For more than five minutes of human history, society accepted biological reality as a simple fact. In primary schools everywhere, children were taught that XY chromosomes make someone male and XX meant female, and this understanding formed the basis of our laws. This foundation, once unshakeable, has been demolished in Australia by a combination of judicial decisions and legislative overreach – a process that culminated in the bizarre Full Federal Court decision in Tickle v. Giggle. Sall Grover, the founder of the women-only networking app Giggle for Girls, recently lost her appeal after being found to have discriminated against Roxanne Tickle, a biological male identifying as a woman. The court didn’t just uphold Justice Bromwich’s finding – it increased the penalties against Grover, delivering a watershed moment that enshrined a male’s right to self-identify as a woman over a woman’s right to single-sex spaces.
I recently rewatched the classic film Some Like It Hot. In it, men dress as women to escape the mob after witnessing a murder; the absurdity is the point. The joke relies entirely on the audience knowing that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are still men beneath the wigs and dresses. At no point does anyone truly believe they have become women – that’s the entire premise of the comedy. Fast-forward to modern Australia, and the absurd script of a 1950s Hollywood farce has become a legally binding tragedy. To make matters worse, legacy media have lined up to applaud this travesty. The ABC published an article gaslighting its audience, insisting that the ruling against Grover was a victory for women’s rights. It takes a unique brand of journalistic delusion to describe a Federal Court decision fining a female entrepreneur for creating an app exclusively for biological women as a triumph for her sex.