideological rot has set in.
The New Sacred Class
The 2013 SDA amendments removed the words ‘two sexes’ with ‘different’ and ‘sex’ with ‘gender identity’ and in doing so, the Act protects characteristics of a subjective and changeable sense of identity over evolutionary biology.
Ms Costello, the HRC barrister sought to embed in law - a man’s right to enter women’s prisons, sports, domestic violence shelters, breastfeeding groups and single-sex services.
The HRC presented the following arguments:
· A fully intact man is legally a woman based solely on his internal sense of identity. This argument reduces a “woman" to nothing more than a claim.
· The legal protections for pregnancy should be extended to include trans-identified men who cannot biologically conceive. This equates a man’s desire to be pregnant with protections for women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant. Male fantasy and desire equal women’s material and biological reality as the sex that conceives, bears children and gives birth.
· That a greater level of protection was due to Tickle because he identifies as a woman than the protections offered to ordinary Australian women under the SDA. This is an attempt to create a hierarchy of anti-discrimination protections in which gender identity becomes the highest category.
· Proposed that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, (CEDAW) a 1979 UN treaty to promote gender equality and protect women's rights was no longer relevant. A 2018 committee of trans activists decided the Article really did mean gender identity after all.
A Dog’s Dinner
The arguments presented by the HRC were logically inconsistent and circular – but that’s the point. An ideology that seeks to fundamentally reorder the basis on which human society operates depends on a network of interlocking concepts – each depending on, and reinforcing all the others - a spider’s web of linguistic gossamer.
Words like “trans” (an umbrella term that includes a variety of very different cohorts), "gender identity," (subjective, unprovable, unstable, multiple), “gender expression," (the same or different) “cis gender” (man/woman), "gender reassignment" (here, ‘gender’ means ‘sex’ and ‘reassignment’ has multiple medical and pharmaceutical options) “transwoman” (a man with a female gender identity) “natal sex” (or simply sex), “non-binary” (neither male nor female) and on it goes.
Judge Perry - schooled in the lingo, clarified; “And when you say natal woman, what you mean is “a person at the time of biological birth who was identified to be a female”.
Perry seems incapable of conceiving how one might identify infants birthed by indigenous women over thousands of years without a doctor to ‘identify’ them.
If the court case did anything, it clarified that the ideology is made up of words filled with air, synthetic concepts and terms that very often mean their opposite - a giant dog’s dinner faking coherence.
We Couldn’t Miss You
The physical presence of Roxanne Tickle produced cognitive dissonance but of a different sort - when Perry said Tickle was a woman it felt more like an instruction. But it’s simply not possible to override the effects of evolution on the human brain. For women - the ability to identify men from a great distance - size, height, gait, shoulder width is a survival skill and Tickle was close up and personal.
Both the HRC and Equality Australia barristers pressed the point - Tickle was a woman – its clear from the onboarding photo showing female hair and a female t shirt.
Women are alert to notice men who encroach, overstep, coerce and demand that their wishes, fantasies and desires be prioritised over a woman’s right to her boundaries.
The 55-year-old Tickle is a member of the East Lismore all-female Hockey club with some players as young as 15. Tickle said in an interview with a local newspaper that he was “terrified” about asking if he could join. As a woman under the Sex Discrimination Act - Tickle shares the women’s changing room with team members.
It will be months before the Federal Court publish its judgement that will determine whether women’s rights exist any longer in Australia. Until then here is an except from Sall Grover’s X post sent on Thursday 7 August:
The Sex Discrimination Commissioners interpretation of the law is bonkers. It is gender ideology in legalese. It is an attempt to enshrine a zeitgeist into legislation, while ignoring every group the sex discrimination act exists to protect in favor of one group: men who claim to be women. If they need to create the Men Who Claim To Be Women Act, create it. But women need laws too and the sex discrimination act has to not only include but protect women otherwise there is absolutely no point to it.
There is a women’s rights rally in Melbourne on the steps of Parliament on Saturday 17th August – if you are in Melbourne please come and join us.
The term “cis” is hate speech. It was invented to relegate real women into being a sub-group of women rather than the only type of women. Trans = fake. Humans cannot change sex, no matter what a brainwashed judge says.
What a complete and utter farce. Put that female judge and Tickle team in a male only prison for a week. No special treatment. Expose them to why women require safe spaces. Prison is not separate from society - it is our society - condensed and intensified. I promise you it would wake them up.